Act of Revenge (21 page)

These were two brothers, surnamed Vo and a cousin, surnamed Nguyen, and they all had adopted, in the usual way, gang nicknames. The smaller of the two brothers, a rat-face with brown teeth, was called Needlenose. The larger, beefy for a Vietnamese, and with coarse long hair and dark skin, was Sharkmeat. The cousin was Cowboy, hardly more than a boy, delicate-boned, wiry and nervous. Lucy gathered that he had been in the country for less time than the others had, and they bossed him around roughly.

“Hey, Cowboy, we're going to call Kenny again,” said Sharkmeat. “You watch her.”

“Yeah,” said Needlenose, “watch, but don't touch. We know you go for hairless pussy.”

“He
is
a hairless pussy,” said Sharkmeat, and laughing, they stomped out.

Some minutes passed. Nguyen spent the waiting time ripping a hole in the plaster wall with a large, heavy butterfly knife, but Lucy felt his eyes on her and when she turned her head, he was staring at her. She returned his gaze. Nguyen stopped his hacking at the wall and picked up Lucy's bag. He examined her wallet, her notebook, the various odds and ends she had accumulated. He riffled through a French-English and a Vietnamese-English dictionary, and a paperback of
Kim.
He picked up
The Tale of Kieu
, studied it briefly, and then stared again at Lucy. He walked over to her, holding the book.

“You read this book?” he asked in English.

“No,” she answered, “I only look at the pictures.”

“But the book has no pictures,” he replied in Vietnamese, and then did a double-take when he realized that the girl had also spoken in that language.

“You speak Vietnamese!” he exclaimed.

“All Americans speak a little Vietnamese.”

He gaped at her. She said, “That was a joke.”

“But where did you learn it?”

“From a friend.” She indicated the book. “Have you read this?”

He looked down, flushing. “No, I had to leave school. To work, and then . . . but I know this . . .” and here he declaimed in a singsong voice, “ ‘The breeze blows cool, the moon shines clear, but in my heart still burns a thirst unquenched.' ”

“Yes, that's from where Kieu and Kim are on their first date and she plays her lute for him. It's so beautiful. I wish I could read it better, it's still hard for me. How old are you?”

“Seventeen. How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” she lied. “How long have you been in America?”

“Oh, six months, something like that.”

“And do you like this kind of work? Kidnapping people?”

He shrugged. “I have no choice. My family brought me over here, and I have to do what they say.”

They heard footsteps approaching. Lucy put her hand on his arm, which was warm and smooth. “Brother,” she said urgently, “please don't tell them I speak your language. I think they would get angry if they knew.”

Cowboy stared at the little white hand on his arm. He nodded sharply and moved away as the other two men came back into the room. Kenny Vo, their leader, had apparently been contacted and was on his way. They sat back against the wall, chain-smoking, and talking about women and gambling and teasing Cowboy. Lucy shut her ears to that and returned to her translating, turning, as the poem recommends, the “scented leaves by lamplight to read the tale of love recorded upon green chronicles.” She had progressed to where the sisters Van and Kieu (both beauties, but Lucy decided to forgive them that, and besides, Kieu was possessed of a deeper charm and talented as well) were lamenting over the grave of a famous beauty of the past who had been betrayed and died of it, when Kenny Vo walked in and started barking orders. Vo had a family resemblance to his brothers, bearing a version both of Needlenose's sharp features and Sharkmeat's muscular bulk. He moved and spoke with casual brutality, and when he looked at Lucy it was as if he were looking at some inanimate and unappealing package, a sack of elderly chicken parts in need of rapid disposal, for example.

“Get her in the trunk,” he ordered. “Cowboy, watch the street.”

This
was
frightening. Lucy had always disliked enclosed places, and the dark, and being constrained, and so her control gave way, and she fought, and having been trained in boxing from an early age, she got a few good shots in before she was slapped silly by Sharkmeat and stuffed in the trunk of a Lincoln. Her bag was gone, but she had Tran's book shoved down her waistband. An interminable, painful ride over New York's infamously ragged paving, and then they popped the lid and threw a stinking blanket over her and hauled her indoors. She ended up on a mattress in what looked like the finished basement of a suburban house, a windowless room, panelled in cheap pine-look sheeting, with red and black linoleum on the floors. There were two doors, one locked, the other leading, delightfully, to a tiny bathroom. She used the toilet and then checked herself out in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Bruises on cheek and jawline, and a big smear of blood down her chin and spattered on her T-shirt from where her nose had bled: a mess. She washed her face gingerly and dried off with wads of toilet paper.

She went back into the other room, sat on the mattress, and listened. She heard the sounds of several men walking and speaking some tonal language, but could not make out what was being said. The Vo boys, she presumed, and maybe the Chinese guy. The talking became louder, turned into an argument. She heard stomping, slammed doors. From outside came the sound of car doors. A car started up and pulled away. Could they have left her here alone? No, she heard steps above. Sighing, she drew out the book and rolled over onto her belly. She translated:

Since time out of mind, cried Kieu,
harsh fate has cursed all rosy faces, sparing none.

As I see her lie there, it hurts to think
Of what will come to me hereafter

An unpleasant thought; she wished Tran would hurry the hell up.

Chapter 10

KARP WAS DINING IN COLUMBUS PARK behind the Criminal Courts Building, using the twenty minutes he had to spare between his briefing of Jack Keegan and his appointment to address the incoming class of ADAs. He sat on the edge of a park bench, leaning over his spread knees, head down and slurping noisily, a position necessary if one wished to eat a sausage, fried onion and pepper hero laden with hot sauce and oozing grease without collecting souvenirs of the meal all over one's immaculately pressed suit. An occasional pigeon darted in between his shoes to sample the dropped bits. Karp noted that the birds always dropped these after a taste, and took an odd comfort in the fact that his normal lunchtime diet would gag a New York pigeon. There appeared now in his restricted field of view a pair of gleaming faux crocodile loafers decorated with gold-colored clasps, above which were black silk socks, above which were the legs of a brown pinstripe on tan wool suit. A deep voice said, “Nice day for a picnic, Stretch. They said I'd find you out here, and here you are.”

Karp carefully deposited the ragged and soggy sandwich on a square of waxed paper and looked up. He saw a smiling solid man in his early fifties, broad-shouldered and half a foot shorter than Karp himself, with a brush mustache and graying sideburns on his mahogany face. Captain Clay Fulton was Karp's first and best friend on the police force. A dozen years his senior, Fulton was the first black college-educated detective captain in the department's history, highly decorated, feared and mistrusted by the department grandees, and hence left pretty much on his own. Officially, he ran the D.A. squad; unofficially, he was more or less Karp's private police force, which amused him, and kept him virtually free of the cop bureaucracy he despised.

“It is,” Karp agreed. “Get yourself something from the wagons and sit.”

Fulton made a face and sat down. “I used to eat like that when I still had a stomach. You know, Stretch, when you're a big shot you're supposed to have lunch in a restaurant, the waiter brings you the food, the kitchen got a health permit, you bask in the admiring glances of lovely women . . .”

“I'm practicing for when I get fired. You got any good news for me?”

“About this Lie character? Not to speak of. The prints came back zilch. Not known on NCIS. We're trying Interpol, but that'll take awhile.”

“Try the Hong Kong police.”

“You think he's from there?”

“It's a good guess. All these Chinese bad boys check in there sooner or later. Where did he go after I threw him out?”

“Downtown, an office building. His lawyer's place, but they didn't stay there long. They hopped a cab back up there.” Here he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the federal building. “They went in, and about an hour later the lawyer came out alone.”

Karp nodded. “So they did a deal. Lie probably went out of the garage in one of those black-window vans with a couple of FBI guys to keep him company. He's eating his chow mein in a U.S. government safe house as we speak.”

“They definitely did a deal. The feds rousted Joe Pigetti out of the La Roma restaurant twenty minutes ago.”

“See, that's what we get for being honest guys. We get to finish our lunch.”

Fulton said, “You thinking now you should've grabbed him when you had him, maybe.”

“Not on the terms he was offering. Next time I grab him, he won't be doing the bargaining.”

“You're mighty sure of that, considering you got jack shit solid on the man.”

Karp resumed his lunch, leaning forward, saying between bites, “Clay, the guy's dirty. All you got to do is find the dirt.”

“Oh, we'll look, all right, but it's Chinatown. And I thought I taught you to avoid betting on the come.”

“I have perfect faith in your talents,” said Karp, balling up his waxed paper and napkin and tossing it ten feet into a trash basket.

A shadow fell on them, and they both looked up to see a ragged, ashy black man pushing a shopping cart full of stuffed plastic bags. “Spare some change, brother,” the man said to Clay.

Fulton pulled a money clip out of his pocket, peeled a single off, and gave it to the man. “Take care, pop,” he said.

“Pop yourself,” said the man. “You old enough to be
my
daddy.” He rolled his establishment away, grumbling.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Karp.

“You said it, man, and to think that at one time that guy was an assistant district attorney. The man just wouldn't stop betting on the come.”

Karp laughed and pointed with his chin across the park. “No,
there's
the lawyer. See her legal pad?” It was the old woman Karp had met previously, sitting in the shade of a tree, scratching away with her pencil. She raised her head, peered across the dusty lawn, made getting-under-way motions, and waved to Karp. Who rose hastily and said, “Clay, I got to go before she comes over here and starts bending my ear. She's got me confused with the court of appeals. Keep in touch.”

The call from Freddie Phat's watcher came in at a little past three, and about five minutes later Tran got the word that the Vo gang had dragged a blanket-wrapped bundle into their Brooklyn house. It took him forty minutes to drive his motorcycle from Manhattan to Avenue J in Brooklyn, via the Battery Tunnel and Ocean Parkway. He parked across the broad boulevard, crossed it, and walked up to the door of the modest two-story semidetached house. He rang. He saw part of a face looking out through the slats of a venetian blind in the front window. The door opened, and the large Vietnamese who opened it scowled and said in halting Cantonese, “Fuck! Where you been, man? They went looking for you.”

“The girl is here?” asked Tran.

“Yes. I must go page my brother now. Wait here.”

He turned to go, but Tran did not wait. Instead Tran slid his great big Colt .45 Commander out of his waistband and slugged Sharkmeat over the head with it. The man grunted and dropped to his hands and knees. Tran kicked him hard in the short ribs, and he fell over onto his side.

Tran quickly knelt and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into Sharkmeat's ear.

“Where is she?” he asked in Vietnamese. Blood seeped up around the grinding muzzle, covered the front sight blade, and filled the little channels of Sharkmeat's ear.

In a while, Sharkmeat told him where, and also that he was alone, even volunteering that the door was locked with a padlock, the key for which was hanging on a nail by the basement door. Tran whipped out a pair of heavy-duty plastic cable ties and trussed the man up hand and foot.

“What took you so long?” asked Lucy, who was waiting at the door when Tran burst through, she having heard and interpreted the unpleasant noises that had lately come from above.

He looked at her face a moment and said, “Who did this to you?”

“It's nothing, Uncle Tran, really. Let's just go.”

He grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her roughly behind him, up the stairs and to where the Vietnamese lay bound.

“Him?”

“They all did, come
on
, Uncle . . . no,
don't
do that, please,
please!
” Struggling, she managed to get between Tran and the bleeding man, so that Tran had to stop hitting him with his pistol, and knelt, breathing hard, like a blown horse.

Tran wiped blood and bits of broken tooth from his pistol barrel on Sharkmeat's shirt front, and then he stood up, grabbed Lucy's wrist again, and pulled her out of the house and across Ocean Parkway, Lucy protesting and demanding to be released all the way. Tran lifted her onto the pillion seat, cranked the motorcycle, and sped northwest to the Battery Tunnel. After reaching the Manhattan side, Tran turned into a narrow side street and stopped. He reversed himself on the seat and faced Lucy, his eyes terrible.

“How?” he demanded in Vietnamese. “How were you captured, and by the Vo brothers, too, who are turtle heads, crude thugs—how?”

“I found the book, Uncle Tran. And I was reading it, translating it, on the subway, and I got too caught up in it, I guess. . . .”

“On the subway? You were reading on the
subway
? You are supposed to watch on the subway. You read behind locked doors. How did they take you on the subway?”

“They didn't. I mean, I spotted them after I missed my stop, and then I ran but they grabbed my bag and I followed them out . . .”

“You
followed
them? Did I understand that you
followed
them?”

“Yes, see, they took my bag. With your
Tale of Kieu
in it . . .”

Tran grimaced and stuck all his fingers in his mouth and chewed them, growling.

When this fit concluded, he shouted at her, “Imbecile child! For a book? You put your life in danger for a
book
? Are you
insane
!”

And then, of course, Lucy did what she hadn't done yet, which was break down and blubber like a three-year-old, the deadly fear boiling up now that she was safe, but also because of the unfairness of Tran, to be angry with her when she had saved his relic, and so he had to comfort her, dragging her down the seat and pressing her against his small, iron-hard chest, and stroking her dirty, damp curls until she was calm again. He gave her a clean handkerchief to mop herself up, and he said, in gentler tones, “My very dear idiot child, we must decide what we are to do now. The Vo will be angry about this, and they are as relentless as hungry dogs. I cannot guard you every minute of every day. Therefore, we must remove the Vo.”

“You intend to kill them?” she asked, a mixture of awe and disgust in her tone.

Tran rolled his eyes. “Of course I don't intend any such thing. Where do you get these ideas? No, we must go to the police and they will arrest them. They committed very serious crimes, and it will be better for us if they are in prison.”

Lucy gaped, astounded. It was like hearing that the president of Pepsi was thinking about putting Coke machines in the corporate headquarters snack bar. “The
police
! We never go to the police.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. Your mother has made it a principle never to engage in any activity that the police and the courts can do better—”

“My
mother
!” cried Lucy in an unpleasant sneering voice.

“Yes, your mother, who will, of course, have to be told of this. And your father also.”

“You would
tell
them!” she cried, tears welling once more. “Traitor! I will never speak to you again as long as I live.” She jumped off the pillion seat and flounced away, in the direction of Broadway. Tran cursed and called after her, but she didn't stop. He kicked his motor into life and followed her down the street.

She walked on, ignoring him, her back stiff and straight as a mast. Tran found himself quite baffled; his long career as a terrorist and guerrilla leader had not prepared him for combat with an American teenager in a snit. In time they reached Broadway, at which point Lucy stopped, turned, and came up to him.

“Go away!” she commanded.

“Lucy, have some sense,” Tran said. “Get on the motorcycle and we will go someplace quiet and talk. You must be hungry—”

“No! You see that policeman over there?” She pointed to where a blue-and-white was parked, its occupant out ticketing cars. “If you don't go away, I will tell him I am a frightened little girl and you are the bad old man who has been following me and that you hit my face.”

Tran took in a startled breath, so long and deep that his nostrils pinched and whitened. Without another word he swung the machine away and roared off back the way they had come. Lucy watched him disappear, feeling empty. Really empty, for she was starving as well as spiritually desolate. She had no money for food, but she did have a subway token. She never left the house without one secreted in the little change pocket of her jeans. She walked to Wall Street and took a northbound train, intending to go to Canal Street and home, but at the Chambers/Centre Street stop, she jumped to her feet, impelled by a pressure she could not have described, but which could not be resisted, and left the train.

“So much for the organization of the office and what you can expect to be doing in your first months here,” said Karp. “I want to finish by telling you some stuff I wish someone had told me back when I started here, way back in the second Roosevelt administration.” This raised a polite titter from the fifteen young lawyers assembled in the jury box of a temporarily vacant courtroom. Karp stood in the well of the court facing them, incidentally demonstrating how to stand in the well of a court and talk to a jury, which it seemed to him some of these kids might not know how to do, so green were they.

“First of all, you all have something in common, besides being lawyers. Can anybody guess what that is?”

The group looked around at one another speculatively. Eight men, seven women, four black, two Hispanic, one Asian, the rest white, or white-ish. Nobody had a clue.

“I'll tell you,” said Karp. “Every one of you participated in a competitive sport. Most of you are team athletes, but we have a varsity sprinter, a couple of state-level tennis players, two women's varsity crew oars, and a junior chess master. This is not an accident. Prosecuting in an adversarial system requires the same kind of competitiveness, endurance, guts, mercilessness, and ability to play when hurt that're necessary to succeed in sports. Just like sports, this game is about winning under a set of rules, but it's not all about winning. It's mainly about doing the right thing. Just do the right thing and don't get all concerned about your won and lost record. Doing the right thing and keeping your integrity is important because you're probably not going to contribute much to making the world a better place, not that you're going to be able to see at any rate.” Here he paused and looked a selection of them in the eye, using his ever useful Severe yet Compassionate Look.