The Return: A Novel (57 page)

“No. I’ve got a lot of work to do at the
casa
. Reconstruction, improvements … like that. Now that we’re internationally famous, I don’t think we’ll have much trouble making a go of it. I thought after the New Year.”

“Okay. Have you seen Pepa around? I kind of thought she’d come by.”

“Oh, our Pepa is being the toast of Defe. She’s on all the interview shows, and Televisa is apparently going to give her her own investigative program. It doesn’t look like she’ll be spending a lot of time in Playa Diamante. Uh-oh, does that make you sad?”

“No, not really. I’d like to see her again, of course, but I think we have different destinies. Basically, we did each other a solid and there are no hard feelings. It’d be nice if every relationship turned out like that. How’s Major Naca? Is that a
blush
, Carmel?”

“Oh, well, he’s definitely
interested
.”

“And you back?”

She wriggled, laughed, and her face opened like a flower, in a gum-flashing grin. “Mmm. I might, you know, give it a
whirl
.”

“Good. He seems like a nice fellow. Not to mention that you’re less likely to be bothered by certain people if you’re with a man who commands a battalion.” He smiled at her, and she felt a pang because the smile was so sad. “Well,” he said, “it looks like my work here is done.”

“Why? Are you planning to ride off into the sunset? Again?”

“You never can tell,” said Marder, and sank back on the pillows. Statch thought she’d never seen her father’s face so peaceful and happy since her mother had died.

*   *   *

At the end of January, some three weeks after her father’s funeral, Carmel Marder boarded an Air Singapore jet and flew first-class from Mexico City to Singapore, paying somewhat more for her ticket than she’d received as an annual stipend as a graduate student. It was not a characteristic expenditure, for she had inherited her father’s attitude toward ostentation along with half of his many, many millions of dollars. But she had worked extremely hard over the past few months and was on a mission fraught with tension; she thought that her father would have approved.

From Singapore, she took a flight to Saigon on a blue Vietnam Airlines Airbus, then switched to a smaller plane for the trip to Huê. At the airport there, she met a young man by arrangement, who took her bags, slid her through the customs and immigration bureaucracy, and placed her in a clean white Toyota Land Cruiser. He said to call him “Lucky”; he was connected in some way with the family of her old lab mate, Karen Liu. Karen had been horrified when told that her friend intended to travel to Laos by herself and had insisted on mobilizing her kin’s considerable
guanxi
in that part of the world, and here Statch was, riding comfortably through the narrow streets of the old capital, on the way to her room at the Imperial Hotel, wrapped in a duvet of Confucian obligation.

*   *   *

The next day Lucky picked her up early. Without thinking, she jumped into the shotgun seat. He gave her a cloudy look, then shrugged and started the car. They drove through cool, damp streets smelling not unpleasantly of flowers, diesel, and decaying fruits.

When they reached the countryside, she asked Lucky how far it was. “Not far. Fifty, fifty-five kilometers.”

“Gosh, that’s nothing.”

“Yes, but the first forty-five to the border are easy, on highway like this, but the last ten, very tough.” He laughed and made a sinuous motion with his hand. “Up and down. But don’t worry, this a strong car.” He flexed a skinny bicep to illustrate strength.

Then they were on 49, the highway that belted Vietnam at its narrowest point. Like most Americans her age, when she thought of Vietnam at all she thought of steaming jungle, but this country looked more like Virginia, with rolling hills and orchards and small dusty villages, distinguished from time to time by ornate decaying tombs, showing crusty white against the green background of the foliage.

The only sign of the war she observed was a piece of obvious aircraft aluminum, with metal showing through the khaki paint, used as a bit of fencing around a buffalo paddock.

“Lucky, do you ever think about the war?” she asked after this remnant whipped by.

“Why, you want to see battlefields? We are close to Khe San.”

“No, just wondering if people thought about it, if they still, you know, resented Americans or felt it was or wasn’t worth it.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said unenthusiastically. “Things are getting better.”

“And you don’t think it’s strange that the grandchildren of the Vietcong are lining up for jobs as bellboys and chambermaids in French- and American-owned hotels?”

“They’re good jobs. Better than work on farm, or work for Vietnamese person.”

She changed the subject and talked instead about his life. He was studying pharmacy.

The land rose. Now it was more like a warmer West Virginia, and they arrived at a built-up area. Lucky turned the car south on what was clearly an important highway.

“This is the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” he said.

She looked through the window at the varied life on the edges of the road—repair shops, places selling tires and batteries, food stalls, and shops selling things she couldn’t know because she couldn’t read the colorful signage. The road that won their war, and it was not paved with gold.

“My dad’s job, in the war,” she observed, “was to destroy this road. I mean, he was one of thousands of people trying to do it.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Lucky in a tone that did not encourage the subject.

They crossed the border at A Yen. A couple of tiny, unkempt Laotian border guards glanced incuriously at her visas and passed them through. Now they traveled on single-lane dirt roads, climbing in low gear around the bends, and now she saw the peculiar humpy green mountains of the region, like illustrations from a children’s book, making the horizon amusingly jagged, flashing different hues of green at them as the clouds cast shadows or the sun struck them full on.

They crossed a wide river on a crumbly concrete bridge and drove for a kilometer or so on increasingly narrow tracks. Statch gave Lucky the coordinates her father had given her, and Lucky punched these into his GPS.

“We are close,” he said. “We take this first track and head north, and when we cross a … what is this word? A little river that comes into the Lun, the one back there?”

“A tributary?”

He flashed a smile. “Just right. This Moon River is a tributary to the Lun. When this track meets the river, we will be there.”

The track was rough, and several times Lucky had to get out and clear fallen branches away with a machete. He drove the Land Cruiser until the track ended at what appeared to be a copse of young trees. When the motor was switched off, they could hear the burbling of a small river. Statch took a cylindrical tin can from her bag.

“I think I’d like to be alone when I do this,” she said.

A nod from Lucky. “Yes. I will wait here.”

She walked toward the river’s sound. The ground was hard to traverse; it seemed to consist of steep little ridges and unnatural deep hollows, and then, with a shock, she understood that she was crossing a crater field. Every green thing within her field of vision was younger than the day that Moon River village died under the B-52s.

She reached the river, a café-au-lait stream ten meters across. Kneeling on the mossy bank, she opened the can. The ashes were white and gritty, and as she looked at them, a chill went through her. She felt too alone and at the same time surrounded by the presence of the dead. She shuddered and, with a wide motion of her arm, flung a stream of ash out to the river.

“Goodbye, Skelly,” she called into the forest, and cast the rest of the ashes out onto the puckered tan stream.

“Oh, that felt good,” said a voice behind her. “It was getting crampy in that can.”

She shrieked and spun around.

He had a full beard and was tanned red-brown, but it was clearly the late Patrick Francis Skelly standing there, grinning down at her. She screamed a curse and threw the empty urn at his head, then charged up the bank at him, fists and feet flying. It took him several minutes to get her immobilized and not before she’d landed a few good ones. He had taught her how to fight and had done a good job.

“Are you going to listen now, or do I have to tie you up?”

“What a terrible thing to do, you horrible man! How could you do that to him? He loved you. I cried for a week.”

The feel of his arms around her, his familiar smell, flung the years away, and she was back with the man who’d indulged every tomboy fantasy, the naughty uncle of every feisty young girl’s dreams. She began to cry.

“Why? Why did you—”

“Because there was a contract out on me. A couple of gun thugs tried to whack me that time we went to Mexico City, and I took the opportunity to arrange my own death.”

“You could have told
us
,” she wailed.

“No, you were watched, and while the Marders have many talents, acting is not one of them. You had to believe I was gone. Can I let you up now?”

He got off her and went down to the riverside, and after a moment she followed him.

“How did you do it? No, wait, it was Dr. Rodriguez, wasn’t it? I noticed he was nervous as a cat and I figured it was because he’d lost an important patient, but you’d bribed him to call the death and arrange for you to get smuggled out of the hospital. But how did you convince my father you’d been shot in the first place? Obviously, Cuello wasn’t part of the scam.”

“No. I had a blank nine-millimeter round made up. I was carrying it around for days, waiting. I slipped it into his pistol and depended on him to come after your dad. A little knife wound to make some blood and that was it.”

“He thought you were a hero. He thought you died saving his life.”

“I’m not a hero. I’m a killer. I never claimed to be a hero.” He looked out at the river and lit a cigarette.

“I used to come to this very spot with a girl I loved. She used to tell my fortune by the patterns of the leaves floating down the river. We were supposed to be happy forever and have many children. Yet another thing that didn’t work out. And … I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral.”

“You could’ve come. No one would have noticed you. We had over five thousand people at the church. There were delegations from the army and the government, the media. Even the Sinaloa cartel sent a wreath. The coffin was on display for a whole day, with a military honor guard, and
campesinos
were rubbing their scapulars and rosaries against the coffin.”

“Well, he always wanted to be a saint.”

“No, he wanted other people to be saints. There’s a difference. He thought he was a cesspool of vice himself. Or maybe that’s a necessary aspect of sainthood.”

“Did you take him to La Huacana?”

“Yes, he’s next to Mom. But we have our own cemetery now, on the headland beyond the golf course. He commissioned a monument for the people of the
colonia
who died in the fighting; it’s a big marble thing with a bronze statue of the Virgin weeping and the names of the people who died on a bronze plaque. The inscription reads, ‘In memory of those who died resisting the assaults of the
narcoviolencia
in defense of their homes and for the good of Mexico.’”

“That sounds like something Marder would do.”

“Yes, we all have typical behaviors. Why did you bring me here on a fool’s errand, Skelly? Throwing ashes into a stupid river, probably from somebody’s barbecue or a dog incinerator.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“What for? To talk about old times?”

“The truth?”

“Oh, don’t start now!” she said.

“No, this is the truth. I have a shitty life. Plenty of money, a nice place, all the pleasures, and I feel like shit all the time, scared and looking for oblivion, but I can’t look for oblivion, because that would make me less than sharp and that would kill me. And then I think, Oh, fuck, why not just die? But that doesn’t feel right either. Marder would say it was because I don’t have God, but I can’t get my mind around that shit.”

“I have the same problem.”

“Yes! See, that’s what I mean. I can’t talk to anyone else about stuff like this. What am I supposed to do now that he’s gone?”

She thought about this for a while as the leaves in their different colors and patterns bobbed past on the current, predicting different futures for everyone, one of which would come true.

Also by Michael Gruber

The Good Son

The Forgery of Venus

The Book of Air and Shadows

Night of the Jaguar

Valley of Bones

Tropic of Night

The Witch’s Boy

About the Author

M
ICHAEL
G
RUBER
,
New York Times
–bestselling author of
The Good Son, The Book of Air and Shadows,
The Forgery of Venus, Night of the Jaguar, Tropic of Night,
and
Valley of Bones,
has a PhD in marine sciences and began freelance writing while working in Washington, D.C., as a policy analyst and speechwriter. Since 1990, he has been a full-time writer. He lives in Seattle, Washington.