Dragonfish

12

MAI WRESTLED THE JEEP into a tight parking spot at the Stratosphere, nearly running over a convertible half its size.

Once she cut the engine, I said, “Twenty minutes. That’s it. We can’t find her, we go straight to your place and get your shit and then go back to the Coronado. We put all this behind us.”

She put her hand on my arm before I could open the door. “Let me speak to her first. You know her, but I speak her language.”

“What’s the difference? We’ll be lucky if she’s even here.”

“You look like you’re ready to choke someone.”

Even inside the Jeep, we could see our own breath.

“Just Sonny,” I said, admitting to myself that I was now relishing the idea of taking his money — anything that was his.

We were on the fifth floor of the parking garage. It had taken us some time to find a spot, but as we marched toward the elevators, hurrying past a football field of cars, we didn’t see a single person and heard only Sinatra’s cavernous baritone blaring from invisible speakers.

I checked the cell phone to see if anyone had called. It was not yet six, but night had already swallowed the city by the time we drove into the garage.

As I tried to keep pace with Mai, a shiver of claustrophobia — of sudden loneliness — ran through me. Driving up into these casino garages, with their stark fluorescence and low ceilings, their serpentine corridors, felt more like a descent, a submersion into something airless.

We got into a warm, empty elevator and Mai stood close beside me, her cheeks pale from the cold. She could have been my daughter, I thought — not without regret and some anger. Before Suzy, I had been a bachelor for decades and thought little of the past and even less of the future, but that’s natural when your solitude is intentional. There’s so much of tomorrow ahead of you, so much time left to redo and rethink your regrets and forget about the rest of it.

The elevator doors opened, and the din of slot machines jerked me back to life.

Mai had played at the Stratosphere only two or three times but apparently knew the place well. She started us walking the casino floor and circling the roulette tables, then the blackjack tables, the baccarat and craps tables. The floor was bustling, the evening crowd here trading in their afternoon sweatshirts for crisp collars and glittery dresses, their baseball caps for hair gel, their handbags for clutches and high heels. This was a newer casino, higher ceilings and skinnier waitresses, and the perfumed air pumped in from the vents masked the cigarette smoke that clung to the walls of a place like the Coronado.

Some of the tables were crowded enough that we had to stop and search for the dealer. Again, they were mostly Asian. Twice we approached a female dealer with glasses, and each time my face went hot with anticipation.

The thought of confronting Happy felt vaguely humiliating, made me regret our chance encounter in Oakland and all my lustful glances at her over the years. I kept imagining Junior and Victor roughing her up, and as ugly as it all was, as much as it proved what she was willing to take for Mai, all I cared about now was whether her bruises had kept her from coming to work.

“Three days are enough for a black eye to fade a bit,” Mai said knowingly. “Little makeup like she had on, and you’re fine. And you can hide a lot with glasses on.”

I followed her into an area with ceilings painted like the sky, past escalators that ascended into clouds toward the entrance of the Stratosphere Tower itself. A sign boasted thrill rides and the Top of the World restaurant. I thought of the suicide Mai had mentioned and wondered if taking this ridiculous route made it easier, gliding past slot machines and fake clouds and zooming up eleven hundred feet to a roller coaster, where to a chorus of laughter and screams you leap off the edge of the world.

Mai had led me on a brisk, circuitous path to the poker room, which was situated far away from the main floor. We arrived at the four-foot wall surrounding the room and started scanning the fifteen packed tables.

Mai slapped the wall irritably and walked to the front desk, which was attended by an impressively tanned guy wearing a double-breasted suit and an oil slick for a haircut. He didn’t look up until she said, “Is Happy dealing tonight?”

“‘Happy dealing’?” he said as if repeating some foreign phrase. He glanced at me.

“Yes, Happy,” Mai repeated. “Is she here tonight?”

“Oh. Wrong poker room. No one here named that. Wouldn’t matter anyway since our dealers rotate every half hour.”

“Okay, then.”

“We have the best, though. They’ll walk you through if you need help.”

Mai had half turned to go but was now giving him the eye as though admiring his ripe tan. “Will they?”

“I can sign you up for the tournament. Starts in half an hour. You’re only risking the sixty-dollar buy-in. A little less pressure.”

“I play cash games.”

“Oh. You do. Well, let’s see. . there’s an open seat at the one/two game. No-limit hold’em.”

“How about a twenty-five/fifty?”

The guy looked up to measure her seriousness, a little embarrassed but also ready to be annoyed. “I’m afraid ten/twenty is the highest we have right now.”

“Too bad. I’ll try another room. Maybe I’ll find Happy there too.”

Mai turned on her heels and stalked off, leaving the guy to look at me again for an explanation.

On our way back to the main floor, I told her, “She’s not here. We need to get going to your place.”

She continued eyeing the tables we passed. “Let me try one more thing. Do you still have that card with my cell number?”

“What for?” I checked my pockets and handed her the card.

She approached an empty roulette table overseen by an older Asian woman and took a seat.

“Good evening, good evening,” the woman said, her crow’s-feet blooming as she smiled. “Try your luck tonight?” She was barely five feet and looked elegantly comical in her bow tie and vest. Despite the “Betty”on her nametag, her accent was strong and unmistakably Vietnamese.

Mai set four crisp hundred-dollar bills on the felt and said, “In quarters please.”

After flashing the bills to the pit boss, Betty pushed a small stack of blue chips in front of her. Each chip, I noticed, was worth $25.

“Excuse me, sir. If you not playing, I can ask you step back from the table? Maybe stand behind pretty lady here?”

She flashed us both another toothy smile and announced, as if the table were full of people, “Place your bets.”

I muttered in Mai’s ear, “Is this all necessary to ask her a question?”

“What’s your birth date?” she whispered back.

“Jesus. September seventeenth.”

“Of course you’re a Virgo.” She took four chips and placed two each on 9 and 17. The minimum bet for the table, a sign said, was ten dollars.

“No more bets,” Betty announced and waved her hand over the table like a magician. She spun the roulette wheel, her smile as empty as her wandering look around the casino.

“My friend Happy deals here,” Mai spoke up, riffling her chips. “Is she on tonight?”

“Oh, you know Happy?” Betty replied brightly. “No, she don’t work tonight.” The ball landed on 23, and she raked in all four of Mai’s chips. She clucked her tongue sympathetically.

Mai again placed two chips each on 17 and 9. “I heard she got hurt bad the other day. She’s doing better?”

It took Betty two long seconds before she nodded. “Yes, that’s right.” She spun the wheel again and looked back quickly at us. Her beaming had lost none of its wattage, but there was a new depth in her eyes, a stillness.

The ball landed on 17 this time. My heart jumped, but Mai gave no reaction. It was like she had expected it. As she watched Betty count out her winnings, about $1,800, she started speaking Vietnamese to her in a measured voice.

At the roulette table next to us, a gaggle of young dudes in khakis and starched shirts were clapping and cheering. I wondered at first if Betty had heard Mai over the noise, but as she pushed four towers of blue chips toward her, she shook her head like she was apologizing and murmured, “I don’t know anything.”

Mai kept at it, her Vietnamese voice tinged with a formal sincerity I hadn’t heard yet. She wasn’t asking questions. She was revealing things.

The humor drained from Betty’s face. She glanced around us. “I don’t know anything,” she said again, soberly this time, and put up a hand as if declining a gift.

A man appeared behind her, in another impeccable double-breasted suit, the pit boss no doubt, brandishing a ringed hand on the felt. He said politely to Mai, “Excuse me, miss — mind if I check your ID there?”

She had it ready for him, apparently used to this. He examined it, then handed it back to her. “Thanks so much. Some people look a little young, is all. You have fun now, miss — but you can only speak English to the dealer, okay?”

“Sorry, sir,” Mai said. “We have a friend in common.”

“That’s fine, but English only, all right? You all enjoy yourself.”

As he walked away, Betty finally looked up from the table, her smile tired now, her silence purposeful.

Mai whispered to me over her shoulder, “What’s my mother’s birth date?”

“We need to go.”

“Just one more bet.”

I told her June 15, and she promptly placed an entire stack of chips each on 6 and 15.

“Jesus, how much are you betting?” I asked her.

“I don’t know — five hundred on each, I think.”

Betty focused on me now like I’d really been the one interrogating her. When the roulette ball landed, she announced “thirty-five” in a small voice and cleared the table of more than half the chips Mai had won in the last spin.

“I’ll cash out,” Mai said. “In blacks, please.” She took out the business card I’d returned to her and placed it on the felt, her phone number faced up.

Betty counted out her remaining chips, announced the cash-out to the pit, and set nine black chips—$900 total — in front of Mai. “Thank you for playing,” she said and mustered one last halfhearted smile for us.

Mai stood from the table, palmed four of the chips, stacked the other five on the card, and slid it toward Betty. “For you. Please tell Happy to call me at that number. Tell her it’s Hong, and that I really need to speak to her.”

Betty looked wary of both the tip and the card.

A man in a black turtleneck and a sport coat appeared at the table with a blond half his age and twice his height, his hand on the small of her back. In one smooth movement, greeting them as she had greeted us, Betty scooped Mai’s $500 tip into her tip bin and slipped the card into her vest pocket.

As we walked away, I glanced back and caught her eyeing us. I asked Mai, “What did you say to her?”

“I told her Happy’s in trouble and needs our help. Did you see her face?”

“You can’t go around right now giving strangers your number. There’s no telling who or what she knows — or if she’s even loyal to Happy.”

“She doesn’t need to be to deliver the message.”

“You’re taking too many chances.”

“I was right, though. You saw her face. A middle-aged Vietnamese woman dealing in a casino? Good odds she’s been here a while and knows every Vietnamese woman who works here, who they’re married to, who they love and hate. She’ll deliver the message.”

We elbowed our way through a thick crowd of people waiting in the lobby for the start of some live music show. Mai bumped the arm of a guy twice her size, who muttered after her, but she kept walking like nothing had happened.

We returned to the elevator, and again we rode it alone. Mai stared at the elevator doors as though she could see some distant destination through them.

It wasn’t recklessness. She was too deliberate for that. What worried me was her unpredictability, always another plan or urge withheld. It had loomed inside her mother too, that same shadowy sea creature right beneath the surface of the water. You’re alone in the company of such people.

“There was more,” I said. “You said something else to her.”

Mai passed a hand through her hair. “I said they’ll hurt Happy again if we don’t help her. They’ll kill her next time.”

When the elevator opened, she marched toward the Jeep. It took me some effort to keep up with her.

13

THREE MILES EAST of the Strip, we disappeared into a dusky neighborhood of low apartment buildings, gravel lawns, and famished pine trees, a few of them lazily adorned with Christmas lights. Mai turned into an alley that led to a small walled-off parking lot behind her complex. She parked beside a rusty VW bus with two flat tires and cut the Jeep’s engine. I had to adjust to the quiet, slot machines still ringing in my ears.

I followed her through a gate with a hole where the knob should be. Her complex looked more like an abandoned motel: two stories of crusty peach stucco wrapped around a dusty gravel courtyard and a lit-up swimming pool half filled with greenish water and leaves, its bottom a brown blanket of scum.

Chicano music drifted from somewhere in the darkness.

We clanged up a metal staircase to the second-floor balcony that led around the building. She led me past dark windows, vacant inside perhaps or nobody home. Across the courtyard, two young black men stood smoking on the opposite balcony, leaning out of the shadows, their murmurs echoing across the way in some African language.

We turned the corner and approached a Mexican man on a plastic stool with a beer in his hand and a small boy in his lap, wrapped in his coat. I smelled grilled onions. When we passed their window, I saw a woman working the kitchen stove and three more children crowded around a small TV on the carpet, beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary framed with Christmas lights. Mai and the man nodded at each other, and the boy watched us intently as we made our way past and arrived two doors down at Mai’s apartment.

When she inserted her key, I said, “Let me go in first. How many rooms are there?”

“Just my bedroom. The kitchen opens to the living room.”

I flipped on the lights, smelled the cold odor of cigarettes. I pulled out my gun and gestured for her to stay by the doorway.

Her place was small, the walls completely bare and the brown shag carpet dark enough to hide stains. The only furniture, shoved into the center of the living room, was a leather recliner, a coffee table littered with a pizza box and soda cans, and a fancy big-screen TV as tall as Mai. In the cramped kitchen, my jacket snagged on the chipped edge of the Formica counter, which looked more yellowed than yellow and held a microwave and a rice cooker and nothing else.

The walls of her bedroom were also bare, her bed a mattress on the floor, a tangle of yellow sheets. Beside the head of the mattress was a lamp and a cardboard box of file folders as well as piles of books stacked against the wall.

I came back out to wave her in. I picked an empty cigarette pack off the floor and set it on the counter. “You get robbed recently, or did you just move in?”

Mai closed the front door, locked it. “I live simply,” she said and walked past me into her bedroom. She opened the closet, pulled out a black suitcase, and started throwing clothes inside.

“Take only what you absolutely need,” I reminded her. “Once everything cools off, we can get someone to come back for the rest of your stuff.”

“I can get new stuff.”

“Won’t your landlord wonder?”

“I’ve always leased month to month. He’ll be more than happy to take the big-screen.”

I noticed a bunch of poker manuals among her books, some Hemingway and Chandler novels, a few books on yoga and Eastern spirituality.

My foot knocked over an ashtray and I apologized, picking up the cigarette butts despite it not mattering. I checked my watch. It was nearly 7:00. Victor said we had until 8:30, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Why do I live in a shit hole?” She set the file folders atop the clothes. The top one had “Bankroll” written on it, the others neatly labeled too, by far the most meticulous things in the apartment.

“You spend money like you have it.”

“Didn’t when I got to town four years ago. This was the only place I could afford and it’s been good enough for me.”

“Kinda shady, no?” I peeked through the mini blinds at the alley below, shrouded in an orange-tinged darkness.

She shrugged. “I don’t go for walks at night.”

“Pretty sure we passed a drug deal down the street — those two kids on their skateboards.”

“Par for the course around here. Muggings too. A stabbing or shooting now and then. Doesn’t make me nervous anymore. If a man can live here with his wife and kids, I can too.”

“Easy to say until shit happens to you.”

“What makes you think it hasn’t?”

She went to the bathroom, and I heard her rummaging through drawers.

On the way to her place, she had asked if I liked being a cop. Her first personal question since we met. I told her that it depended on the day, that some days it’s just one idiot human being after another. When she asked if I had ever saved anyone’s life, I told her about the guy I once pulled from a burning car and how he survived despite third-degree burns to half his body. He’d also just robbed a convenience store, led me on a high-speed chase, and T-boned a minivan, killing a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. I’d wished at the time that he had burned in his car, but I didn’t tell her that. Helping the wrong people often felt as bad to me as hurting the wrong people.

She came back with some toiletries and what looked like a wooden statuette of Buddha, which she shoved into the outer pocket of the suitcase.

She finally went to her books, packing first a small stack of worn paperbacks. The Narnia Chronicles.

“I read those way back,” I said. “Can’t remember any of them except that one where they go through the wardrobe.”

“I’ve read that one eight times.” She snatched a cigarette from a pack on the windowsill and lit up as she picked through the other books. “This is gonna be tough.”

“Don’t take forever.”

“We still got more than an hour, don’t we?” She offered me the cigarette and went back to the books, sometimes lingering on a cover for a few seconds before making her decision. “Yeah, I used to go into my aunt and uncle’s closet and look for a door behind their clothes. I wanted so bad to find one. Just walk into another world like the kids in the book. Close the door behind me, never come back.”

“Was that the kid in you, or was that LA?”

“Both.” She threw in a book on meditation, then a book on the stock market. “LA never felt like home to me. Neither does Vegas, but at least here you can be anonymous. Everyone’s from somewhere else. Passing through for a few days, a few years. Being temporary can be a good thing.”

“Maybe. Being permanent ain’t possible anyway.”

“Permanence is overrated.”

She zipped the stuffed suitcase, stood up, and looked around. She took back the cigarette. I glanced again at my watch but didn’t want her to stop talking. It was calming to hear her so chatty and relaxed, so perversely in denial of the circumstances. She smoked with her arms half crossed, her rigid posture giving her an air of both authority and wariness. The elbows of her leather jacket were frayed like her jeans and cowboy boots, but she wore it all well, with hushed purposefulness, as though she had chosen this uniform — the haircut too, the lack of makeup — to moderate her beauty. Help her blend into the background.

She said, “Do you miss her?”

“Depends on what’s missing.”

“Okay, what do you not miss about her — besides all the crazy shit she did.”

“I don’t know. I guess I was never a fan of all the praying and churchgoing. All that devotion to God. I indulged her, of course, but I haven’t set foot inside a church since she left.”

“It’s a Vietnamese thing. Ingrained in all of us. Total waste of time.”

“That wasn’t it. Your mother always seemed like she was hoping for a fucking revelation or something. You know what I do miss? When she wasn’t being so goddamn serious. When we traveled, on our road trips, she lightened up then. She hated leaving town at first, but she got to liking it over the years. It put her at ease — being on the road, seeing new things.”

“I get that,” Mai said. “Wish I did it more.” She bent down to stub out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve been saving up for a trip to Vietnam. I want to travel the entire country. Start in Saigon and go up to Hanoi, maybe find an apartment by Halong Bay. Live there for a year and see how it goes. That’ll all be easier now. Shit, I almost forgot.”

She went back into her closet and returned with her hand in the belly of a small stuffed bear. She pulled out a passport, slipping it into her back pocket, and tossed the gutted bear on her bed.

“Finally got one four years ago and still haven’t used it,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Mexico.”

A cell phone rang, but it wasn’t mine. Mai rushed to retrieve hers from her purse and threw me an eager look.

She answered it in a low voice and listened intently. Yes, she replied in Vietnamese and then asked a question. After a long pause, another yes. Then, eyeing me, she said, “Okay, okay,” and hung up.

“Was it her?”

She nodded. “She’s at a pay phone across the street. She’s coming over right now.”

“How did she know to come here?”

“Betty must have described me.” Mai hit the light switch and doused us in darkness. “Stay in here and I’ll answer the door. She sounded nervous. It might scare her to see you right away. Let me talk to her first.”

“She could have anyone with her.”

“Well, if she does, you can come out and shoot them.” She nudged me back a step, leaving the door slightly open.

With my gun again in hand, I watched her through the narrow opening. She stood waiting at the edge of the kitchen. After five minutes that felt like twenty, footsteps finally approached and stopped outside the front door. Two quick knocks. Mai disappeared from view.

I heard the front door open and Mai say “Hello, big sister” in Vietnamese. A soft voice replied in kind, but I couldn’t make out if it was Happy, only that it was a woman.

The front door closed, the lock clicking loudly.

They continued speaking in Vietnamese, their voices closer now, Mai’s calm and careful, the other quick and hushed. Mai started explaining something in a reassuring tone. She sounded like someone else entirely when she spoke her mother tongue.

Suddenly I heard my name. A silence followed. Mai’s voice called out for me. I wedged my gun into the back of my jeans. My heart was thumping, and for a moment I thought it was possible someone else had come.

When Happy saw me, she looked more confused than frightened. Under her black peacoat, she was wearing a uniform identical to Betty’s. Her bow tie was askew, her arms at her side with one hand holding on to the strap of her handbag, which nearly touched the carpet.

“She was at the casino after all,” Mai explained with pride. “She’d just left her shift and was about to leave the casino when Betty caught up to her.”

I said to Happy, “How much does Betty know?”

“She don’t know nothing,” Happy replied quickly, still eyeing me with suspicion. “I tell her somebody hit me. That it.”

I inched closer. Despite her makeup and her glasses I could see the shadowy bruises around her left eye and the left corner of her mouth.

“She and me — we not good friend.”

“Then why did you tell her about it?”

“Three day I not leave the house and she come find me. She live in my neighborhood. Why you in Las Vegas, Bob?”

“Sonny. He made me come here and find Suzy for him. I found Mai instead.”

This made even less sense to her, but I didn’t feel like explaining.

She said, “You know she is. .”

“Suzy’s long-lost daughter? Yeah. Found that out about three hours ago. Don’t think Sonny planned on anything like that.”

My mention of Sonny again brought a flash of venom to her eyes.

“Did his men do that to you?” I said.

She blinked away the question. “Why you try find me? I don’t know nothing.”

“Did you know about Suzy’s plan?”

“What plan? She don’t tell nothing to me. They come and they say about the money, but I don’t know nothing about the money. They hit me and they say they kill me and they kill Suzy too, but I not say nothing.” She looked at Mai. “That why I come to you Tuesday — to get you tell your mom leave town.”

“You didn’t let me explain that day,” Mai said. “My mother and me have never talked or seen each other or anything. I got a few brief letters from her last month and that’s it. I don’t even know what she looks like.”

Happy was quiet for a moment. Then she shook her finger at Mai and said something in Vietnamese, like she was gently chiding her.

“Hey, come on,” I said. “English.”

“I ask her why she not leave town. That what I say to her Tuesday. She need to go too.”

Mai was avoiding my eyes. She hadn’t mentioned that part to me. I couldn’t blame her for ignoring the wild exhortations of some strange woman at her door, but even at this point, such dire warnings seemed like invitations to an adventure for her.

I said, “Does Sonny know about her? Don’t lie to me, Happy. Did you say a single word to them about her?”

She dismissed the question with an impatient look. She set her purse on the coffee table and sank into the recliner.

Mai took a step toward her as if to shield her from my intensity. I couldn’t tell if she was playing good cop to my bad cop or if she genuinely felt sorry for Happy. It was undeserved either way.

“So my mom did come to see you?”

Happy nodded tiredly. “She come Sunday night.”

“She say anything about where she was planning to go?”

“No. She come to. .” Happy bowed her head like she was about to cry, but when she looked up again at Mai, she seemed baffled. “How I can explain it to you?”

I let the silence eat her up for a bit. Then I said, “We know about you and Sonny.”

Her face showed no surprise. Just instant acquiescence. Then she narrowed her eyes at me, and that old glint of knowing amusement returned.

“You think I am horrible person.”

“I do.”

“You think you understand all the story.”

I nodded at Mai. “She figured it out. I was too stupid to. Never thought you’d go for a crazy criminal who nearly killed your best friend.”

“Robert, come on,” Mai said. “Go ahead, Happy, what did my mom—”

“Yeah,” I said, “Go ahead. Explain why you did it.”

“Bob, I tell you something — you think you are good man and you are police and you not like Sonny. But you no different.”

“What? He cheated on her. He locked her all night in an office, threw her down a flight of fucking stairs. And who knows how often he hits her.”

“You hit her too,” Happy noted. She asked Mai, “He tell you what he do to your mother before?”

“That was the first time I ever touched her. You know she’s hit me plenty over the years. That night she fucking hit me. I couldn’t hear out of this ear for a week!”

“You almost break her teeth.”

“Bullshit. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. No way you’re comparing that to what Sonny’s done.”

Happy was shaking her head. “But that not what I mean. You and him — you are both weak man. When you not understand somebody, you scare like little boy. You close your eye and you pretend they not there. You not know when you hurt them. Why you think Suzy not call to you for help? She know you still love her. She know what you do here five month before. Sonny hurt her, she almost die, but she never call you.”

“She didn’t come begging for your help either, did she?”

Happy’s scowl deepened as she sat on the edge of the recliner like an alert cat. All those years, she was always the one calming Suzy or me down, the buffer when the three of us were together, making jokes and changing the subject, never an angry word to anyone. It made me wonder now how often she had humored me, held back all the ugly things she really felt.

She turned from me, exhaling loudly as if to relieve herself of my presence.

Mai was standing warily between us. In a composed voice, Happy said to her, “Your mom — she is difficult woman. She scare just like Sonny and Bob. She hurt them too. I know. Fifteen year I friend with her and she hurt me many time. But she ask me come here because she have nobody, and she help get job for me. I know nothing about Sonny. I know nothing about you. But I know she not happy in Las Vegas. So I come. When I meet Sonny, I see he not good man for her. I tell her, but she not listen. And when they start fighting, I tell her leave but she not leave. What I can do? I just listen to her. But in the summer, she stop talking to me. I call her and she not call back to me. When I go see her, she like other person. So Sonny, he start come every day to my house. He tell me everything. Suzy sleep all day. Suzy not leave the house. She not talk to nobody. He say she not love him anymore.”

Happy’s eyes were glistening. Again, she had that inward-looking, baffled expression.

“How I can explain it? He the one who help get job for me. When I owe money to someone, he pay it. When I date the other man who hit me, Sonny go beat him and make him say sorry to me. I know he do the bad thing, but he always do good thing for me. I thought your mother not love him anymore. I thought. .”

She grabbed a tissue from her purse and took off her glasses. As she carefully dabbed at her mascaraed eyes, Mai walked to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of water and set it on the coffee table.

She sat there slumped with her hands over her knees, clutching at the tissue. She looked fragile without her glasses and yet also, in her suffocating vest and crooked bow tie, ridiculous. I could only half listen to everything, distracted by the memory of her naked in my bed, watching me undress and surely knowing that I could not feel for her as I did for her best friend. And yet she had pursued it, plunged into it as she would again a year later with Sonny. Even if it was not for love, it was still a futile thievery, taking something that could never be hers and offering herself too as something provisional. She must have known all that.

She drank the water, wiped her nose with the tissue. “Sonny call to me last month. He tell me Suzy know everything. That it for us. No more. Good-bye.” Happy glanced in my direction as if reminded that I’d done the same to her. “I call Suzy twenty time but she stop answer the phone. One month, I not see her or Sonny. Nothing.”

“So you have no idea what she’d been doing?” Mai asked.

Happy shook her head. “I want to go to the house and explain to her, but I too — I have no idea what I can say. I just stay away. But Sunday night, real late, she knock on my door. I almost not open the door, I too scared. She say she want talk to me. She look calm but — it was too calm, like when she take too much medicine. I say sorry to her and I cry so bad but she—”

Happy had to stop for a moment. Was it the guilt and shame choking her up, or the thought of what she’d lost in the past month?

She said it felt bizarre, her the one in tears and Suzy leading her to the couch, hushing her. How many times had it been the other way around? For a month she’d been steeling herself for this moment, for all that vitriol she knew her oldest friend was capable of. But Suzy began by thanking Happy. The affair had wounded her deeply, but she was long past loving Sonny and had no room left inside her to hate Happy. If anything, the affair and the subsequent end of their friendship had awoken her from “the long dream,” she said, “of these last twenty years”—made her realize, once and for all, that she was alone in the world and had always been, and that perhaps staying that way would not kill her. It could even save her. All she wanted now was to make amends for her sins and leave everything behind for good.

Happy remembered being frightened by the calm finality of Suzy’s voice. She asked her if she was taking her medication. Suzy took the prescription bottle from her purse and set it on the table and said she didn’t need the stuff anymore. When she stood up to go, Happy knew it was the last time she would ever see her.

Mai asked, “Did she say specifically that she was leaving town?”

“She not need to.”

“Well what else did she do then?” I demanded. “She came just to tell you that?”

Happy sat up straight. She dried her nose and eyes and put on her glasses again, then tidied her hair like she was putting herself back together for departure.

Still avoiding my eyes, she said to Mai, “She tell me about you. She leave you twenty year before and now she find you here in Las Vegas. I can’t believe it. Fifteen year I know her, but I never think she have a daughter.”

“She say anything more about me?”

“I ask her so many questions, but she not answer. All she say is Sonny not know about you. She give me your name and your address and. .” Happy looked at her hands. “She say she forgive me. But she make me. . she make me promise I watch you. I protect you. Let nobody hurt you.”

“After what you did to her?” I blurted out.

Mai put up a hand to calm me down. I turned from them both. It was directed at Happy, but I might as well have been yelling at the walls: “How could you protect anyone anyway? I mean, why would she tell you all that? Goddamn it, she had to know Sonny would come after you for information!”

“You think she not know that?” Happy replied softly. She rose from the recliner, took her purse, and fixed me with one last frigid look. “They do come, but I don’t tell them nothing.”

Mai glanced at me, and she understood too. Suzy knew Happy would tell them nothing. She had wanted them to come. She had wanted them to do the punishing for her. Confiding in her best friend one last time was Suzy’s way of burdening her with Mai’s life. A final offer of redemption. The price of forgiveness.

I was shaking my head, but I wasn’t surprised.

On her way to the door, Happy stopped and put a hand on Mai’s shoulder. They were the same height, though Mai seemed like she was looking up at her.

“Di di, con,” Happy said. Go now, child. “Go somewhere good for you. Your mom, I know she care for you, but she don’t know how to be your mom.”

She went to the door. She hesitated with her hand on the knob, melodramatically, and in that instant I considered swallowing my anger and calling her back to apologize for what I’d said, what I’d thought, for everything I’d ever done to her and Suzy. Maybe then she’d tell me the rest of the story.

Another part of me hoped it was the last time I’d ever see her.

She opened the door and walked out. I listened to her footsteps hurry down the balcony along echoing clangs, fading fast into the night.

14

SOME PEOPLE you will never know beyond what they give you. To be with them requires a bridge, an interpreter, and even then you’re only ever approaching them as you would the horizon.

Happy’s visit — though it raised more questions than it answered — finally helped me see that she’d been my interpreter for Suzy, the only recourse I had beyond my own stubbornness and curiosity, my love. She was there for our entire marriage, at our home nearly every week, eating meals with us, sleeping on the couch some nights, on the phone with Suzy every other day. Had I not seen her merely as Suzy’s confidante, I would have understood that she was mine as well. How many times had I asked her to explain my own wife to me, what I had done wrong, what secret or foreign custom or female vagary I was not privy to? She always had answers ready for me, and even if they had been lies, they were the only things I could hold on to in the hope that one day I’d get it right.

I suppose it was envy and exasperation that made me lose it back at the apartment. Happy was closer to Suzy than I ever was, but how can you be that close to someone and still not know them?

By the time we’d driven halfway back to the Coronado, my anger had given way to Mai’s impenetrable silence. She seemed either crestfallen or still unsatisfied by what Happy had told us. Who knew what she had wanted to hear about her mother? Chances were she didn’t know either.

It was 7:45 and we were only a few blocks from the Stratosphere, but the closer we got to the Strip, the worse traffic became. Four lanes bumper-to-bumper with stretch limos and restless taxis jumping lanes, mobile billboards of near-naked dancers creeping alongside us like a prowling peep show. Every other car had a California tag, which only made me more anxious to ship Mai off as soon as possible.

The Jeep’s heater finally worked but was fogging up the windshield. Every few minutes, Mai would curse and wipe at the glass with a dirty T-shirt she grabbed off the floor. Those were her only words for the first fifteen minutes of the ride.

Soon we saw droplets of rain. She turned on the wipers, and they squealed across the windshield.

“Stupid things,” she muttered. “I use them maybe once a year.”

“It’s cold enough to snow. Can it actually snow here?”

She looked up at the night sky, bathed in the glow of casino lights, but did not reply.

“Twice I’ve been here,” I said. “And each time the weather’s been shit. Last time there was a goddamn monsoon.”

A red Mercedes cut us off and she pumped the brakes, immediately laying on her horn for a good three seconds as the guy stuck his middle finger out the window.

“Asshole,” she muttered and glared at the guy as we idled in traffic a foot from his bumper. She checked her watch, the first time I’d seen her antsy about our 8:30 deadline.

A few moments later, though, she was back to being pensive, her elbow up on the door panel and her head resting on a fist.

“I wasn’t lying back there,” I said. “I only hit your mother that one time. I’ve regretted it ever since.”

I thought she didn’t hear me, but then she replied evenly, “We barely know each other. You don’t need to defend yourself.”

“It matters to me that you know that.”

“Why?”

“Because. I don’t want you thinking I’m. . like that.”

“Like Sonny?”

“You know, it’s easy for Happy to say that. She didn’t live with your mother for eight years. She wasn’t afraid of her like I was.”

“How do you know Sonny wasn’t afraid of her too? And what does that mean anyway? What exactly were you afraid of?”

“Victor explained plenty, didn’t he?”

“I want you to explain it. Were you afraid she’d lose her mind? That she’d hurt herself — or hurt you? No longer love you? I mean, what was it?”

I was quiet for a moment, though I already knew the answer. I’d always known. Traffic crawled forward and we followed and I was glad to hear the Jeep’s heaving engine fill the silence in the cab.

“We were always gonna fail,” I said. “On our honeymoon, I knew it. There was some denial there, but really I knew it was just a matter of time. The longer we stayed together, weirdly enough, the stronger the feeling became, and when it was clear that something was seriously wrong with your mother, I started wondering what was wrong with me. Why did I hold on? Why did it feel like I needed her more than she needed me? I don’t know — I guess I was afraid of the inevitable. And I didn’t want it to be more my fault than hers. Turned out it was at the end.”

Another red light. Mai sat there, still not quite satisfied. I was ready to try another explanation, but she said, “So what happened that night?”

“We were fighting about something stupid. I tracked mud on the kitchen floor. She was yelling at me in Vietnamese, cursing me. I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t fair.”

“How did you hit her?”

“I hit her hard, okay? She hit me many times too.”

“No, tell me. You want to defend yourself, so tell me exactly what you did.”

“I slapped her. Twice. Three times. The third time was a backhand — hard as I could. She bled at the mouth. Nearly fell over. You really want the truth? It was like fulfilling a fantasy. Each time I hit her, it felt like something coming true. It felt like a fucking remedy.”

I could hardly believe what I was admitting, but Mai’s questioning had been like a challenge. Was I man enough now to lay it out straight to her and to myself?

“I knew it was wrong,” I added. “I knew I’d regret it. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good.”

The light turned green, and Mai revved up close to the red Mercedes like she was ready to roll over it. But then she turned right and we were on Las Vegas Boulevard again, trailing another long line of cars.

Finally she said, “I’ve decided I don’t care anymore. I care about the money and I care that she gave it to me, but she never wanted anything more than that. So why should I go chasing after her like she’s someone I lost? She was never mine to lose anyway.”

For the first time since we met, I had no pity for her, even if she had it for herself. Maybe her moment of clarity was my own too. I looked in the Jeep’s side-view mirror to check if my face looked as defeated as I felt.

“What would I have said to her anyway?” Mai concluded.

“Go to Vietnam with the money,” I said. “Go find yourself a husband somewhere. Have a kid or two.”

She laughed suddenly, a slightly bitter laugh. “No need for a husband really. But I’d like to have a son. Teach him how to play cards one day. Raising a daughter would be like mothering yourself.”

THE FIRST THING we encountered as we reentered the Coronado was a guy in baggy corduroys and a Christmas sweater hitting a jackpot on the slots. Over five grand. It was one of those Elvis slots, so “Viva Las Vegas!” was blaring obnoxiously as lights flashed atop the machine, terrifying the little girl in his arms. Heads turned, a swarm of eyes pausing out of envy before returning gradually to their own pursuits.

Mai stopped to watch. The guy was so busy freaking out that he seemed oblivious to his sobbing daughter, whom he cradled in one arm like a bag of groceries as he peered stupidly at the clanging machine. An attendant arrived to handle his winnings, and all the guy could ask, over the little girl’s wails, was, “Do I get it all now?”

“Let’s go,” I said to Mai.

She started moving again but kept eyeing the scene until we turned the corner and headed toward the elevators.

The casino floor felt like an endless theater stage swarming with actors, the floodlights glaring, a balcony of eyes watching from somewhere above. I wondered if Victor had gotten anxious about how long we’d taken, if he was still keeping his word. One more question had started worrying me, ever since I retrieved the room key from the potted plant in the garage. It had been nearly eight hours since Junior sent me here, and neither he nor his father had called.

We rode the elevator with four drunk businessmen on their way to some room party. They leered at Mai the entire way, smirking quietly at each other until I started glaring at them. As we got off on the twelfth floor, one of them whispered, “Sayonara, missy,” and the elevator doors closed on their dumb sniggering.

We walked side by side to room 1215, and I unlocked it. The lamp was still on, the curtains still drawn, and the brown suitcase still standing glumly where we had left it inside the closet.

I opened it with Mai’s chrome key to check the money. I took back the five hundred Junior had given me, just in case I had to return it to him in person.

Mai had wandered into the center of the room and was peering at the dark walls and the shadows cast across the ceiling. She stood there with her chin raised like she had smelled something.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s like someone was here.”

“Everything looks the same to me. You see something?” I noticed a trembling along the bottom of the curtains, but it was only hot air blowing from the heater’s vents.

“No.” She gave me a sheepish look. “I just feel it.”

“Got to be more specific than that, kid.”

“I don’t know. It’s like sitting down in a chair that someone else was just in.”

She remained motionless as though trying to remember something, and I let her do that for a bit, not sure what to ask her or what to make of her sudden clairvoyance, until finally she shook her head and started for the door.

We didn’t say a word to each other the entire way down, through the casino, to the parking garage, and finally to her Jeep, where I loaded the suitcase into the cramped backseat, squeezing it alongside her things.

I stood by the driver’s-side window as she keyed the ignition. On a faded Chinese takeout menu she gave me, I wrote down Tommy’s address in Oakland. I thought of what he’d say to her when she arrived at his doorstep. I thought of how Laura, his beloved wife, was going to have a fit. Then I remembered all the times I’d saved Tommy from himself back in the day, from bar fights and unsavory women, from moments on the job when he’d been on the edge of losing it just as, countless times, I had been.

“It should take you nine hours,” I told Mai, “but drive the speed limit. You hear me? And drive straight there. Don’t stop for anything but gas and food — and take that food with you. When you get there, tell Tommy I sent you and that you’ll be staying for a few days. Tell him I’ll be coming soon to explain everything. Don’t say anything else — about me or Sonny or the money. I don’t care how hard he tries to get shit out of you. And stay put, understand? Don’t go anywhere until I get there. It should be no later than noon Saturday.”

“And if you’re not there by then?”

“I’ll be there by then. Remember, stay put and stay quiet. Tell him I ordered you to be a mute.”

Her hands were in her lap.

“What is it?” I said.

She shrugged. “My mother. . ” she said. “Just because you guys were married doesn’t mean you have any responsibility to me.”

I just nodded. I checked the time: 8:20. Ten minutes to spare. “You’ll be okay driving for that long?”

“I’ve done it plenty times before.”

I stepped back. As her window went up, the glare from the fluorescent lamps overhead swallowed up her face.

The Jeep lumbered away, its tires squealing as it turned onto the ramp and dipped away from view.

AFTER SMOKING A CIGARETTE by the elevators for a good five minutes, enough time for Mai to have left the Coronado entirely, I walked back into the casino and made my way as casually as possible to the front entrance. Outside, a new pair of lifeless valet attendants stood leaning against the conquistador. They nodded perfunctorily at me as I passed them and crossed the rain-slicked street.

At night, the Coronado was lit up like a pinball machine, brilliantly reborn out of its dullish daytime appearance. It stood at the mouth of the pedestrian mall on Fremont Street, which went on for blocks beneath a mammoth canopy of white latticed steel, like a cavernous circus tent, flanked by all the old Vegas casinos. A colossal Christmas tree stood at the midpoint of the mall amid a swarm of revelers. It seemed impossibly real, towering over the casinos, reaching almost halfway up to the canopy.

I walked slowly, trying my best to steer clear of the crowds streaming onto Fremont. The rain had stopped but the wind picked up. Nobody noticed. People were too busy sipping at their plastic tumblers and snapping photos, their heads turning skyward when suddenly the lights dimmed and the canopy came alive, like a digital sky, with video of reindeer prancing down the length of the mall and pulling a sleigh manned by Santa and a gaggle of beautiful showgirls. A parade of nonsensical images followed, elves morphing into dancing trees, girls riding candy canes, yin-yangs spinning into flowers into snowflakes into psychedelic whirlpools of color, all as dancy Christmas music filled the mall and the crowds cheered and snapped more pictures.

I stood at the edge of everything, just out of reach of the canopy, and had to remind myself that I was still in the desert, watching this Martian circus come alive before me in the dead of winter. Part of me found it ridiculous, like the rest of the city, while another part of me wanted nothing more than to dive into all that lurid revelry and drown myself.

Some joker in a Santa hat, wearing only a T-shirt and cargo shorts, went skipping around and tapping everyone with a giant candy cane like it was a magic wand. He came close and I saw his bleary eyes, and he slurred at me through his bushy red beard, “Merry fucking Christmas, man!” When his cane tapped my shoulder, it felt like a blessing.

I finally heard the cell phone ringing at my breast and hurried to an empty wall outside the mall to escape the clamor. I had already missed three calls.

“Yes,” I said into the phone, covering my other ear.

“I thought you were ignoring me.” It was Victor. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. This was the only way I could get you to call me. Listen — I need Happy’s phone number.”

“You know I can’t give you that.”

“Why not?”

“Stay at the hotel, Officer, and wait things out until tomorrow morning. We went over this. That’s the only way you’re ever leaving this city.”

I was making my way back to the Coronado. “I’m not going anywhere. Mai just left with the money and is headed out of town as we speak. She has a safe place to go. All I’m asking now is to speak to Happy. One quick conversation.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

“Victor—”

“Goodnight, Officer.”

“Victor, hold on. Why did Suzy wait four days to give Mai this money? Four days she sticks around town when she knows Sonny’s after her. What was she doing all that time?”

“You got to stop. Put this all behind you.”

“And why didn’t she just bring the money to Mai’s apartment? Why go through all the trouble of leaving it here for her — in that specific room?”

Victor was silent.

“Are you there?” I said, nearly shouting over the thousand voices behind me singing “Jingle Bell Rock.”

“I don’t have any answers for you.”

“Well, if you don’t, then Happy’s all I got.”

I was back in the Coronado and the new quiet of singing slot machines. I lowered my voice. “Mai just left town with a load of your boss’s money. I can’t keep her safe if I don’t know everything Suzy did to steal it for her. You understand? Victor?”

He finally spoke up, muttering Happy’s phone number with quiet reluctance. “If you take another step outside the casino tonight,” he warned me, “I’ll have no choice.”

I RETURNED TO my room for the duffel bag I’d dropped off, then went back next door to 1215. What Mai had said — that someone had been in the room — still troubled me. Not that I believed her, but that same hush used to pass across her mother’s face every now and then, like she had seen or heard something I could not.

I checked the room more carefully this time, even getting on my knees to inspect the carpet. Nothing peculiar finally except a whiff of sweetness in the air which I hadn’t noticed until then, like that smell in my apartment from a few days before.

A thought startled me and I searched my pockets for my badge. I rummaged through my duffel bag for a few minutes before finally remembering that Mai still had it. She had forgotten to give it back. I couldn’t think of why I’d need the badge at this point, but having it stripped from me made me feel like a shade of my former self, lighter but also less substantial.

I shook it off and sat down beside the telephone on the nightstand.

Happy’s phone rang six times. I hung up, waited a minute, and tried again. This time, on the fourth ring, she picked up. Her hello sounded small, distant.

“It’s Bob,” I said. “What took you so long to answer?”

“I just get home. How you know this number?”

“We need to talk. Look, I know you didn’t give us the full story. I understand why, but I’ve sent Mai on her way. She’s probably already past the city limits. You can tell me now.”

“Bob—”

“Don’t deny it, okay? What else did Suzy want from you?”

“Bob. .” She uttered my name this time with pity and exhaustion in her voice.

“Happy, listen. . I was mean to you back at the apartment and I’m sorry. I don’t have any right to be angry. And everything that happened with us — I’m sorry about that too. I’ve been a mess ever since the divorce, you know that. But all this stuff in Vegas — I didn’t ask for any of it. I’m just trying to do the right thing, so please help me out here, okay? I deserve to know everything that happened.”

I could hear her breathing over the long silence that followed. Finally she said, “She give me a shoe box. It have the letters for Mai.”

“She wanted you to deliver them?”

“She want me keep them. If I hear something happen to her, only then I give them to Mai.”

“If something happens to her?”

“I don’t know, Bob. I not want to ask her that. She make me promise I not read them or give them to nobody.”

“Well Mai’s gone for good now. You won’t know where to send her the letters anyway.”

I could see Happy with her phone to her ear, staring at the wall, wondering what else she should tell me.

“I want to tell her at the apartment,” she said, “but I promise Suzy I not do nothing—”

“Yeah, until something happens to her. That could literally mean anything. Jesus, why does she talk this way?”

“What way?”

“Come on, you know. She used to talk like that to me all the time. Everything was like some fucking riddle. It was like she was constantly trying not to lie to me and not tell me the truth either.”

“But she not mean to.”

“Of course she did. She never trusted me, Happy. With anything.”

“She do. She marry you.”

It was the old Happy again, explaining the pain away, dismissing the truth to soften its blow. It surprised me, with everything that had happened between her and Suzy, that she could so easily slip back into this role.

“You know why she married me? I was safe. I was a dumb American who would take care of her. Do shit for her. Protect her from whatever.”

“Bob, why you say that? You know Suzy care for you.”

That was all she had for me, and it sounded for a moment like she didn’t believe it either. But when she spoke again, her voice was sad, almost a whisper: “She also write letter for you.”

When I didn’t respond, she went on, “She ask me keep it too. One day I send it to you.”

“You weren’t going to tell me this?”

“I promise her.”

“Happy, it might say where she’s going. I could help her — even save her life. You have it there at home with you?”

“No, Bob, you don’t come here.”

I squeezed the receiver tightly, then looked at the time. It was nearly nine. “I’m at the Coronado, Happy. I’m sitting in the same room Suzy went to every Thursday evening. I know she came here to write the letters. You can keep Mai’s, but please come bring me mine.”

I regretted the idea as soon as I said it, but my overwhelming need to get the letter felt justified. In an instant, it had become the thing I deserved all along, after everything that had happened here in Vegas and everything I’d been through all those years with Suzy.

Happy said, “How you know that?”

“Sonny’s boy told me. He sent me here. Put me in the room next door and made me wait in case she showed up one last time. He and his father have no idea why she was coming here. But they’re barred from the Coronado. You probably know that. It’s just me here. You’ll be safe.”

“No.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. You got to do this for me.”

“No way I go to that place.” There was an edge again to her tone. I couldn’t tell if she was refusing my request or refusing something else.

“It’s a casino. You’ll be safe.”

“That place — I can’t tell you.”

“Good God, tell me what?”

“You not believe me.”

“I’ll believe anything at this point.”

Happy made a sound, like a pained laugh, like she was ready to cry and tell a joke at the same time. “Bob,” she said in a pleading voice, “how I can explain it to you? Her husband. Her first husband. He die in Vietnam long long time ago. She think he come to the room. She think he come back to find her.”

I waited a moment before saying, “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” she murmured, and I could almost hear her slowly shaking her head. She hung up before I could ask the question again.

I called her back, but the line just kept ringing. I banged the receiver on the nightstand and let it drop to the floor.

The heater by the window clicked on. A dull drone permeated the room. I stood up to sniff the air. That smell was still there, and as I looked around the shadowy room, my skin crawled and it made me want to yell at myself for being so easily spooked.

“If you’re there,” I said out loud, “say something. Vietnamese, English, just fucking say something.” I picked the receiver off the floor and slammed it down on the cradle.

I sat on the bed with the duffel bag in my lap and stared at the time blinking on the VCR atop the TV set. Then, like an alarm had gone off, I remembered the videotape.

I didn’t want to, but I had to turn off all the lights in the room.

Victor’s account had been unsettling, but watching the video with my own eyes — remote in hand, constantly fast-forwarding and rewinding — was like seeing three versions of Suzy at once: the one I remembered, the one Victor romanticized, and this other phantasmagoric shade of her that had descended into Sonny’s darkness. Her bizarre behavior appeared harmless one minute, heartbreaking even, but the next minute grotesque. When I got to that final footage, where Sonny is on top of her, I found myself watching it as a stranger might. Could she not be enjoying herself? How could you tell if she had truly forgotten any of it, that what she felt in Sonny’s dark office that night was horror and not shame? And yet despite the questions, I still felt sick seeing her on the screen, seeing Sonny there with her, looming like an incubus. I thought watching the video would bring me more clarity, but after half an hour the story felt as incomplete as ever.

I shoved the tape back into the duffel bag and changed into some dark jeans and a black sweater. I washed my face in the bathroom, drank a full glass of water though I wasn’t that thirsty.

Leaving all my things in the room, I hurried downstairs to the casino. In the gift shop, I bought a black down coat with a hood and a midnight-blue baseball cap with the Coronado’s logo and put them on before leaving the shop.

At the front entrance of the casino, I jumped into one of the waiting taxis and showed the driver the address I had torn out of the phone book from my room. There were over thirty listings under Happy’s surname, and sure enough one of them — Tuyet Phan — matched her phone number. The driver said it was thirty minutes away in Summerlin, which was west of the Strip and sounded like some faraway made-up place.

“Get there in twenty and I’ll pay you double,” I told him.

As we sped away from Fremont, I peered behind us for any suspicious-looking cars. The driver was playing holiday music and I asked him to turn it off, which he did a little begrudgingly.

In the darkness of the cab, I looked again at the listing and wondered if the first name — Tuyet — was fake, then realized I’d been foolish enough all these years to believe that Happy was actually her real name.

15

WE MERGED ONTO THE 95 going west. Towering sound walls flanked the highway like Native American murals, emblazoned with turtles and geckos and giant scorpions lurking beneath parabolas of shadow and amber light.

Traffic was moderate, easily navigable, and the driver was weaving across the four lanes with a wildness that pleased and slightly nauseated me.

I held the cell phone in my lap, waiting for it to ring, unsure if I would answer it. Victor would have called by now if he had seen me leave. For the first time since Happy hung up the phone, I considered the possibility of this working out, of me convincing her to hand over Mai’s letters too. Who else could deliver them at this point?

I could see her standing by the phone with her hands over her ears as it rang and rang. She might have regretted telling me about the letters, but my suspicion was that she had wanted to all along, that all her redemptive promises to Suzy had become too burdensome for her. Happy meant well. Despite what she’d done, she wasn’t a liar. But she also wasn’t someone who sought the truth or lived very easily with it. Her preference was for the scenic route, the path that skirted the forest and the brush and led circuitously to the sea, and if you were lost she’d draw you a map, or better yet blindfold you and lead you by the hand. That’s why she was the perfect friend for Suzy.

What made Suzy good for her was still a mystery to me. The same question I had for myself.

I pictured Suzy bent over the desk in the hotel room, scribbling away for hours to her daughter, to Victor, to God knows who else. All those years of her being as generous as a mute, and now she apparently had words for everyone. Even me.

Was it something I needed to know or something she needed to tell me — secrets she was at last confessing? That she had abandoned her only child twenty years ago because she was too young and afraid, too selfish, to raise her on her own? Because she’d lost that child’s father, a man I’d never been able to replace, no matter how happy I had made her in those first few years or how hard she had tried to bury him and their child and that life they had together before she came here, before she ever met me? And now this man had returned. A ghost? A figment of her imagination? An impostor?

I thought of her red journal at the bottom of my dresser at home and all the things she might have revealed in there about the past two decades, or just the past two years, like what had led to her disappearing, where she was planning to go. I had brought it back from Vegas all those months ago with firm plans to translate it all — if necessary, hire someone in the department to do it for me. But I kept putting it off. It was easier to leave it buried beneath my socks and sweaters and not know what she might have truly thought of our life together — or worse yet, that she had thought nothing of it at all.

Her voice came back to me in the silence of the cab and with it a series of events about midway through our marriage. I’d nearly forgotten them.

IT MUST HAVE started with the flu. She spent four days in bed under three blankets, her fever so high that I would have taken her to the hospital had she not refused me half a dozen times. Happy watched her while I was at work, fed her Vietnamese porridge and dabbed her face and chest with that green hot oil throughout the day.

When the fever broke, her color and appetite returned but her mood did not improve. She’d lie on the living room couch with wine in her coffee mug and listen to those old Vietnamese ballads on our stereo, the volume so high that I had to escape into the bedroom and close the door. At dinner, out of nowhere, she started talking about our savings and how much it might cost to fly to Vietnam. Would I mind letting her go on her own for a month, maybe two? When I asked if she still had family to stay with, she said she hadn’t spoken or written to anyone in such a long time, and then she promptly dropped the subject.

I stopped home one afternoon during patrol and heard her talking in the bedroom, and since no one’s car was in the driveway, I figured she was on the phone with Happy. I knew by then not to disturb their conversations, which could go on for hours.

But something about her voice led me to the bedroom door. She was speaking slowly in Vietnamese, like she was trying to say things as clearly as possible — to a child or a dumb person, someone who was not listening. Her voice kept fluctuating as though she was moving around in the room. We had no cordless in the house at the time.

I nearly knocked several times but ended up returning to the kitchen to check the beers in the fridge and the bottles in our wine rack, which hadn’t been touched that day. Carefully, I picked up the kitchen phone and heard the dial tone, and a slow ache traveled down my body.

A few minutes later she appeared in the kitchen and jumped back when she saw me. I tried to act normal. I asked her if Happy was over, but she shook her head irritably, her hand still on her heart, and went back upstairs to the bedroom.

Days later, I awoke in the night without her beside me, which was not yet so common that I wasn’t alarmed. I searched the house and finally heard her in our other bathroom downstairs, speaking again in that voice. I knocked this time. She hushed and the light beneath the door went out. I knocked again and the light turned back on and she opened the door.

What do you want? she said. I asked who she was talking to. I was praying, she replied, and when I asked why in the bathroom, she said it was peaceful there and why was I being nosy? Then she walked past me and returned to bed.

Her praying voice was familiar to me, of course, that droning monkish chant that was depressing to hear but never unsettling. What I heard that night was a conversation.

I once asked her, apropos of nothing, if she believed in ghosts, and she replied that everyone believes in ghosts because everyone has memories. I told her I was referring to literal ghosts, not metaphorical ones, which she didn’t quite understand, and that’s when she told me about the visions she had at night, ever since she left Vietnam. It’d be a man or a woman, never more than one person. Sometimes she knew them. Sometimes they were too far away to recognize. When she saw them on her walks at night, they moved like they had a pressing destination, a thing they were searching for and needed to find soon, and she would follow them for a time, though they never looked at her or acknowledged her in any way, like she was the ghost in their world.

I must have looked at her like she was crazy, because she didn’t mention it again during our marriage.

I called up Happy the next day. She reminded me that Suzy’s flu had been pretty bad and that she had murmured nonsense during the worst of her fever and talked in her sleep several times. And besides, who didn’t talk to themselves now and then? This didn’t make me feel any better, but Suzy’s behavior soon took a different turn.

When I left for work in the morning, she would follow me to the door and ask me when I’d be home. When I stayed up late and didn’t come immediately to bed, she’d leave the bedroom door wide open, sometimes coming out hours later to call me in. She was always in the same room as me now, joining me on the couch where I read or at the kitchen table where I finished reports, asking me about work, making conversation out of the blue about customers at her flower shop or horrible stories on the news. I started noticing a childish alarm in her eyes every time I ran out for cigarettes or groceries. I couldn’t tell at the time if she enjoyed being around me again or if she simply didn’t want to be alone. It bothered me that I couldn’t just ask her, that not knowing was something I preferred because I hadn’t felt this close to her since the first year of our marriage.

We were making love every other day. After four years together, we’d gone through the cycles, bouts of sudden desire amid the long barren periods, but the one constant was that I was the initiator. Now it was her kissing me right when I walked into the house, pulling me away from the kitchen sink after dinner, caressing me on the neck in bed. She would remove my clothes first, immediately take me in her mouth, climb on top of me, handle me violently until I came, then afterward crawl into my arms. We’d made love like this before, but her passion was new and bizarre, and though the shock of it all delighted me at first, gradually it wore on me.

After she startled me one day in the shower, at once kissing and stroking me from behind, I pulled away and asked what was wrong with her. Why was she suddenly acting this way? Even as the shower sprayed her face, I could see her tearing up. She stepped gingerly out of the shower and left the bathroom without another word. I found her on our bed, naked under the covers, her hair soaking the pillow. She was still crying, but I could sense her anger as well. And even as I resented that anger and felt no inclination whatsoever to soothe her or apologize or explain myself — even then, I desired her.

A month into all of this, she awoke me one night after a bad dream. She was always most talkative then, in the middle of the night, in total darkness, when sleep and fear still had a hold of her.

Tell me your happiest memory, she said, as if pleading for a lullaby. The question was so unlike her that I wondered if she was fully awake.

I said it was the day she agreed to marry me, but she dismissed this and asked me to really think hard about it.

Eventually I told her about my father disappearing for three days when I was eight. My mother hurled a frying pan at him one evening. There was hair-grabbing, shaking, screaming. He stormed out, which was normal, but he didn’t return the following evening, and my mother explained nothing to me. For the next three days, I blamed her for everything and locked myself in my room. I kept an ear out for the front door creaking open. I’d peek out the window to check for his car on our driveway, and at night I’d wait for headlights to beam across the mini blinds, dreaming later of him drowning in the bay or moving somewhere dark and far away, like Asia or Africa. He finally returned in the dead of night, his hulking form like an apparition by my bed. I did not mind his reeking of cigarettes and liquor, or that he took up most of my twin bed and fell asleep without saying a word. I followed soon after, my arm touching his, the deepest and most peaceful sleep I’d ever had. Years later, long after the divorce and his death, my mother revealed that he had spent those three days with the woman he eventually left her for. He had changed his mind and come home that third night, putting off his permanent departure for a few more years. For what reason, I would never know.

Even Suzy thought this wasn’t that happy a story. So I asked for her happiest memory, and to my surprise she told me: about a man she once knew who died a long time ago back in Vietnam, who spent two years in a reeducation camp after the war. They gave him two small bowls of rice a day, mixed with a teaspoon of salt and a little water so that the salt dissolved in the rice. His thirst was so bad that he drank his own urine. When he finally came home after his reeducation, his very first meal was a bowl of his mother’s pho. He’d always say that was the happiest day of his life.

I pointed out to Suzy that that was the happiest day of his life, not hers. She seemed on the verge of replying, but after a few minutes, I realized she had fallen back asleep.

Over the years, that conversation had been buried beneath what happened a week later, when Suzy started distancing herself once again, no longer even looking at me, until finally I came home to a dark and empty house one afternoon and discovered that her suitcase was gone from the closet along with half her clothes.

I drove at once to Happy’s apartment, but Suzy was not there. Happy was as alarmed as I was. We went together to the flower shop, to the movie theaters, to every restaurant and shop in Chinatown that Suzy frequented and every spot on Fisherman’s Wharf where she might seek temporary refuge. Happy knew these places well and ended up doing the driving, leading me to sites and habits in Suzy’s life that I had not been part or remotely aware of, hushing me every time I lost my patience and cursed my crazy fucking wife in front of her.

We drove around the city until darkness fell and we had exhausted all our options. I wanted to quit then, too worn out and pissed off to care anymore about why she’d up and leave like this or why she’d been acting this way for so many weeks, so many years.

I remembered sitting in the darkness of the car with Happy, feeling as alone as I did now in the darkness of the cab. I finally asked her why Suzy would want to leave me, a question I already had many answers for. She said something about how women get this way at a certain age and maybe all Suzy needed was something new in her life.

Like a new husband? I asked her. Or maybe having a child would make her happy?

She shrugged and thought for a moment, her face contemplative and sad in a way I’d rarely seen. Who know what make somebody happy? she said. It usually not what you think, and it almost never what you want it to be.

That must have triggered something, because she sat up and said she had one last place we could check.

We found Suzy’s lone white Toyota in the parking lot of St. Mary’s, a mere three blocks from our house. Suzy and I walked there every Sunday morning, even in the rain.

Evening Mass must have ended hours before, though the church doors were still unlocked. Inside, we found no one. There was some light from chandeliers and votive candles along the walls, but at that hour the church was shrouded in dusk and silence.

Happy and I made our way down the aisle, hoping to find Suzy asleep in one of the pews. I suggested we go search the confessionals, but Happy stopped halfway up the aisle. I thought at first that she was pointing at the life-size crucifix above the darkened sanctuary. It took me a moment to see Suzy’s small figure below it, standing behind the altar as casually as she would at the kitchen sink at home. One hand kept coming up to her mouth, and as we quietly approached the sanctuary, I could see that she was chewing on something, that it was in fact the Body of Christ. She was picking the communion wafers out of the Eucharist bowl like they were potato chips. Behind her, the doors of the tabernacle stood open.

Happy and I reached the front pew, where Suzy had left her suitcase. She hadn’t noticed us yet. Her eyes were directed at the high arched ceiling of the church. Was there something up there along the shadowy rafters? Something beyond the shadows? If it was God she saw, her face showed no sign of revelation or communion. Each time she brought a wafer to her lips, she bit into it indifferently, chewing it as she would a stale cookie. The way her face caught the pale amber light from the chandeliers, she seemed at once beautiful to me and intolerably alien.

I was too baffled to do anything — to even want to do anything. Happy finally called out to her. When she turned to us, she seemed unsurprised by our presence — calm and clear headed. But then her eyes began to tear up. I remember, before the floodlights abruptly turned on, her saying something in Vietnamese to Happy. It sounded regretful, an apology perhaps, an admission.

A voice boomed behind us. The parish priest was stomping up the aisle in his cassock, shouting, What is this? What are you all doing up there?

He hurried past us and up the sanctuary steps and seized the Eucharist bowl from Suzy, covering it with his hand as he continued chastising all three of us, demanding that we leave the premises at once.

Happy took Suzy by the hand and rushed her out of the church as I stayed behind and tried my best to explain everything to the priest, who knew Suzy and me from Mass but seemed too furious to recognize us. By the time I came out to the parking lot, Suzy was sitting alone in her Toyota and Happy was insisting that I not talk to her, that I should drive home, cool off, and let her take care of everything.

An hour later, when Suzy walked into our bedroom with her suitcase and returned it to the closet, the sight of her instantly drained me of all the questions and bitter words I’d stored up. She peered at me from across the room, unsure if I would yell at her or ignore her. She finally approached the bed and without taking off her shoes crawled onto the sheets and burrowed into my arms, crying softly until we both fell asleep.

There would never be a right time to ask her. We immediately went on with our life together, ignoring what had happened. We started eating out and going to the movies more frequently and even took trips to the Redwoods and other parks that she had always wanted to visit. At my suggestion, we began renovating the entire town house, tearing down the rooms one by one and rebuilding each with our own hands, slowly and patiently and meticulously so we’d not only get it right but also leave ourselves more still to rebuild, to fix and improve. The marriage would end before the renovation was complete, but for four more years we fed off that silent and inexplicable need for each other. That was enough, at least for me.

I did ask Happy once if she found out why Suzy almost left me and how she had convinced her to come home. She would only say that Suzy never truly wanted to leave. I never thought to ask about what she’d been doing at the church. In my mind, she’d simply been trying to talk to a God who wasn’t answering — the only kind I’ve ever known.

I do remember looking through her empty suitcase the day after her return. Inside an inner pocket, I found a brand-new passport, issued that past week, and an envelope full of cash that must have taken her many months, perhaps years, to save.

THE CABDRIVER was still racing through the night a good fifteen miles over the speed limit. We passed shopping malls that straddled the highway, closed down for the night, then golf-course mansions and sprawling housing estates, then suddenly a lone casino, majestic and brilliant in the night, then more houses and condominiums, lit-up gas stations and cold commercial buildings and all those other badges of suburban peace.

The Strip had long vanished behind us, no sign of the pyramid light or anything.

I asked the driver how much longer we had to go. He said, “Five minutes max,” and nudged the gas pedal.

I checked the battery on the cell phone. It was still half full.

The wipers squealed across the windshield, startling me. In the yellow nimbus of the highway lights, you could see the snow flurries buzzing about like flies.

“Fucking snow in the desert,” the driver said, unimpressed. “Left Jersey to get away from this.” He didn’t seem to care if I was listening. “Betcha anything people gonna die tonight. People here can’t even drive in the rain.”

He said something else, but I was no longer paying attention.

I rolled down my window and tossed the cell phone out into the night.

16

THE SNOW WAS FALLING fast by the time the taxi dropped me off at Happy’s gated neighborhood. I didn’t ask the driver to wait. There was no telling how long it would take to convince Happy to give me the letters, but I’d already decided I wasn’t leaving without them. My immediate concern — despite all the others I should have had — was whether I’d chosen the right address.

The security gates were closed. I stood shivering beneath the streetlamp in a chamber of yellow light that felt like the inside of a snow globe. Soon a car approached and I followed it through the gates and into the neighborhood, its tire trail and my footprints the first markings on the fresh snow.

A narrow road led me down a long, winding block of identical one-story duplexes, which were themselves two mirrored halves, each with the same Mediterranean-style roof and pink stucco walls and sometimes the same collection of palm trees and bushes, the only distinguishing feature the color of the front door or the car in the driveway. As I wandered through the falling snow with Happy’s address in my hand, I wondered how long it had taken her to not get lost in this maze of sameness.

I passed some kids playing in the snow without coats or gloves. They slid across small patches of lawn that were still green underneath, shook powder off tree branches that still had leaves. This must have been their first snowfall. I remembered a few flurries that instantly melted on the streets of Oakland thirty years ago, when I was in my teens. It stunned me that my first real snowfall ended up being in the desert, of all places, that forty-five years in the world had only gotten me this far from home.

By the time I found Happy’s house, I couldn’t feel my face or my fingers and had to brush snow out of my hair. Several cars were parked along the curb across the street, covered in a thin layer of snow, none of them familiar. Her side of the street was empty, as was her driveway, her car probably parked in the garage. The blinds on all her windows were closed too, but the lights in one were on. I rechecked the address above the garage. Even as I approached the front door, I kept wondering if I had the wrong half of the duplex.

I knocked and waited, then knocked again. I thought about calling out her name, but all the houses on the block were close together, and even my knocking had sounded too loud.

I tried the knob and it turned and the door opened. I spoke into the doorway, “Happy? Are you there?”

On the wall of the dark entryway, a painting of a young Vietnamese woman in a yellow áo dài smiled at me. She was holding her rice hat against her belly, her long black hair falling over her shoulder. Beside the painting stood a coat rack that held Happy’s black peacoat.

I stepped into the entryway and could see part of the living room around the corner and the illuminated red lampshade that ruddied the shadows.

“Happy?” I called out again, my annoyance growing now that I was sure I had the right place. “It’s Robert. I’m coming in.”

I closed the front door and approached the living room. Turning the corner, I saw lit candles on the kitchen counter, then an ivory couch across the way with something long and black draped over its back. Another coat. Beyond the couch was an unlit hallway that led to four closed doors.

When I stepped onto the cream carpet, my wet shoes stained it, so I bent down to untie my laces, and it was only then that I noticed the darker shoeprints ahead of me.

I pulled out my gun and stepped farther into the living room. To my far left, sitting in an armchair beside an unlit Christmas tree, was Sonny.

His head was reclined on the seatback, his dull eyes narrowed on me. He seemed unsurprised by my presence and uninterested in the gun I had on him. His own he held limply, pointed at the floor. It was like my appearance had just awakened him from a deep nap. Beside him on the end table was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“Set the gun on the floor,” I ordered him and moved behind the couch.

He lifted his head. His face was flushed. Tiredly, he said, “This again, huh?”

He was right, of course. Even the shadows gave me déjà vu. I’d spent the last twenty-four hours wishing I had shot him five months ago, and here I was back in the same spot, made impotent again by fear and curiosity.

“Why are you here?” I said. “Where’s Happy?”

“She not here no more. She gone.”

“Gone where? Why?”

He shook his head as though the questions were too stupid to answer.

“I said drop the gun, Sonny. Did you hurt Happy? Where is she?”

“Where my wife? Where my fucking money? You know that?”

He came to life, wincing as he sat up and plunked his gun on the table and grabbed the pack of cigarettes lying there. He lit up and massaged his scalp with his other hand, then ran it roughly across his face like he was wiping off the exhaustion. His smoking hand, I noticed, was shaking slightly. He was an emotional drunk, unsurprisingly, liable to be at his most violent but also, I was hoping, his most sincere.

“Suzy’s gone,” I said. “She’s left town for good. I don’t know where, but I know she’s not coming back. To me or to you.”

“Suzy,” he muttered and shook his head. “You give her that name?”

“Let’s bury it right here, Sonny. She’s gone, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Go on with your life. Let me go home and go on with mine.”

“That it, huh? We just say bye-bye, huh?”

“You brought me here to find her, but there’s nothing to find.”

“My stupid son — that his idea. He don’t tell me nothing. He say he take care of everything, but he don’t get shit done. Look at you. What you do here now? You point the gun at me like this your house. I pay for this house! My son — it all his fucking idea! Me? I want bring you here and fuck you up, man.”

His voice was rousing his body, his fists tightening with each word. I’d been holding on to some possibility of getting him out of the house so I could search for the letters, but my other con cern now was how to get myself out without one of us getting shot.

The phone beside him rang, startling only me. After the third ring, Sonny lifted the receiver, killed the call, and left the receiver upturned on the end table beside his gun. The dial tone droned between us.

“Who’re you ignoring, Sonny?”

He dumped a couple of cigarettes onto the table for himself, then held out the pack. “Smoke with me.”

When I didn’t move, he flung the pack peevishly at me and it landed on the carpet by my feet. “Smoke a fucking cigarette, huh?”

“Why?”

“We talk. Like man to man. You want go home, right?”

I had only two choices now: shoot him or humor him. I reached down for the pack, keeping my gun trained on his heart, and shook a cigarette out onto my lips. I lit it with the candle on the kitchen counter behind me and took it in like a long drink.

The phone had gone into its echoing off-hook tone like some distant siren. Sonny stole a swill of the Johnnie Walker and winced again. Then he relaxed, and a wry smile appeared on his face.

“Nowadays, man, I love play poker with American. The old day I sit down at the table and they think I don’t know shit. They loud, they laugh, they think they run over me because I small, I talk funny. It don’t matter I have good game or bad game. They always think they better. But now, man, I talk louder, I laugh louder, make bigger joke, especially when I beat them, take all their money. I love when they don’t got nothing to say. It’s like I broke their dream, man. It’s like I take their money and their voice.”

“Why’re you telling me this?”

“You fight in the war? I fight with Americans in the war. They get drunk and piss in the street in front of my mother. They drive around and try to pull the pretty girl on their Jeep and laugh when the girl scream and run away. They wanna fuck all the Vietnamese girl, every one they see. Sometime, they fall in love too. One fucking GI, I remember he tall and so white he look like he sick. Always call us ‘slant-eye’ and ‘Marvin the motherfuckin’ ARVN.’ He make joke we not understand, pat us on our head like we little boy. You know what this guy do? He fall in love with a bar girl, man. He buy her all the gifts and promise he take her home and marry her. He so dumb he don’t know she just want go to America and take his money. So what happen? She find another GI who promise her better thing and she leave this guy. And he so fucking sad, he not talk to nobody for a whole week. Nothing. Then one day, he find the other GI in the street. He not say a word. He just walk up and stick his knife right here.”

Sonny made a single stabbing gesture at his throat.

“So I remind you of him.”

“No, man. You not got the balls to do what he do. You the other GI, the one who die.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Sonny.”

“Shoot me then. I let you.” He picked up his gun by the barrel and tossed it on the couch in front of me. “Shoot me and you can go.” He made a finger gun and pointed it at his temple. “Shoot me!” he hissed through his teeth, his chin raised, his bloodshot eyes flaring at me.

Just as quickly as it erupted, his temper vanished and he took another pull from the bottle.

I reached for his gun and slipped it into my coat pocket. I looked around for something I could tie his hands and feet with, keep him drunk and immobile while I looked for the letters.

“She never talk about you, man,” he said wearily.

“All right, Sonny.”

“No, she not talk about you ever, man. You know why?”

“Shut up, Sonny.”

“She feel sorry for you, man. She hate me, but she feel sorry for you.”

His tone stopped me. His bravado had given way to a hush of seriousness, like he was genuinely sad for me. He put the bottle again to his lips, then changed his mind and let it sink into his lap.

Mai might have been right about him after all. I wanted to despise him wholeheartedly in that moment, but it was dawning on me that he not only loved Suzy, but might have loved her more than I ever did — with a depth, with layers, too many probably, that I’d always hoped for but was never truly capable of. Perhaps you need full reciprocity to feel it like he did. Perhaps you have to be willing to hurt and kill and suffer and die for it.

I dropped my cigarette in a glass of water on the kitchen counter, unsatisfied by the hiss, and I wondered if Suzy had asked Sonny for my life also out of pity. There was, strangely, no real anger or envy in me — just the suspicion that I had lost this fight a long time ago, that actually the fight was never mine to win or lose.

Sonny was peering at the fake fireplace with its fake logs and all the candles and picture frames cluttering Happy’s mantelpiece. I remembered those same pictures from her old place in Oakland and knew how much family she still had in Vietnam, how none of them had ever made it to America though some had tried. Sonny was looking them over like he knew that too.

Then I spotted, atop those fake logs, the crumpled ashy remains of an envelope. I picked up what survived of the letter inside, a tiny scrap of paper with Suzy’s unmistakable handwriting in English, the end of two lines:

never forget.

first time I see

Sonny’s heavy-lidded eyes were still pitying me.

“Why did you do this?” I said. “This was mine.”

“You not deserve it. Don’t worry, it just one page.”

“You read it?”

“You want know what she say? She say she appreciate what you do for her. She say she want remember you like the first day she see you. She say you a good man. She say she admire you.”

“You’re making that shit up.”

“I not lie, man. She lie, though. She want to make you feel better. That what I say, man — she feel sorry for you.”

“Where are the other letters? Where the fuck are the other letters?”

He had another cigarette in his mouth. Absently, as though sighing surrender, he said, “Happy not tell me that.” His hands shook slightly as the lighter lit up his face. That’s when I noticed the bright red scratch marks on his cheek.

“Sonny — where’s Happy?”

He was staring straight ahead, drowsily, as though waiting for sleep to overcome him.

“Sonny. I called here an hour ago. I was just on the phone with her.”

“I hear you all talk.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I hear every word she say to you.” His head rolled back onto the seatback and he closed his eyes.

I backed into the hallway. With my gun still trained on him, I opened the first door and flicked on the light. It was the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain but the tub was empty.

The adjacent door revealed a closet full of stacked shoe boxes and casino uniforms hung in dry-cleaning plastic.

I threw open the third door. The darkness receded into the room: bedsheets pulled onto the floor, an overturned lamp, a whiff of shit. Even before I flipped the light switch, I could already make out the outline of her body, her thin forearm extended over the edge of the bed.

She was still wearing her uniform, her bow tie twisted vertically like he had used that to strangle her, though I could see his purple thumb marks on her throat. Her body was warm, but her face was the color of concrete, her eyes hemorrhaged red and gaping at the ceiling. Her tongue stuck out, a dry slug on her bluish lips, like it was plugging her mouth, and in my mind her pained laugh on the phone became the sound of everything she had ever been to me.

I finally noticed the kitchen knife, streaked with blood, lying on the carpet beneath her outstretched hand. I reached down for it, and it was then that I stepped on her glasses. They crunched beneath my feet.

Sonny had not moved in his chair, his eyes open but looking at nothing. I finally saw the dark wet blotch on his outer thigh, staining the inside of the yellow chair brown.

“I not want to do it,” he murmured and brought his cigarette to his lips.

I slapped it out of his hand. He tried to speak but I swatted his face with the butt of my gun and he fell out of the chair and onto the carpet. He gasped and grabbed his thigh and I stomped on him twice there, on his hand and his wound, and when he screamed out I went down on one knee and slugged him, pummeling his skull, his face, my knuckles scraping his teeth. My hand recoiled and I had to catch my breath, and all my rage went to the pain in my torn hand.

I shoved the gun’s muzzle against his temple. His face was half hidden in the crook of an arm, blood dripping from his mouth and onto his chin, crawling down his cheek from the gash above his eye.

It wasn’t fear or hesitation that kept me from pulling the trigger this time. Just an animal need to hurt him much more while he was still alive to feel it.

“You motherfucker!” I hissed, still on my knees.

Then I saw the phone cord. I thrust my gun into my coat pocket and ripped the cord out of the phone. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

But I felt his hand seize my leg, and then something hard clunked me on the side of the face. Everything erupted into a black, throbbing vacuum of silence. I came out of it lying on the floor and struggling to open my eyes and finally seeing a bright flare. In my hazy vision, the Christmas tree sprouted a fiery arm, and out of that nightmare came Sonny’s shadowy half-form, crawling toward me and raising his arm one last time to bring the bottle down on my head.

I WAS UPSIDE DOWN, draped over someone’s shoulder. My arms dangled heavily. A thick hand gripped my thigh. The air was bitter cold and it was hard to breathe, my face thudding against some one’s broad backside. We were lumbering across wet, crunchy snow, and in the distance I heard somebody scream.

THEN I WAS LYING in a darkness that droned and trembled. My legs were scrunched against a car door and I could see the highway lamps pass in the window, that sickly yellow light again, the snow still flying about like so many buzzing flies.

The road beneath me felt like it was all around me.

17

THE FIRST THING I SAW when I awoke was the painting of the geisha climbing the staircase. It seemed to me she was floating up the stairs.

I was lying on the leather couch in Sonny’s gloomy office, my shoes still on my feet, still slightly damp.

“Can you sit up?” said a voice.

Junior sat behind his father’s desk in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled. He looked even younger with unkempt hair, strands of it falling over his eyebrows. Smoke was curling off a forgotten cigarette in the ashtray beside him. He must have been sitting there for some time, waiting for me to awake, contemplating the quiet.

I sat up gingerly and that triggered a nauseating pain that swam through my eyes and swamped my head. I touched the bandages on my cheek and ear, saw dried blood on my sleeve and the front of my shirt, raw cuts on the knuckles of my right hand.

“How do you feel?” Junior said. His serene face amplified the sincerity in his voice. He filled a glass with water from a pitcher.

“Not good.”

“Can you walk?”

“Not sure I can stand. What time is it?”

“Six in the morning. You’ve been out for most of the night. We had someone stitch up your cheek and your ear. You’ll be fine except for the headache. You will need some food, though. Do you think you can drive?”

“Is that something you want me to do?”

“It would be good for you, yes.”

“What about the hotel? And Suzy? What about your father?”

“That is all done and over with now.”

Junior pushed a button on the phone beside him. A voice on the speaker said “Yes” in Vietnamese, and Junior issued some kind of order and hung up. He opened the prescription bottle on the desk, shook out a few pills. He carried the glass of water over to me and presented it along with the three white pills on his palm.

“For the pain,” he said and set the prescription bottle on the coffee table in front of me and returned to the desk chair. He saw me studying the pills. “Don’t worry, Mr. Robert. If I wanted to do something bad to you, I would have left you in the fire last night.”

As I downed the pills, a vision of the Christmas tree ablaze came back to me and with it another wave of nausea. “There was a fire. You mean the house. .”

“Yes. We didn’t stay to see it burn to the ground, of course, but we saw enough.”

“And Happy?”

He let the question linger between us for a moment. “I had to make a quick decision. She was already dead, Mr. Robert.”

“Jesus Christ. She didn’t deserve that. Even if she was already dead.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

“Your father — he strangled her.”

“I know.”

“I came there to talk to her and find out where Suzy might have gone. That was it. I had no idea he’d be there. I’d been waiting all day at the hotel—”

Junior waved his hand. “None of that matters anymore. Frankly, I don’t care what you were trying to do. It’s all over now.”

“Why would your father do that to her?”

He got up from the chair impatiently and faced the bookshelf, his hands in his pants pockets. His manner seemed defeated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or sadness.

With his back to me, he said, “Do you know what it’s like to spend your entire life with someone who must always be held back? Muzzled? Contained? The worst part is that you understand it — you understand everything about them. You’re the only one in the world who does. So you live with it. You live with the. . It’s not fear, really. It’s futility. You know they’re always on the verge of something you cannot control. It is not wise to go about loving someone in this manner.”

With one hand, he started pressing against the spines of books so that they were all perfectly aligned on the shelf — a habit I indulged at home with my own books.

“Since Sunday,” he continued, “when Miss Hong disappeared, my father has been on the precipice of one thing after the other. He was convinced she had run away with another man. He was convinced you were this man. He was convinced that Happy must have helped her steal his money. Anything would have put him over the edge, but something about Happy cut him much deeper. He had let her in — like he had let Miss Hong in. The thought of the two of them conspiring against him. . that was too much. I still don’t know what Happy did, but last night I found out that she had quit her job at the casino and would be moving back to Oakland.”

“Who told you this?”

He ignored the question, aligning the books with both hands now.

“It was a mistake to tell him. He went into a rage, convinced it was proof she had deceived him too. He wanted to go confront her himself this time — in the middle of the Stratosphere if he had to. He wanted to hurt her. It took all my energy just to keep him from going to the Coronado to hurt you. But I couldn’t keep him still forever. There’s just so much you can do. You can try to minimize the damage, fix what you can afterward. When he called to tell me what he’d done, I was horrified, I did not think he would go that far — but I was not surprised.”

“Not surprised?” I said. The loudness of my own voice deepened the ache in my skull. “You could’ve done something. She didn’t have to die.”

“He would have found some other way to hurt her. Sooner or later. I told you, my father is not one for forgiveness.”

“Bullshit. You can’t just give up and let someone go crazy on the world.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never given up on anyone.”

He had started reshelving some of the books, slowly and methodically — stubbornly.

I said, “So what now? You still gonna protect him? Let him get away with it? They’re gonna find out, you know. Even if the whole place is a pile of ash, they’ll figure out what he did.”

He stopped and turned to me, a book aloft in his hand. “Mr. Robert — you were the only person we removed from that house last night.”

He shelved the book and returned both hands to his pockets and stood there with his back to me.

“He was still breathing. I felt his pulse. Right here.” He placed two fingers on the side of his neck. “My only consolation was that he was not awake to see me walk out the door with you. All my life, even as a child, I’ve always known that some day I’d have to do what I did last night.”

I was too stunned to say anything. I could see it all in his bowed head, his stillness. What he’d done was a sacrifice, but also a betrayal. There would be no getting away from that. And if there was any relief, there would also forever be regret and shame and anger and, worst of all, doubt. He must have known all this when he walked out of that burning house with my lifeless body. I couldn’t help admiring him, despite there being nothing admirable about any of it.

Maybe that was when I accepted that I’d have to give up on Suzy and on everything that tied me to her. A heavy finality fell over me, heavier than what I felt that night I hit her, like I could no longer remember her or any part of our marriage correctly — like a stone door had closed on the last ten years of my life.

A soft knock came at the door. It opened, and Victor appeared, carrying my duffel bag and a small paper sack. Junior gestured for him to come in and close the door.

Victor didn’t make eye contact until he was standing above me. If he was upset with me for disobeying him, I couldn’t tell. He set everything on the coffee table, including my car keys.

Junior said, “That is food. Take it with you. It’s nearly daylight now. I have no idea how long it will take the authorities to identify my father’s body and then contact me. I’m fairly confident, though, that you will not want to be here when that happens.”

The door opened again and this time it was the giant Menen dez, his face as expressionless as it had been five months before. I felt a strange tenderness at the sight of him ducking under the doorframe. He must have carried me last night. I wondered if behind that inscrutable face he ever thought about the things he was ordered to do or the people he did them to, if it mattered to him that he had to take one body and not the other.

Victor started for the door, but Junior said, “Not yet. Mr. Robert, before you make your departure, I need to take care of some unresolved issues. One is this.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out Suzy’s red journal. He held it open, turning the pages delicately.

“Very many years ago,” he said, “when I first knew Miss Hong, I asked her what she was writing in this book, and she replied that she was writing letters to someone who would never read them. I didn’t quite understand that at the time, but I took it very seriously. I still do. You took this from my father’s house five months ago. I would say you stole it from him, but it wasn’t his. Nor is it mine or yours. That’s the way it should remain.”

He ripped out a handful of pages, then tossed the journal into the metal trashcan by the desk. He took the lighter on the desk and lit the pages in his hand, watching the flames grow into a torch before also dropping it into the trashcan. He peered darkly at me as curls of smoke began rising and that sweet burning smell filled the room. All the while I thought about running over and saving the journal, but it was like Junior already knew that I wouldn’t, that the fight in me had already been exhausted.

“I’ve been sitting here watching you asleep on that couch,” he said, “asking myself why I let you live. My only answer is that letting you die would gain me nothing. I learned that from my father. Don’t do something if you have nothing to gain from it.”

Smoke was drifting all over the office, past Victor and Menen dez and out the doorway. We all remained silent amid the soft crackling and the swirling haze, watching Junior as he watched the fire. After a minute more, he picked up the pitcher of water and emptied it into the trash can. Then he set the pitcher down on the desk with a loud thud that startled Victor.

Calmly, I said, “You had no right. It wasn’t yours to destroy.”

“Yes, that is true. But I’m doing you a favor one last time, Mr. Robert. I’m saving you from futility. It’s like my father always said about poker. Even if all the cards are shown, the story is still incomplete. It’ll always be incomplete. Live with it.”

“You’re punishing me. That’s what you’re doing.”

“Yes, that is true too. But you’re not alone.”

He turned now to Victor and stared at him as if waiting for him to speak first. I would always remember Victor’s immediate glance at Menendez, who was blocking the entire doorway. His face, its blank intensity, betrayed too much. Junior was probably only a few years his senior, but for the moment he seemed decades older.

“Victor, I want you to answer me honestly. Did you help Miss Hong steal my father’s money?”

I expected Victor to acknowledge me now in some way, but he was too dumbstruck to do anything but stare back at his interrogator.

“I don’t care about the money,” Junior told him. “I don’t care about anything else you did. All I want to know is whether you helped her betray my father.”

Victor let the silence swell a moment more before replying, “Yes. I did help her.” He started to say something in Vietnamese, but Junior held up his hand.

“No, no. Speak English so that Mr. Robert will understand.”

The look Victor finally gave me was not angry or uncertain or even fearful. It was oddly conspiratorial, like he and I had planned this very moment. “She was afraid for her life,” he said, “so she asked me for help. I felt a duty to help her.”

“And your duty to my father? To me?”

“She was afraid. She had no one else. I couldn’t say no.”

Junior considered that for a moment, then walked around the desk. “That doesn’t make sense to me. You can always say no. You have a tongue, don’t you?”

They were a foot apart now. Victor opened his mouth to reply, but Junior struck him with a vicious upward blow, a palm heel to the chin that flung his head back and sent him stumbling into Menendez’s chest.

I leaped to my feet, and the sudden movement made me light-headed. I managed to say, “Wait, goddamn it!”

No one paid me any attention.

Victor was bent over, grimacing and cupping his mouth like it was swollen inside. He had bitten his tongue badly. I could already see blood on his lips and his fingers. From behind him, Menendez had both hands on his shoulders like he was either consoling him or propping him up. Then he gently nudged him forward toward Junior.

“What were you going to say?” Junior asked.

Gently, affectionately it seemed, he pulled Victor’s hand away from his mouth and lifted his chin with a finger to inspect the damage. Then he put his other hand on Victor’s shoulder, as if coming in for a hug, but in one swift motion slipped behind him and wrapped his arm tightly around his throat as the other hand gripped the back of his head.

Victor came alive and grasped at Junior’s forearm to break the chokehold, lifting him off the ground for a second before backing him into the bookshelf and knocking books onto the floor. But Junior was glued to him, his hold as tight as a vise. Victor was tucking in his chin and managed to reach behind his head to grab Junior’s sleeve, and that’s when Junior kneed him brutally in the ribs, which made him gasp. From there the chokehold was unbreakable. His face reddened, his eyes started rolling back, and moments later his body went limp, crumpling to the floor.

I made a move toward him, but Junior threw up his hand and pointed at me like he was brandishing a dagger. He was standing over Victor’s prone body, his rolled-up sleeve kissed with blood. I was startled by the sight of him so unrecognizably disheveled and out of breath, flushed with anger as Menendez loomed behind him like his gargoyled shadow.

He nudged Victor’s head with his shoe, then nudged it again much harder.

Victor shuddered suddenly, and I heard the violent insuck of breath as his back rose like a tide. He was gasping and coughing into the floor, holding on to his side as he also grabbed at his throat, his legs writhing slowly like he was in the midst of a troubling dream.

I don’t know if it was relief or guilt or the throbbing in my own head, but I sank back down onto the couch.

Junior took a deep breath. He stepped over Victor and returned to the desk. I saw him open the drawer again and this time pull out a switchblade, the same one he had used on me. He set it on the desk.

“Please get up, Mr. Robert,” he said, slicking back his hair and tucking in his shirt. “It’s time for you to go.”

“What are you going to do to him?”

“It has nothing to do with you. I’m letting you leave. Be satisfied with that.”

“You can’t expect me to see this and just go.”

“That’s very heroic of you. But I’m giving Victor what he deserves.”

“He doesn’t deserve to. . I won’t let you.”

“You misunderstand. I have no intention of killing Victor. He will be fine — you have my word. He’s like a brother to me. He’s all the family I have now. But punishment is punishment. We all get our due sooner or later.”

Junior walked over to the wall clock beside the geisha painting. He said to me, “Menendez will take you to your car. This will be the last time we see each other. As far as I am concerned, I do not know you, I have never met you, and you have never been to Las Vegas in your life. In return, I recommend you never set foot back in this city.”

He turned the hands of the clock in the same combination he did five months before.

As the painting crept open, as Victor continued groaning and writhing on the floor five feet from me, I thought of Sonny and Happy and of all the letters that surely went up in flames alongside their bodies.

Menendez followed me down the dark stairway, but as the painting started closing behind us, I called over my shoulder, “I was here, though. I was here, and everything happened.”

I could no longer see Junior. I was not sure he even heard me.

18

AS I DROVE OUT of the city, the sun shone as intensely as it had the previous morning. The sky was the color of the Pacific in July. The farther south I drove on the 15, the less snow I could see. Only a few unmelted patches on the shoulders of the highway, the broken lumps on the tops of passing cars, spitting flurries onto my windshield. It was strange to see green palm trees swaying in the breeze and beyond them the vague warm mountains, because in the bright sunlight, if you squint, it all seems like a vision from some tropical island.

I held on to that thought to lessen the pain in my head. To bury as much as I could of the last two days.

It was my second and my last time leaving Las Vegas. The farther away I got, the more I felt I was shedding some pitch-dark side of myself that the place had awoken. Maybe it was my most genuine side. It doesn’t matter ultimately — who you think you are. Sonny and Happy had died, and mourning one and cursing the other made me no more wiser about the things that people do to each other. In the end, good and bad people perish all the same.

I felt inside my duffel bag for the videotape. It was still there, though its value was lost on me now. It would never tell me where Suzy went or what new life she would find for herself. It would never tell me what she had actually written me or what else had happened in that hotel room. All it contained were darkened glimpses of two people whose love for each other somehow lasted for over twenty years.

Two hours out, I stopped at a gas station to fill up my car and change out of my bloody clothes. I threw away the food and painkillers Junior had given me and bought a bottle of ibuprofen, some cold sandwiches and hot coffee, and a pair of cheap sunglasses to cover up my bruised eye and shade myself from the harsh sunlight.

It was still desert all around me, gray mountains behind brown mountains, miles of hoary creosote bushes blanketing the flat land like a bed of thorns. I ate all the sandwiches sitting on the frigid hood of my car and drank my coffee slowly and decided I was never coming back to this or any desert.

Only then did I call Tommy.

As soon as he heard my voice, he said, “What the hell did you do, man?”

“I can explain the girl,” I said.

“What girl? There’s no girl. All I see is a suitcase at my front door with fifty fucking grand inside and a note with your name on it. And oh yeah, your badge.”

He grilled me with a string of questions, but I wasn’t listening. I hung up without saying another word.

I sat in the car for a while, sifting through my surprise, my disappointment, and eventually the realization that I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.

I considered tossing the videotape then. Run over it with my car first. Burn it and let it melt into the desert dust. If Mai was gone now, why hold on to anything else, especially this?

But I kept it. I would never watch it again, but somehow it felt right to save this one reminder. At least it wasn’t some heartfelt memento of something we once had. On the tape was everything I knew about her and everything I would never know. That wasn’t enough, but at least it was real.