Dragonfish: A Novel Read online

  The voice spoke again over the line. “I ask you one time. Where is she?”

  2

  FIVE MONTHS BEFORE ALL THIS, I drove into Vegas on a sweltering July evening just before sunset. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light and glowing alien and purplish in the sky. I was convinced it was a UFO and kept gazing at it before nearly hitting the truck ahead of me. That jolted me out of my exhaustion.

  Half an hour later, the guy at the gas station told me about the beam of light from atop that giant pyramid casino, which you can spot from anywhere in the city, even from space if no clouds are in the way.

  “Sorry, man,” he said like he was consoling me.

  I must have looked disappointed.

  The drive from Oakland had taken me all day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my five-shot still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for ten hours straight and woke up at six in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me in the night. The sun had barely risen, but it was already a hundred degrees outside. Not even a wisp of a cloud.

  After a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk from last night—an old Chinese guy who spoke English about as well as I spoke Chinese—was slurping his breakfast and watching TV behind the counter. He looked up when I knocked on the counter, but did not set down his chopsticks until he saw me brandish cash. I’d already paid him for last night’s stay, and now I handed him a hundred for two more nights. He said nothing and hardly looked at me before handing me a receipt and diving back into his noodles. When I asked him where I could get some eggs, he mumbled a few incomprehensible words, his mouth stuffed, glistening. I felt like slapping the noodles out of his mouth but I turned and walked out before he could annoy me any further. Ever since Suzy left me, I’d learned to curb my temper. Let it sleep a little, save it for another, more necessary day.

  In the strip mall across the street, I had some coffee at a doughnut shop and spent an hour thumbing mindlessly through a couple of Asian newspapers, waiting for the pho restaurant next door to open. I hoped they made it like Suzy used to—the beef thinly sliced and not too gristly, the noodles soft, the broth clear and flavorful. Turned out theirs was even better, which finally cheered me up, though it reminded me of something her best friend—a Vietnamese woman named Happy, of all things—once told me years ago when she was over at the house for Sunday pho. Suzy had been mad at me that morning for nodding off at church, as I often did since my weekend patrols didn’t end until midnight, and though she knew I’d only converted for her and had never taken churchgoing seriously, she chewed me out all the way home, and with more spite than usual. So when she stepped outside to smoke after lunch, I asked Happy, “What’s bugging her lately?” Happy was her one good friend, her sole witness at our courthouse wedding and her emergency contact on all her forms, and they talked on the phone every day in a mix of English and Vietnamese that I never did understand—but she shrugged at my question. I chuckled. “Just me, huh? I bet she tells you every bad thing about me.” But again she shrugged and said, very innocently, “She don’t talk about you much, Bob.” I’d long figured this much was true, but it burned to hear it acknowledged so casually. Suzy and I had been married for two years at the time. We somehow lasted six more years before she finally took off.

  I sat in a front booth and finished off an extra large bowl of beef pho, four spring rolls, and two tall glasses of Vietnamese coffee, staring all the while at people passing by in the parking lot, including a bald Asian man who climbed into a red BMW. It could have been him, except Suzy’s new husband looked more bullish on his driver’s license and sported a thin mustache that accentuated the stubborn in his eyes. DPS listed a red BMW under his name—Sonny Van Nguyen—as well as a silver Porsche, a brand-new 2000 model. The master files at Vegas Metro confirmed he was fifty, five years older than me, and that he owned a posh sushi restaurant in town and an equally fancy rap sheet: one DUI, five speeding tickets, and three different arrests, one for unpaid speeding tickets, two on assault charges. He apparently struck a business associate in the head with a rotary phone during an argument and a year later threw a chair at someone in a casino for calling him a name. The last incident got him two years’ probation, which was four months from expiring. It was Happy who told me he was a gambler, fully equipped with a gambler’s penchant for risking everything but his pride. You should be afraid of him, Happy had said, but I knew it was already too late for that.

  In my two decades on the Oakland force, I had punched a hooker for biting my hand, choked out a belligerent Bible salesman, and wrestled thugs twice my size and half my age. I once had a five-year-old boy nearly bleed to death as I nightsticked his mother, who had chopped off his hand with a cleaver, tweaked out of her mind; I’d fired my gun three times and shot two people, one in the thigh, the other in the palm, both of whom had shot at me and quite frankly deserved more; I’d been known to kick a tooth or two loose, bruise a face here and there, maybe even silently wish more harm than was necessary. But never, not once, had I truly wanted to kill anyone.

  I WALKED DOWN Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, beyond the Strip, is not a place for pedestrians, especially in the summer. I’d pictured a Chinatown similar to Oakland’s or San Francisco’s, but the Vegas Chinatown was nothing more than a bloated strip mall—three or four blocks of it painted red and yellow and then pagodified, a theme park like the rest of the city. Nearly every establishment was a restaurant, and the one I was looking for was called Fuji West. I found it easily enough in one of those strip malls—nestled, with its dark temple-like entrance, between an oriental art gallery and a two-story pet store. It was not set to open for another hour.

  Nothing surprising about Vietnamese selling Japanese food. Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the giant white-aproned Mexican—all seven feet of him—sweeping the patio, though you might as well have called it swinging a broom. He gazed down at me blankly when I asked for Sonny. He didn’t look dumb, just bored.

  “The owner,” I repeated. “Is he here?”

  “His name’s no Sonny.”

  “Well, can I speak to him, whatever his name is?”

  The Mexican, for some reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man—late twenties, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored tan suit and a precise pink tie—appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand tenderly. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the wooden pillars that flanked the patio.

  “How may I help you, sir?” He held his hands behind his back and spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he’d ironed it.

  “I’d like to see Sonny.”

  “I’m sorry, no one by that name works here. Perhaps you are mistaken? There are many sushi restaurants around here. If you like, I can direct you.”

  “I was told he owns this restaurant.”

  “Then you are mistaken. I am the owner.” He spoke like it was a friendly misunderstanding, but his eyes had strayed twice from mine: once to the parking lot, once to my waist.

  “I’m not mistaken,” I replied and looked at him hard to see if he would flinch.

  He did not. I was a head taller than him, my arms twice the size of his, but all I felt in his presence was my age. Even his hesitation seemed assured. He slowly smoothed out an eyebrow with one finger. “I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.”

  “How about this. I’ll come back this evening for some sushi. And if Sonny’s not too busy, he can join me for some tea. I just want to have a little chat. Please tell him that for me.”

  I turned to go but felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness yet in his face, but his words had become chiseled. “You are Officer Robert Rue
n, aren’t you?” he declared. When I didn’t answer, he leaned in closer: “You should not be here. If you do not understand why I am saying this, then please recognize my seriousness. Go back home and try to be happy.”

  That last thing he said unexpectedly moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I noticed how handsome he was—how, if he wanted to, he could’ve modeled magazine ads for cologne or expensive sunglasses. For a moment I might have doubted that he was dangerous at all. He nodded at me, a succinct little bow, then grabbed the broom and walked back through the heavy mahogany doors of the restaurant.

  I felt tired again. Pho always made me sleepy. I walked back to the hotel and in my room stripped down to my boxers and cranked up the AC before falling back into bed.

  People my age get certain feelings now and then, even if intuition was never our strong suit in youth, and my inkling about this Sonny guy was that he was the type of restaurant owner who, if he came by at all, would only do so at night, when the money was counted. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was willing to do anything to protect his boss. I had a long evening ahead of me. Before shutting my eyes, I decided to put my badge away, deep in the recesses of my suitcase.

  WHEN SUZY LEFT ME, it was easy at first. No children. No possessions to split up. No one really to care. I was an only child, my parents both years in their graves, and her entire family was either also dead or still in Vietnam. After eight years together, I’d gotten to know maybe two or three of her friends, and the only things my police buddies knew about her was her name and her temper.

  She gave me the news after Sunday dinner. I was sitting at the dining table, and she approached me from the kitchen, her mouth still swollen, and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow and I’m taking my clothes. You can have everything else.” She carried away my half-empty plate and I heard it shatter in the sink.

  The first time I met her, I knew she was fearless. I was responding to a robbery at the flower shop where she worked. She’d been in America almost a decade, but her English was still pretty bad. When I arrived, she stood at the door with a baseball bat in one hand and bloody pruning shears in the other. Before I could step out of the patrol car, she flew into a tirade about what had happened, as though I’d been the one who robbed her. I understood about a quarter of what she said—something about a gun and ruined roses—but I knew I liked her. That petite sprightly body. Her lips, her cheekbones: full and bold. Firecracker eyes that glared at people with the urgency of a lit fuse. We found the perp two miles away, limping and bleeding from a stab wound to his thigh. The pruning shears had done it. Suzy and I married four months later.

  I was thirty-five then, an age when I once thought I should already have two or three kids, though I suspected she, at thirty-three, had given little thought to her own biology, let alone the passage of time. When I proposed, she agreed on the spot, but only if I was okay with not having children. She was not good with kids, she said, and having them would hurt too much, two reasons she repeated when I brought it up again a year later and a third time the year after that. I always figured she’d eventually change her mind.

  Her real name was Hong, which meant “pink” or “rose” in Vietnamese. But it sounded a bit piggish the way Americans pronounced it, so I suggested the name of my first girlfriend in high school, and this she did give me, though her Vietnamese acquaintances still called her Hong.

  When we married, neither of us seemed to have any worldly possessions beyond our clothes and the car we drove. It was like we had both, up until the time we met, lived our adulthoods at some cheap motel, so that we knew nothing about domesticated life beyond paying bills and doing laundry. We combined all our savings and bought an old townhouse near Chinatown that I repainted and she furnished—a luxury she’d apparently never had and one she indulged in with care and sincerity, down to the crucifixes that adorned every room and the two brass hooks on the wall of the entryway, the one for my coat a little higher than hers.

  In our first year, we bonded over this novelty of owning a home, of living with another human being and building a brand-new life together with chairs and tables and dishes and bath towels. We were happy, I realize now, not because of what we actually had in common, but because we were fashioning this new life out of things that had never existed for either of us.

  I’d stop by the flower shop every afternoon during my patrol to visit her. We had two days of the week together, and we spent it fixing up the townhouse, exploring local consignment shops, trying out every cheap restaurant in Chinatown, then going to the movies (Westerns and old black-and-white detective films were her favorite) or walking the waterfront, where the smell of the ocean reminded her of Vietnam. For a long time I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the food, the sappy ballads on the tape player, her handful of “friends” who with the exception of Happy hardly spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the grue some crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead people she never talked about. That was all fine, even wonderful, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself.

  But after two years, I realized she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball or cars or a nice steak and potato dinner. She hardly ever asked me about my family or my upbringing. She must have assumed, because of her silence about herself, that I was equally indifferent to my own past. She didn’t know that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when I was eighteen and the draft ended and saved me from the war, and that all of a sudden, decades later, this distant country—this vague alien idea from my youth—meant everything again, until she gradually embodied the place itself, the central mystery in my life. The least she could do was share her stories, like how happy her childhood had been and how the war upended everything, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had died in battle or survived a reeducation camp, or something. But she’d only say her life back home was “lonely” and “uninteresting,” her voice muted with hesitation, like she was teaching me her language and I’d never get it anyway.

  Gradually, an easy distance settled between us. I found I loved her most when she was sick and had no choice but to let me take care of her. Feed her. Give her medicine. Keep her housebound, which she rarely was for more than a day. And since I’d apparently reached the limit of what she was willing to give me, I grew fond of any situation where she’d talk about herself, even if it was her waking in the night from a bad dream and then, in the grip of her fright, waking me too so I could lie there in the darkness and listen to her recount it.

  She had bad dreams constantly. Recurring ones where I had cheated on her and hurt her in some profound way and she’s beating me with her fists as violently as she can and yet all I’m doing is laughing and laughing as she throttles me in the face. Sometimes it’s another man in this dream, though she’d never say who that might be—perhaps a lover from her past whose sins she was now mistaking for mine. Then there were the dreams where she’s murdered someone. Not just one person but a lot of people. She doesn’t murder them in the dream, she’s only conscious of having done it and must now figure out how to cover it up. In one version, she has buried them under piles of clothes in the closet. In another, she has shoved them into the washer, the dryer, that large cabinet in our laundry room where she kept all the strange pickled foods I could never force myself to like. And the entire time, all she can think about it is that she has killed people and that her life is now over.

  I remember her describing one dream where she’s walking for hours through an empty furniture store and someone is following her as she makes her way across beautiful model bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms. Even as she climbs the stairwells from one floor of the store to the other, the person keeps following her, their footsteps loud and steady. I asked if she ever saw what the person looked like, and she said sh
e couldn’t make herself stop or turn around in the dream, and that all she wanted was for the person to catch up to her, take her by the shoulder, and show their face.

  To church every Sunday, she brought along a red leather-bound journal, worn and darkened with age, and held it in her lap throughout Mass like a private Bible, except she never opened it. She said it was a keepsake from the refugee camp and that it made her feel more right with God at church, whatever that meant. At home, it lay on the altar beneath the crucifix. I opened it once. The first few pages, brittle and yellowed, were written in someone else’s handwriting, the rest in Suzy’s tiny Vietnamese cursive, which was already hard to read. I tried translating the first page with a bilingual dictionary but could get no further than the opening sentence. Something about rain in the morning and someone’s mother yelling at them. Suzy once forgot the book at church and didn’t realize it until bedtime. She wanted to go right then and there to retrieve it, insisting, “Someone is always there!” But I refused to let her go. At dawn the next morning, after a long, sleepless night, she drove to church and came home with the journal clutched to her chest like a talisman, her eyes red from crying. She did not speak to me the rest of the day.

  She could go an entire week without speaking. A way at first to punish me for whatever I had done to anger her, though gradually, almost every time, her silence outlasted her anger and became a retreat from me and into herself, an absence actually, as though she had gotten lost in whatever world she had escaped into. Her temper—that flailing beast inside her that she herself hated—would retreat as well, and the only thing left between us until she spoke again was what we had said and done to each other when we fought: about money we didn’t have and the children we weren’t having, about what to eat for dinner, about my poor driving and my poor taste in clothes and a million other things I can’t remember anymore. I always played my part, stubborn and mouthy as I am, my own temper always burning brightest before hers exploded. She’d go from yelling at me to lunging at me, those eyes erupting out of her face as she slapped and punched my chest or seized my neck with both hands. Both of us knew she was not strong enough to hurt me, and on a certain level I think she went out of her way to avoid it, never throwing or breaking anything in the house, never once using anything but her hands and her words. Even as I held her wrists and let her scream at me, let her kick me in the stomach or the legs, it sometimes felt as though she were asking me—with her hateful, pleading eyes—to hold her back and tie her to the mast until the storm passed. Because inevitably she’d crumple to the floor and cry herself into a numb silence and eventually into bed, where she would begin withdrawing from me and the world.