1
The problem with heroes was they thought the world owed them tribute before being sent to die. Awed respect. Last requests. Nobility in death. All that bullshit. This hero was no different. Handcuffed to a rusted wall pipe, wrists bloody, looking up at Lin Thi Vu through a sheen of sweat and fear and perverse hope. Dark eyes, lean shoulders, lean face. He said, jaw set: “[Get word to my mother. Tell her what happened.]”
The words came through her on-retina translator, in English. She understood what he was saying, but out of habit read the translation before nodding once.
Uncle Bao had given her the location of the safe house, told her to be careful, only go for the target, call it off if he had accomplices. Do no more than they’d been paid to do. Her thoughts, precisely.
He’d come alone; she’d got him. As usual, she’d made it harder than necessary.
* * *
Thirty minutes earlier Lin had been waiting on a plastic chair in the darkest corner of the room, wearing a conical bamboo hat, the rim down over her eyes. Chain smoking to help keep the tremors in her hands under control. The target was late, so the shakes had gotten progressively worse. Lin tapped her foot on the ground in a nervous staccato; her free hand gripping and un-gripping the loose material of her faded blue pants. The pulse pistol rested near her crotch. She picked it up, checked the charge, put it down again. Up, and down again. Battered blue metal, faded Baosteel logo stamped into the rear of the stock.
Lin was down to her last three cigarettes when a key rattled in the lock. She jumped, the pistol clattered to the ground. She bent down to scoop it up, dropped it again as the door opened, a shaft of light splitting the gloom. A shadow outlined in the doorway as Lin, down on one knee, finally grasped the weapon.
“[Who’s there?]” asked a voice. Lin could see more clearly now. Clear enough, anyway, to confirm it was her mark: young man, twenty-two, message runner and scout for the Việt Minh in Hoàn Kiêm.
He took one step forward, squinting into the gloom as he reached for something at his belt. She squeezed the trigger, the room lit up, strobe-flash-blue, the boy’s eyes wild-wide.
But her aim was off, the blue arc of electricity hitting his shoulder then striking the wall behind him, the shock popping a black-and-white picture of Ho Chi Minh from the wall. The boy shouted at the pain, half turned, legs wobbling. The weapon he was holding – a hook-bladed knife – dropped to the floor. He reached for the doorframe behind, trying to drag himself out.
Lin said: “Fuck,” and pulled the trigger again. The gun answered click. Then repeated itself: click click click. She swore again, too strung out to care what the neighbours heard. The shaking in her hands abated, her vision cleared, the adrenalin of imminent failure pumping into her system.
She sprung up, took four steps and swivelled her hips, delivering a high kick to the young man’s temple. His head snapped sideways, bounced off the doorframe, and he collapsed at her feet.
Lin dragged him by the arms across the smooth tile floor. Breathing heavily, she handcuffed him to a pipe and gaffer-taped his mouth, just as the shakes started up again. She stagger-stepped towards the couch, slumped backwards into it, missed, slid off the rounded armrest and cracked her temple on the side table as her butt hit the floor. Undeterred, Lin slid the vial out of her pocket and held it up in the thin light.
A sigh escaped from her lips. The viscous yellow liquid glowed as though generating its own light. No drink to mix it with, she pulled the dropper, hands respectfully calm as the chemicals in her body began to change in expectation, already starting to behave as they would post-hit.
Three drops onto her tongue. Bitter, pungent, cat-piss taste and then—
Euphoria.
The glow of the drops spread from her tongue, to her eyeballs, to her earlobes, to her fingernails. So she was glowing, glowing just like the vial. At peace, just like the vial, welcomed, belonging, just like the vial, part of an infinite present, connected via vital luminous threads to all the other vital luminous beings in that web, spread out in space, connected, all connected, all needed, all known, all wanted…
She awoke. Mouth dry. Lips tingling, aftereffect of the drug; she drew her thumb across them, as though to wipe the sensation away. Lin grunted as she pushed herself up. Left arm pins and needles where she’d been lying on it. The timestamp on-retina said: 6:16 pm
She’d been out twenty minutes. The boy was still there; the tension ebbed in her chest. Wrists bloody, must have woken before she did, one last desperate attempt to flee.
* * *
“[Yes, you’ll tell her?]” he asked again.
Lin nodded. Even that single gesture heavy, weighed down with the lie. There’d be no back-channel communication, no quiet moment over a kitchen table, Lin’s hand on some old woman’s, mumbling condolences. Tokenism of that sort could be linked back to Lin. And Lin, well, wasn’t much in the mood for being kidnapped by the Việt Minh, then tortured, murdered, filmed, and later broadcast out onto the freewave as an example of what happens to traitors.
“[Promise,]” he said.
Lin pressed her lips together in displeasure at his demand, but replied in Vietnamese: “Chị hứa.” No point in letting him get all emotional before the authorities arrived.
“[She lives on Chan Cam. Green apartment, third floor,]” he said. “[You know it?]”
Lin nodded. In the thirty-six streets. Of course she knew it.
“[Tell her I died as a patriot, for our country.]”
Lin lit a cigarette and settled back into the sofa. The body buzz from the drugs relaxed her limbs, sharpened her focus. The boy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. He was speaking for himself, the words forming heroic images in his mind. The coda of his life’s narrative. She blew out a cloud of smoke. Twenty years old, more or less. Pretty short story.
The smoke pooled across the ceiling. Peeling paint, dirty white, no fan. Narrow window, sunset, room darkening. Outside a view of a courtyard, overgrown, a tight square between apartments stacked on top of each other, four, five, six stories high, depending on how much risk the landlord wanted to swallow. Poorly made top-floor apartments were known to lose roofs, contents, even occupants, if the winds got high enough.
This one was solid. Just old, its entrance hidden down one of the alleys in the Old Quarter. Labyrinthine passages, unmarked, slick concrete, shocks of green emerging from cracks, from drains.
She smoked until someone tapped on the door, light. Lin rose to her feet, fluid, knife in her hand. Black moulded grip, long black blade, matching pair each ankle, nano-edged Chinese special forces knives that had found their way onto the Hà Nội street market.
“Yes?” she asked, in Vietnamese.
The door creaked open, hesitant; Lin reached, no hesitation, and pulled the person in. It was her street kid, grubby face, eyes round in their sockets. He was too poor to have a memory pin, the room was dim, and the rim of the conical bamboo hat covered half of her face. Still, she grabbed his hair and gently tilted his head until he was looking at the floor.
“[They’re here,]” he mumbled.
She sheathed her blade, pulled a wad of yuan from her pocket. A cashless world, they insisted. Against all contrary evidence. Citizens didn’t like putting prostitutes on their credit link, for one, no matter the guarantees of anonymity. Everything black market required cold hard.
She handed him a note. He grabbed it, big smile cracking his face. Lin turned him around and pushed him out the door. Increased jamming in the Old Quarter lately had neural links dropping out all the time, so she’d gone analogue, found a street communicator. Better anyway, harder to trace.
Lin closed the door and walked over to the young hero, checked his cuffs, gleaming in the low light, firm around his red wrists. She’d add the price of them to the bill.
He looked up at her. The fear was consuming him now, chasing away the last hints of righteousness. He asked: “[What will they do to me?]”
Torture you. Virtual, physical, until you don’t know the difference. Over weeks. Turn you. Turn you against everyone you ever loved. Everything you ever loved. Everyone you ever fought alongside. Make you confess every offence you, or anyone you ever knew committed. Put a bullet in you. Bury you in the jungle in an unmarked grave.
“Don’t know,” she said.
He nodded. Steeling himself.
She found herself staring at the young man. His thin shirt, sweat-soaked skin, his failing courage. Utterly alone. She wet her lips to say something, but the thump thump thump of heavy boots on stairs changed her mind.
Lin Thi Vu left the room quickly, passing the men with her eyes down, conical hat covering her face. Not wanting to be seen, and most of all not wanting to see them and the hard purpose in their eyes.
At the bottom of the stairs she picked up her bamboo pole, baskets on either end holding bananas and lychees and mangosteens and whatever else she could find in the market earlier that day. She stepped out into the darkened alley, into the steaming night air.
Loose pants, traditional tunic, conical hat: at first glance she looked like a young hawker. And hawkers didn’t warrant more than a first glance. She walked towards the light and noise. The traffic frenetic, as though in the intensity of nine million glimmer bikes and one million cars the world could be forgotten. The war could be forgotten. The fierce energy of the city hit her as her foot touched the sidewalk, the fury of occupation, of defeat, of a rebellious, quarrelsome, unbreakable city that now lay broken. The fury now directed into white noise, throwing it like a cloak over thought and memory.
Memory most of all. To forget the past, to forget even the present, obscure it with sound and movement; with arguments over the price of produce, fistfights over one bike parked too close to another, stabbings over the outcome of a soccer game.
A whole city pulsating with fear and denial, sweat streaming down its face, in a heat that clogged the throat and clouded the mind.
Lin, bamboo pole balanced on her shoulder, walked through it all unseen. A spectre, part in the city, part elsewhere. The weight of the bamboo bearing down as she stepped between slick, stinking puddles, through the cacophony of blaring horns and street sellers.
Straining under the burden, head bowed, she made her way into the fetid heart of the thirty-six streets.
2
Lin walked up the narrow, uneven staircase. Musky air, moisture on the stone. A hundred years old, a hundred years of soft-soled feet trudging up and down, smoothing the steps, bowing them. The drip drip drip of human existence wearing down the rock, wearing it smooth and indifferent.
Three floors up, Lin banged on a blue steel door with her fist. She took a step back and tilted her head upwards, let the nano-cams above – and the people behind them – check her face. Simultaneously, sensors in the door received the pass code from her cochlear implant. Human and technological components of the security system satisfied, the door creaked open.
She stepped into a room filled with smoke, laughter, and the sour smell of masculinity. Maybe half of Bao’s men were inside – thirty or so – sitting on knee-high plastic chairs drinking, eating, playing cards and dice.
They yelled chúc sức khỏe! [Good health!] as they downed rice whiskey and fresh beer, red-faced, boasting, boisterous. Smoking cheap cigarettes rolled with black-market tobacco for hours on end, day after day in between jobs. Nicotine coated the white blinds in a thin film of yellow, stained the roof. The concrete floor, swept every night by an ancient bent woman in exchange for food, was covered now in peanut shells and spilt beer.
At the table closest to the door, a skinny toe-cutter named Snakehead Tran and a thick-necked southerner called Bull Neck Bui sat with heads craned over a game of Vietnamese chess. Bull glanced up, whacked Snakehead on the shoulder, indicating Lin with his chin.
Bull was a third-generation taxi driver from Sài Gòn, now a head enforcer for the gang. She never quite knew where she stood with him. Technically, she was above him in the hierarchy, but neither he nor anyone else acted as though this was the case.
She lowered her pole and fruit baskets to the ground with a sigh.
Tran smiled, Bull burst into laughter, “Bah hah hah!”pointing a shot glass at her clothes. “[Hey! Silent One! Make me some phở!]”
A man at a nearby table joined in: “[Little sister! Off to work in the fields?]” And another: “[Little sister, some fucking doughnuts!]”
Lin glanced at the translation of the comments on-retina and replied: “Đụ má!”
The men fell about laughing. Lin could never quite get the accent right, even when using words she always used, like motherfucker. The men always found it hilarious. Red-eyed, sheen of sweat on their skin, missing teeth. Ugly men, violent men, crude, uneducated, loyal, tough. Better than most. As good as it got, in this city.
Lin walked past the smoke and insults, pushing through a cheap wooden door at the other end of the room. The door swung closed and she leaned against it. Alone in her tiny, dark office, shutting her eyes for just a few moments. She sighed, yanked off her hat, chucked it into a corner, and nudged her way around her desk. Standing, she opened the top drawer, pulled out a bottle of green-labelled sake and a white ceramic cup. Filled it, took a shot, filled it again, got the glowing dropper out, gave it one.
Lin turned to the window, cup in hand. Lights across the city now, the crackle of gunfire somewhere in the distance, raucous laughter of the men coming from behind. The violet neon of a gin bar gleaming down below. She sipped her sake and ice-seven.
A crack of light, as the other door to her office popped open.
A voice, quiet but not soft, said in Vietnamese: “[How are you, little sister?]”
“Fine, Uncle,” she said in English.
“Fine,” he repeated, using the English word, then waited.
Lin sighed again. “No more of those jobs.”
“[Why?]” Curiosity in the voice.
She turned. Bao Nguyen stood in the doorway. Full white hair, black moustache, watchful eyes, always watching, never missed a thing. She made to say something, then changed her mind.
“[Bring the bottle,]” he said, and disappeared from sight.
Lin closed the door and was reaching for her sake when the throbbing pain in her temple made itself known.
It’d been there all along, under the buzz of the drugs and the dulling guilt. She winced as she touched it and drew away her hand, spots of blood on her fingertips. She went over to her cooler unit – a small black box sitting on the floor against the wall – removed the ice tray, popped some cubes out onto the floor. Sifted through the shelves until she found one of her singlets, wrapped it around the ice, and pressed it to her temple.
Holding the sake with the other hand, she went through to the next room.
Bao sat behind his desk, the fauxwood surface battered and scratched, flexiscreen to one side, half-bottle of brandy and a plate of sunflower seeds sitting in front of him. Bao was simply dressed. Worn cloth jacket, shirt with drooping collar. Like always, nothing to give his status away as the most influential gangster in Hà Nội.
She sat across from him and poured herself a drink while he watched. Bao had a habit of looking at someone for too long before taking his turn to speak. Lin was never sure if he was thinking about what he wanted to say, or was trying to see something in the person he was talking to. Lin sometimes wondered another thing, related to those rumours that followed him around. Whether he actually wasn’t interested in what was being said, his mind’s eye, somewhere else, back in the jungle.
Lin put down the ice pack for a moment so she could light a cigarette, snapping closed her steel lighter before chucking it onto the table in front of her. Ice pack in one hand, sake and cigarette in the other, she was set.
Bao smiled wryly and lifted his small, red-coloured glass. He said: “[Good health,]” she replied: “Chúc sức khỏe,” and they downed their drinks.
Bao always seemed calm, reserved, with just the occasional glimpse of dry humour. She’d only seen him violent once in the five years she’d known him. Though that one time. Well.
“[You got the job done,]” he said. Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“[That is what matters.]”
Lin said nothing to that, taking a drag on her cigarette instead.
“[How old are you now, Lin?]” he asked.
Lin raised an eyebrow at him. “Does it matter?”
“[Yes,]” he replied, and waited.
“Twenty-four.”
“[Hm. Your spirit is older than that. But still, you have the naïvety of the young.]”
“Fuck. Uncle. I’ve been a gangster since I was nineteen. With you.”
“[Yes. But when you are young it is still possible to believe in something.]”
Lin downed her drink. As she poured another she said: “That’s all you got, Uncle: don’t be naïve? You’re young, you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
He stared at her for a few moments. “[Well. Yes. It works with everyone else.]” He smiled. “[They nod respectfully and then pour my brandy.]”
“Ha. Pour your own fucken brandy.” The glow from the ice-seven was spreading. One drop, just enough to relax her body, focus her mind, shift her conscience to neutral. Bao was the only one she was comfortable speaking English with, other than her family. Nearly nine years returned, she could understand pretty much everything that was spoken to her in Vietnamese. But she found it useful to double-check unfamiliar words on-retina, make sure the meaning she got was straight.
She had a few strong suits. A couple, anyway. Language wasn’t one of them. Hated the laughter every time she foundered on a tone, self-conscious with new words, she fell back into silence. Perfectionist, acutely self-conscious, proud: the unholy trinity when it came to learning a language. So she never talked much. Switching between English and Vietnamese, embarrassed at using either, at the impurity of her identity.
Her reluctance to talk earned her the gang name Silent One. They called her Mouse at the start, but after she broke the knee of Laughing Man Tran and pushed his face into a pan filled with deep-frying tofu, well – they decided the Mouse didn’t quite fit. The Laughing Man had called her a foreign dog. Probably the last coherent thing he did say. Lips melted, nose halfway down his face, a slurring horror show that no one wanted to look at.
Bao condoned the fight; she fought exactly as he’d taught her. After Laughing Man got out of hospital he didn’t want to hang around. Packed his bags and was gone. Rumour it was for the underground freak fights down in Đà Nẵng.
She’d fought him in silence. Took the abuse, then unmanned him. It didn’t take much to make it as a gangster: you just had to be smarter, tougher, and meaner than anyone else in the room.
Bao cracked sunflower seeds between his fingernails, popping them into his mouth, discarding the husks. Watching her, always watching.
“[It’s war,]” he finally said.
“Yeah,” she replied, settling back into her chair. Bao had comfortable chairs. Cloth hand-sewn, padded armrests. She tilted her head back until it rested against the back, her face pointed at the ceiling. Moisture ran in lines across the surface above, warping, bubbling the off-white paint. It was cool in Bao’s room. No point in being the boss if it didn’t come with air conditioning.
Lin smoked, cold pack still pressed against her temple, and watched the water seep across the ceiling. Listened to the crick crick crick, as Bao broke open sunflower pods; clatter of dice and beer glasses on tables from the room behind lulled her, drew her back to that first time.
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