Nine Days by Fred Hiatt

Author:Fred Hiatt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307977274
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2013-04-08T21:00:00+00:00

Day Five: Thursday

Hanoi–Haiphong

Chapter 26

When I say Mr. Thieu looked like a rat, I don’t mean to be insulting. Mr. Thieu just really looked like a rat.

We found his place without much trouble. It was odd—not a building right on the street, but a gate to a big plot of land. Big for Hanoi, anyway, where everyone seemed to live on top of each other. From the street you could see a jumble of greenery and, set back a ways, part of a red and black roof, almost as if an old temple had been converted into something else.

I pushed a buzzer in the wall.

Nothing happened.

“We could climb over,” Ti-Anna mused.

The gate looked scalable, barely. But her suggestion was enough to make the scrapes on my palms start stinging again.

“Please,” I said. “Enough jumping around.”

I pushed the buzzer again, and almost instantly we heard the gate unlatch, as if Mr. Thieu had a rule not to answer unless someone buzzed twice.

He looked, as I said, like a rat: beady eyes in a puffed-up face, sharp nose, tufty hair that looked like he’d cut it himself, pink curly tail. No, just kidding; no tail. But you almost expected one.

Before Ti-Anna could get more than a sentence into explaining who had sent us, Mr. Thieu cut her off.

“I know who you are,” he said, in heavily accented English. “Come back tonight. Alone.”

“We are alone,” Ti-Anna protested.

“No,” he said, pointing to me. “You are not alone. If you want to hear about your father, come back tonight. Alone.”

And with that he ducked away. The rusty metal gate swung slowly shut, with a creak and a click.

We stood there, too surprised to speak. In fact, you know the five stages of grief? I don’t either, exactly, but I remember reading them somewhere, and in Ti-Anna’s face you could see her cycling through the ones I remember. Shock. Depression. Anger. Finally—what would you call it?—resignation: “I guess I’ll just have to come back tonight,” she said. (Yes, I know that was only four. It’s not like someone had actually died.)

“You will not come back alone,” I said.

Thus began an argument that continued, in fits and starts, for the rest of that day.

Not that we stood in front of the gate all day. After a while, we turned around and sat in front of it, leaning back against the wall. Arguing. Then we started walking south, back toward downtown. Arguing. We stopped for some pho. Arguing.

As the tiresome day wore on, we walked and argued and walked some more. I would say, “I don’t think you should go back alone.” And Ti-Anna would say, “If that’s the only way he’s going to tell us where my father went, then I’m going.” “You shouldn’t.” “Why not?” “Because.”

“Maybe Radio Man didn’t mention you, only ‘the daughter,’ and so he doesn’t know whether he can trust you,” Ti-Anna guessed. “Maybe he’s scared he’ll get in trouble, and it’s safer to tell one person than two. Maybe he doesn’t like white people.

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