The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
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Indonesia, a package of kopi luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. We had been inspired by one of the Boss’s henchmen, who had approached us the day before our departure with three packages of kopi luwak as gifts for his patron. The Boss loves this coffee, the henchman said. His quivering nose, scraggly whiskers, and black pupils made him resemble the weasellike creature on the packages, or so I had thought at the time. Boss asked for it special, the henchman said. Bon and I scraped together our money at the airport and bought the fourth package of kopi luwak my aunt now held, choosing the same brand. When I explained that the luwak, the civet cat, ate the raw beans and excreted them, its intestines supposedly fermenting the beans in a gastronomic way, she burst out laughing, which rather hurt. Kopi luwak was very expensive, especially for refugees like us, and if there was anything that the French should love, it should have been civet-percolated coffee. Given their gastronomic peculiarities for eating brains, guts, snails, and the like, the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.
Oh, the poor farmer! she said, wrinkling her nose. What a way to make a living. But aware now of her faux pas, she quickly added, I’m sure this is delicious. Tomorrow morning I’ll brew us a cup—or at least, I’ll make one for you and me.
She nodded toward me, as by tomorrow morning, Bon should be with the Boss. Sober in the morning light, Bon made no mention of the devil that had divided them, a sign that the City of Light might already have enlightened him just a touch. Neither did she, instead offering directions to the metro station Voltaire, a block away, from where we made our way to the 13th arrondissement. This was the Asiatic Quarter, or Little Asia, of which we had heard many rumors and tales in the refugee camp.
Stop crying, Bon said. My God, you’re more emotional than a woman.
I could not help myself. These faces! The people around us reminded me of home. There were a good number of them, but nowhere near as many as one would find in the Chinatowns of San Francisco or Los Angeles, where almost everyone was Asian. But as I soon came to learn, more than a handful of people who were not white made the French nervous. Hence, Little Asia offered a notable if not overwhelming number of Asian faces, most of them ugly or unremarkable, but nevertheless reassuring to me. The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.
I wiped the tears from my eyes, the better to see our customs and practices, which might have been out of place here but nevertheless raised the temperature of our hearts. I speak of the shuffle that Asians preferred to longer steps, and how the men typically walked ahead of their long-suffering women, who carried all the shopping bags, and how one of these same examples of chivalry cleared his nose by closing one nostril with a finger and forcibly ejecting its contents through the other, the missile narrowly missing my two feet by a foot or two. Disgusting, perhaps, but easily washed away by the rain, which is more than can be said for a balled-up tissue.
Our destination was an import-export store that announced its intentions in French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, its services including the dispatch to our homeland of parcels, letters, and telegrams, which is to say the delivery of hope to a starving country. The clerk looked at us from where he was sitting on a stool behind the counter and grunted by way of greeting. I told him I was looking for the Boss.
He’s not in, the clerk said, just as the henchman told us he would say.
We’re the ones from Pulau Galang, Bon replied. He’s expecting us.
The clerk grunted again, eased himself off his stool with hemorrhoidal care, and disappeared down an aisle. A minute later he reappeared and said, He’s waiting for you.
Behind the counter, down an aisle, and through a door was the Boss’s office, scented with lavender air freshener, decked in linoleum, and adorned with pinup calendars featuring nubile Hong Kong models in exuberant poses and a wooden clock whose type I had seen before in the Los Angeles restaurant of my old commander of the Special Branch, the General, the man I had betrayed and who betrayed me in return. Admittedly I had fallen in love with his daughter, but who wouldn’t fall in love with Lana? I still longed for her the way we refugees longed for our homeland, which was the shape into which the clock was carved. Now our homeland was irrevocably altered, and so was the Boss. We almost did not recognize him when he stood up from behind his steel desk. In the refugee camp, he had been as emaciated and ragged as everyone else, hair shoddy, his one shirt stained brown under the pits and between the shoulder blades, his only footwear a pair of thin flip-flops.
Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of Homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove. In our homeland, he had owned considerable interests in rice, soda pop, and petrochemicals, not to mention certain black-market commodities. After the revolution, the communists had relieved him of his excessive wealth, but these overeager plastic surgeons had sucked away too much fat from this cat. Threatened with death by starvation, he had fled here, needing only one year to become a businessman again and reassume the padded appearance of affluent humanity.
So, he said. You brought the goods.
We commenced our masculine social grooming ritual by embracing and slapping each other on the back, followed by Bon and myself assuming the position of the socially inferior simians by offering the alpha male our tribute: the three packages of kopi luwak. Then the fun began, which involved smoking French cigarettes and drinking Rémy Martin VSOP from snifters that fit in our hands like the most perfectly shaped breasts. For the last couple of years, I had drunk nothing more refined than moonshine rice whiskey, which could blind a man, and the reunion of my tongue with one of its truest loves, cognac, made me weepy. The Boss said nothing. He, like Bon, had seen me cry many times in the refugee camp. While some of the others had suffered from malaria, I had been shaken by unexpected bouts of blubbering, a fever from which I still had not fully recovered.
When my tongue had recovered from contact with the voluptuous copper body of the cognac, I sniffed and said that I had never taken him for the type to appreciate coffee brewed from the beans defecated by a civet. He gave his best imitation of a smile, picked up a letter opener, slit open one of the packages, and shook out a gleaming brown bean onto his palm, where it glistened under the desk lamp.
I don’t drink coffee, he said. Tea, yeah, but coffee’s too strong.
We looked at the poor bean, the tip of the letter opener pressed against its belly. The Boss rolled the bean with his fingers until it ended up between his thumb and index, and then scraped it gently with the blade. The brown flaked off, revealing whiteness underneath.
It’s just vegetable dye, he said. Won’t hurt you, even when you snort it.
He opened the second bag, shook out another bean, and scratched off a portion of the coloring again to reveal the whiteness beneath.
Got to check the product, he said. Can’t always trust the henchmen. Matter of fact, rule of thumb: Never trust the henchmen.
He opened a drawer and casually took out a hammer, as if hammers were always to be found in drawers, and gently tapped the bean until it crumbled into a fine powder. He dabbed a finger in the white powder, tinged with the brown coloring, and licked it. The brief glimpse of his pink tongue made my big toe twitch.
Sniffing’s the best test. But I got people for that. Or you could do it. Want a try?
We shook our heads. He offered another facsimile of a smile and said, Good boys. This is a great remedy, but you don’t want to need the cure.
Then he slit open the third bag, shook out another bean, laid it on the desk, and tapped it with the hammer—once, twice, a third time. The bean did not crumble. He frowned and tapped it again a little harder. Then he smashed the bean with a blow that made the desk lamp jump in surprise, and when he lifted the head of the hammer from the table, we saw not fine white powder but a circle of debris, brown to the core.
Shit, Bon muttered.
No, coffee, the Boss said, gently laying the hammer down. He reclined in his chair, the corners of his lips crinkling just a little, an amused auditor