36 streets, p.19
36 Streets, page 19
“He…” she started, and stopped to draw on her cigarette. Her mouth forming a sentiment she hadn’t wanted expressed.
Bao turned back to her.
“He saved my life.”
“[Mosquito Brother’s death is yours to atone, Lin,]” he said. And as he spoke it wasn’t accusatory or in anger. Just matter-of-fact.
“How?”
“[You will kill the man who killed Mosquito Brother.]”
She nodded; Bao turned away. She wasn’t nodding in agreement. Just nodding to stop Bao looking at her. She settled back into her seat, into the hum of the engine, the dull pain in her chest. Pushing down on the sentiments she didn’t want to look at, her cheeks burning, her throat thick.
Ice-seven to smooth it over, to keep emotion at a safe distance. To glide over memory, like a frozen pond, distorted shapes trapped underneath the surface as she passed over, unrecognisable. Ice-seven to bring to her the eternal present, where body buzz and mind shine are the only concerns. No history, no country, no family, no blood debts.
She ran her thumb across her bottom lip. The cityscape glided by her window, unseen.
They walked through the headquarters of the Bình Xuyên. The men and women inside stood as they passed. Stood for Bao, glared at Lin. No rowdiness as they entered, no drinking games. Bottles of good rice whiskey sat on the low tables, the air thick with cigarette smoke. Faces smoothed in their anger, closing themselves off to her, like they did for outsiders.
After she and Bao had settled in his office, drinks and cigarettes running, she said: “They blame me.”
He looked at her for longer than necessary. “[Mosquito Brother was well-liked.]”
Bao seemed closed to her as well. He took a woven bamboo container from his drawer, slid out a flexiscreen and unfurled it. Subvocalised a command.
A three-dimensional image flickered into life above the flexiscreen. A street scene, Old Quarter, evening. Down one sidewalk moved a white man, thick-set, suit, baseball cap. Lin narrowed her eyes. Herbert Molayson, limping, shoulders hunched, eyes on the ground, cap a non sequitur. But definitely Herbert.
“Where was this? When?”
“[Yesterday. Outside the safe house. Watch.]”
She watched. Herbert walked out of view as the city continued its frenetic dance, indifferent. It was like that for thirty seconds, and Lin was about to ask what he was getting at when she saw herself in the playback, running from the opposite direction, crossing the street. Forcing a scooter to swerve. Down into the darkness of an alley, at the end of which the worn concrete stairs led up to the safe house.
The moving pictures flicked out of existence, clearing the space between her and Bao.
“Can you go back to the start?” she asked.
“[No one else comes out. No one goes in.]”
She raised an eyebrow. “Then how?”
“[Perhaps this Englishman is not all he appears.]”
Lin paused to get his meaning, then shook her head. “Yeah. Nah. That man wouldn’t know how to kill himself with a grenade and detailed instructions, let alone rip another man’s head off and leave it on the kitchen bench.”
Bao sipped his brandy, made a noise in the back of his throat, noncommittal.
“The man I fought today, Passaic Powell. He could do it.”
Bao waited.
“Maybe Herbert escaped while they were working on Blue Point and Snakehead. The attackers went out the window.”
“[Maybe.]”
“Yeah.” Lin sighed a cloud of smoke. “Doesn’t seem likely.”
“[No.]”
“These pieces don’t fit together.” She thought it over. “What if…”
“[What if?]” repeated Bao.
“What if Herbert had some sort of martial arts training downloaded, into his other personality. Into Hermann.”
“[No,]” said Bao, without hesitation.
“No?”
“[The will and the act, Lin. The physical capacity for violence does not equate to the ability to inflict it. A European dillettante with a clean criminal record does not suddenly start tearing men’s spinal columns from their bodies, whether or not they’ve had some memory edits and an unwanted personality upload. These edits cannot change who we are at our core, cannot make sudden murderers out of suburban housewives. If this were true, China could simply build an army of cold-blooded, remorseless killers and send them down here to do their mean and endless work. If it were true, China could simply round up Vietnamese civilians and turn them, one by one, into fiercely loyal supporters of Beijing. No. Violence as we saw in the safe house was by a person committed to the art of violence. The call of blood magic lies in the true heart of the killer. This was not Herbert Molayson.]”
He was right. What Bao said was right. Her eyes felt heavy, her mind starting to drift.
Smoked curled up from his cigarette. “[It’s late,]” he said.
Her timestamp read: 3:10 am. It reminded her how hungry she was. Then reminded her she was meant to be eating with Mosquito Brother. She stopped thinking about food.
“[You look bad, Silent One.]”
“Cheers.”
“[I saw such a look, in other places. Those men and women disappeared soon after, into the jungle.]”
“I’m not fucking going anywhere.”
“[Other times they died. Suicide charge, blood words in their mouth.]”
Lin ran a hand through her hair, uncomfortable. Some part of her shining at the idea. “I just need some sleep, Bao.”
“[This will not be happening for some time.]”
The master would share a small bottle of sake with Lin before each fight. She wasn’t sure if it was ceremonial, a warrior’s tradition. Maybe he just liked sake. He wasn’t big on explanation.
Cross-legged, low, real wood table between them. Polished, smooth. A flat bamboo serving tray, square. Two traditional ceramic cups (ochoko), and matching flask (tokkuri). Two-handed, the master would pour her sake; two-handed, she would pour his. His ceramic cup marked with the symbol for the dragon, hers with the carp.
Normally he would remain silent. Content to close his eyes and savour the drink as he sipped it, watch her as she poured. It was the only time he’d smile, even if only slightly. Off the mats, he almost gave the appearance of being human. Just a middle-aged Japanese man who liked a quiet drink. Not the sociopath who made her kick a bamboo trunk until her shins bled.
Sometimes he would talk.
It was the sake before their forty-fifth fight. This time he talked. Upbeat, she supposed, after thrashing Lin two fights in a row. In the two fights since she’d pinned his foot to the floor he’d been ruthless. For their forty-third fight he’d selected halberds. Ponderous, heavy, awkward weapons. The least suited to Lin’s style. He knocked her unconscious with the flat of the heavy blade within the first twenty seconds.
She’d woken, screaming, to a broken kneecap.
For their forty-fourth fight he’d given her a baseball bat, himself a crowbar. Weapons of the street, he said, before promptly breaking both her arms.
Lin Thi Vu was tired of losing. She’d gotten fast, had upgrades to make her faster, but she’d never be faster than the shihan. And he’d always be stronger. She thought it over, in traction, after the crowbar fight. Came to a conclusion. If she was going to win, she’d have to use the one thing she was better at.
So she took the tokkuri in both hands. Her master was talking about the weapons hung on the wall of the small room. A samurai sword, gleaming. A longspear, red tassels below the blade, the shaft snapped in half. A Western-style broadsword, its edges blunted, rust-pitted. And an AK-47, long thin bayonet affixed, the stock scratched and battered.
A long time before, he’d told her the weapons were from his four great battles. She’d asked whether it was more noble to avoid war. Not because she believed, but because it sounded like the ancient wisdom bullshit she’d heard in movies.
He responded by hitting her with a bamboo switch and telling her not to be so stupid.
He said the four fights had made him. Forged him. The only greatness was in war. The only moments in life with true meaning, when the soul was stripped bare, were on the battlefield.
Her master was talking about the weapons, because Lin had asked him. She’d heard the story of the samurai sword, now she asked for the story of the spear.
“[The Two Battles of the Broken Spear,]” he said, glancing up at the wall. His fights all seemed to have elaborate titles. The samurai sword was ‘ Dosaku’s Masterpiece’. The Western sword was ‘ Encounter on the Eastern Perimeter, at Dusk’. The machine gun, ‘Sixteen Soldiers at Danghu’.
The moment he glanced up at the spear was the moment she struck. The ice-three tablet, wedged gently between the ring and little fingers of her left hand, dropped into his ochoko with the sake, dissolving instantly.
Yeah.
Lin had to play to her strengths. She’d learned it in the working-class town she grew up in, against tough kids, bigger kids, for whom violence was part of their cosmology, a way to define and measure the world. What it dealt to them, and what they could deal back before they were broken. She learned it on the hard slick stones of the thirty-six streets. Against the thugs and the desperate and the war-ravaged who’d already lost it all.
Lin knew what she had to do.
She had to be the bigger cunt.
Lin was awoken by priority message three hours later. 6:13 am, according to her timestamp. Lying deep in her couch, boots still on her feet, orange dawn breaking through the slats. She stared at the ceiling.
Torn away from her dreams, deep dreams of sun-white beaches. Fading now, with those sensations, of the rough comfort of sand between her toes, sun-bitten skin, the sea-music of waves crashing against long pure expanses of white.
Calmed as the dream drifted out beyond the edge of her mind’s peripheral. Tranquil within those few moments, of a morning, in the anonymity of amnesia. Those few moments when a person can forget who they are and every problem they’ve accumulated. Before the world comes rushing in, a kind of peace. Before her boots hit the floor, a solace in ignorance of the self.
Her boots hit the floor.
She thought about Ly. She thought about Mosquito Brother. She opened the message.
Bao: The Englishman has been sighted. Serviced apartments on Trần Phú. Pick him up. Take him to the clubhouse. Get the answers.
She stood, dizzy with hunger and exhaustion. Felt around for the ice-seven vial, found it, held it up to the light. Empty. She popped the lid and tongued it anyway, a faint bitterness of the drug, but that was all. No body rush. Half a cup of water left in the tower; she wet her parched lips. As she did she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Purple lines under her eyes, face drawn. Her skin pale, unhealthy pale. Her shoulders looked small, with no jacket on. A small sick girl. She put her bomber jacket on and ran her hands through her hair, pulling her fingers through the tangles. She stood in front of it, full length, and watched herself pour and drink three shots of sake, all that was left in the bottle.
“Mosquito Brother’s dead.”
Barry hopped around on his perch behind her, in the mirror.
“I know you sang for him.”
The songbird turned on his perch, looked out the window, and watched the failing rain.
Lin put her shaking hand to her lips, her chin, her heart.
“Fuck.”
Her other hand let the empty bottle drop to the floor.
She got a ride over in her regular cab. Bull Neck Bui was waiting out the front of the apartments, sheltered from the morning drizzle by a canvas awning. Bull said nothing, not even a nod, his face smooth as she exited the cab and stood next to him. The two gangsters with him, a man and a woman, hard young faces, were vaguely familiar; she didn’t know their names. Probably runners pulled into action by Bao, now it all had started.
Lin asked Bull: “He alone?”
“[No. A girl is with him.]”
“One of ours?”
“[Close enough.]”
Lin looked up and down the street. Quiet, this early, just before the storm of people rose up to occupy. The morning air was muggy, roads slick with last night’s rains. A woman rode past on a bicycle, speaker blaring with the weather the forecast, with reports of Chinese gains along the fronts on Jammu and Kashmir in India and Quảng Ngãi in Vietnam.
Lin signalled the two young gangsters to wait in the black-and-white tiled foyer. Carefully she went up to the room with Bull. Mosquito Brother’s .45 in her hand, fresh magazine, spare in her pocket. Bull had a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun, useful if they were suddenly attacked by an elephant.
They soft-footed down the corridor. Well, Lin did anyway, Bull scuffed his feet, breathing heavy; Lin gritted her teeth in frustration. They stopped outside the door on the second floor, she raised a finger at Bull, stilled him, so she could listen.
Only one sound she could make out. Didn’t need enhanced senses either, to catch it.
“[Is that snoring?]” asked Bull.
Lin nodded and kicked in the door. Following through to a one-kneed crouch, marking the terrain inside with the barrel of her gun. Modern, cream faux leather furnishings, cleansteel kitchen, hardwood dry bar, one other door leading from the room. A huge tai screen on one wall; on another a large oil painting of old-school European women in ancient clothes, one or both breasts exposed, fat naked baby angels fluttering around their heads.
The snoring continued.
Lin pointed at the bedroom door with her chin, Bull aimed his shotgun at it.
Lin looked over items spread across the kitchen bench. Yellow-tinted glasses, a pack of cigarettes, a small clear vial marked ‘clozapine’, a silver cylinder of hi-end spray-on prophylactic, a fat roll of yuan, and two small, ivory-handled, double-barrelled pistols. Lin picked each up, eyebrow raised, feeling the weight, snapping both to see if they were loaded, sniffing for the residue of a recent firing. She slipped the pistols into the pocket of her jacket.
Lin eased herself over to the bedroom door, turned the knob and pushed it open, gently. Bull raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
A woman sat in a chair, next to the bed, watching herself in the mirror as she brushed her long, pink hair. Naked from the waist up, creamy smooth skin, went by the name All City Do. Hooker, thirty-six streets, rich clients only, protected by the Bình Xuyên. The only payment required from her was information on her clients, whenever asked, in every detail.
Lying face-up on the bed was Herbert Molayson, arms akimbo, mouth wide. Fast asleep. He was wearing a crumpled suit, slightly too small for him. Sock on one foot, the other one bare.
All City Do looked at Lin, in the reflection of the mirror, and smiled, sultry. Lin, starving, exhausted, strung out, still got a buzz from the glance. Didn’t show it though, jerking her head at the door instead, indicating for the escort to leave. All City Do gave a little pout at the rejection, and took her time running the brush through her hair once more, more in rising, casually, to find her clothes, and luxuriantly stretching her arms and back as she pulled a tight black tube top over her small breasts. Facing Lin while she did it all, smiling innocently.
All City Do sauntered past Lin brushing her arm, giving her a little electric thrill at the touch. Behind her back, the escort didn’t go straight to the door, but paused to take the roll of hard currency from the kitchen bench.
The apartment door clicked closed. Herbert snored. Bull stood in the bedroom doorway, shotgun over his shoulder, and watched Lin as she sat on the bed, next to the Englishman. Up close, he smelled of cigarettes and the acrid sweat of hard liquor.
She slapped his cheek with the barrel of the .45. He snorted, mumbled, then jerked awake, eyes popping at the intruder.
“Wakey wakey,” said Lin. “Hands off snakey.”
“Who the fuck are you?” asked Lin.
Herbert sat at the other side of her desk, in her office back at the clubhouse. Hollow-eyed, still not quite processing where or why he was.
“What?” he said, voice thin.
She regarded him for a moment before chucking her pack of cigarettes in front of him. He stared for ten long seconds, processing the item in front of him, before he nodded to himself and pulled a thin white cigarette from the packet. She signalled him to lean forward, he did; she lit it.
He enjoyed it. Eyes closed. Exhaling a long white cloud of smoke through his nose.
“Like I was saying,” said Lin, as she added to his smoke with her own. “The fuck you up to, Bert?”
The confused sheen still hadn’t left his eyes. “Bert?”
“You. Herbert Molayson. Dilettante. Louche. Goat-fucker.” She pointed at him with her cigarette. “Why are you with a high-end hooker in the wrong part of town with shit in your hair, a bad suit—” She clunked the derringers on the table in front of her. “—pistols from a wild west poker game.”
He looked at the guns like they were dead fish she’d just demanded he gut.
“I don’t…” He trailed off.
Shrunken in on himself, shell-shocked, holding on to his cigarette like a drowning rat to a piece of driftwood. Easy mistake to make, looking at him.
She sighed. “Hungry?”
He swallowed. “Um. Actually. Yes. I am rather peckish.” It occurred to her that his accent hadn’t been present, for a few minutes. She’d have to go back on-retina and double-check.
“I’m fucken starving,” she said, and subvocalised an order to one of the fetch boys outside. Lin and Herbert smoked cigarettes and waited, Herbert staring into dead space, his cigarette burning down idle rather than being smoked. Lin closed her eyes and checked her memory feed, looked over Herbert’s behaviour and words from the morning.
A tap on the door and the fetch boy brought in coffee, two bánh mìs filled with vat-grown beef, and two steaming bowls of phở.
