Four Blind Mice (Alex Cross 8)

“Well, anyway, this man had a kindly grandfather who adored both him and his family. He’d noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays — to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser.”

“I see,” I said. “Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who’ll listen.”

“Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat’s-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious beyond belief. Think about that, Alex. If you have the time,” said Nana.

So here I was at a supermax prison — on a Saturday. I didn’t think I was wasting the day, not at all. But Nana’s message had sunk in anyway.

This was my last murder case. It had to be. This was the end of the road for Detective Alex Cross.

I focused my mind on the baffling case as I walked toward the cell of Tran Van Luu. He would make my trip worth at least one marble.

Or so I had to hope.

Chapter 72

TRAN VAN LUU was fifty-four years old, and he informed me that he spoke Vietnamese, French, and English fluently. His English was excellent, and I couldn’t help thinking that he looked more like a college professor than a prison inmate convicted of several murders. Luu wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and had a long gray goatee.

He was philosophical — about everything, apparently. But was he Foot Soldier?

“Nominally, I am a Buddhist,” he said as he sat in a cell that was only seven by twelve feet. A bed, a stool, and a fixed writing shelf filled more than half of the space. The fixtures were all made of poured concrete so they couldn’t be moved or disassembled by the inmates.

“I will give you some history,” he said. “The back-story.”

I nodded. “That would be a good place to start.”

“My birthplace is Son Trach village in the Quang Binh province, just north of what was the DMZ. This is one of the country’s poorest provinces, but they are all relatively poor. I started work in my family’s rice fields at five. Everyone was always hungry, even though we grew food. We had one real meal a day, usually yams or cassava. Ironically, our rice was handed over to the landlord. All loyalty was to the family, including ancestors, a plot of land, and the village. Nationalism was nonexistent, a Western notion imported by Ho Chi Minh.

“My family moved south in 1963 and I enlisted in the army. The alternative was starvation, and besides, I had been brought up to hate the communists. I proved to be an excellent scout and was recommended to MACV Recondo School run by U.S. Army Special Forces. This was my initial encounter with Americans. I liked them at first.”

“What happened to change that?” I asked Luu.

“Many things. Mostly I came to understand that many of the Americans looked down on me and my countrymen. Despite repeated promises, I was left behind in Saigon. I became a boat person.

“I finally got to America in ’seventy-nine. Orange County in California, which has a very large Vietnamese population. The only way we could survive was to re-create the family/village structure from our own country. I did so with a gang — the Ghost Shadows. We became successful, at first in California, then in the New York area, including Newark. They say I murdered members of rival gangs in New York and Jersey.”

“Did you?” I asked Luu.

“Oh, of course. It was justifiable, though. We were in a war.” He stopped talking. Stared at me.

“So now you’re here in a supermax prison. Have you received a date for the execution?”

“No. Which is very humorous to me. Your country is afraid to execute convicted murderers.”

“It’s comical? Because of things you saw in Vietnam?”

“Of course. That is my frame of reference.”

“Atrocities committed in the name of military activity.”

“It was war, Detective.”

“Did you know any of these men in Vietnam: Ellis Cooper, Reece Tate, James Etra, Robert Bennett, Laurence Houston?”

Luu shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Over thirty years. And there are so many American surnames to remember.”

“Colonel Owen Handler?”

“I don’t know him.”