Beginning to worry that he was not going to be able to make this connection, Tommy found himself babbling:
“Really, she did, she saved my life, just put herself on the line for me, a total stranger, got her van bashed up because of me, she’s the reason I’m even standing here, so I’d appreciate if you’d invite us to sit down and—”
“Total stranger?” Gi asked.
Tommy had been plunging forward so rapidly that he had lost track of what he had said, and he didn’t understand his brother’s reaction. “Huh?”
“Total stranger?” Gi repeated.
“Well, yes, up to an hour and a half ago, and still she put her life on the line—”
“He means,” Del explained to Tommy, “that he thought I was your girlfriend.”
Tommy felt a blush, hot as oven steel, rising in his face. Gi’s sombre expression brightened slightly at the prospect that this was not the long-anticipated blonde who would break Mama Phan’s heart and divide the family forever. If Del was not dating Tommy, then there was still a chance that the youngest and most rebellious of the Phan boys would one day do the right thing, after all, and take a lovely Vietnamese girl as his wife.
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Del said to Gi.
Gi appeared willing to be convinced.
Del said, “We’ve never dated. In fact, considering that he doesn’t like my taste in hats, I don’t see how we ever could date. I couldn’t go out with any man who was critical of my taste in hats. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.”
“Hats?” Gi said, confused.
“Please,” Tommy said, speaking as much to Del as to Gi, “can we just sit down and talk about this?”
“About what?” Gi asked.
“About someone trying to kill me, that’s what!”
Stunned, Gi Minh Phan sat with his back to his computer. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the two chairs on the other side of his desk.
Tommy and Del sat, and Tommy said, “I think I’m in trouble with a Vietnamese gang.”
“Which?” Gi asked.
“I don’t know. Can’t figure it out. Neither can Sal Delano, my friend at the newspaper, and he’s an expert on the gangs. I’m hoping you’ll recognize their methods when I tell you what they’ve done.”
Gi was wearing a white shirt. He unbuttoned the left cuff, rolled up the sleeve, and showed Del the underside of his muscular forearm, which bore a long, ugly, red scar.
“Thirty-eight stitches,” Gi told her.
“How awful,” she said, no longer flippant, genuinely concerned.
“These worthless scum creep around, saying you have to pay them to stay in business, insurance money, and if you don’t, then you and your employees might get hurt, have an accident, or some machinery could break down, or your place could catch fire some night.”
“The police—”
“They do what they can—which often amounts to nothing. And if you pay the gangs what they ask, they’ll want more, and more, and more still, like politicians, until one day you wind up making less out of your business than they do. So one night they came around, ten of them, those who call themselves the Fast Boys, all carrying knives and crowbars, cut our phone lines so we couldn’t call the cops, figuring they could just walk through the place and smash things while we would run and hide. But we surprised them, let me tell you, and some of us got hurt, but the gang boys got hurt worse. A lot of them were born here in the States, and they think they’re tough, but they don’t know suffering. They don’t know what tough means.”
Able to repress her true nature no longer, Del couldn’t resist saying, “It never pays to go up against a bunch of angry bakers.”
“Well, the Fast Boys know that now,” Gi said with utmost seriousness.
To Del, Tommy said, “Gi was fourteen when we escaped Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, the communists believed that young males, teenagers, were potential counter-revolutionaries, the most dangerous citizens to the new regime. Gi and Ton—that’s my oldest brother—were arrested a few times and held a week or two each time for questioning about supposed anti-communist activities. Questioning was a euphemism for torture.”