Tran Dragonfish

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84344-827-3
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

New York Times Notable Book 2015 Vu Tran has written a thrilling and cinematic work of sophisticated suspense and haunting lyricism set in motion by characters who can neither trust each other nor trust themselves. This remarkable debut is a noir page-turner resonant with the lasting reverberations of lives lost and lives remade a generation ago. Robert, an Oakland cop, still can't let go of Suzy, the enigmatic Vietnamese wife who left him two years ago. Now she's disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese smuggler and gambler who is blackmailing Robert into finding her for him. As he pursues her through the sleek and seamy gambling dens of Las Vegas, shadowed by Sonny's sadistic son, 'Junior', and assisted by unexpected and reluctant allies, Robert learns more about his ex-wife than he ever did during their marriage. He finds himself chasing the ghosts of her past, one that reaches back to a refugee camp in Malaysia after the fall of Saigon, and his investigation uncovers the existence of an elusive packet of her secret letters to someone she left behind long ago. As Robert starts illuminating the dark corners of Suzy's life, the legacy of her sins threatens to immolate them all.

Vu Tran's fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, A Best of Fence, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and other publications. He has received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers' Award and a 2011 Finalist Award for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise. Dragonfish is his first novel. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction at the Black Mountain Institute. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tran, Vu

Leseproben

2

Five months before all this, I drove into Vegas on a sweltering July evening just before sunset. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light and glowing alien and purplish in the sky. I was convinced it was a UFO and kept gazing at it before nearly hitting the truck ahead of me. That jolted me out of my exhaustion.

Half an hour later, the guy at the gas station told me about the beam of light from atop that giant pyramid casino, which you can spot from anywhere in the city, even from space if no clouds are in the way.

‘Sorry, man,’ he said like he was consoling me.

I must have looked disappointed.

The drive from Oakland had taken me all day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my five-shot still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for ten hours straight and woke up at six in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me in the night. The sun had barely risen, but it was already a hundred degrees outside. Not even a wisp of a cloud.

After a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk from last night – an old Chinese guy who spoke English about as well as I spoke Chinese – was slurping his breakfast and watching TV behind the counter. He looked up when I knocked on the counter, but did not set down his chopsticks until he saw me brandish cash. I’d already paid him for last night’s stay, and now I handed him a hundred for two more nights. He said nothing and hardly looked at me before handing me a receipt and diving back into his noodles. When I asked him where I could get some eggs, he mumbled a few incomprehensible words, his mouth stuffed, glistening. I felt like slapping the noodles out of his mouth but I turned and walked out before he could annoy me any further. Ever since Suzy left me, I’d learned to curb my temper. Let it sleep a little, save it for another, more necessary day.

In the strip mall across the street, I had some coffee at a doughnut shop and spent an hour thumbing mindlessly through a couple of Asian newspapers, waiting for the pho restaurant next door to open. I hoped they made it like Suzy used to – the beef thinly sliced and not too gristly, the noodles soft, the broth clear and flavorful. Turned out theirs was even better, which finally cheered me up, though it reminded me of something her best friend – a Vietnamese woman named Happy, of all things – once told me years ago when she was over at the house for Sunday pho. Suzy had been mad at me that morning for nodding off at church, as I often did since my weekend patrols didn’t end until midnight, and though she knew I’d only converted for her and had never taken churchgoing seriously, she chewed me out all the way home, and with more spite than usual. So when she stepped outside to smoke after lunch, I asked Happy, ‘What’s bugging her lately?’ Happy was her one good friend, her sole witness at our courthouse wedding and her emergency contact on all her forms, and they talked on the phone every day in a mix of English and Vietnamese that I never did understand – but she shrugged at my question. I chuckled. ‘Just me, huh? I bet she tells you every bad thing about me.’ But again she shrugged and said, very innocently, ‘She don’t talk about you much, Bob.’ I’d long figured this much was true, but it burned to hear it acknowledged so casually. Suzy and I had been married for two years at the time. We somehow lasted six more years before she finally took off.

I sat in a front booth and finished off an extra large bowl of beef pho, four spring rolls, and two tall glasses of Vietnamese coffee, staring all the while at people passing by in the parking lot, including a bald Asian man who climbed into a red BMW. It could have been him, except Suzy’s new husband looked more bullish on his driver’s license and sported a thin mustache that accentuated the stubborn in his eyes. DPS listed a red BMW under his name – Sonny Van Nguyen – as well as a silver Porsche, a brand-new 2000 model. The master files at Vegas Metro confirmed he was fifty, five years older than me, and that he owned a posh sushi restaurant in town and an equally fancy rap sheet: one DUI, five speeding tickets, and three different arrests, one for unpaid speeding tickets, two on assault charges. He apparently struck a business associate in the head with a rotary phone during an argument and a year later threw a chair at someone in a casino for calling him a name. The last incident got him two years’ probation, which was four months from expiring. It was Happy who told me he was a gambler, fully equipped with a gambler’s penchant for risking everything but his pride. You should be afraid of him, Happy had said, but I knew it was already too late for that.

In my two decades on the Oakland force, I had punched a hooker for biting my hand, choked out a belligerent Bible salesman, and wrestled thugs twice my size and half my age. I once had a five-year-old boy nearly bleed to death as I nightsticked his mother, who had chopped off his hand with a cleaver, tweaked out of her mind; I’d fired my gun three times and shot two people, one in the thigh, the other in the palm, both of whom had shot at me and quite frankly deserved more; I’d been known to kick a tooth or two loose, bruise a face here and there, maybe even silently wish more harm than was necessary. But never, not once, had I truly wanted to kill anyone.

I walked down Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, beyond the Strip, is not a place for pedestrians, especially in the summer. I’d pictured a Chinatown similar to Oakland’s or San Francisco’s, but the Vegas Chinatown was nothing more than a bloated strip mall – three or four blocks of it painted red and yellow and then pagodified, a theme park like the rest of the city. Nearly every establishment was a restaurant, and the one I was looking for was called Fuji West. I found it easily enough in one of those strip malls – nestled, with its dark temple-like entrance, between an oriental art gallery and a two-story pet store. It was not set to open for another hour.

Nothing surprising about Vietnamese selling Japanese food. Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the giant white-aproned Mexican – all seven feet of him – sweeping the patio, though you might as well have called it swinging a broom. He gazed down at me blankly when I asked for Sonny. He didn’t look dumb, just bored.

‘The owner,’ I repeated. ‘Is he here?’

‘His name’s no Sonny.’

‘Well, can I speak to him, whatever his name is?’

The Mexican, for some reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man – late twenties, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored tan suit and a precise pink tie – appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand tenderly. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the wooden pillars that flanked the patio.

‘How may I help you, sir?’ He held his hands behind his back and spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he’d ironed it.

‘I’d like to see Sonny.’

‘I’m sorry, no one by that name works here. Perhaps you are mistaken? There are many sushi restaurants around here. If you like, I can direct you.’

‘I was told he owns this restaurant.’

‘Then you are mistaken. I am the owner.’ He spoke like it was a friendly misunderstanding, but his eyes had strayed twice from mine: once to the parking lot, once to my waist.

‘I’m not mistaken,’ I replied and looked at him hard to see if he would flinch.

He did not. I was a head taller than him, my arms twice the size of his, but all I felt in his presence was my age. Even his hesitation seemed assured. He slowly smoothed out an eyebrow with one finger. ‘I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.’

‘How about this. I’ll come back this evening for some sushi. And if Sonny’s not too busy, he can join me for some tea. I just want to have a little chat. Please tell him that for me.’

I turned to go but felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness yet in his face, but his words had become chiseled. ‘You are Officer Robert Ruen, aren’t you?’ he declared. When I didn’t answer, he leaned in closer: ‘You should not be here. If you do not understand why I am saying this, then please recognize my seriousness. Go back home and try to be happy.’

That last thing he said unexpectedly moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I noticed how handsome he was – how, if he wanted to, he could’ve modeled magazine ads for cologne or expensive sunglasses. For a moment I might have doubted that he was dangerous at all. He nodded at me, a succinct little bow, then grabbed the broom and walked back through the heavy mahogany doors of the restaurant.

I felt tired again. Pho always made me sleepy. I walked back to the hotel and in my room stripped down to my boxers and cranked up the AC before falling back into bed.

People my age get certain feelings now and then, even if intuition was never our strong suit in youth, and my inkling about this Sonny guy was that he was the type of restaurant owner who, if he came by at all, would only do so at night, when the money was counted. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was willing to do anything...