The hotel’s lobby was empty, but the Hyatt desk was being run by a young woman who was far too sophisticated and generally out there to be running a hotel desk. Virgil had the uneasy feeling that if he asked her to connect a phone number to a room and a name, she’d call a manager, who might want to see a subpoena… blah-blah-blah.

He looked around and saw an elderly rusty-haired bellhop sitting on a window ledge, reading a sex newspaper called Seed, which, Virgil happened to know, was the publishing arm of an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Virgil went over and sat down next to him. The bellhop looked like a model for the next Leprechaun horror film, with a nose the size of a turnip and a bush of red hair shot through with gray.

He glanced at Virgil and said, “You look like a hippie, but you’re a cop.” He was wearing a tag that said George. “Looking for hookers?”

“Nope. I’m trying to find out which room is connected to a particular phone number without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit,” Virgil said. “The girl behind the desk looks like she lives for bureaucratic bullshit.”

The bellhop looked at the girl behind the desk and said, “Somebody turned me in for smoking in the stairwell last winter. It was about a hundred below zero, which is why I was there instead of outside. I think she’s the one. She’s like this no-smoking Nazi. When I was bitching about it, she said it was for my own good. I said, ‘What, getting fired?’ Bitch.”

“You think you could work this sense of anger and disenfranchisement into a room number? And a name?” Virgil turned his hand over; a folded-over twenty-dollar bill was pinched between his index and middle fingers.

“What’s the number?” George asked as he lifted out the twenty.

“Atta boy,” Virgil said. He wrote the number on a slip of paper and passed it over.

The bellhop disappeared into the back and a moment later was back. “Got the number and the names. It’s Tai and Phem, a couple of Japs.”

“Japs?” Virgil was puzzled. “The names sound Vietnamese.”

George shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll tell you what, though, they are bad, bad tippers. The other night, Tai-he’s the tall one-orders a steak sandwich and fries at midnight. They don’t give those things away, that’s a thirty-dollar meal. He gave me a fuckin’ buck.”

“What else you got?”

“Well-just what everybody knows,” George said. “They’re Canadian.”

“Canadian?”

“Yeah. They’ve been here, off and on, mostly on, for three months.

They’re supposedly working on a big deal with Larson International to build hotels.”

“Larson,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, you know.”

“I know.” The chain that Sinclair worked for. “So they’re high-fliers.”

“Well, if they are, somebody’s got them on a pretty friggin’ tight expense account-either that, or they’re putting down twenty percent for tips and keeping the cash.”

“They’re that kind of guys?” Virgil asked.

“They’re, uh… They’re some guys I wouldn’t fuck with,” George said.

“You’re fuckin’ with them now,” Virgil said.

The bellhop looked startled. “You’re not going to tell them.”

“No. I just wanted to see if you’d jump,” Virgil said, standing up, stretching. “You did, which means, you know, maybe you’re not bullshitting me.”

“You watch yourself, cowboy,” the bellhop said. “Them Japs is some serious anacondas.” He made a pistol shape with his thumb and forefinger, poked Virgil above the navel, and shuffled away.

VIRGIL HAD SPENT a good part of his life knocking on doors that had nobody behind them, entering rooms that people had just left, so he was mildly surprised when a slender man with longish hair, combed flat over the top of his head, and apparently nailed in place with gel, opened the door and said, pleasantly, “Yes?”

“Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said, flipping open his ID. “I talked to Mead Sinclair a while ago, he said you might be able to help me with some Vietnam-related stuff. Are you Mr. Tai?”

“Yes. Well… Okay, come in,” Tai said. He was thin, with a face that was delicate but tough. The splice lines of a major scar cut down his forehead, another white scar line hung under his left eye, another below his lip. “We’re working right now, it’s coming up on early morning in Vietnam, the markets are opening…”

“Just take a couple of minutes,” Virgil said.

He followed Tai into the suite’s main room, where another Asian man sat on a couch, with a laptop on his knee and a telephone headset on his head. He was shoeless, wearing a T-shirt and blue silky gym shorts. “My partner, Phem,” Tai said.

Phem didn’t look up from his laptop but said, “What’s up, eh?”

He said the “eh” perfectly: Canucks, Virgil thought, not Vietnamese.

Tai pointed at a chair, and Virgil settled in and said, “Have you ever heard of the Vietnamese, uh, what would you call it… custom? The Vietnamese custom of putting a lemon in a man’s mouth, as a gag, before they execute him?”

Tai had arranged his face in a smile, which vanished in an instant. “Jesus Christ, no. What’s up with that?”

“You guys are from…”

“ Toronto,” Tai said. “Born and raised.”

“But your parents must have been from Vietnam?”

He nodded. “ Saigon. Got out just before the shit hit the fan. I spoke Vietnamese until I was three, lucky for me. Hard language to learn later on,” he said. “It helps when you’re running around the rim. Phem the same, except he started English a little later.”

“The rim?”

“The Pacific Rim,” Tai said.

“Ah… so… well, heck, I just about used up my questions,” Virgil admitted. “That lemon thing is really bugging me. Have you seen the stories on TV, or the papers, about the guys who were murdered and left on veterans’ memorials?”

“Something about it, but we usually mostly read the financial pages.”

Phem nudged Tai, tapped his computer screen. Tai leaned over to look and said, “No way,” then turned back to Virgil.

“There’s some connection with Vietnam,” Virgil said. “One of the murdered men was going to meetings with a Vietnam vet group, and he’d talked to Sinclair, and I know nothing about Vietnam. Hell, I’ve never been much further away from here than Amarillo, Texas.”

Tai said, “ Amarillo? You ever have the chicken-fried steak at the Holiday Inn?”

“Oh, Lord, I have,” Virgil said. “That one right on Interstate 40?”

“That always has some soldiers hanging around?”

“Ah, man, that’s the one…”

They talked about the effects of the chicken-fried steak for a minute, the effects lasting, depending on which direction you were going, at least to Elk City, Oklahoma (east), or Tucumcari, New Mexico (west).

When the talk died down and he couldn’t think of any more sane questions, Virgil stood up, took out a business card, and handed it to Tai. “Well, shoot. If you have the time, ask some of your Vietnamese friends about lemons. Give me a call.”

Tai tilted his head back and forth. “Mm. I think that would be… inappropriate… for people in our position. But I’ll tell you what you could do. You could call a guy named Mr. Hao Nguyen at the Vietnamese embassy in Ottawa, and ask him. Don’t tell him you got his name from me, for Christ’s sakes.”

“Who is he?”

“The resident for the Vietnamese intelligence service,” Tai said. He stepped across to the telephone desk, picked up a small leather case, took out a business card, wrote on the back with a gold pen, and passed it to Virgil. He’d written, Hao Nguyen.

“Really? You know that sort of stuff?” Virgil asked.

“The embassy isn’t that big,” Tai said. “You go through a process of elimination, figuring out who is really doing what. Whoever’s left is the intelligence guy.”

“Really.”

Tai was easing him toward the door. “No big secret. Don’t tell him you talked to me. That would hurt. I would be interested in his reaction.” He giggled. “Really get his knickers in a bunch.”