Little Saigon

Chapter 24

The storm ended as quickly as it had begun. He parked at home and walked down to the festival grounds, where the Pageant of the Masters had been delayed. The city smelled of wet eucalyptus and ocean spray. As Cristobel said it would be, Frye’s ticket was waiting for him at will-call.

He found his seat, a minor chill moving through him under his still-wet clothes. The tableau on stage before him was called “The Four Muses,” said the program, and showed four gold-painted women posing in recreation of a sixteenth-century French statuette. The women were suspended mid-air — even from the third row Frye could not see how — giving them a precarious, otherworldly quality. Breathing stopped, a low murmur rose from the crowd, breeze jiggled the rain-slick trees around the amphitheater.

Then the stage went dark, and the announcer’s resonant baritone came through the speakers. Frye could see the golden bodies floating offstage in the darkness. Where do goddesses go when their workday is done?

“The Pageant of the Masters would like to take just a moment,” said the announcer, “to pass along the good news to anyone who has not heard it yet. The MIA Committee, based in our own Laguna Beach, will be negotiating with Hanoi for American soldiers still remaining in Vietnam. The pageant extends Its warmest congratulations to Lucia Parsons and her committee.” There was a round of applause, cheers from the crowd. “Our next piece is based upon...”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and issued a vague prayer heavenward that they could get Li back. Benny’s falling apart, he thought. What if his plan caves in? She was his purpose, and Benny always needed a purpose. Without that, he’s just a storm of impulse, not containable by skin alone. What was it that Benny had said after he’d come out of the hospital in Maryland, back to California with his new wife, his new body, his new life? She got me through this, brother. She’s not just a woman. She’s my god.

His muse. The stage lights came on slowly, and he found himself staring at a life-size Remington bronze, the cowboy galloping his horse across some timeless plain, reins in one hand, lasso in the other, hat brim flipped up by speed. Frye could almost hear hoofbeats. The crowd’s inhale was palpable.

Momentarily transported by this illusion, Frye crossed his arms, sank down a bit in his seat, and tried his best to think nothing except whether this cowboy was going to catch his cow.

It was impossible to think of anything but Li. What are your chances, Benny, of pulling this off? Not very goddamned good. But what would work better? No wonder the FBI is keeping wraps on the Thach story, with the POWs on the line. Hanoi sends over a terrorist squad and — just in time — happens to discover American soldiers still alive. Some diplomacy.

The next thing Frye knew, the announcer was telling the apocryphal story of Susanna, wife of a prominent Jewish merchant, who went to her garden to bathe. Left alone by her servants, she was viewed by two elders, who approached and demanded her submission. If not, he explained, the elders would claim to have seen her in adultery with a young man — a charge which could get her stoned. Susanna refused, the elders barked their story to the local tribunal and she got the death penalty. Only the cleverness of Daniel, cross-examining the elders and finding two differing accounts, saved her from death. Susanna’s virtue was triumphant. The tableau was a re-creation of a painting of Susanna at her bath, under the eyes of the scheming elders.

When the lights went on, Frye caught his breath and felt his heart dissolve in one instant. Cristobel stood at the garden pool, about to step from her robe, her head cocked slightly as if she’d just heard a rustle from the two men spying on her from the trees. It was the angle of her head that caught him, the long gentle plane from ear to shoulder, white in the light and set off by the blue water of the pool. Her hair was tied up loosely, a strand or two escaping down and across her face, almost hiding the eyes that looked to the ground, both innocent and suspecting at once. Something in the angle of her head caught Susanna’s indecision and doubt. Her arms were already lowering the robe, her neck and shoulders already bare. Frye considered the sculpted roundness of her limbs, the uninterrupted perfection of her back, and a leg, barely visible where the loose white material gave way with Cristobel’s step to the water. He barely noted the lurking men, the trees, the bench beside her on which rested three small vessels and a folded towel, or the two servant girls disappearing in the background toward a house. The breeze moved her robe, just slightly, and Frye saw her hair brush her cheek. The lady beside him whispered something, but he ignored her. He hated the sniveling, cretinous elders, though he felt like a third. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me? He shifted in his seat. What odd compulsion had brought Cristobel to this tableau and its shadows of seduction, rape, betrayal? What’s going through her mind right now, with a thousand elders’ eyes fixed on her body?

For a moment he swore her gaze wandered across the seats to him, but that was silly. Her leg was imponderably lovely. Was she getting cold? His body felt light and his mind distant, as under hypnosis. I could sit here all night. But the lights began to dim and he watched in genuine sadness as Cristobel’s form lost its clarity and dissolved, slowly vanishing into the dark.

He met her outside the stage door an hour later. Her hair was still up and she was wearing a loose blue dress, tied at the waist with a sash. Two men he assumed were the elders walked with her, and she said good night to them at the bottom of the steps. They looked at Frye with a protective air, then headed down the sidewalk different ways. Cristobel ran down the stairs, smiling, and threw her arms around him. “Can you believe what Lucia did? It’s just the best thing I could have heard tonight.”

“It sure is. My jaw dropped when I watched the news.”

“I’m just so... there’s no way to say. Did you like my piece in the show?”

“Not bad...”

She stopped and regarded him, askance. “The rain got our timing off and made everything slippery.”

“It changed my life, really.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“Yes. Get some coffee?”

“I’d prefer a little motion. All that posing makes me want to move.”

They walked up Broadway, slick with rain and littered with eucalyptus leaves. The storm had left in its wake a clear dry sky, with stars emerging deep in the west. Cars hissed along the boulevard. Frye noted that the savings-and-loan thermometer read seventy-one. Even from two long blocks away he could hear the rumbling surf, and when a big wave hit it sent tremors up the sidewalk and into his toes. They tickled.

“Feel that?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.”

She took his arm. Frye felt an immense pride as he walked down Broadway with Cristobel, secretly desiring that anyone who’d ever wished him harm could be here for this march of triumph. He would be humble in victory, though: signing autographs, giving advice, laying on hands, and what have you. They crossed Coast Highway and headed up the boardwalk toward Heisler Park.

“Must be kind of hard playing Susanna, considering the recent past,” he said.

Her arms stayed in his. “I showed up for the audition, and they offered me Susanna,” she said. “I was shocked. Then I thought about it, read the story in the library, and decided it might be therapeutic. Kind of like you going out on a two-foot day, maybe. Just to get wet again.”

“That’s it. One step at a time. First night kind of rough?”

“I wanted to run. The applause helped. It’s all a matter of getting comfortable with myself again. When something like that happens to a woman... well, I felt... unclean. Spoiled and dirty. Somehow you have to get the shame out of your head. Time helps. And putting your toes in the water again. And being made love to by you.”

“You were beautiful. All I saw was you.” Frye stopped and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry about what I did, what I said. Both times.”

“I am, too. Sorry you found out I had this obsession about you. I was going to play this very cool. Now, I’m busted.”

He kissed her. People on the sidewalk had to move around them, but Frye didn’t care. I could get lost in this woman, he thought.

She broke away and looked at him. “There’s something dark in you right now, Chuck. What happened?”

They lay on his living room floor and let the warm breeze pass over them. She rested her head on his chest. Frye stared at the ceiling.

“You can’t keep it all bunched up inside,” she said.

“I know.”

A moment later, he was spilling it. The Secret Army, the tape, the tunnels, Eddie and Loc, Minh and Wiggins, Hanoi’s POW revelation, Bennett’s transcontinental grudge match with Colonel Thach. He left out the details, in deference to his brother, his family, his own sense of what you tell someone and what you don’t. “The biggest worry I had last Sunday evening was getting a job,” he said.

“How come you always think you have to solve it all and fix everything? Seems to me you lay a lot of blame for things right on yourself. That’s either foolishness or arrogance, Chuck. You know that?”

“Who the hell are you, Toni Grant?”

He felt the muscles in her jaw tighten. She lay still.

“Sorry,” Frye said.

“I know it’s there, Chuck. I can feel it. But what is it? What is it that eats at you so bad?”

He closed his eyes and felt her head on his chest and smelled her rain-damp hair. He listened to the cars whisking by on Laguna Canyon Road. He could hear the power lines buzzing below, aggravated by the rain. Then, the sounds seemed to fall an octave and all he heard was a faint ringing in his ears. He could see it. He could see her. He could hear the seagulls yapping overhead.

“I had a sister, Cris. Her name was Debbie and she was a sweet kid. Two years younger than me. Kind of skinny, built like me, Nice smile. Hair like straw. Freckles. Tomboy, I guess. I imagine that she’d have grown into a good woman.”

Cristobel’s fingers moved through his hair.

“We were close in a lot of ways. Closer than me and Benny, because he was five years older than me, and you know how older brothers are.”

“I sure do. They ignore you.”

“Yeah. Well, Benny taught me to surf and I taught Debbie. Other kids had little league or powder puff or whatever. We had waves. We were close enough to the beach, we could ride down the whole peninsula on our bikes and find where the break was best. All summer that’s what we did. When school was in, we’d get up at six, surf an hour, then make it home for breakfast. After school, back out again if the wind hadn’t picked up too much.”

“Mike and I had horses. Same kind of thing.”

“When I look back now, I can see she worshipped me. Me. I just tolerated her, but that’s how brothers treat sisters. She’d always do what I was doing — wear the same kind of clothes, get her hair cut like mine, pick up the slang I got from my friends. I think the first word she learned was bitchin’. Hell, she asked Mom if she could get braces when she was old enough because I had the damned things.”

Cristobel laughed. “For a while I thought Mike’s pimples were really swell.”

Frye could see her, peddling beside him on a red Stingray, dragging a surfboard behind her on the wheeled cart he’d made her. “When I went out on the big days, I wouldn’t let her come. She’d scream and bitch and I’d make Mom keep her home. One day I came back from a six-foot morning at the River Jetty, and Debbie had spray-painted all over my surf posters. Then one day, the swell was up, and I saw Debbie’s bike and board were gone. I went down to the point at Nineteenth Street. Ten foot, solid walls, sets lined up four and five at a time. The current was so strong I watched a guy paddle out at Seventeenth Street and before he got outside, he was four streets down — all the way to the pier. Man, it was awesome just to watch those things come in. Her bike was chained to the trash can and she was already heading out. She was eleven years old.

“So I went after her. I had to wait five minutes for the set to end just to paddle out. The Whitewater was high enough to keep the goons from going in. There were photographers and a crowd there, just to watch. I got outside and looked back to shore. It felt like I was a mile out, the houses looked like something on a Monopoly board. It was twelve feet. I’d never seen it like that. Corky Caroll was out, and Rolf Arness — Matt Dillon’s son. They still got pictures of that day up in some of the surf shops in Newport. Every place has its Big Wednesday, and that was ours.”

“Big as Rockpile two mornings back?”

“It made Rockpile look like a swimming pool.”

Frye shuddered. “I was thirteen. I’d been surfing the point since I was six. And I’ll tell you, when I got out, I was scared. Debbie was thirty yards away, and I could see how white she was. I told her to go back in, so she paddled away further. The more I yelled, the less she paid any attention. Finally I got sick of screaming and missing waves, so I got my hair up and dropped in. It was second wave of the set, ten feet and I shredded that sucker all the way to shore. It’s the kind of ride you don’t forget. I still haven’t. It was the first time I ever made Surfer magazine.”

“Not the last.”

Frye looked up at the ceiling. Cristobel slipped her hand inside his shirt and ran it over his chest.

“When I got back out, Debbie was still there. She was grinning like an idiot. My heart was doing back-flips. Then I looked outside and the next set was lining up. Biggest of the day so far. We had to paddle like hell just to make it over the lead wave. Then two more. I looked across from me and watched the other guys paddling too — they looked like an army of ants riding sticks. Deb got outside faster. The next thing I knew she was dropping in on the cleanup wave. It was just too goddamned big. She stroked a couple of times. She looked at me, like, watch this.

“It lifted her up and she tried to stand, but she was going too fast and she pitched. It had her. It drove her down. She just kept falling, but she wasn’t free of the thing, she was imbedded in it, this little girl in a black wetsuit stuck in the curl, trapped like a fly in amber. The board spiraled down after her. I sat there and waited. When you look at a big wave from the back, all you see are these big muscles of water bearing down, then you hear the boom, then you feel the world tremble, then you see the whitewater shooting up like a geyser. I kept waiting for it to bring her up. Five seconds? Ten? I don’t know. What I do know is I was there in the middle of it, diving down with my eyes open and not seeing a thing except a green swirl everywhere I looked. Then coming up and screaming for help. Back down again. Then up. Then a bunch of guys diving down too, and lifeguards, and a few minutes later the rescue boat roaring up and almost capsizing when the next set hit.”

Frye closed his eyes and saw it all again, clearly as the morning it had happened. He could feel the burn of the saltwater, the ache in this throat as he screamed and went down again, the cold sludge of sand under his fingertips as he clawed along the unyielding, treasure-less bottom.

“They found her twenty minutes later, wrapped around the last piling of the pier.”

They lay still. Frye listened to the cars below. He could hear Denise’s stereo throbbing away down the hill. The curtains floated with the breeze.

“It wasn’t your fault, Chuck.”

“Maybe, Maybe not. But I was the last one with a chance to do something, and I didn’t take it. I could have stopped her before she left home. I could have taken her board. I could have just chased her down and dragged her in. There were a million little things that might have prevented what happened. It never got said that way, but that’s what mom and pop thought too. I could see it in their faces. After it happened, nothing was quite the same.”

“You’ve never talked about it.”

“Tried to a couple of times. Didn’t want to grovel.”

“That’s not groveling, it’s wrestling. You have to wrestle it until you pin it down and it leaves you alone. Is that why the water gets to you now? The dizzy spells you told me about?”

“I don’t know. I thought it started when I banged my head a few months ago. I thought it was that, but the doctor says I’m fine. Now, under the water, or in a cave or tunnel. Even in my bed sometimes, when the covers are pulled up too tight — I just can’t handle it.”

“Sometimes, it just takes a long while to heal. Believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“I love you, Chuck Frye. I want to spend some time with you. Get under that skin of yours.”

He looked at her, touched her face, looked into her dark brown eyes. “Those words sound good to me.”

She led him to the bedroom and shut the door.

They were dozing when the phone rang. It was Shelly from Elite Management, who had stopped by the office to get a couple of “rilly good joints” she’d left in her desk. As she had driven away, Rollie Dean Mack had driven in. “He didn’t see me, so I thought I’d call you. You still, like, wanna see him?”

Frye considered. “Sure I do. What kind of car does he drive?”

“Black Jaguar. Totally rad.”

“Totally. Thanks, Shelly.”

Cristobel pulled the blanket up, and snuggled close. “Who was that?”

Frye explained. Cristobel seemed to shrink away a little. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“No.”

“Want to come with me?”

She checked her watch, then looked at Frye for a long moment. “I should go. I’ve got an early shift at the towers tomorrow.”

“Suit yourself. You okay, Cris?”

She dressed quickly, slung her purse over her shoulder, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Can’t you just get a job somewhere else? Quit screwing with this Mack character?”

“I liked my job. I liked the Ledger. And everybody else wants five years experience. I got one and a half. Besides, there’s something strange going on at Elite. I’d like to know what. I could use another set of eyes and ears.”

“No. But good luck.”

The black Jaguar was out front, parked beside a long white Cadillac. The lights of Elite Management were on. Frye sat for a moment in his car, composing his story to Mack: I saw it as a dive, but I might have been wrong. I gave your fighters better coverage than anybody else did. Let’s forget the piece on the welterweight. You reinstate your ads, and I’ll get my job back.

What I might not ask, just yet, is why Lucia Parsons has the keys to your suite at the Sherrington, or why you never come to work.

He climbed the stairs and went to the door. He could hear a voice inside, drawling away. Something about it was familiar. He stopped his fist just short of knocking, then moved to a side window. The blinds were cracked open just enough to see inside.

The lobby was empty. But through the open door he could see Burke Parsons, phone to his ear. Behind him sat General Dien, arms crossed.

But no Rollie Dean Mack.

Parsons hung up. The phone rang a second later. He answered, checked his watch, slammed down the phone, and stood. “Come on, General.”

Frye flew down the stairs as fast and as lightly as he could. He realized he’d parked three cars away from the Jaguar.

He dodged around a corner and ran along the first-level suites. He pressed into a dark doorway, flattening against it as best he could.

Parsons and Dien moved quickly toward the lot. The General stopped beside Frye’s car and said something. Burke got into the Jaguar and started it up. His voice echoed across the lot. “Come on, Dien. We don’t have all fuckin’ night, now do we?”

The general shuffled toward his Caddy. Frye watched the Jag back up, straighten, then bounce from the Elite Management parking lot onto Palisade. Dien’s car followed.

Parsons, he thought. Of course you know Mack. Of course Lucia has a key to his suite at the Sherrington. Of course you could ask Mack a favor. You are Mack.

Frye sat in his living room for a few minutes, wondering why Burke Parsons had gotten him fired. No matter which way he turned it, he couldn’t make sense of it.

The phone rang just after one A.M. Detective John Minh sounded exhausted. “I’ve been here since eight this morning,” he said. “Did you hear about the banners?”

“What banners?”

“Draped all around Saigon Plaza sometime last night. They said ‘Thach Watches,’ ‘Thach Knows,’ ‘Thach Sees.’ I got there at nine and there must have been two hundred refugees milling around the plaza, staring at the things. By noon the place was deserted. Nobody but FBI. They got those banners down very quickly. No one’s going out. Everybody thinks they’ve seen some old ghost from the war now. I’ve got a stack of reported sightings a foot high — Viet Cong murderers, Dac Cong torturers, traitors of every description. Everybody’s carrying a gun. Just after dark, an old Vietnamese shot someone trying to get into his house. It was his son, who’d forgotten his key. An hour after that I found the Dark Men and Ground Zero patrolling their neighborhoods on foot. More guns on them than you could count. Tonight around ten, Loc tried to get into Dien’s house. Dien’s guards found him inside the fence and shot him down. They said he fired first. It’s crazy up here. Now listen, Frye, I shouldn’t have taken the time to look into this rape thing, but I got the answers you need. I checked with the police in Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Pedro, Wilmington, Seal Beach and Portuguese Bend. L.A. county sheriffs, too. Nobody named Cristobel Strauss was raped up there. Not in the last ten years, anyway.”

Frye’s felt his heart accelerating. “Oh.”

“Maybe she’s a little crazy, Chuck.”

“Maybe. Thanks.”

He called Cristobel but the line was busy.

He went back out to the Cyclone.

The blue apartments were dark and the traffic on Coast Highway was thin. Frye parked in front of the bookstore and wondered just what he was going to say. The truth of it was, he didn’t have any idea.

The house lights were dim. Frye looked through the window and saw nothing. Then, two silhouettes materialized on her deck that overlooked the water. He moved to the railing and peered around the corner. They stood on the deck, the water sparkling black behind them.

One was Cristobel, and the other was Burke.

He couldn’t make out their words because of the surf rushing in below. He could see that Cristobel was sobbing. She was outlined against the ocean: face in her hands, hair spilling forward, back quivering. Parsons reached out and drew her to him. He lifted her chin with a finger and put his mouth on hers. Then a muted crack of flesh against flesh, and Burke’s head snapped. Cristobel crossed her arms, and Parsons laughed.

The next set of waves drowned him out. Frye headed down the stairs and back to his car.