Dark Rivers of the Heart

night."
        Spencer was surprised again. "How do you know anyone was there?"
        "'They were asking about a man she might have been living with.
        Your height, weight. What were you doing there, if I may ask?"
        "She was late for work. I was worried about her. I went to her place to see if anything was wrong.
        "You work at The Red Door too?"
        "No. I was waiting there for her." That was all he chose to say.
        'The rest was too complicated-and embarrassing. "What can you tell me about Valerie that might help me locate her?"
        "Nothing, really."
        "I only want to help her, Mr. Lee."
        "I believe you."
        "Well, sir, then why not cooperate with me? What was on her renter's application? Previous residence, previous jobs, credit references-anything like that would be helpful."
        The businessman leaned back, moving his small hands from his knees to the arms of his chair. "There was no renter's application."
        "With as many properties as you have, sir, I'm sure whoever manages them must use applications."
        Louis Lee raised his eyebrows, which was a theatrical expression for such a placid man. "You've done some research on me. Very good.
        Well, in His. Keene's case, there was no application, because she was recommended by someone at The Red Door who's also a tenant of mine."
        Spencer thought of the beautiful waitress who appeared to be half Vietnamese and half black. "Would that be Rosie?"
        "It would."
        "She was friends with Valerie?"
        "She is. I met His. Keene and approved of her. She impressed me as a reliable person. That's all I needed to know about her."
        Spencer said, "I've got to speak to Rosie."
        "No doubt she'll be working again this evening."
        "I need to talk to her before this evening. Partly because of this conversation with you, Mr. Lee, I have the distinct feeling that I'm being hunted and that time may be running out."
        "I think that's an accurate assessment."
        "Then I'll need her last name, sir, and her address."
        Louis Lee was silent for so long that Spencer grew nervous.
        Finally: "Mr. Grant, I was born in China. When I was a child, we fled the Communists and emigrated to Hanoi, Vietnam, which was then controlled by the French. We lost everything-but that was better than being among the tens of millions liquidated by Chairman Mao."
        Although Spencer was unsure what the businessman's personal history might have to do with his own problems, he knew there would be a connection and that it would soon become apparent. Louis Lee was Chinese but not inscrutable. Indeed, he was as direct, in his way, as was any rural New Englander.
        "Chinese in Vietnam were oppressed. Life was hard. But the French promised to protect us from the Communists. They failed. When Vietnam was partitioned in nineteen fifty-four, I was still a young boy. Again we fled, to South Vietnam-and lost everything."
        "I see."
        "No. You begin to perceive. But you don't yet see. Within a year, civil war began. in nineteen fifty-nine, my younger sister was killed in the street by sniper fire. Three years later, one week after John Kennedy promised that the United States would ensure our freedom, my father was killed by a terrorist bomb on a Saigon bus."
        Lee closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. He almost seemed to be meditating rather than remembering.
        Spencer waited.
        "By late April, nineteen seventy-five, when Saigon fell, I was thirty, with four children, my wife Mae. My mother was still alive, and one of my three brothers, two of his children. Ten of us. After six months of terror, my mother, brother, one of my nieces, and one of my sons were dead.
        I failed to save them. The remaining six of us… we joined thirty-two others in an attempt to escape by sea."
        "Boat people," Spencer said respectfully, for in his own way he knew what it meant to be cut off from one's past, adrift and afraid, struggling daily to survive.
        Eyes still closed, speaking as serenely as if recounting the details of a walk in the country, Lee said: "In bad weather, pirates tried to board our vessel. Vietcong gunboat. Same as pirates. They would have killed the men, raped and killed the women, stolen our meager possessions.
        Eighteen of our thirty-eight perished attempting to repel them.