Absolute Rage (31 page)

*  *  *

All of them were packed into the black Ford Explorer: Lucy, the twins, Tran, and two young Vietnamese men, part of a shifting crew that Lucy had started to call privately the Lost Boys. Freddy Phat drove. Where were they going? A surprise, said Tran. They drove briefly on the highway and then turned off into what looked like an extensive industrial district, a reminder of Bridgeport's glory days as the national machine shop and instrument maker. Most of the factories were vacant, their yards weed-grown, their windows staring, glassless. They stopped before a chained gate in a long chain-link fence around what seemed to be a large, derelict industrial property. One of the boys jumped out and unlocked the chain.

“What is this place, Uncle?” Lucy asked.

“It is a cement plant. I own it.”

“I thought you were in the restaurant business.”

“Yes, but one must
diversify.”
He used the English word. “Or so I have read. Besides, you know, I am a gangster, and all gangsters must have a cement plant.”

“Are we going to observe you constructing a concrete canoe for a squealer?”

“Of course not. Such an event would not be suitable for your brothers. No, we are going to shoot.”

The property was extensive. They passed a row of gray, peak-roofed buildings equipped with silos and smokestacks and came to a huge sandpit. A crude plywood table was at the lip of the pit and an old wooden swivel chair. Out in the pit against a mound of sand some twenty-five yards away stood a structure of two-by-fours like a giant easel. The Lost Boys got out of the SUV with a brown duffel bag and laid it clanking on the table. Then they went into the pit and stapled a number of silhouette targets to the two-by-four frame.

Freddy Phat lined up the weapons on the table, with stacks of clips and magazines, like cakes at a bake sale. There was an AK-47 assault rifle, a Skorpion submachine gun, a Beretta 9mm pistol, and a Colt .45 Gold Cup. Everyone put earplugs in. The two Lost Boys fired first, then Freddy Phat. Tran sat in the swivel chair and made comments in Vietnamese, mostly to do with not wasting ammunition, firing shorter bursts, keeping control. He did not seem all that concerned with the marksmanship of his staff. The twins and Lucy stood back and watched. The Lost Boys stopped firing and replaced all the shredded targets.

Then it was the twins' turn. Lucy watched Tran showing Zak how to fire the Beretta, placing his feet, arranging his hands on the weapon. Tran's horrible scarred hands against the smooth flesh of the boy's hand. She recalled Tran teaching her to shoot in the same way, when they were in the city. She was younger then than the boys were now, and mad for shooting.

Tran took Zak through all the weapons, crouching behind him supporting his arms when necessary. Zak's face was shining with joy. Then Giancarlo, just the pistol and the Skorpion, and then he said he had a headache and withdrew.

Tran turned to Lucy with an inquiring look. “No, thank you, Uncle, not today.”

“You used to enjoy it so much.”

“Yes. But now I don't think it's good for me to shoot, especially not at man targets. I can't not think about what the bullets are meant to do, to people's bodies. It makes me too sad.”

He nodded and looked sad himself.

“But aren't you going to shoot?” she asked.

In answer he removed a small weapon from his jacket pocket.

“Oh, you still have the Stechkin,” she said.

“Yes. You remember you were always plaguing me to let you fire it, and I would not. Would you like to now?”

“I don't think so,” she answered, smiling. “I missed my chance, I think.”

He turned toward the firing line, hefting the little weapon.

Zak asked, “What is that? Another pistol?”

“Yes, but a machine pistol. It's very rare. Most people can't shoot one very well.”

“But he can.”

“Yes,” Lucy said.

“Tran does most things very well.” Tran shot. In an instant the center of the target vanished into flapping rags.

*  *  *

After the shooting party, they all went to one of Tran's restaurants and in a private room had stuffed squid and garlic quails. Lucy was glad the boys had been trained from an early age to eat everything, and they did not disgrace her in the American fashion by demanding hamburger. After the meal they returned to Tran's house, where their host and his minions departed for their regular evening round of inspection, collection, and terrorization. Lucy took her brothers, who were hyped and restless, on a walk through the parklike neighborhood. They found a playground, a basketball court, and three kids of around fourteen playing horse in the fading light. Did they want to have a game, Lucy asked them, and after some nervous hesitation, they agreed. They had expected a walkover, a girl and two little kids, but the Karps had been playing b-ball together for a long time, and Lucy was as good a player as you were likely to find outside of a top-flight college team. Zak was an excellent shot and aggressive even against kids twice his weight, although he shot whenever he had the ball. Giancarlo was a born point guard and had inherited from his father an almost preternatural sense of what everyone on the court was likely to do next. They played until they couldn't see anymore, winning two, losing one.

Later, as Lucy tucked them into their sleeping bags in the guest room, Zak said, “This was the best day of my whole life.”

“I'm glad you liked it,” said his sister. “What about you, GC?”

Giancarlo and Lucy exchanged a look. “Oh, definitely the best day, superterrific,” lied Giancarlo out of love for his brother. Only Lucy knew how much he disliked shooting.

She mooched around the house for a while after that, made herself some tea, smoked a cigarette in the garden. Then she went into the house and, like the good girl she was, called her mom.

But was not surprised, nor disappointed, when Dan Heeney answered the phone.

“Oh, I was thinking about you,” she said.

“Really?” This was actually the first time that a girl had said that to him. “How come?”

“I was out with the boys and a bunch of gangsters shooting machine guns today and I thought, ‘Oh, I'll probably talk to Dan when I call Mom tonight and he'll ask me what I was doing and I'll say that, and he'll say, “No, really.” ' ”

“You're making this up.” He laughed. “Yeah, or, ‘You're making this up.' No,
really.
My strange life. What's hopping in McCullensburg?”

“Oh, well, I don't know where to start. There's so much to do. We caught B.B. King's concert at Amos's roadhouse and brothel. Pavarotti's at the VFW hall. Most nights I just drop in at Rosie's to check out the wits and glitterati who assemble there nightly—Woody, Jay, Leo. It's like
People
magazine.”

She laughed. “I mean
really.”

“Oh,
really?
I'm studying matrix algebra and astrophysics. Working on my world-famous pyramid of Iron City beer cans. Waiting for this damn thing to resolve.”

“My dad'll fix it.”

“Yeah, that's what
my
dad thought,” Dan snapped bitterly, “and look what it got him.”

Lucy thought that between the two dads, hers struck her as the more competent fixer. She let the thought pass, but the mere mention of the case strummed the ever-tuned strings of responsibility in her, and she said, “Well, it'll work out somehow. Is my mom there?”

“No, as a matter of fact, she's out.”

“Out? Where is she? It's pretty late.”

“Oh, you know—McCullensburg, the city that never sleeps. I don't know where she is exactly. She had some whacked-out idea about using a big magnet to troll the river for the murder weapon. She thought she'd figured out exactly where it is. I thought it was kind of dumb, myself.”

“It probably was. She can go off on an idea sometimes. That's how she lost her eye, you know.”

“I didn't. What happened?”

“This was before they got married. She started obsessing about my dad's ex. She thought they were getting back together. Then she found an envelope addressed to him, from the city where the ex was living, and she opened it to see whether anything was really going on, and it was a letter bomb, meant for my dad, from this maniac. The funny thing was, she was the DA's expert on letter bombs at the time.”

“Weird. She's sort of a strange woman, if you don't mind me saying so.”

“Not at all. Which makes it odd that she has such perfectly normal children. Look, I'd like to chat more, but I hear my host is arriving. Would you do me a favor? Have her call me when she gets in—it doesn't matter how late it is. Okay?” She gave him the house number.

“Sure. Fine. By the way, you said you'd work on us getting together this summer. Any progress?”

“I promised my dad I would stay away until they catch the bad guys. Because of the twins.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I guess it's going to have to be back at school.”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Lucy, “two Karps on the case, those guys're doomed.”

*  *  *

Midnight. Lucy sat cross-legged on a cushion in the plain finished basement of Tran's house, using
yenhok
needles to prepare a pill of black Chinese opium for her host, who was reclining on a couch. She manipulated the tarry mass over the blue flame from a brass alcohol lamp, shaping and heating it all the way through, as he had taught her. It was curiously relaxing work. The lamp provided the room's only light.

She placed the pill in a long, carved pipe, brass-bound bone with an amber mouthpiece, and handed it to him. He took two long sucks from it and fell back against a cushion.

“You are good at this,” he said after a while. “An opium chef as we call it. Do you feel corrupted?”

“Not at all. It seems a very innocent pleasure. And I like to see you relaxed.”

“You're a good girl.”

Another long pause. “And I am a very bad man. But when I take
nha phien
with you, I seem to float into another world, as if I am living a story different from the actual story of my life. As in the
Tale of Kieu,
the story of Kieu and the bandit chieftain. Do you remember that?”

“Yes. The bandit chieftain was really a decent man, forced by necessity into a cruel life. I always thought of you when I read it.”

“Our sorrowful national epic. We Vietnamese are connoisseurs of sorrow, you know. We make the Russians look like the French. Or the happy Americans, the fortunate people. My hope is that the boys I bring over will in time learn something about this.”

“Who are they?”

“Sons of my old comrades. Southerners, of the NLF. I find as many of them as I can, and whoever remains of the people I served with, and their families. We were all disgraced after the war. Insufficiently grateful to our northern comrades, too many bourgeois tendencies, our grandfathers could read, perhaps. We had imagined we were fighting for a better life, so we all had to be reeducated. It turned out that what we were fighting for was to give absolute power to a bunch of fat bastards who sat out the war in Hanoi bunkers. Imagine our surprise!”

“How can you get them out?”

“Oh, in Vietnam now anything can be arranged with money. The country is one great bazaar. The granddaughters of the Vietcong are selling themselves to fat Germans in Saigon hotels. Nothing changed. All the wars, twenty years of them, so that the pimps can be Vietnamese instead of French. Or Americans. You should have dropped dollars from your bombers instead of bombs; it would have been cheaper.” He took another long drag and closed his eyes.

“You don't have to continue in this life,” she said. “You could go anywhere. Start over.”

“I do start over, my dear. Every night when I smoke my pipe I have a beautiful and quite different life.”

“And then you kill more people.”

“In fact, the last time I killed anyone it was rescuing you, do you recall? From those Chinese in that shop by the beach.”

She felt a flush of shame. “I'm sorry, Uncle. I was being a prig. Who am I to judge you?”

He said nothing for several minutes. “No, I am far from offended. I believe that had I not met you and your mother, I would not have been a real person anymore. As it is, my goal is to keep violence”—he drifted for a moment—“to a minimum. If I died before I had to kill another person, I would be happy.”

At this he fell silent. She stayed with him, drifting off herself into a semisleep, touched a little by the drug fumes, a state that provided just a taste of the famous silky dreams.

From which she was startled by a ringing phone. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

“Hai ba ba, nam sau bon bay.”

“Lucy?”

“Yeah. Dan?”

“Uh-huh. What was that?”

“The number in Vietnamese. Is my mom okay?”

“Yeah, well, that's why I'm calling. It's two-thirty and she's not back. I called Poole's and she's not there either. I checked the cops and the hospital, too. I'm a little worried and you said to call . . .”

“Yes. Thank you. Do you know where she went?” “She said something about the bridge on Route 130, north of town.”

“Okay, good, I'll take it from here. You should get some sleep.”

“You'll
take
it . . . ?” he exclaimed, disturbed by the coldness in her tone. “What're you going to do?”

“Call my dad, for starters. Don't worry about it.”

“Aren't
you
worried?”

He heard a long sigh over the wires. “Of course I'm worried. But I'm used to this. In my family we don't get all upset when someone goes missing. My dad calls it Karp Disaster Mode. I have to go now.”

Karp had the answering machine on, so Lucy had to call six times before the accumulated disturbance penetrated her father's sleep.