The Orange Curtain (20 page)

“I think that is preferable to being sometimes racist and sometimes not.”

Tien Joubert came out of her inner office and interrupted something else that Lt. Vo was about to say. “They come just now,” she announced. Lt. Vo retreated to the place at the table Loan Pham pointed out to him, as Tien went to wait by the door to greet the gangsters.

In a moment she backed a foot and the glass door was nearly flung open. Two angry-looking Vietnamese men banged in and glanced around. They wore all black and took up stations by the door and crossed their arms grimly, the Secret Service stance again. In a moment one of them whistled, and Thang Le sauntered contemptuously in, followed by a younger man with big horn-rim glasses. Jack Liffey recognized Thang Le easily. It was hard to miss a guy with one pink eye and a long whisker dangling from his cheek.

Thang Le locked his eyes on the remains of the shiner he’d given Jack Liffey and smiled. “Nice eye,” he said.

“Nice eye yourself, pinkie,” Jack Liffey said. The smile glazed over into a glare.

“Gentlemen,” Tien Joubert remonstrated. “This no way to start to end big war. We must all shake hand and sit at peace table.”

After a bit of a stare-down, they shook hands formallly and everybody sat. Tien Joubert rapped on the table in front of herself. She seemed to be in command. She went around the table and named everyone present, one by one, and then launched into a magisterial preamble. “All this crazy war thing—it always come from stupid tit and tat stuff you little boys get somewhere. You all like fighting cock pushed into same cage. Some little thing happen and you do tit and then I do tit, you hurt my feeling and I hurt your feeling, and then you tit my family and then I tat your family and then whole world drawing guns like crazy.”

Elegantly put, Jack Liffey thought. There was a pause while the boy in the horn-rims translated for Thang Le. He didn’t know whether the translation was necessary, or it was just to honor a kind of demand for parity, or to preserve face in some way. Loan Pham circled the table quietly pouring tea, and Father Dang added his own preamble in Vietnamese.

Tien turned to Jack Liffey, the only person in the room who couldn’t speak Vietnamese. “Priest say some religious stuffs about God always blessing makers of peace.”

Dang smiled at the characterization but didn’t amplify it.

“In this business now,” she went on to Thang Le, “you already tit my friend Jack Liffey and he not tat you. He ahead. He got right to get friends and come some fine night give you all,
Quan Sats
, dark eyes for tat, but he not want to. He want peace.” She slapped both palms softly together and then on the table top as if resting her case, and Horn-rims translated.

Then Thang Le began a diatribe that went on for some time, words bitten and chewed and snapped out, punctuated by scowls aimed at Jack Liffey. Finally he broke off, seemingly in mid word, to wait for the translation from Horn-rims. “Thang Le says the feud began much earlier than that. He knows exactly who this man is. He is one of the soldiers who went to our country and now think they know all about us because they shot us and dropped bombs on us. They cannot come into our community here and ride roughshod over us and accuse us of heinous crimes and then wait until we strike one tiny blow in return and pretend that the whole war starts just at the minute of that blow.”

Tien Joubert tried to speak, but Jack Liffey cut her off. “I’d like to speak for myself since I am the invading military force here.”

For the next few exchanges they refought the Viet Nam War, with Jack Liffey insisting he had been a draftee and not, in any case, a combat soldier, and as far as he knew at the time, he had gone there at the request of a legitimate government, and even if he had a lot of second thoughts about it now, he was no longer fighting that war. America and South Viet Nam had lost and it was over. Thang Le said how much he resented a country so rich and insulated from the pain it had caused that it could lose a war and fly away and leave behind the people who had fought and worked alongside it and then act as if nothing had happened. Or perhaps he said something a bit cruder and less elegant, which is what his manner and tone suggested, and Horn-rims spiffed it up in translation. As Thang Le spoke, the single whisker bobbed and waved from side to side and it was hard not to stare at it.

“This not about no Viet Nam War,” Tien Joubert cut in. “You don’t give no flying damn about that war. You just baby then.”

The priest spoke for a moment and seemed to be taking the part of the
Quan Sats
. After he spoke, they all turned and looked at the policeman, and sure enough the issue of the war had vanished.

“No, I don’t think you gentlemen did, and neither does he,” Vo replied, insisting on speaking in English. “Phuong was killed with a 9mm handgun. We think it was a cheap Star semi-automatic import. I don’t for a moment suppose you gentlemen would carry a second-rate weapon like that, any more than you would drive a rusty Yugo. If I went outside now and busted into the trunk of your rice rocket, I would find an AK or a Steyr or an Ingram and if you absolutely had to have a handgun, maybe an expensive Glock or Walther. I know that.”

“So we are clear with you?” Horn-rims asked.

“For Phuong, yes. However, there is the matter of the Nhat residence that was invaded last month and the family tied up. A 32-inch Mitsubishi television is missing, and a rack-mounted Nakamichi stereo, 100
luong
of gold, some jade jewelry and some cash from a floor safe.”

“You’ve already questioned us about that and you know we were at a party on Minnie Street in Santa Ana.”

“Don’t make me laugh. You don’t party with poor Hmong.”

“They are our friends.”

Now the debate seemed to spin out of control for a while, with Tien Joubert, Thang Le and his translator, and the priest all pointing and gesturing and putting in their two cents, overlapping and even speaking at the same time. Even though the discussion was all in Vietnamese, Jack Liffey could sense that he had shrunk to a minor issue and there were a lot of old ghosts rearing up. Perhaps that was good news, and he could be the derisory item that was settled easily while the tough ones were put off for later.

“We must all choose a path,” the priest said suddenly in English, “so that there will be harmony.”

Thang Le spoke sharply, only a few words, and so did the policeman. They seemed almost the same words.

“Can a tiger find harmony with a goat?” Horn-rims said. “It was our way once, but in this country, no one honors harmony. Wishing for harmony is a sign of weakness here, and we have learned that some things are much stronger.”

“What things?”

“Americans only respect what they fear. They never respected the black man until he started carrying guns and burning.”

“I respect you all and I fear you,” Jack Liffey said evenly. It was about as far as he was willing to go. He could feel himself getting annoyed at being the odd man out. “I have nothing against you. I just want peace with you.”

Thang Le grinned sarcastically and spoke.

“He says the respect only lasts as long as the fear. That is the way with round-eye cowards.”

“The shape of my eyes doesn’t matter. You haven’t begun to see my rage and what it can do,
fuckhead
,” Jack Liffey said. “Translate that for the little freak.” He’d been okay until about the middle of the sentence and then his temper had just blown out all at once, like a very old tire hitting a pothole. This had happened to him before, a sudden, almost self-destructive need to challenge whatever was threatening him.

“Your rage does not interest us in the least.”

Jack Liffey found himself breathing heavily and Tien’s hand was on his shoulder. “All stop it now! Priest right, we got to find path of harmony here.”

Thang Le said something else angry that Horn-rims didn’t even bother translating. Jack Liffey found his hands working compulsively as if he wanted to strangle someone, and he knew he was really riding the sharp edge.

Thang Le carried on some more without any sign of relenting, and then the door came open and Phuong Minh’s father strode in. Thang Le caught sight of him and wound down. The man’s eyes were red and he wore an out-of-date disheveled dark suit and black tie that made him look like a small reissue of Dracula.

“Isn’t my daughter dishonored enough?”

He said something in Vietnamese, maybe a repeat of the same thing, and Jack Liffey felt his anger draining away. Their ridiculous sideshow had pulled the poor man away from his mourning, and for Jack Liffey the sense of utter absurdity flowed back in like a fluid finding its level.

Thang Le spoke for a moment, but there had been a sea-change in his tone of voice. He was quiet and respectful to Phuong’s father. Trac Minh turned to Jack Liffey.

“Your work is over in Little Saigon, Mr. Liffey. Nothing can bring my daughter back and I want you to stop using her name and stop whatever is happening here. I want her spirit to be able to go from among us and rest.”

Jack Liffey nodded contritely. “All right.”

Trac Minh strode up to the table and looked at the papers lying there and scowled. “A peace treaty,” he said scornfully. “Okay then. You all sign this paper and go home.”

Thang Le seemed to be agreeable. Trac Minh handed the paper to Jack Liffey and he signed immediately. When the paper was passed across the peculiar peace table, Thang Le handed it sight unseen to Horn-rims, who signed it with a fountain pen flourished out of his breast pocket. That seemed to be as far as they were willing to go.

“He signs, too,” Jack Liffey said, indicating the immobile Thang Le.

A lot of eyes focused on Jack Liffey. Tien Joubert leaned close to him and whispered very softly into his ear, “He not read and write, Jack. Don’ make him lose face.”

Jack Liffey stared at the illiterate young hoodlum for a moment, and then nodded to him. “Fine.”

They shook hands coolly and Trac Minh banged out the door and left. The
Quan Sats
soon followed, in the same protocol order they’d entered.

They all sat in silence a moment, as if a tornado had just passed over, and then Tien Joubert whispered to her receptionist about something.

“Will they keep their word?” Jack Liffey asked Vo.

He nodded. “For some reason, they believe in treaties. It’s the world they know. There is honor in thieves, you know.”

“Until they discover murder,” Jack Liffey said. “Murder is the ultimate argument for people with no conscience. In the nastier corners of the world, sooner or later they discover murder can make you right, whether you are or not, and you never have to worry about things like your own failings.” Death again, he thought. The old bugaboo.

The priest stirred. “I don’t know if you know them well enough to say that.”

“Psychopaths are the same everywhere, but I’m satisfied if you are.”

“We did good,” Tien Joubert said, and she encircled his upper arm with her two hands. “Everybody happy. We go din-din and celebrate.”

The house was growing shadowy with dusk, and he adjusted a box of cereal on the counter to shield the low flame under the saucepan of soup, so the blue light couldn’t be seen from the window in the kitchen door. Just in case. Billy Gudger had been sitting for hours figuring things out and his plans grew more and more elaborate, as his plans always tended to do. Things almost never worked out the way he intended, but usually took themselves off in loopy directions. Still, he felt compelled to lay out his plans. It was all you could do.

While the soup boiled he went to the freezer and checked inside for the zillionth time. What he had put there was still there, an intractable impasse. Even when he poked it hard with a finger, it didn’t move.
Now you’ve gone too far
, a voice told him. It wasn’t a real voice. He didn’t hear voices, he knew that much. It was just another portion of his mind talking to himself. Everybody did that. He was just like everybody.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.

Jack Liffey came again, slipping in the door without knocking, sat again with a smile and asked what he’d been doing for the day. His voice was friendly, with that cheerful confidence that Billy loved so much. But this time the picture wouldn’t stay stable, and it took off along its own trajectory, first Jack Liffey was kneeling, whining and begging for mercy and saying he would never never suspect Billy of anything bad, then he was crying out in pain as somebody held his arm behind his back and twisted. Then he was gone, just like that.

But he was sure that Jack Liffey would come back, peering in all the windows again. That much was for absolute sure. And only the most elaborate of plans could save Billy from the man who might once have been his friend.

“I hope you didn’t use up all your favors setting up the Westminster Peace Accords,” he said. He leaned back against the gray granite counter in her kitchen as she fiddled with an egg whisk. She looked like she knew what she was doing with it and he wondered if she’d ever been a cook in France.

“With our people, favors not like that. Not just so much money in bank, write it down in book, you draw that much out some time and it gone. No, no. I do something for Mr. Minh and he do something for me and maybe I do
two
thing more. And I need favor for Mr. Nguyen, so Mr. Minh do something for Mr. Nguyen, and then Mr. Nguyen do something for me. It like a big camouflage netting. You know camouflage netting?”

He nodded. They’d had it stretched over the small motor pool at their radar base, the nylon web covered by a random scatter of cloth peanut shapes in greens and browns to hide the jeeps and 6-bys from the air. There had been a lot of jokes about the V.C. flying their bamboo reconnaissance satellites over low.

“Your own family always in middle of net but lots of people at edges, too, and everybody covered.”

“Eloquent,” he said. Like her description of tit for tat, he thought. Straightforward, simple, and shrewd.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Thank you. I seem to be under the big net now, thanks to you, and I still feel I owe Minh Trac some work, but he asked me to stop.”