Floating City (10 page)

Nicholas peeled a leech from the base of her spine, then gently pressed a fingertip along one of the scars. “What happened here?”

“Do you really want to know?” Bay had her back to him, and her voice was partially swallowed up by the pulsing darkness of the tunnels.

“Not if it’s difficult for you.”

“I was thinking about you.” She took a breath, let it out slowly. When he made no reply, she went on. “Someone turned... What word would I use?”

“Violent?”

“Ardent.”

Nicholas thought this over for some time. “Then it was done... deliberately.”

“Yes.”

“By a lover.”

Bay swiveled around so that her eyes locked on his. “Are you judging me again,
Chu
Goto?”

“I hope not.”

“Really?” Her head moved a little, the beam of light streaming past one eye, firing it, leaving the planes of her face in shadow.

“You made a convincing man,” Nicholas said. “I can only admire you for that.”

That smile came again with its sardonic edge. There was nothing world-weary about her, nevertheless there was sometimes in her expressions the sense that she had been exposed to too much of life too soon. Her eyes had the look of someone who has gazed for too long into the fiery heart of a blast furnace.

“If worse comes to worst,” she said, crushing the leeches one by one beneath her heel, “we can eat these.”

Nicholas did not want to think about the leeches. “Did you agree to allow your lover to maim you?”

“It will sound strange if I say yes; and yet the answer is much more complex.” She turned her head into the darkness, as if hearing a distant sound. At length, Nicholas realized that she was listening to the past. “It was the pain, you see. The physical... evidence. The scars really have nothing to do with it.”

“What did the pain do?”

“It made us real.”

In the deathly silence he could hear the last of the river water dripping off them, running into the red clay earth, past the bones of the dead, beneath the clawed feet of the rodents that scampered along the tunnels.

She chilled him, this young woman, not so long out of her teens, because she had needed such a terrible extreme in order to feel and to remember.

He felt sorry for her, but keen instinct warned him that any portent of this emotion in him would only enrage her. She did not want his pity, would, in fact, see it only as an enemy that required extinction.

They dried their clothes on an odd stovelike contraption called a Dien Bien Phu kitchen, where decades before the VC had cooked their food. A complex network of flues vented the smoke far away from the area. Kindling and wood were plentiful, and thankfully, Bay’s metal lighter had not been damaged by immersion in water.

Naked, they squatted in the darkness, feeling the spirits of the dead, restless and inchoate. Nicholas, all too aware of her breasts as they rose and fell, said, “Why did you bring me here?”

“This is a kind of halfway point.”

He waited for her to continue, but when she remained silent, he said, “Between where and where?”

“Saigon and...” She smiled to take some of the rebuff out of her shrug. “It doesn’t matter. Abramanov agreed to meet you here and nowhere else. He feels safe here.”

“This Abramanov is the man who worked for Vincent Tinh, who built the illegal computer around the stolen neural-net chip?”

Bay rolled the burning wood with a charred stick. “Abramanov is the only one within five thousand miles who could have.”

Nicholas kept his eyes on her. “Are you being deliberately evasive?
Was
Abramanov the one?”

“Yes.” She said it very quietly and with a tone that led him to think he had taken a pair of hot tongs to her.

“Bay, what is it?”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask me, please.”

“Why not?”

Her eyes closed for a moment, and he thought he saw the edge of a tear slide down her cheek before she turned away. “Because I want to tell you, and I know if I do, you won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

The back of her hand went briefly to her face, and he knew he had been right about the tear. She turned back to him, gave him that sardonic smile. “No. You don’t trust me as it is. My mother once said to me that the biggest mistake one could make in life was to tell someone what he doesn’t want to hear.”

“I’ll listen to anything you tell me.”

“Um, I’m thirsty.” He watched her walk into the darkness. She returned a moment later with an American Army helmet filled with water. She placed this atop the stove, let the water boil for some time.

While they waited, she said, “Your friend Vincent Tinh came here often.”

“He was no friend of mine, but I think you already knew that.”

“I think that you did not know him.” She glanced at the helmet. “It was here that he met with Abramanov... and the others he dealt with. He liked it here. He was comfortable in this darkness, this murk. He once confessed to me that to be surrounded by so much death made him feel close to life; it excited him.”

Nicholas was alerted by the word “confessed.” The world inside Cu Chi began to change as a mask slipped away, revealing a truth beneath.

“It was difficult to know what made him go on,” Bay continued. “He never knew his parents or where he was born. He grew up on the streets of Saigon and almost died twice, once when he was very young at the hands of a local gangster, the other from American fire during the war. Truthfully, I don’t know who he hated more.”

She rose and, wrapping her hands in her dry clothes, took the helmet off the fire. “He was very good at that, hating. He ingested it like you and I eat food.” By this time all the exotic and unpleasant microbes teeming in the water had been killed.

“Did Tinh take you down here?” Because this is what she was telling him in her roundabout way, that she and Vincent Tinh had been lovers. Tinh would never have “confessed” anything of his background or of his feelings to a business associate, and he had not been the type to have friends to confide in. But it was a universal truth that there were times when confession was the only thing that could heal the soul, and for Tinh, the choices were limited. Whom could he confess to but someone who shared his bed?

“Yes, often.” Bay dipped her finger experimentally in the water. “He enjoyed making love here.”

“Did you?”

“Sex with him was... ecstatic. The place was unimportant.”

“Even so... potent a place as this?”

Bay lifted the helmet, handed it to him to drink. “It was important to make him happy.”

Nicholas drank the water, then passed the helmet to her. All the taste had been boiled out of it, but it was delicious nonetheless. He watched her carefully while she sipped. Questions swirled in his mind, but they all led down one path, and with this woman, he was becoming convinced he needed to search for the unfamiliar in order to understand her.

“How did doing that make you happy?”

Bay passed her fingers through her thick hair. “It was like the pain, you see. His reactions were real. When he was happy,
truly
happy—not drunk happy or stoned happy—he was a different person. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I affected him. I could feel the excitement bubbling through his skin. That was important because at every other moment of his life he wore a kind of mask that he had fashioned from his past—fear, rage, poverty, the utter
aloneness
of his existence, were the materials he used. But I was able to get beneath the mask.”

Nicholas sat back on his haunches, deep in thought. He could see how having such power would be of profound significance to Bay—a woman in a society that had little respect for females; a woman in a city where most people of her age and sex were selling their bodies on the street, increasingly prone to syphilis, hepatitis, AIDS, and an early, unnoticed death.

Abruptly, he shivered. It occurred to him that the drama that had been playing out between Bay and Tinh was now in some fashion being repeated. For it was clear that upon Tinh’s death she had donned Tinh’s remarkable mask, and that he was now finding the human being behind it.

“Bay, how long have you been on your own?” he said at last.

“It’s enough now.” She bit her lip. “Let me alone.”

Nicholas went to his clothes. They were dry, and he put them on. “When do you expect Abramanov?”

She glanced at her watch. “To tell you the truth, he should have been here by now.” She grabbed her clothes. “I think we’d better find out what happened to him.” She pointed. “There’s a contact spot about a quarter of a mile this way. If Abramanov couldn’t make the rendezvous for any reason, a note will have been left there.”

The inner world of the Viet Cong grudgingly exposed itself to Bay’s light as they made their way down the cramped tunnel. Nicholas could see that they were heading directly toward a section that had caved in, and he wondered where she was leading him.

Just before the rubble began, she stopped and, crouching down, pulled on a metal ring. A trapdoor opened and she levered herself down. Nicholas followed.

They were now on the level below the cave-in; the way was clear. He began to have more respect for the engineers who designed and constructed this ingenious labyrinth.

They moved on. The remains of Viet Cong were always with them; they were traveling through a city of the dead seemingly without end. At length, they arrived at the contact point. There was no one there. Bay got down on her knees, felt beneath a broken-down series of berths.

“There is nothing here.” For the first time, Nicholas detected a note of alarm in her voice. Up until this moment she had been almost unnaturally calm in the face of harrowing circumstances. She looked up at him. Was that a trace of fear in her dark eyes? “Abramanov should have been here. I don’t know what has happened.”

“Maybe all the activity on the highway deterred him.”

But she shook her head. “He would have entered the tunnels from miles away. The soldiers wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Then either I’ve been double-crossed or we’ve both been.” He pulled her up by her elbow. “It’s time to get some answers.”

At that moment, they heard a sound.

“Someone’s coming!” Bay whispered. She extinguished her flash. “Quick, this way!”

They slithered backward into a pile of loose dirt, rubble, and bones. The stench was as indescribable as it was unpleasant. Nicholas, lying close beside Bay, was aware of the extreme tension gathering in her frame. It was then that a dull metallic gleam caught his attention, and shifting slightly, he saw the knife in her left hand. It was a Marine ka-bar, a large-bladed, wicked weapon, capable of cleaving through both sinew and bone.

She was staring fixedly, and following her gaze, he saw what she saw: the figure moving stealthily down the tunnel. Even in the darkness, even with it hunched over, he could tell that it was a soldier. So she had been wrong: they weren’t afraid to come down here.

A flash of her rage, like being spat at, bloomed in his mind. He felt her intent in the split second before she moved. He could have stopped her, but to what purpose? He was coming to know her, and he knew she would only fight him and, in doing so, give their position away. He let her go, then launched himself after her because his
tanjian
eye had picked up something that she could not as yet see.

She was like a cat, silent and small, and the Vietnamese soldier was not aware of her until the blade of the ka-bar was buried in his bowels. She ripped the knife upward with tremendous strength, and her victim screamed, the blood spurting out of him like a river.

He pitched sideways, against the wall of the tunnel, and that was when Bay saw the ugly muzzle of the submachine gun leveled point-blank at her. Her only weapon was still hilt-deep in flesh, and her eyes opened wide in astonishment and fear.

Then Nicholas was barreling into the second soldier. A string of explosions rocketed down the tunnels as the submachine gun went off. Nicholas drove his fist into the soldier’s solar plexus, momentarily paralyzing him. The heel of his hand smashed into the man’s larynx, crushing it. The soldier went down and stayed down. A soft gurgle of blood and saliva came from him. Then silence.

“What the hell is going on?” Nicholas snarled. “You told me—”

“I know what I said.” Bay flicked on her flashlight. She began to hurry down the tunnel. “Something’s gone terribly wrong. This place has turned into a death trap. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

Every few feet she reached up with her bloody ka-bar and tapped the ceiling of the tunnel. The fourth time, she stopped, pushed aside a pair of false wooden beams. A trapdoor dropped open and she levered herself up through the hole. Nicholas followed, looked around. Bay was already several yards down the tunnel.

He heard her curse softly in Vietnamese.

Coming up beside her, he saw that a fairly new cave-in had blocked the way. They went back up the tunnel. Several hundred yards from where they had emerged, she discovered another trapdoor and up they went onto the next level.

The air was thin here, more musty than down below, leading Nicholas to believe that even Bay and her contacts hadn’t explored this section of the labyrinth.

They made no sound as they went. Consequently, the noise from behind came to them clearly, chillingly. Bay put on an extra burst of speed.

Nicholas turned back, opened his
tanjian
eye in order to locate the source of the noise. That was when he heard Bay give a little cry. Immediately, he ran toward her.

Her mini-flash was on the floor of the tunnel, giving an eerie half-light to the scene. She lay stretched on the floor, a tapered cylinder beneath her legs.

“Don’t come any closer!” she cried. “Don’t move! For the love of God, don’t—”

There was a soft
thwop!
and an intense whitish green light burned into his retinas. Heat like a raging sun blasted him.

“Ah, Buddha,” she moaned. “Buddha, no.”

He thought at first that she had broken a leg, but she sprang back, almost colliding with him. She was staring with a mixture of horror and panic at a large patch on her left thigh that appeared to be burning.