The Price of Blood

64

Trin’s voice rode a hysterical batshit vietnamese bobsled down in the pit. The silica flew. Above ground, Trung Si totally lost his phlegmatic peasant reserve. He scrambled to his foot and his crutch and, despite his earlier cautions about keeping it quiet, jabbered in the night.

Broker was double lost. Strange land. Strange tongue. Stuck in the dark with crazy people. One of whom was armed. He strobed his flashlight back and forth between the pit and the agitated old man who now had gone peg-leg wild and was stumping in the sand, swinging the rifle at the ready in all directions.

Trin’s shovel hacked with manic energy at sodden wood and sand. Crazy man here, chopping down a beach. The sound carried hollowly up from the pit. His excited voice exceeded all previous pitch, close now to the tonal frenzy of the flute player’s music.

In a stab of light Trung Si dropped his rifle and waved his arms, covering his face, warning Broker. Objects flew out of the hole, thick, oblong. One. Two. Trin’s voice maxed out on a triumphant fever shriek. Broker stepped back as another dark shape lobbed through the dark.

Panting, greased with sweat and dirt, Trin scrambled up from the hole. Trung Si had plopped back down on the sand and yelled, crawling one-legged, collecting the three sand-gummed ingots that Trin had thrown from the pit. Trin yanked him upright and arm in arm, clutching the heavy bars, they did a three-legged race down to the edge of the sea. Broker followed them as their electric torches swung like giddy miniature searchlights. They continued to rave as they collapsed in the water and scrubbed at the ingots. Then they crabbed their way to the edge of the surf.

Kneeling in the wet sand, Broker shook them by the shoulders. Trin went down on all fours. He lined the three ingots up in a row in the soft smooth sand and bent, his flashlight held over them like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass. Trung Si protested and picked up the center bar, moved the left one in and put the bar down at the end of the row. Broker gathered that they were arguing about an ordering sequence.

“Speak English, goddammit!” he shouted.

Like an Asian Laurel and Hardy, Trin and Trung Si comically hushed their voices. Trin rocked back on his heels and grinned. “French would be more appropriate,” he crowed in a whisper.

“That’s them,” said Broker, pointing at the ingots. Both flashlight beams now pinned the yellow rectangles to the inky sand. The indestructible sheen of gold perfectly complemented the desperate night. Gleaming, wrapped in soft ribbons of surf and nervous muscular brown hands sluiced by sea water, the ingots were about seven inches long, three to four inches wide and more than an inch thick. A panel was stamped in a decorative border with stacked Chinese characters, three on two of the ingots, four on the third.

Trin shook himself, fell on his back and fluttered a hand on his chest. “It’s too big for me,” he said.

“It’s gold, like I told you,” said Broker.

“It’s not just gold,” said Trin in wonder.

“Okay, it’s old Chinese gold,” said Broker.

Trin jackknifed up into a sitting position, pounded the sand with his fist and declared, “Not Chinese. Ours!”

Broker, weary of dramatic outbursts, got up. “I’m going back to the hole to get some coffee and my cigarettes. You calm down.”

Trin and Trung Si commenced a brusque debate in Vietnamese. Broker helped Trung Si return to the pit and reunited him with his crutch and his rifle. Muttering to himself, the old man hobbled back up the slope and disappeared into the dark. Broker then returned to the beach. He poured a cup of coffee and tried to take its comfort. He faced Trin. They sat cross-legged, the ingots between them.

In the distance they heard an engine start. The van.

“What’s going on? Can that old guy drive?” asked Broker.

“He uses the crutch on the clutch, he’s fine. Phil-he’s going for the boat,” said Trin in a grim voice.

“So we’re going to do it,” said Broker.

“How many boxes should we take? Ten? Fifteen?”

“As many as we can. How many are there?”

“A lot.”

They lowered their eyes. No flashlights. The metal picked up a faint iridescence from the moon, pecked by tiny points of starlight. Like the moving lines of surf.

Calm now, Trin composed himself. “That hole is a lot deeper than you think,” he said. He tapped the first ingot. “Gia Long, third year, eighteen oh-three.” His finger moved to the second bar. “Minh Mang, fifth year, eighteen twenty-five.” The third. “Tu Duc, tenth year, eighteen fifty-eight.”

“Emperors,” said Broker slowly as he recognized the names and placed them in context. A shuttle of magic moved in the night. Hemming them in. His skin shrunk two sizes and prickled and cinched around the testicles. “No shit!”

“No shit. This wasn’t stolen from a bank. It isn’t just…money. This is Imperial gold. Part of the treasure of the Nguyen emperors. No one has seen gold like this for over a hundred years except in a museum in Paris.”

“Goddamn, Trin. I thought the French took it all…”

Trin nodded. “When they looted the Hue Citadel in eighteen eighty-five. Looks like they missed some.” Trin shook his head. His hands groped the air. “You see. It’s…big.” He clicked his teeth. “Bigger than us.”

“Real treasure,” said Broker, now understanding Cyrus’s morbid obsession. And he saw how, in his fractured way, Jimmy Tuna was making his amends.

“If they knew about this in nineteen seventy-five Hanoi would have parked a division of tanks on it,” said Trin slowly.

“Okay,” Broker blurted. “Jimmy and Cyrus found the stuff and got it as far the bank. They phonied it up as a pallet of ammo. It just sat there after Hue fell.”

Trin exhaled. “God, I probably walked by it a dozen times myself. Just sat there for over a month?”

“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Ask Cyrus.”

Trin struggled to his feet. Broker joined him. They wobbled, supporting each other.

“So,” said Broker.

“So, we have to keep Highway One open for one more day.” Trin’s voice threw a resonating thespian echo down the empty beach. “We just get Nina away from Cyrus and then draw Cyrus here and call the militia when he’s digging it up.” It was three in the morning. The plan had the teeth of a butterfly assault on Mount Rushmore.

“That’s all,” said Broker, reeling. They both had the gold delirium tremens.

“C’mon. We’ve got to haul some boxes down to the water. And they’re heavy. Then we have to fill in that hole,” said Trin. “And meet Cyrus at noon in Hue. And not tell anybody else.”

“Trung Si knows,” said Broker.

Trin wearily brushed sand from his shirt. “Trung Si will keep his mouth shut. He’s more worried about the curse of found gold.”

“Once we load the boat, where we going to hide it?”

Trin shrugged. “Let Trung Si worry about that. He was a guerrilla all his life. He’s hid stuff from the Japanese, the French, the Americans…”

Arm in arm, they staggered back up the beach.