Tick Tock (13 page)

The family was finally training a cousin—the American-born son of Tommy's mother's younger sister—to serve as a shift manager on a rotating basis that would allow everyone at the management level to work approximately forty-hour weeks and, at last, have normal lives. They had resisted bringing in the cousin, because for too long they had stubbornly waited for Tommy to return to the fold and take that job himself.

Tommy suspected that his parents had believed he'd eventually be overwhelmed with guilt as he watched his father and his brothers working themselves half to death to keep all the principal management positions in the immediate family. Indeed, he had lived with such guilt that he'd had dreams in which he'd been behind the wheel of a car with his father and brothers as passengers, and he'd recklessly driven it off a high cliff, killing them all, while he miraculously survived. Dreams in which he had been flying a plane filled with his family, crashed, and walked away as the sole survivor, his clothes red with their blood. Dreams in which a whirlpool sucked down their small boat at night on the South China Sea, drowning everyone but the youngest and most thoughtless of all the Phans, he himself, the son who was sharper than a serpent's tooth. He had learned to live with the guilt, however, and to resist the urge to give up his dream of being a writer.

Now, as he and Del stepped through the back door of the New World Saigon Bakery, Tommy was conflicted. Simultaneously he felt at home yet on dangerous ground.

The air was redolent of baking bread, brown sugar, cinnamon, baker's cheese, bitter chocolate, and other tantalizing aromas less easily identifiable in the fragrant melange. This was the smell of his childhood, and it plunged him into a sensory river of wonderful memories, torrents of images from the past. This was also the smell of the future that he had firmly rejected, however, and underneath the mouth-watering savour, Tommy detected a cloying sweetness that, by virtue of its very intensity, would in time sour the appetite, nauseate, and leave the tongue capable of detecting only bitterness in any flavour.

Approximately forty employees in white uniforms and white caps were hard at work in the large main room—pastry chefs, bread bakers, assistant bakers, clean-up boys—amidst the assembly tables, dough-mixing machines, cook tops, and ovens. The whir of mixer blades, the clink-clank of spoons and metal spatulas, the scrape-rattle of pans and cookie sheets being slid across baking racks, the muffled roar of gas flames in the hollow steel shells of the minimally insulated commercial ovens: this noise was music to Tommy, although like everything else about the place, it had two conflicting qualities—a cheerful and engaging melody, but an ominous underlying rhythm.

The hot air immediately chased away the chill of the night and the rain. But almost at once, Tommy felt that the air was too hot to breathe comfortably.

“Which one's your brother?” Del asked.

“He's probably in the shift manager's office.” Tommy realized that Del had removed the Santa hat. “Thanks for not wearing the stupid hat.”

She withdrew it from a pocket in her leather jacket. “I only took it off so the rain wouldn't ruin it.”

“Please don't wear it, don't embarrass me,” he said.

“You have no sense of style.”

“Please. I want my brother to take me seriously.”

“Doesn't your brother believe in Santa?”

“Please. My family are very serious people.”

“Please, please,” she mocked him, but teasingly and without malice. “Maybe they should have become morticians instead of bakers.”

Tommy expected her to don the frivolous red-flannel chapeaux with characteristic defiance, but she crammed it back into her jacket pocket.

“Thank you,” he said gratefully.

“Take me to the sombre and humourless Gi Minh Phan, infamous anti-Santa activist.”

Tommy led her along one side of the main room, between the equipment-packed baking floor and the stainless-steel doors to a series of coolers and storerooms. The place was brightly lighted with banks of suspended fluorescent fixtures, and everything was nearly as well scrubbed as a hospital surgery.

He had not visited the bakery in at least four years, during which time its business had grown, so he didn't recognize many of the employees on the graveyard shift. They all appeared to be Vietnamese, and the great majority were men. Most of them were concentrating so intensely on their work that they didn't notice they had visitors.

The few who looked up tended to focus on Del Payne and give Tommy only scant attention. Even rain-soaked—again—and bedraggled, she was an attractive woman. In her wet and clinging white uniform and black leather jacket, she possessed an irresistible air of mystery.

He was glad she wasn't wearing the Santa hat. That would have been too much novelty to ignore even for a roomful of industrious Vietnamese fixated on their work. Everyone would have been staring at her.

The manager's office was in the right front corner of the room, elevated four steps above the main floor. Two walls were glass, so the shift boss could see the entire bakery without getting up from his desk.

More often than not, Gi would have been on the floor, working elbow to elbow with the bakers and their apprentices. At the moment, however, he was at his computer, with his back to the glass door at the top of the steps.

Judging by the tables of data on the monitor, Tommy figured his brother was putting together a computer model of the chemistry of a new recipe. Evidently some pastry hadn't been coming out of the ovens as it should, and they hadn't been able to identify the problem on the floor, with sheer baker's instinct.

Gi didn't turn around when Tommy and Del entered, closing the door behind them. “Minute,” he said, and his fingers flew across the computer keyboard.

Del nudged Tommy with one elbow and showed him the red-flannel cap, half out of her pocket.

He scowled.

She grinned and put the cap away.

When Gi finished typing, he spun around in his chair, expecting to see an employee, and gaped wide-eyed at his brother. “Tommy!”

Unlike their brother Ton, Gi Minh was willing to use Tommy's American name.

“Surprise,” Tommy said.

Gi rose from his chair, a smile breaking across his face, but then he registered that the person with Tommy wasn't an employee, either. As he turned his full attention to Del, his smile froze.

“Merry Christmas,” Del said.

Tommy wanted to tape her mouth shut, not because her greeting was completely off the wall—after all, Christmas was only seven weeks away and supermarkets were already selling decorations—but because she almost made him laugh, and laughter was not going to help him convince Gi of the seriousness of their plight.

“Gi,” Tommy said, “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. Miss Del Payne.”

Gi inclined his head politely toward her, and she held out her hand, and Gi took it after only a brief hesitation. “Miss Payne.”

“Charmed,” she said.

“You're terribly wet,” Gi told her.

“Yes. I like it,” Del said.

“Excuse me?”

“Invigorating,” she said. “After the first hour of a storm, the falling rain has scrubbed all the pollution from the air, and the water is so pure, so healthy, good for the skin.”

“Yes,” Gi said, looking dazed.

“Good for the hair too.”

Tommy thought,
Please, God, stop her from warning him about prostate cancer.

At five-feet-seven, Gi was three inches shorter than Tommy and, though as physically trim as his brother, he had a round face utterly unlike Tommy's. When he smiled, he resembled Buddha, and as a child he had been called “little Buddha” by certain members of the family.

His smile, though stiff, remained on his face until he let go of Del's hand and looked down at the puddles of rainwater both she and Tommy were leaving on his office floor. When he raised his gaze and met Tommy's eyes, he wasn't smiling any more, and he didn't look anything at all like Buddha.

Tommy wanted to hug his brother. He suspected that Gi would return his embrace, after a moment of stiffness. Yet neither of them was able to display affection first—perhaps because they both feared rejection.

Before Gi could speak, Tommy hurriedly said, “Brother, I need your advice.”

“My advice?” Gi's stare was disconcertingly direct. “My advice hasn't meant much to you for years.”

“I'm in deep trouble.”

Gi glanced at Del.

She said, “I'm not the trouble.”

Clearly, Gi doubted that assertion.

“In fact,” Tommy said, “she saved my life earlier tonight.”

Gi's face remained clouded.

Beginning to worry that he was not going to be able to make this connection, Tommy found himself babbling:

“Really, she did, she saved my life, just put herself on the line for me, a total stranger, got her van bashed up because of me, she's the reason I'm even standing here, so I'd appreciate if you'd invite us to sit down and—”

“Total stranger?” Gi asked.

Tommy had been plunging forward so rapidly that he had lost track of what he had said, and he didn't understand his brother's reaction. “Huh?”

“Total stranger?” Gi repeated.

“Well, yes, up to an hour and a half ago, and
still
she put her life on the line—”

“He means,” Del explained to Tommy, “that he thought I was your girlfriend.”

Tommy felt a blush, hot as oven steel, rising in his face. Gi's sombre expression brightened slightly at the prospect that this was
not
the long-anticipated blonde who would break Mama Phan's heart and divide the family forever. If Del was not dating Tommy, then there was still a chance that the youngest and most rebellious of the Phan boys would one day do the right thing, after all, and take a lovely Vietnamese girl as his wife.

“I'm not his girlfriend,” Del said to Gi.

Gi appeared willing to be convinced.

Del said, “We've never dated. In fact, considering that he doesn't like my taste in hats, I don't see how we ever
could
date. I couldn't go out with any man who was critical of my taste in hats. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.”

“Hats?” Gi said, confused.

“Please,”
Tommy said, speaking as much to Del as to Gi, “can we just sit down and talk about this?”

“About what?” Gi asked.

“About someone trying to kill me, that's what!”

Stunned, Gi Minh Phan sat with his back to his computer. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the two chairs on the other side of his desk.

Tommy and Del sat, and Tommy said, “I think I'm in trouble with a Vietnamese gang.”

“Which?” Gi asked.

“I don't know. Can't figure it out. Neither can Sal Delano, my friend at the newspaper, and he's an expert on the gangs. I'm hoping you'll recognize their methods when I tell you what they've done.”

Gi was wearing a white shirt. He unbuttoned the left cuff, rolled up the sleeve, and showed Del the underside of his muscular forearm, which bore a long, ugly, red scar.

“Thirty-eight stitches,” Gi told her.

“How awful,” she said, no longer flippant, genuinely concerned.

“These worthless scum creep around, saying you have to pay them to stay in business, insurance money, and if you don't, then you and your employees might get hurt, have an accident, or some machinery could break down, or your place could catch fire some night.”

“The police—”

“They do what they can—which often amounts to nothing. And if you pay the gangs what they ask, they'll want more, and more, and more still, like politicians, until one day you wind up making less out of your business than
they
do. So one night they came around, ten of them, those who call themselves the Fast Boys, all carrying knives and crowbars, cut our phone lines so we couldn't call the cops, figuring they could just walk through the place and smash things while we would run and hide. But we surprised them, let me tell you, and some of us got hurt, but the gang boys got hurt worse. A lot of them were born here in the States, and they think they're tough, but they don't know suffering. They don't know what
tough
means.”

Able to repress her true nature no longer, Del couldn't resist saying, “It
never
pays to go up against a bunch of angry bakers.”

“Well, the Fast Boys know that now,” Gi said with utmost seriousness.

To Del, Tommy said, “Gi was fourteen when we escaped Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, the communists believed that young males, teenagers, were potential counter-revolutionaries, the most dangerous citizens to the new regime. Gi and Ton—that's my oldest brother—were arrested a few times and held a week or two each time for questioning about supposed anti-communist activities.
Questioning
was a euphemism for torture.”

“At fourteen?” Del said, appalled.

Gi shrugged. “I was tortured when I was twelve. Ton That, my brother, was fourteen the first time.”

“The police let them go each time—but then my father heard from a reliable source that Gi and Ton were scheduled to be arrested and sent upcountry to a re-education camp. Slave labour and indoctrination. We put to sea in a boat with thirty other people the night before they would have been taken away.”

“Some of our employees are older than me,” said Gi. “They went through much worse… back home.”

Del turned in her chair to look out at the men on the bakery floor, all of whom appeared deceptively ordinary in their white caps and white uniforms. “Nothing's ever what it seems,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

To Tommy, Gi said, “Why would the gangs be after you?”

“Maybe something I wrote when I still worked at the newspaper.”

“They don't read.”

“But that has to be it. There's no other reason.”

“The more you write about how bad they are, the more they would like it if they
did
read it,” Gi said, still doubtful. “They want the bad-boy image. They thrive on it. So what have they done to you?”

Tommy glanced at Del.

She rolled her eyes.

Although Tommy had intended to tell Gi every incredible detail of the night's bizarre events, he was suddenly reluctant to risk his brother's disbelief and scorn.