Nine Days (11 page)

Before Ti-Anna could get more than a sentence into explaining who had sent us, Mr. Thieu cut her off.

“I know who you are,” he said, in heavily accented English. “Come back tonight. Alone.”

“We are alone,” Ti-Anna protested.

“No,” he said, pointing to me. “You are not alone. If you want to hear about your father, come back tonight. Alone.”

And with that he ducked away. The rusty metal gate swung slowly shut, with a creak and a click.

We stood there, too surprised to speak. In fact, you know the five stages of grief? I don’t either, exactly, but I remember reading them somewhere, and in Ti-Anna’s face you could see her cycling through the ones I remember. Shock. Depression. Anger. Finally—what would you call it?—resignation: “I guess I’ll just have to come back tonight,” she said. (Yes, I know that was only four. It’s not like someone had actually died.)

“You will not come back alone,” I said.

Thus began an argument that continued, in fits and starts, for the rest of that day.

Not that we stood in front of the gate all day. After a while, we turned around and sat in front of it, leaning back against the wall. Arguing. Then we started walking south, back toward downtown. Arguing. We stopped for some pho. Arguing.

As the tiresome day wore on, we walked and argued and walked some more. I would say, “I don’t think you should go back alone.” And Ti-Anna would say, “If that’s the only way he’s going to tell us where my father went, then I’m going.” “You shouldn’t.” “Why not?” “Because.”

“Maybe Radio Man didn’t mention you, only ‘the daughter,’ and so he doesn’t know whether he can trust you,” Ti-Anna guessed.
“Maybe he’s scared he’ll get in trouble, and it’s safer to tell one person than two. Maybe he doesn’t like white people.”

At some level, I’m sure Ti-Anna knew that none of those made much sense. But she had come this far, she felt like she was about to find out what had happened to her father, and she wasn’t going to let anything stop her now. And
I
had come this far so she wouldn’t have to do this alone, and
I
wasn’t going to let anything stop me.

The rain was streaming down our faces, even as sweat was trickling down our backs.

To kill time, and get under some kind of roof, we visited Ho Chi Minh, though he happens to be dead.

Ho was the Communist leader who led Vietnam in wars against the French, in the 1950s and ’60s, and against the Americans, in the 1960s and ’70s, eventually beating both. According to their official history, which of course is written by the Communists who still run the place, he is the beloved father of his nation—their George Washington. Yes, just like the Chinese and Mao.

They have him pickled and on display, in this monumental mausoleum in the middle of a parade ground in the middle of Hanoi. (Yes, just like Mao in Beijing.) To see him you have to go through a metal detector and get in a long line, and there are guards telling you to take your hands out of your pockets and keep quiet. When you get inside it’s like being inside a temple, or a funeral home.

While we were waiting to get in, I started in on the sickness of creating state religions around Communist dictators. Ti-Anna shushed me, and I thought back to the last time I was shooting my mouth off about a pickled Communist dictator. That seemed like a couple of eons ago.

I shut up. But as we filed past the mummified corpse, nicely turned out in a shirt and tie, I couldn’t help nudging Ti-Anna and
whispering, “How do we know he’s not made of wax?” Because, honestly, he looked suspiciously orange.

“Shhh!” she said again. “Not here!”

“Shhh!” a guard said, in a less friendly way.

When we got outside, we resumed our arguing. All I could think about was Rat-face, and why he didn’t want me along.

“Look,” Ti-Anna said, in what she obviously thought of as a compromise. “You can wait right outside the gate. He’ll know you’re there. What could go wrong?”

Which is the question that was echoing in my mind, over and over, as we headed back to Mr. Thieu’s. Because, of course, Ti-Anna had won the argument and was planning to go in alone. I had agreed to wait right outside the gate.

I might have kept my promise, too, if the gate hadn’t closed so slowly.

We returned to the house as darkness fell. I hung back as Ti-Anna punched the buzzer. The gate opened, Ti-Anna disappeared, the gate swung back—and paused, for just an instant.

Without thinking—or maybe because in some corner of my mind I’d been thinking about it all day—I darted through the gap before the gate clicked shut, and dropped into the shrubbery.

Ti-Anna was being escorted up the path, through shadows. I assumed the man next to her was Rat-face.

I squatted in the humid Hanoi night, surrounded by cicadas even noisier than my ragged breathing. I had no plan. I couldn’t have told you why I had done what I did, or what I thought I was going to do next, except that I didn’t trust Mr. Thieu, and I didn’t want a wall separating me from Ti-Anna.

I edged forward through an unkempt garden. The driveway opened onto a gravel-covered lot that encircled Thieu’s house like a moat. It wasn’t really a house, though—it looked more like a
squat pagoda, with the ground floor lit up and the higher floors in darkness. An old army truck, with a canvas roof, was parked by the door.

Curtains were pulled across the windows. But as I crept along the edge of the gravel clearing, I noticed an outdoor wooden stairway connecting the porch to a second-floor balcony. I decided to make a run for it.

Every footstep was like an explosion on the gravel as I sprinted through the light. But I made it across and up the stairs. I listened, and let my breathing slow again. It didn’t seem I’d been noticed.

They were talking beneath me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, in part because the truck was idling noisily around the corner. Luckily its rumble covered the creaking of the wood floor, too, as I crept along the balcony.

A door opened easily, into a storeroom that took up the entire second floor—no furniture, as best I could make out in the bit of light that seeped in, just boxes and old file cabinets. From here, the voices were clearer—there was Ti-Anna speaking now, I was sure—but still indistinct. Then I noticed a bit of light, a small hole in the floor. I tiptoed over, lay flat and peered down: nothing. Angled slats made it impossible to see anything but the ceiling fan below. But pressing an ear to the opening I could hear almost as though I were in the room.

“I don’t believe you,” Ti-Anna was saying angrily.

“See for yourself,” a man said. It did not sound like Thieu—the voice was deeper, the English less accented. He said something in Vietnamese, and I heard some walking and some rustling. “Here are the photos,” he said.

Ti-Anna gasped. “My father.”

“Yes,” the man said.

“And who’s that? The labor leaders?”

“She still does not get it,” a different voice said. This was Thieu,
I was certain—the same higher-pitched, sneering rat voice we had heard at the gate that morning. “Stupid as her father.”

“There never were any labor leaders,” the other man said, in a more patient voice. “That was how they lured him here. Don’t you see? Those are Chinese agents. Doing their job.”

There was a pause.

“Where is he?” I heard Ti-Anna ask. Now she sounded more frightened than angry, as though she didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Not our business,” the man said. “But that car? From China. Probably they drove back across the border and threw him in prison that same day. If they’d wanted to kill him, they would not have had to go to such trouble.” He laughed a bit. “Not to mention expense.”

Now there was a longer pause. “So … why tell me now?” Ti-Anna asked.

“We were not supposed to,” the man said. “But I think, why not? Where you are going now”—the blood froze in my veins—“you will not be telling anyone. So what harm in satisfying your curiosity?”

“You’re going to kill me?” She sounded a lot more composed than I would have.

“No.” There was a chilly laugh. “What a waste that would be—an attractive young woman like you. These men”—I heard something, and assumed he was thumping the photo—“want you out of the way. ‘A good lesson,’ they say. ‘They will think twice about making trouble again, if they know even the children are not safe.’ But they didn’t tell us how. Now we will give you something to help you sleep. And you will go on a ride. And when you wake up—well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You will have a new life, believe me.”

The next second all hell seemed to break loose. Something was scraping along the ground, Ti-Anna was screaming, men were yelling in Vietnamese. Then I heard a groan from Ti-Anna. A thump. Quieter talking in Vietnamese. The front door opening.

The truck, I thought. With its engine rumbling.

I scrambled to my feet, ran out to the porch and around the corner. Below me two men were shoving Ti-Anna into the truck while a third supervised. She was limp.

The two haulers clambered after her and disappeared for a minute. Then they slid back out onto the gravel, said a few words to the third man and walked back inside. The third man rehooked the flap, tugged it to make sure it was fixed and started toward the cab.

I climbed onto the balcony railing. The truck’s canvas roof was about six feet below me. I knew I could either jump and try to hold on or lose Ti-Anna forever.

I jumped.

The next—what was it, two hours? three? four?—were the scariest of my life.

The tarp sagged when I jumped, but didn’t give way. I started snaking toward the back, thinking I could swing inside, grab Ti-Anna and make a run for it. But as I hung my head over the edge, the truck lurched forward.

It was all I could do not to tumble off. I grabbed the edge of the tarp and managed to wriggle feetfirst, inch by inch, toward the front of the truck as it rumbled down the driveway.

When it stopped at the gate, I scooted back a couple more feet so I could loop my ankles under a rope that ran side to side near the cab. With my hands I grabbed hold of a parallel rope toward the back. I didn’t dare let go long enough to turn around. As we lurched onto the street, I was backward, spread-eagled, facedown and scared out of my mind.

Right then, of course, it started to pour.

For a while I barely opened my eyes. The driver obviously had had a bad day. He braked hard, accelerated harder, ground his gears
and careened around every corner. He seemed to aim the truck at every pothole he could find, and Hanoi’s streets gave him plenty of chances. Rivulets of tropical rain gushed down the canvas. The rope was rubbing raw my scrapes from the pier.

But nothing lasts forever, right? That’s what I kept telling myself. Just hold on. And eventually we had left the center of the city and settled onto a smoother, straighter roadway.

I opened my eyes, feeling like a fool for not having paid more attention. Now I knew we were heading out of Hanoi, but I had no idea which way.

Think, I told myself. You need a plan. What is your plan?

Everything was swirling in my head. Ti-Anna’s limp body as they slung her into the truck. Rat-face’s sneering
She still does not get it
. The dark concrete apartment blocks marching past me in the night.

The rain eased and I lifted my head slightly. We were on a two-lane divided road with few lights and little traffic. Every once in a while we’d flash through a commercial strip, where a few men would be squatting on low stools clutching bottles of beer. A store or two would be deserted but garishly lit—once, a store with nothing but vases; another time, nothing but stuffed animals.

At one intersection four men were playing Ping-Pong, outdoors, with a couple of kerosene lanterns to light their game. I wondered if I was hallucinating.

In my pockets I had my passport, some dollars, some dong, and the cell phone Sydney had given us. Not that I could get to it: There was no way I could let go of the rope, reach back into my pocket and pull out the phone without getting blown off and flipping end over end down the highway.

But even if we stopped, and I could get someplace where I could make a call without being overheard, what would I do? Punch number 2 and say, “Sydney, I’m on a truck, Ti-Anna’s been drugged and
kidnapped and she’s inside, and, uh, no, I have no idea where. And no, I have no idea who. And as to why—”

I didn’t want to think about why, about what they might have in mind for Ti-Anna, after some of the stories Sydney had told us. But what would she do with a call like that, anyway? What could she do?

And there was something else, too, which at first I didn’t want to admit into my brain, but as time went on I couldn’t keep it out. I had to figure out how this had gone so wrong. My first thought was that somehow
they
had followed us from Hong Kong to Hanoi, figured out where we were headed and gotten to the house before us. Rat-face wasn’t the real Mr. Thieu, who we were supposed to meet, but some agent of the Chinese who’d been waiting to take Ti-Anna away.

Apartment buildings gave way to what I figured must be factories, hulking dark things behind imposing fences. As one after another whipped past, I had to admit there was another, maybe likelier possibility for what had gone wrong. If the conversation I’d overhead was what I thought it was, and the photos I hadn’t seen were what I thought they were, then Ti-Anna’s father had had the same rude surprise when he came to his meeting. He had been set up—and so had we, and fallen for it as he had.

The truck slowed, grinding its gears, and came to a stop. I pushed up, saw we were at a kind of toll gate and flopped back down, pressing myself into the tarp to become as two-dimensional as possible. I heard snatches of conversation, and then the driver lurched forward again. Still mad about something, I thought.

But if it was all a set-up, what did that mean? Was the original email to Ti-Anna’s father the beginning of the plot, or had someone hijacked it along the way? Was it Horace? Or Radio Man?

And if Radio Man had intentionally sent Ti-Anna’s father into a
trap, and then Ti-Anna, too, what did that say about Sydney? After all, he’d sent us to her. All that business of her wanting to come with us, and worrying about us, and all the rest—had that been an act, part of this whole gruesome show?