The Committed Page 3

  Our destination was an import-export store that announced its intentions in French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, its services including the dispatch to our homeland of parcels, letters, and telegrams, which is to say the delivery of hope to a starving country. The clerk looked at us from where he was sitting on a stool behind the counter and grunted by way of greeting. I told him I was looking for the Boss.

  He’s not in, the clerk said, just as the henchman told us he would say.

  We’re the ones from Pulau Galang, Bon replied. He’s expecting us.

  The clerk grunted again, eased himself off his stool with hemorrhoidal care, and disappeared down an aisle. A minute later he reappeared and said, He’s waiting for you.

  Behind the counter, down an aisle, and through a door was the Boss’s office, scented with lavender air freshener, decked in linoleum, and adorned with pinup calendars featuring nubile Hong Kong models in exuberant poses and a wooden clock whose type I had seen before in the Los Angeles restaurant of my old commander of the Special Branch, the General, the man I had betrayed and who betrayed me in return. Admittedly I had fallen in love with his daughter, but who wouldn’t fall in love with Lana? I still longed for her the way we refugees longed for our homeland, which was the shape into which the clock was carved. Now our homeland was irrevocably altered, and so was the Boss. We almost did not recognize him when he stood up from behind his steel desk. In the refugee camp, he had been as emaciated and ragged as everyone else, hair shoddy, his one shirt stained brown under the pits and between the shoulder blades, his only footwear a pair of thin flip-flops.

  Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of Homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove. In our homeland, he had owned considerable interests in rice, soda pop, and petrochemicals, not to mention certain black-market commodities. After the revolution, the communists had relieved him of his excessive wealth, but these overeager plastic surgeons had sucked away too much fat from this cat. Threatened with death by starvation, he had fled here, needing only one year to become a businessman again and reassume the padded appearance of affluent humanity.

  So, he said. You brought the goods.

  We commenced our masculine social grooming ritual by embracing and slapping each other on the back, followed by Bon and myself assuming the position of the socially inferior simians by offering the alpha male our tribute: the three packages of kopi luwak. Then the fun began, which involved smoking French cigarettes and drinking Rémy Martin VSOP from snifters that fit in our hands like the most perfectly shaped breasts. For the last couple of years, I had drunk nothing more refined than moonshine rice whiskey, which could blind a man, and the reunion of my tongue with one of its truest loves, cognac, made me weepy. The Boss said nothing. He, like Bon, had seen me cry many times in the refugee camp. While some of the others had suffered from malaria, I had been shaken by unexpected bouts of blubbering, a fever from which I still had not fully recovered.

  When my tongue had recovered from contact with the voluptuous copper body of the cognac, I sniffed and said that I had never taken him for the type to appreciate coffee brewed from the beans defecated by a civet. He gave his best imitation of a smile, picked up a letter opener, slit open one of the packages, and shook out a gleaming brown bean onto his palm, where it glistened under the desk lamp.

  I don’t drink coffee, he said. Tea, yeah, but coffee’s too strong.

  We looked at the poor bean, the tip of the letter opener pressed against its belly. The Boss rolled the bean with his fingers until it ended up between his thumb and index, and then scraped it gently with the blade. The brown flaked off, revealing whiteness underneath.

  It’s just vegetable dye, he said. Won’t hurt you, even when you snort it.

  He opened the second bag, shook out another bean, and scratched off a portion of the coloring again to reveal the whiteness beneath.

  Got to check the product, he said. Can’t always trust the henchmen. Matter of fact, rule of thumb: Never trust the henchmen.

  He opened a drawer and casually took out a hammer, as if hammers were always to be found in drawers, and gently tapped the bean until it crumbled into a fine powder. He dabbed a finger in the white powder, tinged with the brown coloring, and licked it. The brief glimpse of his pink tongue made my big toe twitch.

  Sniffing’s the best test. But I got people for that. Or you could do it. Want a try?

  We shook our heads. He offered another facsimile of a smile and said, Good boys. This is a great remedy, but you don’t want to need the cure.

  Then he slit open the third bag, shook out another bean, laid it on the desk, and tapped it with the hammer—once, twice, a third time. The bean did not crumble. He frowned and tapped it again a little harder. Then he smashed the bean with a blow that made the desk lamp jump in surprise, and when he lifted the head of the hammer from the table, we saw not fine white powder but a circle of debris, brown to the core.

  Shit, Bon muttered.

  No, coffee, the Boss said, gently laying the hammer down. He reclined in his chair, the corners of his lips crinkling just a little, an amused auditor discovering a cheat’s fatal error. Time must have frozen because I could see that the hands on the clock had not moved at all since we had come into the Boss’s office. Hey, guys, he said. I think we’ve got a problem.

  And by “we,” he of course meant “you,” or “us.”

  No one knew what the Boss’s name was, or if he did, no one dared utter it aloud. His passport had a name, but no one knew if it was real, and only the authorities had seen it. Presumably his father and mother knew his name, but he was an orphan, and perhaps they had not even given him a name before leaving him at the orphanage. An orphan was akin to a bastard, and this made me feel a certain amount of sympathy for the Boss, who had run away from his orphanage at twelve, no longer willing to tolerate the Catholic instruction, the repetitive diet of porridge with a few flakes of dried pork, the abuse from other orphans for being Chinese, the unending rejection of never being adopted. His experience among children meant that he had no desire to have children. The Boss had no need for a legacy outside of the one he made for himself, the only kind worth possessing. He focused on the two men before him—one of whom was me—and decided they were not a threat to his legacy, not dumb enough to risk their profitable relationship with him for half a kilogram of this remedy of the finest kind.

  Tell you what. Come back tomorrow with the other kopi luwak. No big deal, right?

  In chorus, they said yes. People who knew him always said yes, if that was what he wanted, or no, if that was what he wanted. As for people who did not know him, it was his task to let them know who he was and how they should respond. These two knew him and understood that if he could not trust them with half a kilo he could not trust them with anything. He drew a smile on his face and said, Honest mistake, I’m sure. Sorry to put you through the trouble. You say your aunt likes hashish? I’ll give her some. On me. Free of charge.

  Then he wrote two addresses down for Bon on a piece of paper and said, Drop off your stuff, then get to the restaurant. You don’t want to be late for your first job.

  They finished their cognac, shook his hand, and left him alone with the bottle of Rémy Martin, the packet of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, three empty snifters, the coffee beans, and the hammer. He brushed off the white powder and brown coffee smeared on the hammer’s head and, holding it in his hand, admired its weight, balance, and elegance. He had bought it in a hardware store soon after arriving in Paris, along with a box of nails. Wherever he went, one of the first things he liked to buy, if he didn’t already have it, was a hammer. A hammer was a simple tool, but it was the only thing he had ever needed, besides his mind, to change the world.

  CHAPTER 2

  Although I feared the Boss for good reason, I feared Bon a little
bit less. This was a mistake, in retrospect, given that Bon has shot me in the head. I had known Bon for more than two decades, ever since we had met at the lycée. He had seen too much violence and death, and dealt them as well, to be afraid even of someone like the Boss. For most of his life, in a way that was completely unhealthy for everyone but him, Bon had been concerned with what it meant to die. If that was one aim of philosophy, then Bon was a fine philosopher. He had dwelt on death ever since the childhood moment when a Viet Cong cadre aimed the accusatory finger of a revolver at the back of his father’s head, puncturing the fragile shell, revealing what no son should ever see, and awakening a homicidal urge in Bon, one that knew no restraint until his time in reeducation. It was there that Death woke him every morning, holding the broken shard of a mirror close enough for him to see the fog of his breath clouding his image.

  In the years before reeducation, hunting and killing had not bothered Bon in the least. After reeducation, he took more care with the offer of employment the Boss gave him in the refugee camp. Having witnessed Bon’s handiwork in saving his life, the Boss had said, I could use a man like you to do things like that.

  I don’t hurt innocent people, Bon said.

  They studied the man crumpled at their feet, unconscious or perhaps expired, the elements of his face rearranged by Bon in a cubist manner. The Boss shrugged and agreed, since the price of entry into the Boss’s profession entailed a loss of innocence. But the Boss hesitated about Bon’s other stipulation, that he provide a job for me as well.

  I don’t employ people like this crazy bastard, he said at last. He could see that I had a screw loose, the trusty screw that had, for years, held together my two minds. Sometimes I did not even notice that I had two minds, since that was my natural condition, even if it was unnatural. Now the threads of the screw were stripped, having been placed under a great degree of stress from my years of being a spy, a sleeper, and a spook. As long as the screw had remained tightly screwed, my two minds had worked together reasonably well. Now I was no longer screwed—­humanity’s universal condition—but was instead unscrewed.

  It’s either both of us, Bon said, or neither of us.

  That’s the problem with loyalty. The Boss sighed. It’s great until it’s a pain in the ass.

  Outside the Boss’s import-export store, we were faced with a dilemma. The Boss wanted us to get to work right away. The Boss also wanted the return of his kopi luwak, which my aunt possessed and might open at any moment. What was to be done?

  She did say she’d make the coffee tomorrow, I said. And she didn’t seem enthusiastic, so I don’t think there’s much chance of her drinking it by herself.

  All right, Bon said, looking at the sun to determine the time. His watch had been taken from him by our guards in reeducation in order to . . . in order to . . . well, there was no justification for it. Let’s get this done as quickly as we can.

  The housing was a short walk away, through an area whose pedestrian architecture was charmless. Unlike the Paris of Maurice Chevalier and Catherine Deneuve, most of the 13th arrondissement was deficient in charm, although it was unclear whether the authorities permitted Asians to live in this quarter because of its ill-favored qualities or whether the presence of Asians added to the unloveliness. Regardless, Bon was satisfied when the weary concierge with the deflated perm showed us his lodgings, the stacks of bunk beds recalling for Bon the military barracks he had loved with true ardor. The atmosphere was nostalgic, too, tangy with masculine sweat that evoked honesty and camaraderie. Otherwise the room was lived in by civilians, judging from the blankets huddled in shame on the mattresses, the rumpled reed mats on the parquet floor, and what passed for a kitchen: a folding table on which sat a rice cooker and a greasy two-burner plug-in stove.

  Everyone’s at work, the concierge said. This bunk’s yours.

  What’s the rent?

  The Boss takes care of that. Good deal, huh?

  A good deal for Bon meant an even better deal for the Boss. But with no other recourse than my aunt’s apartment, Bon dropped his duffel on the mattress and said, I’ll take it.

  That, as reeducation had taught him, was his unique talent. He could take anything.

  Our next stop was Delights of Asia, located on rue de Belleville, where Bon would work as a line cook. Cook? Bon had said. I don’t know how to cook. Don’t worry about it, the Boss had said. The place isn’t known for its food.

  In this restaurant not known for its food, the white tiles of the floor throbbed with varicose veins of brown grease, the yellow walls were stained with what I hoped were sticky fingerprints, and the surly waiters and cursing chefs could be heard shouting and cackling whenever the kitchen doors swung open. Next to the register, a stereo played cassettes of high-pitched Chinese and Vietnamese opera. Behind the register was the maître d’ and musical curator, Le Cao Boi, who, from looks to manners, was the typical romantic Vietnamese man: part poet, part playboy, and part gangster.

  I love seeing their bodies tense after I hit the play button, he said with a laugh, watching the lone customer leave behind a plate still swarming with worms, which on closer inspection turned out to be greasy and gelatinous noodles. He ejected the cassette and inserted another. Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven,” he said. That’s better. So! The Boss told me all about you two bad boys.

  Le Cao Boi was the Boss’s field marshal. He introduced the restaurant’s employees: the two waiters, the three chefs, the busboy, and the janitor, or, as Le Cao Boi called them, the Seven Dwarfs. Unlike the Seven Dwarfs of Snow White, they were not cute and not even that dwarfish, being merely nasty, brutish, and short. Most notable, as I pointed out to Le Cao Boi, was that seven of them seemed excessive for a restaurant empty at noon on a weekend. He grinned and said, Makes you wonder why the Boss would send me two more employees, doesn’t it?

  As must be obvious even to a tourist or stranger, the restaurant was not surviving on its culinary output, being instead an outpost for the Boss’s ambitions to expand from the ghetto of Little Asia to inner Paris, the heart of whiteness, even with its shadows of darkness. This outpost was a front for Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarfs, who, besides being short, were angry and ambidextrous. Their favored weapons were cleavers, functional in the kitchen and on assignment, when they would each carry two of the big blades sheathed under their armpits in custom leather holsters.

  They’re angry because they’re short, Le Cao Boi said. And they’re hard to beat because they’re short. Someone takes a swing at where they think their heads should be and they hit air. You don’t want all seven coming at you at once, but that’s how they do their job. One cuts off your manhood, another slices your kneecaps, a third hamstrings you, all at the same time. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. But they’re not great on nuance. “Nuance” is not in their vocabulary. Hell, “vocabulary” is not in their vocabulary. That’s what you’re here for.

  Le Cao Boi adjusted his aviator sunglasses, which he never removed, not even during lovemaking, or so it was said, especially by him. He was proud of their name-brand status as authentic American Ray-Bans, not, as he liked to point out, cheap imitations. Le Cao Boi was fashion-conscious, from designer socks to hair so streamlined with pomade that not a strand moved regardless of whether he was declaiming poetry (his own), making love (energetically), or swinging his favored weapon, a baseball bat gifted by an American cousin. It was Le Cao Boi’s bitter experience to come as a refugee to France instead of America, the country for which he pined during his youth in Cholon. Le Cao Boi, like the Boss, was ethnic Chinese, son of a Cholon gangster and grandson of a Guangdong merchant who had settled in Saigon at century’s turn. The grandfather sold silk and opium, the father sold only opium, and the grandson sold nothing except his violent services, a great decline over which he ruminated often in his poetry, which was so unspeakably bad that none of it will be quoted here.

  Just think of me as Baudelaire with a b
aseball bat, he said, showing us his prized Louisville Slugger. What a name, he added, rolling the baseball bat on the counter where the depressed cash register stood, its sole purpose in life—to have its keys punched—hardly ever achieved. So, what should we call you? You’re Killer, that’s obvious. I wouldn’t want to see your face when I open the door. But you! Le Cao Boi turned his reflective gaze to me. The Boss said you already had a name. Know what it is?

  He offered a smile, the kind that the Americans he admired so much called a “shit-eating grin,” a phrase whose meaning was the exact opposite of what one would suppose. Hello, Crazy Bastard, Le Cao Boi said. I’ve heard a lot about you.

  Once, I would have taken offense. But after all I had suffered and seen, perhaps I actually was a crazy bastard. Perhaps that was just another name for a man with two faces and two minds. If so, at least I knew who I was, and that was more than could be said for most. The dual images of myself floating in his lenses reminded me that I was not one but two, not only me or moi but also, on occasion, we or us. We might have been two people in one body, two minds in one shell, but if this was a weakness, to be divided against oneself, it was also a strength, to be one’s own twin. We were not half of anything. As my mother had told me time and again, You are twice of everything!

  Okay, enough chitchat, Le Cao Boi said. Small talk kills me. Let’s get to work.

  Hey, chief, said one of the dwarfs, emerging from the back of the restaurant. He had droopy eyelids. Grumpy did it again.

  Du ma! Le Cao Boi said. Well, why don’t you do something about it?

  Du ma! Sleepy said, pointing at me. He’s the new guy.