Dragonfish: A Novel (14 page)

“I don’t know. I guess so.” The girl glanced behind her as if to check that the room was still empty. “I was told to come here. Why are you looking for her?”

“She’s been missing from home since Sunday. Her car is gone, so we think she left on her own, but she didn’t tell anyone. Who told you to come here?”

“
She
did. She’s been sending me letters.” Her demeanor hardened suddenly like she was remembering herself, and she narrowed her eyes. “Look, I’m sure you are who you are, but I don’t know you any more than I know her. Shit, a month ago I didn’t even know she was alive. Now I’m here in an empty hotel room for God knows what reason.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Here, let me show you something. I’m just going for my wallet.”

I pulled out an old photo of me and Suzy at Fisherman’s Wharf, our backs to the ocean. We were a week away from getting married. Though I was beaming with my arm around her, her face was as solemn as the gray skies behind us. Smiling in pictures made her feel fake.
We smile for who?

It came back to me then—how awkward and cold she’d get around children, how she’d always refuse when people offered their baby to her to hold, how adamant she’d been when I mentioned kids just a month before this photo was taken. She would have been about ten years older than the girl was now.

She held the photo close to her face and momentarily forgot me. That stirring inside me, I realized, was an outlandish urge
to protect her. She had her mother’s beauty, except hers was distracted and uncertain: her chewed nails, her scuffed cowboy boots, the
Rosemary’s Baby
haircut framing her crinkled brow.

“You even stand the same way she does,” I said. “Here—” I handed her my driver’s license. “My name is Robert Ruen. Your mother and I were married for eight years. We lived in Oakland. It’s where I met her.”

“Guess she never told you about me. Why would she, right?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sure she had her reasons.”

“Don’t we all?” She gave me back my license. “Someone should apologize to you too.” She opened the door a little wider now. “You came all the way from Oakland to look for her?”

“She moved here a couple years ago. After our divorce. Her new husband here . . . I’m helping him find her.”

I could see more questions popping into the girl’s head. She said, “Is she in trouble?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

“But how did you know to come to this room?”

“It’s a long story. You mind if I come inside?”

She glared at me like she was trying to peer into my soul, but there was also an eagerness in the way she pursed her lips and tapped her fingers on the door. She finally held it open for me.

The room was identical to mine. It was made up, pristine, no sign whatsoever that anyone had been here except for the girl’s purse on the dresser.

I asked her, “Were the curtains open or drawn when you came in?”

“Drawn. Had to let in some light. The rooms in these old casinos feel like tombs.”

I walked to the far wall without showing myself in the window and pulled the curtains close, plunging us into the room’s bronze
light. I clicked on another lamp. She stood in the hall by the door, still holding my photo in her hand, thoroughly intrigued by all the stealth. I noticed a piece of paper by her purse, the one I had slid under the door. It must have mystified her until I came knocking and hollering. And even then.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m as confused by everything as you are. But before I tell you what I know, I need to ask you some questions. Is that okay?”

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

“I am?”

“You talk like one. No offense. I’ve run into a few cops in my life.”

“I guess you have. Don’t worry, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I know. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She approached me and gave back the photo. “You look happy there.”

I returned the photo carefully to my wallet, deflated by her composure. She didn’t want or need protecting, not yet. And even if she did, who was I to offer it?

She walked over to the dresser and retrieved her purse. She pulled out an envelope. “I got this yesterday in my mailbox. The letters always come in the mail, but they’re not stamped or addressed or anything. Just my name on the front.”

I opened the letter:
Mai, Please go room 1215 at Coronado Hotel. 2:00 tomorrow. I leave something for you. Tell front desk your name and they give you the key. Your mother.

It was Suzy’s elfin handwriting. Her robotic English.

I didn’t hide my relief. “At least we know she’s alive and still in town. Yesterday, anyway. That’s all there was?”

“Yeah. Her other letters aren’t that much longer. More like notes really. I don’t have them with me.”

“You started getting them—a month ago, right?”

“A month exactly. This is the fourth one. The first one confused the hell out of me. No one I know would write me in Vietnamese. I had to get some random waitress at a noodle shop to translate it for me.”

“Sounded like you knew Vietnamese just a minute ago.”

“I can speak and understand it okay. But I might as well be reading Chinese. Anyway, in the first letter she says she’s my mother and has wanted to write me all these years, she’s never forgotten me, and she wants me to know she’s watching me now. That was it. Kinda freaked me out. First, I had to believe it was her. Then I had to imagine her out there watching me. Like, how the hell was she doing that?”

“Do you frequent the casinos? Do you work there, I mean?”

She had glanced at me as though I’d just accused her of something. She seemed both leery of my questions and anxious to answer them. “You can say that. I play poker for a living. Don’t look surprised, I make more at cards than I would at anything else.”

“I ask because Suzy was a dealer briefly when she first got here. At the Horseshoe, I think. She might have seen you there. Even dealt to you.”

“I’ve played there, and I’d remember her if she dealt poker. She must have done the table games.” She stopped and squinted at the floor. “Jesus, how many times did I pass her?”

“She’d never written you before? Even when you were younger?”

“She was dead, for all I knew. She left when I was five, a few months after we got to the States. Just disappeared one day without saying a word to anybody. Guess she has a habit of doing that. I have barely any memory of her. She left two weeks before Christmas. Right about now, come to think of it.”

I was ready to say something consoling, but a flash of bitterness in her eyes told me she didn’t want the sympathy.

“Do you know your father?” I said and found myself wincing inside at the thought of whoever he was, someone long before me, someone secret and original.

She shook her head casually. “He died in Vietnam not long after my mother and I escaped. Cancer or something. I can’t remember a thing about him. All I know is that he fought with the Americans and was sent to the reeducation camps after the war and got real sick there. My uncle—
his
uncle, actually—told me all this. He’s the one who raised me in LA after my mother left, he and my grandaunt.”

“They’ve never heard from her?”

“Wouldn’t have told me if they had. They were hard-core Catholics—unforgiving as hell. She was dead to them, and when I dropped out of college and took up gambling, they cut me off too. Probably started seeing a bit too much of her in me. They weren’t way off, because after my granduncle died a few years back, I left for Vegas and haven’t spoken to anyone in the family since.”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed and talking mostly to the dresser. I could sense that she had wanted to tell someone these things for a long time.

“So there were two other letters.”

“Yeah. In English, actually. It was weird—her English wasn’t that good, but that made it easier for me to read, you know? Less intimate maybe. Less of her real voice. I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. In the second letter, she says she called up my cousin in LA two years ago and pretended to be an old friend of mine, and my cousin—that twit—tells her I’m a drug addict and a gambler in Vegas, which is only half true. So anyway she moved here and
tracked me down. She says she doesn’t like it here, but it reminds her of Vietnam for some reason, and she starts going on about the mountains and the skies in Vietnam. Bad poetry, honestly. She says she hopes I quit the drugs and the gambling and visit the homeland some day. It’ll help me. Who told her I needed helping? I kept thinking of her living here all this time, driving past my apartment, then putting shit in my mailbox—when I’m at home, even. She came here to look for me and she found me, and for two years she didn’t do anything. So why now?”

Her voice had gotten small, and she was picking at a thread on the bedcover. She became a child all of a sudden, as though she’d been spending the last ten minutes suppressing any part of herself that might seem young or feminine or weak. She was a clarified version of her mother, with all the carefulness but none of the mystery, and that somehow eased my mind amid the shock of all she was telling me.

The moment passed and she stood from the bed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “By the way—what did you mean, ‘at least she’s alive’? Were you afraid she was dead?”

“Not exactly. I just want to find her as soon as possible and make sure she’s okay.”

She was studying me again with that hard burrowing stare. “She divorced
you
, didn’t she?” I must have shown some annoyance because she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

I swallowed and waved away the apology. “It’s all right. Your mother did leave me. And yes, I’ve never stopped caring for her.” She nodded sheepishly, so I pressed on, “Tell me about that third letter.”

“That was the oddest one. It came last Saturday. She says she’s going somewhere, and that before she leaves she has to give me
something. She also says that one of these days everything will be explained to me. Still not sure what she means by ‘everything.’ I don’t know if it’s me or her English or if she’s just trying to be the most mysterious person on earth.”

“She had a habit of that too. Don’t take it personally.”

The girl almost smiled, which startled me, made me aware of how intimate our conversation had become.

I said, “Did she give you any indication in her letters that she wanted to meet?”

Her face fell, again that childish demeanor, that instant smallness, eyes averted and lips pursed. “No. I figured she might be here, waiting for me. I was all ready with things to say.”

I looked around the room. “So what did she leave you?”

She shrugged. “Didn’t have much time to look before you started knocking on the door.”

I walked into the bathroom and started searching the cabinets, the tub, the hamper. Mai was picking through the nightstand drawer when I came back out. “The dresser has nothing either.”

“Have you checked the closet?”

She shook her head.

The brown carry-on suitcase stood beside the ironing board in the closet, with a notecard taped to it.
Mai
, written in red marker. I carried it to the bed. It weighed a good thirtysomething pounds and looked brand-new.

“I’ll do it if you want,” I said, but she was already trying to unzip it. Then we both saw the small silver lock.

She grabbed her purse and rummaged through it until she finally fished out a tiny chrome key. “This was also in the envelope.” She shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know yet if I should tell you.”

She inserted the key into the lock, and it opened. She hesitated a second before unzipping the carry-on and flipping it open.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered.

It was packed with jumbled bricks of cash. She picked up one and flipped through the twenty-dollar bills. I did too. Fifty bills a brick. It took me a while to count all the bricks. About a hundred in all.

“Goddamn,” I said. “There’s got to be a hundred grand here.”

“They’re real,” she muttered, inspecting a bill under the lamplight and feeling it between her fingers. She plopped herself on the bed beside the carry-on. “She left this all for me?”

“I don’t think it’s hers to leave.” I gently took the brick from her hand. She gave me a defensive look. I replaced the money and zipped up the suitcase and went through the outer pockets and sleeves. Nothing but a few silica gel packets.

I turned to her. “Mai, listen to me carefully. Do you know a man named Sonny Nguyen?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure? He plays a lot of poker in town. Short, bald, about fifty. Mean-looking.”

“Half the Vietnamese guys that play are balding and trying to look mean. One at every table.”

“How about a Jonathan Nguyen?”

“Am I supposed to know these guys?”

“Well, Sonny is your mother’s new husband. Jonathan is his son. This is their money.”

“You know this for sure? Why can’t it be hers?”

“A hundred grand? Your mother had nothing when she left me, and she stopped working when she married Sonny. I doubt he’s this generous. She took this money from him. No wonder they’re desperate to find her.” I banged my fist on the suitcase.
“Goddamn it, how can she be this stupid! She didn’t think they’d come after you too?”

Mai gave me a moment before saying, “Maybe I should be scared, but I’m more confused than anything. Who are these guys?”

I turned away from her so she couldn’t see my face and that exasperated flush that only Suzy could inflict on me.

“I guess you can call them businessmen,” I said. “High-class smugglers, actually, gamblers in every way. The father’s got an ugly temper and has had more than a few run-ins with the law, so the son seems to run everything—a restaurant, a pet store, black-market shit, who knows what else. Anyway, it’s not about who they are. It’s about what they’re willing to do to get what they want. And now I know what they want.”

“But you said you were helping them.”

“I didn’t have a choice. Listen, I don’t have time now to explain. You need to leave this hotel. They can’t know you were here or who you are or that you even exist.”