Captain Tan Phan had not slept well in almost a month. He would wake up three, four, five times a night to find his entire body covered in sweat and his skin prickling with an itch of unknown origin. His sleeping pills did nothing. He could take five or six of them and he would still jerk awake a few hours later and then be unable to sleep again. His nightmares were pill-proof. He knew it was bad dreams that were waking him up, but he never could remember what they were about, just that he had had them. The worst part was that whenever he had the dreams, Tan would…well, not scream, exactly—it was closer to moaning. In fact, he could almost be certain that they were actually words. He knew this because the noises he made in his sleep were so loud, he would wake himself up. And in that fleeting moment just before he smashed head-on into consciousness and sat straight up in bed, Tan would hear himself, but could never quite grasp what it was he had been trying to say.
He wanted very badly to lay his head down on his desk and doze. The slants of mid-March sunlight coming in through the bars of his window were warm, and the bustle of the vegetable market outside his District 10 precinct was gentle this time of afternoon, even soothing. Tan’s eyelids drooped. No! To keep himself alert he shook his head from side to side with such vigor that his cheeks flapped. Better. Tan gave a cursory pat to his hair, checking if any strands had been shaken out of place. Everything seemed intact, but just to be safe he took out a container of hair gel from his bottom drawer and slicked on an extra coconut-scented glob around each temple.
During his training at the academy, Tan had worked hard to ingratiate himself with the correct officers and so, after graduation, managed to get away with doing only ten months of the requisite year and a half on traffic duty. It had still been a miserable time, spent sweating in a peach-colored uniform at a roundabout in My Tho, blowing a small whistle and being ignored by the old women bicycling on the wrong side of the road. After the ten months were up, Tan was given an olive uniform and his first star and stationed at an Immigrations booth with a stamp at Tan Son Nhat Airport.
Tan’s superiors were impressed by his knack for turning a blind eye at the right moment, particularly when it was done on their behalf, and so after a year at the airport he was made a lieutenant and assigned to an easy paper-pushing gig at a station in District 5. The pay was more than adequate and he even had his own little desk, but Tan was a man of greater ambitions. He had saved up enough of his airport bribes to always lose when he played cards with his captains and major, but he made sure to demonstrate enough skill that they felt pleased with themselves when they won. He quickly became a favorite, and so when the precinct in District 10 was in need of a new captain, he found himself with a promotion and a third yellow star. The area’s large population of poor university students meant that Tan rarely had to deal with anything more serious than drunken brawling and petty theft. His office was private and well lit, his desk was spacious enough to store all of his hair products, and he received his groceries for free from the market ladies next door in exchange for generously overlooking their expired vendor’s licenses. Tan was very content. He did not know why he couldn’t sleep.
A junior officer named Khoa rapped on his door. “Sir? Sir?”
Tan sighed, patted his hair once more, and then put on his hat. He had become fanatical about his hat since losing his old one six months earlier; he never let it out of his sight. He rose to let the boy in. Normally he would invite Khoa to stay for a glass or two of rice wine from the bottle he kept in a different desk drawer, entertaining his subordinate’s fawning behavior as penance for his own apple-polishing past. However, when Tan saw how the boy’s face was drained of color and his hands—clutching a sheet of thick, cream-colored paper of a quality much higher than anything kept in the precinct—were shaking, he snatched the note and shooed Khoa from the office immediately. It was vague and brief, and it came from Colonel Khoi. Captain Tan was to report to him without delay. Tan swallowed hard. He was going to receive another promotion; he was certain of it. He’d only met the colonel once before, at a card game, but must have made an impression on him somehow. Perhaps word had gotten out about his invaluable work investigating a university drug ring (two first-years at a polytechnic college busted for dealing marijuana—Tan had proudly planted the evidence himself).
As the chief of the district, the colonel worked a few blocks down from the station in a converted French colonial villa. A small one, admittedly, but still magnificent, with high ceilings and a spiral staircase and a veranda with showy blue tiles.
Truly important buildings were always distinguished by the number and size of Ho Chi Minh busts displayed on the premises. In the colonel’s waiting room alone there were two, of bronze, positioned at either end of the room atop tall cabinets. Tan looked from one to the other, back and forth, to pass the time. He wondered if he should try growing a beard. It might make him look distinctive and stately, befitting District 10’s youngest major.
It was nearly two-thirty by the time Colonel Khoi returned, flanked by several lieutenants, back from a long lunch banquet and noticeably red. “Ah—the captain! Here already?” the colonel thundered, and Tan tried not to wrinkle his nose at the sour lager aroma that came blasting out. “Come in! Come in!” The lieutenants slunk away to another corner of the villa—probably to nap off the beers, Tan thought enviously, remembering how very, very tired he was.
There was another bronze bust of Uncle Ho in the colonel’s private office, along with a large oil painting of him in a jungle with his devoted revolutionaries. Colonel Khoi sank back in his chair behind his desk and flicked on his computer. He studied Tan with slightly bleary eyes and then snorted loudly to dislodge some phlegm. Then he scowled at the computer, which was taking a long time to come to life, and he jiggled the mouse around impatiently. He turned to Tan again. “I’ve got some important news for you, Phan…”
Tan leaned forward in his chair. His feet and palms were sweating. The muscles of his cheeks twitched, poised to break into a gracious smile at the news.
“We have reason to believe that someone may be trying to kill you. Well, kill you or seriously harm you. Why are you smiling? This isn’t good news.”
Cursing inwardly, Tan adjusted his face to express appropriate alarm.
“Early this morning an officer was attacked out in District 2. He was driving home at around—oh look, the briefing’s right there.” Colonel Khoi waved his hand toward the stack of papers at the corner of the desk nearest to Tan. “It’s the top one. Yes, that’s it. You read it—it’s all explained in there.”
This was certainly not the news that Tan had anticipated, and he was trying very hard to swallow the potent mix of rage and embarrassment and anxiety that he was experiencing simultaneously. “Three-thirty a.m., morning of March the eighteenth, 2011,” he read aloud from the paper, “the victim, Phan Quang Tan—that’s my name!”
“Yes, you both have the same name,” said the colonel, staring at his computer screen and clicking the mouse intently. “It’ll make sense later. Keep reading.”
“The victim, Phan Quang Tan—Sergeant, Binh Thanh District, Ward 26—was assaulted shortly after crossing the bridge into District 2. The Sergeant recalls that he saw a woman in the middle of the road, possibly in her early twenties. Long, dark hair, but no other distinctive features that he can remember. It appeared that she was in distress and waving him over. When Sergeant Phan stopped his bike to offer his assistance, he claims…” Tan paused and frowned. “He claims the woman ‘flew’ at him, seized him by the throat, and held him above the ground. The woman possessed extraordinary strength and what the Sergeant refers to as ‘claws.’ He recalls that when the woman looked at his face, she first seemed surprised, and then angry, and dug her ‘claws’ further into the skin of his neck and shouted, ‘Who are you?’ in a voice the Sergeant describes as low and hoarse. He could not answer at first because her grip on his throat was too tight; he was consequently dropped onto the ground and then stated his name for her.
“ ‘Well you’re not the right Tan Phan,’ she said to the Sergeant. ‘But I am going to leave you alive so that you can pass on a message for me. Tell him that I’m coming for him, and…and…”
Tan gulped. “ ‘Tell him not to worry, because he will get to sleep soon.’ Sergeant Phan says that the woman then leapt over the edge of the bridge and into the river, but states that he did not hear the splash of her landing, and that when he looked over the side himself, he saw nothing in the water. The sergeant was able to drive himself to a hospital in District 2. No broken bones; minor blood loss from unusual-looking cuts on the neck. This morning he relayed the full account of the attack to his superiors.” He put the paper back onto the desk.
“There are currently five men with the full name ‘Phan Quang Tan’ who are policemen in the Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area,” said Colonel Khoi, without taking his eyes from his computer screen. Tan, who had assumed that the colonel was working on some important document, now saw that he had been playing Minesweeper this whole time. “You and the injured sergeant, two privates—one of them in District 12 and the other one in 9—and a lieutenant in Thu Duc. After the attack on their sergeant, the guys in Binh Thanh ran a quick check on the rest of you and discovered that the Tan Phan in Thu Duc had been reported missing by his wife three days ago. There’s no evidence yet that indicates these two events are related, apart from the shared names, but we were told to inform the rest of you so that you can take any precautions you feel necessary. So. Now you’ve been warned. Be careful.”
“And that’s it?” Tan wailed, fingers knotting his hair. “Just ‘be careful’?”
The colonel had set off a bomb in the game and he shoved the mouse away, annoyed. “What were you expecting, Phan? A bodyguard? We don’t have any video footage, just some scratches and a story from a guy who was drunk at the time—he was on his way home from a bar. And the colleagues of the missing lieutenant said he has a mistress and a second family out in Chau Doc, so he’s probably just there. But if you’re worried, you can go talk to the sergeant if you like. He’s still in the hospital.”
“Thank you for the warning, sir,” Tan muttered. “I’ll see myself out.”
Colonel Khoi watched as he left the office. “Creep,” he muttered to himself as the door closed, and then he snorted again. It was clear that the phlegm wasn’t going to stay down, so he opened up the window behind his desk and hacked a clam-shaped splatter out into the garden.
Tan rarely ventured across the Saigon River and into District 2. It was a confusing place for him—part slum, part haven for expats, part suburb for wealthy Vietnamese who wanted to live like expats, and the parts at the seams where they met and bled into each other. The hospital was located along one of the seams. To get there, Tan first had to drive through an enclave of tasteful modern villas with curly-haired Eurasian children playing in the front yards or riding bicycles up and down their driveways. Tan snickered at the helmets and kneepads they wore. The illusion of safety was an invention of the West.
Even though this hospital was painted a friendly butter yellow and its steps weren’t overrun with weeping or bleeding people like the hospitals in the cluster of central districts, the grim atmosphere and aroma of hot antiseptic were the same. Loitering by the fence outside were half a dozen unemployed men waiting to hire themselves out to family members of the very ill who needed to briefly leave the hospital. The rented men would take their place at the bedside for an hour or two to make sure the patient didn’t die of neglect by the overtaxed nurses.
Because he was a policeman, despite not being a high-ranking one, Sergeant Phan had been given a cot next to a window in a room with only two other patients. He must have been on the mend, because he was drinking a can of 333 beer and eating a pack of dried mackerel snacks when Tan walked in. There were three empty, crunched up cans lining the windowsill next to him already, and several more unopened ones waiting in a bag of ice beneath the cot.
“It’s the captain!” the sergeant slurred, saluting him with his beer and then taking a swill. His neck was swathed in gauze and medical tape. He scooched over to make room for Tan on the cot. “Have a beer. Consolation prize for having to be in the Tan Phan Club. Most of the other ones already stopped by this morning—they were both pretty spooked too, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Sergeant,” Tan said, “I’ve read your description of the woman who attacked you in the initial report—early twenties-ish, long black hair—but are there any other, more specific details you might be able to tell me about her? Anything at all?”
The sergeant leaned back against his pillow. “She’s not a woman, Captain. I mean, she’s got the body of a normal-looking girl, but there’s something inside there that’s not human. She picked me up by the neck, with one hand, and threw me onto the ground. Like I was a doll! And she had claws!”
“Did you actually see claws?” Tan asked coolly. “Couldn’t they have been those stick-on artificial nails that girls wear? My girlfriend poked me in the eye with hers once.”
“They were real claws! I felt them! You want to see?” the sergeant asked, fingering the edge of his bandage. Tan nodded.
Wincing a little as the tape pulled loose from his skin with a sucking noise, the sergeant unrolled the white cloth. The cuts were stark and pink, just beginning to scab in places. Two sets of four parallel lines running down his neck. They were not shallow.
“No stick-on nails made those,” said the sergeant, patting the bandage back in place. “Hurt like a motherfucker. But it’s not so bad anymore. I could’ve been discharged already, but the time off is nice.” He tossed back the rest of his 333. “Look,” said the sergeant to Tan, “I don’t know much about this kind of thing. The creepy shit. Monsters. Demons. Whatever. My folks do—they’re Delta people, the real superstitious kind of hicks—and I used to laugh at them whenever they’d lecture me about, like, the twenty-eight different species of water ghost.” He paused to open a new beer and took a long, noisy swallow. “Not anymore. After I leave the hospital I’m going straight to the closest pagoda and loading up on all the protective junk I can find.” He appeared thoughtful for a moment, then solemn. He gave Tan a surprisingly sober look. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re the real Tan Phan she’s after. I’m sorry.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Tan snapped, feeling sweat prickle at the nape of his neck.
A blush crept up the sergeant’s face, spreading from his bandages to his eyebrows. “There was another thing she said to me. I left it out of the report, because I wasn’t sure if I’d misheard. It didn’t make sense to me. I mean, none of what happened made any sense, but…” He looked at Tan for a reaction before continuing. “Okay, what she really said at the end, before she ran away, was: ‘You can tell Cat-Eyes that his Bé Lì is coming for him.’ And when I saw you and, well…your eyes…I put it together…”
Bé Lì. Cat-Eyes. How did he feel, hearing their nicknames for each other after all these years? Tan asked himself. Not struck with terror. No, it was more like he was deflating slowly. Or sinking backward into something soft and dark. His eyes had always been narrow, with a feline upturn at the corners. And even as a child, she had always been a little cruel. Cat-Eyes. Kitten. Kitty. The names had done the double duty of mocking his appearance and emasculating him, and they had stuck. Bé Lì—“bad girl”—wasn’t even really a nickname. It was what Binh had always been, and so it was what she had always been called. Old memories, down in the secret recesses of his mind where they had long been confined, began to tug at their moorings.
The sergeant was babbling, still embarrassed. “I think you’re a very handsome guy! I wouldn’t’ve told you the whole cat-eyes thing, but I felt like I had to, because I think that maybe you should be worried. She was just so angry. That’s the only other thing I remember about her. She was angry, and you could feel it just, like, beaming out of her.” He looked askance at Tan. “I don’t want to be rude, but you must’ve done something bad to piss her off that much, Captain.”
Tan rose from the cot and smoothed the wrinkles out of his trousers. He couldn’t lose any more time here. He needed protection if she was really back.
“I can give you the phone number of someone who might be able to help!” called out the sergeant. “There’s a company I’ve heard of just for this kind of thing—unnatural problems. The Saigon Spirits of something or another. I was told by the friend of a friend of…” But Tan had already left. He nearly bumped into a young, white-clad nurse outside in the waiting room. Tan glared at her, certain that she was smirking at him underneath the surgical mask covering most of her face.
Tan crossed the Thu Thiem Bridge back into Binh Thanh and then pulled his bike over to the curb and took out his phone—an old, calculator-sized Nokia. While Tan did own an expensive smartphone, he usually kept it at home, because he was worried about it being stolen. He switched SIM cards and brought out the fancy one when he needed to impress people, but secretly he preferred the Nokia, because it was so much easier to use. Can we meet? He typed with sweaty fingers, and as he pressed Send, he prayed fervently that the number still worked. He loitered on the side of the road for five minutes while he waited for a response, leaning on his handlebars, and was just starting to feel sleepy again when out of the blue he shivered. He jerked upright and glanced over his shoulder; the street seemed exceedingly unsuspicious. Traffic, muggy heat, some scraggly ginkgo trees, a woman sorting through garbage in the gutter, a man trying to sell old junk to tourists from a tarp spread out on the corner. Tan started the bike quickly, and set off down a random side street.
He tried his hardest to drive aimlessly but didn’t really have the knack for it, and he just ended up first following one canal, and then another. When the road running alongside the second one ended, Tan couldn’t choose between turning left or right, so he decided to stop at the coffee shop on the corner. He parked his bike and took a seat inside, at the table farthest from the café’s television. There were still no new messages on his phone. Tan ordered and then quickly drank two coffees, one iced and one hot, and then hesitated over whether or not to order a third. Now that he knew who was behind his nightmares, though he had no idea how she was doing it, he had decided that he would stop sleeping completely. At least while he tried to figure out how close she was to killing him. And until he could manage to get his hands on something a bit more potent, caffeine would have to do. Tan’s phone buzzed suddenly on the table and he pounced on it, blood whooshing to his temples and his heart pounding. When he saw that it was only a message from his girlfriend (Miss u hubby! See u 4 dinner!) he slammed the phone back down and almost knocked over his empty glasses. He jiggled a leg irritably, then ordered a Red Bull and was given a can of a Chinese knockoff brand called Angry Cow.
As Tan sipped it, he stared at two women seated a few tables in front of him. They were clearly a couple—he could tell by the way they were leaning against each other without noticing it, a natural gravitational pull. Tan resented them because they seemed unfairly happy. The woman on the right was slightly older and had the daintiest, palest wrists he had ever seen. The one on the left was wearing an unusual, broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Tan narrowed his eyes. There was something familiar about that hat. Another old memory was stirring at the back of his brain. But before he could latch on to it fully, his phone buzzed again. Tan reached for it wearily, prepared for another saccharine text from Tram-Anh, whom he kept meaning to dump though he never got around to it. Then his heart leapt—it was not from Tram-Anh, it was from him. All it read was: The zoo. 16:00.
Tan summoned a waitress and paid. He left the café and drove off in such a hurry he didn’t realize that he had left his kickstand down until he was already five minutes down the road. By now he had forgotten the woman in the hat completely.
Tan found no place more depressing in the entire city than the Saigon Zoo. The animals were all dead eyed and bony and kept in filthy cement enclosures. He had visited more cheerful looking District 12 slums. Why the doctor had chosen to meet him there instead of one of the nightclubs he owned was a mystery to Tan.
He walked past a pit containing three malnourished tigers. One of them was gnawing listlessly on a log, and the other two were slumped against a wall. Next was an exhibit of scab-covered monkeys, observed through the bars of their cage with horror by two German tourists. Across from the monkeys, a group of children threw rambutan rinds from a plastic bag at a cowering Malayan porcupine.
It took him fifteen minutes of wandering before he finally spotted the profile he was searching for by the elephant ghetto, slouched against the railing and texting at warp speed.
“Captain,” said Dr. Sang, snapping his phone shut. “Good to see you again.”
“Thank you for meeting me,” said Tan through gritted teeth. Even though the doctor’s accent was nearly imperceptible, and his grammar was perfect, Tan could never stop a part of himself from bristling whenever he heard the doctor’s Việt kiều Vietnamese. The diaspora-tinged flourishes of his vocabulary. The way he always used the pretentious, pre-’75 words for “airport” and “opera house.” The quintessentially capitalist manner in which he moved his lips.
“Don’t worry, I’m always looking for an excuse to stop by the zoo. This is my favorite place in Saigon,” said the doctor, gesturing at the skinny elephants. “Let’s go look at the hippos, and then we can discuss whatever it is that’s on your mind.”
Tan made sure to maintain two and a half paces behind him as they walked, partially out of respect for his former boss but primarily because the doctor was someone you never wanted to let out of your sight.
They were not going in the direction of the hippos, he realized, slightly too late. The doctor was heading for the reptile house. Tan began to sweat and drag his feet.
“Keep up, Captain,” the doctor said cheerfully, without turning around. Tan scowled. The bastard knew exactly what he was doing. “I thought you might like to visit an old friend of yours.” He gave a chilly, carefully meted-out three-syllable laugh.
It appeared that the reptiles were suffering from a housing shortage. Several dozen crocodiles were crowded into a single enclosure. There were at least eight pythons living in the same cage, heaped on top of one another like a clumsy serving of noodles, scaly bellies squashed up against the glass. Across from them, tortoises were being forced to share quarters with a species of acid-green tree viper.
His old friend, at the end of the hall of snakes, was the only one with the luxury of a cage all to itself. Indochinese Spitting Cobra, Dak Lak Province (Polycephalic), read the brass plate at the bottom. Its long body lay in sloppy, slate-colored coils in one corner of the cage, which was decorated with a lonely branch and a decorative cactus. The snake looked so harmless now, behind that glass. It was like visiting a prison to see the man who had murdered your family. You. I remember you perfectly, Tan thought to himself. I took you from your home. And you took something even more precious from me. Now here we both are, two years later, meeting each other once again. That time in the Highlands seemed ludicrous, laughable, now. It didn’t seem possible that it had been his life once. Tan pressed his palms against the glass. This cobra wasn’t pretty like some of the others had been, with their skin pearly white, or bangled with black. But this one had two heads.
“Species with the mutation don’t often live this long,” said the doctor, without taking his eyes off of the vivarium. “One of the heads will try to attack or eat the other.”
“Did you ever make any more of it? The, um…the stuff?” Tan finished prudishly, unable to make his mouth form the word “drugs.”
“No,” said the doctor flatly. “The cobras were difficult to milk, the pills were wildly expensive to produce, and they sold terribly.” He paused and then added, a little wistfully, “I still think it was worth it, just for the novelty of the thing, but the exercise wasn’t rewarding enough to bear repeating.”
Deep in the sunless, silty backwaters of his mind, a part of Tan laughed. Of course it wasn’t worth it, it called softly from the darkness. None of it was worth it. It will never be. A vision came to him, unbidden, of removing his uniform piece by piece and then throwing himself into the tiger pen. He had to scrunch his eyes shut and shake his head hard to knock the image loose and make it go away.
When he opened his eyes again, the doctor’s expression had turned sly. “From what I’ve heard, the effects of the pills were not particularly enjoyable. But you were still tempted enough to try it, weren’t you, Captain?” Tan’s throat tightened. “The Worm told me that you purchased some pills from him a few months ago.”
Tan blinked several times and contemplated lying and saying that he’d bought them for friends. “I was just curious,” he finally admitted. “I don’t remember anything that happened that night, or the morning after, so I can’t really say whether I enjoyed it or not. I took one”—this was untrue; he had taken three—“and the next thing I know, I’m sitting in the shower in my apartment and eighteen hours have passed and my hat and my shoes are gone.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “That seemed to be fairly common, from what we heard.”
“Missing shoes?”
“Missing time, Captain. People said they’d had blackouts and temporary amnesia. But I don’t think that was the only reason for the poor sales. Backpackers are just less reckless nowadays. Their drugs are boring. They’re all huffing nitrous oxide out of cute balloons in clubs, and they don’t want their MDMA laced with cobra toxins.” He gave an exasperated shrug. “Seven years ago, they would have gone wild for it. But of course, seven years ago I didn’t have any friends in the police who could catch snakes in bulk for me.” He bestowed a swift and conspiratorial smile upon Tan, and Tan could only bear it for a moment before turning away and pretending to be fascinated by the cactus in the cobra’s vivarium so that he wouldn’t have to respond.
“Whatever happened to the other eight snakes?” Tan suddenly wondered aloud.
“I wasn’t sure what to do with them once we had extracted their venom. Several wealthy Chinese businessmen expressed interest in purchasing them.”
“As exotic pets?”
“What? No, to eat,” snorted the doctor. “But I thought that would be inhumane. So I set them free.”
Tan felt a premonitory chill. “You let them out in the countryside?”
The doctor grinned. “I let them out here!”
Tan’s eyes darted frantically around at the dense hedges lining the zoo paths and the other potentially snake-concealing bushery nearby.
The doctor roared with laughter. “Why would I want to release them at the zoo? Let me see if I remember…I dropped one cobra down an open manhole out in District 6. Then I left one on the lawn of one of the big banks on Vo Van Kiet Street. I made sure to take the flashiest looking snake out to Thao Dien—I thought it suited the new megamalls and fancy boutiques and cocktail bars there. And I let one go near the water park in District 11.”
“You really don’t need to tell me about every single one,” Tan limply protested, but the doctor spoke over him and kept going:
“The largest went to an abandoned construction site in Thu Duc. I released another one by the little river between District 4 and District 7, and I stuck one in the branches of a tree at a Phu Nhuan monastery. The last one I left in a bush next to the airport before a flight to Singapore.” He counted quickly on his fingers. “Yes, that’s all eight. To my surprise, I’ve never heard anything on the news about someone encountering one. Not once in almost two years! I guess the snakes have just adapted to city life.” He looked at the expression of dismayed incredulity on Tan’s face. “What, you’re not actually afraid of running into one, are you, Captain?” he scoffed. “Why would you be—you’re an expert at capturing them!”
The doctor now turned to the cobra with two heads. “I knew this one wasn’t cut out for the streets of Saigon,” he said ruefully. “So I donated it to my friends at the zoo in exchange for the brief use of their crocodiles.”
He left a pause for Tan to ask him what he had used them for—Tan kept his lips pressed together tightly; he was confident that the crocodiles had been deployed for an appalling purpose and had no wish to learn the specifics—and when the question did not come, the doctor proceeded, visibly disappointed: “So, Captain. What was it that you wanted to talk to me about?”
Tan carefully considered how to phrase his request in a way that sounded sane and vague and erudite. “I need protection,” he said. “From a dangerous individual.”
The doctor looked intrigued. “Is it one of those Hai Phong machete boys? Or the gang that peddles Japanese meth?”
“No, no. The individual in question…is not, corporeally speaking…tangible…at this present moment.”
“Captain, it’s admirable that you’re exercising your vocabulary, but you’re also annoying me. Who is it?”
“It’s a ghost!” Tan’s voice rose sharply, approaching the territory of a squeal. He coughed and then dropped it to a panicked whisper: “An angry ghost. She’s coming to get me.”
The doctor patted Tan’s arm gently. The palms of his hands were silky soft. He was a man who had never held a shovel in his life. “How did you think that I could possibly be of any help with this?” he said. “Do I look like a shaman? Hmm? Do I look like I perform exorcisms in my nightclub basements? Tell me!”
Tan had been a fool, asking for his help. “No,” he said quietly.
“No what?”
“No, you don’t look like you perform exorcisms in your nightclub basements.”
The doctor laughed at Tan’s reddening face. “Oh, Captain, you’re so cute. This is why I like you so much. You haven’t turned out nearly as helpful as I’d hoped you would, but I like you anyway. That’s why you’re still here but Douglas was cut into little pieces and fed to the crocodiles.” Tan gave him a jittery fake smile. He had known that the doctor wouldn’t be able to resist bragging. Part of him had always wondered about the fate of Douglas, the Australian smuggler they had worked with.
“He liked to beat his Vietnamese mistresses,” said the doctor. “He used to boast about it. Said they were so small that it was funny if they tried to fight back. And he always took nude photos of the girls to blackmail them with later. When one of them went to the police with a broken arm, they laughed her out of the station and told her she deserved it for fucking a foreigner.”
“Oh.” Tan was not sure how to respond. “I mean, I’m sure it was…I didn’t need to know the, the reason…”
“Of course,” interrupted the doctor, “We would have still needed to get rid of him even if he hadn’t been a monster. I just wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. But regardless,” he concluded, “if you’re really asking me to help you fight an angry spirit, I will be of less use to you than your colleagues were to Douglas’s ex-girlfriend.”
Tan was not angry. Nothing good ever came from getting angry at the doctor. He resorted to plan B instead. “If you can’t protect me, could you at least get me something that can stop me from sleeping? It’s important that I don’t sleep.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows. “Something…pharmaceutical?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll ask the Worm to sort something out for you,” said the doctor, flicking open his phone like a switchblade and typing with one hand. “He handles most of that end for me these days. The club keeps me busy, and I’ve started a new side gig finding Vietnamese wives for Korean men.” He shot Tan a smile that was as reptilian as any creature in the cages surrounding them. “If you know any girls who might be interested, send them my way. Rural ones if possible, and under twenty-five—they need to be a bit…malleable. Can’t be harder than catching cobras, right?” His phone was buzzing. “The Worm will be at my smaller club tonight after ten,” he said. “You know the one—just down the street from here. He’ll have something for you. And don’t worry—it’s on me.”
Tan nodded. He did not thank him, because he knew that there was going to be a catch, and that whatever it was would be made apparent before too long. In its cage, the snake raised its heads an inch, and then flopped back down.
“I’ve read that having two brains affects the motor skills,” said the doctor.
“That’s why it was the easiest one to bag—it kept going in circles.” That was what Binh had told him.
The doctor stretched his arms and then looked down at his watch. “I hope that you’re going about this ghost thing the right way, because it really looks like you could use more sleep, if anything. Think it over. Pepto?” He had taken out his little pink bottle from his jacket. “Suit yourself,” he said when Tan shook his head, then tilted two into the palm of his hand and swallowed them. “I have to leave now; wait for ten minutes before following. I’ll need you to sign off on a bit of visa paperwork for me—the passports will be on your desk on Monday.”
Ah, thought Tan. There you are, catch.
It was the middle of rush hour when he left. Tan tried to reroute his drive home to avoid some of the worst traffic but still ended up trapped at the large roundabout where Districts 10, 3, 5, and 1 intersected, stuck in a hot, fume-choked, slowly-clogging-toilet swirl of traffic. It was haunted in addition to being over-congested—two thousand bodies from a failed nineteenth-century uprising were buried in a mass grave somewhere underneath it. Tan blamed the ghosts for the traffic. When he was finally able to break free of the traffic circle, he sped over the bridge to District 4 with his olive trousers flapping against his ankles in the wind, headed for home.
District 4 was wedge-shaped, surrounded on all sides by river, and its demographics were a mix of young professionals who had moved away from the center of Saigon to escape rising rents, and past-their-prime gangsters. These were pedestrian goons, the kind with sad facial hair, who only trafficked in soft drugs and domestic prostitutes, and who were several rungs below the doctor in the world of contemporary Vietnamese thuggery.
Tan rented a room in a hive of small apartments down an alley behind a pagoda. The entire neighborhood smelled like incense, which was pleasant, but the noisy predawn chanting of the monks was not. Each apartment in the complex was identical, and every door had a built-in, translucent acrylic panel at eye level. Though most of the tenants had taped newspaper or cardboard over their little windows, gaps were inevitable. Everyone had a habit of spying on their neighbors, and all were aware that they were spied on in turn.
The three boys living on the second floor were all students. Two of them attended the law school and the third was studying painting at the academy of fine arts. One of the law students was rarely home, and the other spent all his time on his computer playing an elaborate online game about intergalactic warfare. It was the young painter, Vung, who was the only one worth secretly watching. He was usually up until the early hours of the morning, attacking his canvases or staring at them despondently, brushes flung in a corner in frustration, and he appeared to subsist entirely on cigarettes. For unknown reasons, Vung was quite fond of Tan and would treat the policeman to private viewings of his work when the mood struck him. That afternoon it did.
“Older brother! Hey! Older brother ơi!” Vung poked his head out and called to Tan when he heard him in the hallway. “Come and see what I’ve been working on!”
Though he didn’t possess an eye for art, Tan could appreciate the nude portraits that the painter did of his various girlfriends, so he strolled over for a look.
“Any new cases?” Vung asked as Tan slipped off his shoes and entered the room. He liked imagining that Tan was some sort of hard-boiled detective, and Tan usually didn’t mind encouraging him. But today he was not in the mood to be playful. The painter could sense this, so he dropped the subject. “It’s right over here.” He gestured grandly to a painting propped up against the wall on the far side of the room and ran over to fetch it.
“Well, what do you think?” Vung turned, smiling eagerly, the canvas in his hand. Then his smile fell when he saw Tan’s face. “Anh Tan, are you okay?”
Tan’s face had gone completely gray. “Who is that?” he spluttered, once he had found his voice. “Who is that woman?”
Vung hugged the painting defensively, trying to hide his disappointment at Tan’s reaction. “It’s a girl I saw in a dream. I liked her, so I painted her.”
Tan could barely hear him. He was transfixed by the eyes on the canvas. Undone by them. It was Binh. Her face, her impish smile, her unruly hair, pointy chin, full lips, small forehead with a widow’s peak. “Tell me the dream,” he whispered, unable to look away from her for even a moment. He was filled at once with ecstasy at seeing the face he had yearned after for so long and utter terror from knowing that she was trying to kill him.
“Well, it was a weird dream, and I had it three or four times,” said Vung, cheered by Tan’s apparent new interest. “That’s how I remembered her face well enough to paint it. They were those kinds of dreams where you don’t think you’re really dreaming, you know? Because everything seems so normal. The dream would start with me right here, just working, nothing out of place, nothing strange, and then I’d look up, and the girl was standing in the room. The first time I had the dream, I was scared when I saw her there all of a sudden. But then she told me not to be afraid, and said that she was in the wrong room.”
“And?” Tan had realized that he was now shaking slightly.
“Well…I woke up. That was it. It was short and strange and it stuck with me. The other dreams were all like that too.”
“The girl would show up and say she was in the wrong room each time?”
“Well, it changed a little bit each time, I guess. She would always appear out of nowhere, and then one time she asked if she could watch me work. And then another time she told me that I should try painting her. So that’s when I started.”
“Nothing else?”
Vung shook his head. “Nope. She really didn’t say much. But it’s a beautiful face, right? I had no choice but to paint her.” Suddenly he grinned. “That reminds me: I saw your girl walking past on her way up to your place about an hour ago. She was carrying a lot of grocery bags.”
Shit. Tram-Anh. Tan groaned. He had completely forgotten about her text. She was upstairs now, cooking something bland and nutritious for dinner and cleaning the apartment and snooping around on his laptop. And then she would want to stay over, which meant nine minutes of insipid intercourse followed by three hours of cuddling, he realized disconsolately. Tan needed to get rid of her if he was going to be at the doctor’s club tonight.
Tan dragged himself up the stairs to the third floor, to his door at the end of the hallway. He leaned against it miserably, listening to the sound of clanging pot lids coming from inside. He screwed his eyes shut and kept them that way until he could summon up Binh’s face in his mind again. He held her there, etched behind his eyelids, until he suddenly worried that his neighbors were watching him from behind their doors. Tan sighed, opened his eyes, and went inside.
He could tell that Tram-Anh was angry with him when she didn’t immediately turn around to greet him as he walked in. She kept her back to him while she hacked an onion apart with a cleaver. Tan cringed. If he tried to apologize without knowing why, exactly, she was upset, it would only make her angrier. So instead he silently took a seat at his small table and waited while Tram-Anh diced vegetables and smashed his pots and pans around with increasing frenzy. The longer Tan sat, the worse his mood grew. He did not feel anything remotely near the realm of love for Tram-Anh, and in fact, he secretly doubted that she actually liked him very much either. She was his barnacle. A girl with a symmetrical face and decent teeth from a village in an insignificant, mosquito-bitten corner of the south who thought her only chance at happiness was marriage, and so at seventeen she had come to the city and immediately latched on to Tan. He could admit it was his fault that the relationship had begun in the first place—she was too young for him, but he had been flattered by the attention, and he had been sure that once she’d lived in Saigon for a few months and the city had gotten its depraved hooks into her she would lose interest, distracted by younger, better-looking guys with flashier bikes and moneyed families. But it had been two years now, and she was still coming around and cooking dinner and dropping hints about which banquet halls she thought would make good wedding venues.
Tram-Anh worked at a phone store and shared a room in a boarding house with two unmarried female colleagues. They all wore each other’s clothes and brought home magazine clippings of designer shoes and purses that they would tape up on the wall and then try to find cheap replicas of at night markets. Tan had made the mistake of coming to visit her there once, and the two other girls had cooed and tittered over him while Tram-Anh held his hand and made possessive half jokes. She tried to model as much of her life as possible after the girls she saw in the popular Korean soap operas she devoured—her pouts; her exaggerated cutesiness; her hair, dyed an orange-brown and cut into bangs that looked like they had been trimmed around an upside-down phở bowl, her slightly wooden kisses. In fact, she was probably an ideal candidate for the doctor’s new bride-trafficking business. Every six weeks or so she would take the long and dusty bus ride down to her village to visit her parents. Each time she would beg Tan to come along, each time he would refuse, and they would fight and she would cry and he would hope that this would be the time she would finally decide to break up with him. And then when she returned to the city, she inevitably forgave him and came over and cooked him dinner like tonight.
It was finished. Tram-Anh began banging platters on the table in front of Tan, then two bowls and two pairs of chopsticks, practically throwing his at him. Finally, she slammed down the rice pot so hard it made the other plates jump and the fish sauce in its dipping bowls slosh over the sides, and then she took her seat across from Tan and wordlessly began to serve him dinner even though she was trembling with what he correctly assumed was rage.
Dinner was boiled pork, scrambled eggs with slivers of bitter melon, and a soup full of green bits that floated atop it like algae in a pond. Country food. Wifely food. Tan and Tram-Anh began to chew in tormented silence. Tram-Anh would not look up at him from her bowl. They kept this up for five minutes before she started to sniffle, and Tan saw a tear fall into her soup and could not control himself anymore. He hurled his chopsticks onto the tile floor. One of them splintered as it bounced, and the other rolled underneath the refrigerator. Tan was fond of his chopsticks and regretted breaking them, but it felt so good to lose his temper. Tram-Anh snapped her head up, startled, to look at him, and her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Well?” Tan snarled at her. “Tell me what’s bothering you. I’m sick of this game.”
Tram-Anh leapt up from the table and stormed into Tan’s bedroom. He thought she might slam the door closed and stay in there all night, which she had done on several occasions, but instead she returned a moment later with something balled up in her fist.
“Explain these,” she hissed, opening her hand and thrusting it in Tan’s face.
Several strands of long hair were unkinking on her palm. They were unmistakably female, but they were black, not the artificial orange of Tram-Anh’s hair. “Who is she?” Tram-Anh’s lips were quivering. “These were on your pillow.”
It was impossible. Impossible. Tan’s mind raced. He was not, he regretted, sleeping with anyone else. He did not have a cleaning lady. Perhaps there was the slim chance that a girl on the street had been driving past him, had caught a few strands on one of his buttons or a helmet strap…but no, no, he would have noticed that. How would they have gotten onto his pillow? He had made his bed this morning, and he had not been back since. No. It was her. She had finally found the right room. He smiled cruelly.
“They’re my lover’s,” he said coolly, and enjoyed watching Tram-Anh’s face crumple. “My old girlfriend. Binh.”
“You’re lying!” Tram-Anh was not very pretty when she cried, Tan thought. “That’s not true! You told me she died in a traffic accident!” she whimpered.
“There was never any accident,” said Tan, which was the truth. “And now Binh is back. So you’ll have to leave.” This was also true. His face felt hot, felt irradiated, but he did not have any sense of shame at causing the poor girl pain. This was new and thrilling. The neighbors were probably pressed up against their walls listening. Still, he could not stop himself. “I hate your cooking!” he yelled. “Fucking you is like having sex with an almost dead fish! You just lie there and twitch! The makeup that you wear to cover your acne scars doesn’t match your skin, and it’s so obvious!” Tan was running out of insults. “And you do not and will never look Korean!” he concluded, then stopped and panted.
Tram-Anh bared her teeth unintentionally as she wept, and her eyes were so puffy they resembled cowrie shells. Her sobs were guttural, little seal barks.
“Just get out! Get out now!” Tan banged the table. Tram-Anh screamed, grabbed her jacket and handbag from the counter, and then ran from the apartment, hiding her face with her jacket. She had forgotten her shoes in the corner by the door. Tan picked them up and tossed them out of the apartment’s bathroom window into the pagoda’s courtyard. They were thick-heeled foam sandals, and he heard them bounce when they hit the concrete. Then he returned to the kitchen and crawled around on his knees on the floor, looking for the hairs.
“Bé Lì?” he whispered. “Are you here? Can you hear me?” There was no reply from anywhere in the empty apartment. He swept his hands across the floor underneath the table but only felt dust. And then, because he was already on the ground, Tan decided that he would do pushups to help keep himself energized until it was time to go to the club. He did thirty, got too sweaty, and then took off his uniform and did twenty more. In high school Tan had been a kickboxer. He rose to his feet and tried to resurrect some of his old moves from training—jabbing and uppercutting the air in his fraying underpants. The kitchen wasn’t large enough for kicking, he discovered, after he roundhoused a table leg and sent Tram-Anh’s bitter melon splattering. Tan didn’t bother to pick it up. He went into the bathroom, ran a freezing cold shower, and made himself stay under the jet of water until his skin had gone numb. He rinsed all the gel out of his hair and then lathered it up with Tram-Anh’s fancy honey-locust-bean-infused shampoo, delighted that he could now use as much as he wanted (he had only stolen the occasional, stealthy squirt before). Tan was proud of his upper body, which he considered to be fairly well sculpted. He had always been the strongest one in his family—more muscular than both his younger brother and their father (even before the late Duc Phan had drunk himself soft and flabby). His legs, though, were chicken skinny and bore two scars: one down by the ankle, courtesy of his father, and one by the knee from Binh and a broken bottle. His cock resembled a steamed fish cake—on the small side, yes, but not laughably small, he thought. He was convinced that his brother’s had to be smaller, simply on account of Long being the shorter and skinnier sibling, but as he hadn’t seen his brother naked since their prepubescent years, he couldn’t be completely sure. This still bothered him. His eyes, of course, were squinty and catlike.
Tan toweled himself dry and then reapplied his hair gel with great precision. Being out in the world without his uniform made him nervous, so most of the casual wear he bought tended to be olive too. He selected from his closet one of the several dress shirts he owned in the color, and a pair of jeans. He could sense the eyes behind doors following him, the held breaths, as he strode down the narrow hallways of the apartment building, and it made him feel strangely powerful.
Tan figured he had three hours to fill up with eating, which would not be a problem for him. He parked his bike in front of his favorite neighborhood snail shop and greedily eyed the tubs piled with assorted mollusks, more gleaming and beautiful than gemstones. He ordered carelessly, and he ordered too much: A dish of paddy snails in a lemongrass soup, with rubbery flesh that squeaked as he chewed. A dish of ice-cream-cone-shaped mud creepers in coconut sauce. A dish of blood cockles with tamarind. A dish of crab claws encrusted in chili salt. Tan didn’t order beer, both because he didn’t like its taste and because he wanted to leave as much room as possible on his table for plates. He hunched over them possessively, barely taking the time to breathe or spit shells onto the sidewalk between bites. He didn’t notice the girl with the long hair in the corner until he had already crunched through half his plate of crab.
To be precise, he noticed what she was eating before he actually noticed the girl. She had ordered a snail porridge, and his eyes followed it with envy as it was brought over to her. Tan was tempted to call for a bowl of his own but was beginning to feel full and wasn’t sure if he could fit the cháo into his stomach on top of everything else that was swimming in there. He observed her doctoring it, first dropping in a sensible amount of chili paste and swirling it into a thin orange spiral, then dusting the top with shredded herbs and onion. He watched as she raised her first spoonful up to her mouth—one hand cupped protectively beneath it to shield the loose white smock she was wearing from spills—and then he lingered on her face even after she had set the spoon down again. There was something a bit odd, something vaguely foreign about the features. Something from elsewhere. He couldn’t identify what it was exactly—the width of the nose, or in the reddish undertones of the hair, though perhaps it was all just an effect of the snail shop lighting. She could have Khmer blood, or Hmong blood, or a drop of French. But the longer he looked at her the less sure he became until, when he looked at faces of the other people in the restaurant, they all resembled people from elsewhere too. He focused his attention back on sucking the chili salt off his crab legs. He did not notice the small brown-and-white dog, because it was lying on the ground between the girl’s feet, batting an empty shell around with one paw, with something like boredom.
To kill a little more time, Tan made some perfunctory small talk with an aging gangster at the table next to him whose saggy chest skin was crawling with faded indigo tattoos of slack-jawed dragons. Tan accepted a beer from him and drank it while trying not to grimace. Eventually he gave in and ordered a snail porridge of his own but could only finish half of it because the hard, convex curve of his belly was straining his shirt buttons. The long-haired girl’s table was empty now—she had left without his noticing. Tan stifled a yawn and then, for the second time that day, felt an inexplicable shiver right at the base of his neck. Slowly, Tan turned on his stool in every direction and checked his surroundings. He even looked up, fearful for a minute that the vengeful ghost of Binh would be dangling above him like a bat. She was not, and he was embarrassed by his paranoia. The street was much too crowded. She would not come for him here.