Without answering, he picked up a machete that one slaughterhouse worker had abandoned in the dirt when the gunfight broke out. Then he slowly climbed over the slaughter pen wall and walked toward the bodies that littered the dust-filled street.

“Head shots,” he muttered, moving from one body to another and seeing the results of Dzung’s few seconds of work. “Look at that! The fucking guy was a pro.”

The body of the Caucasian man was lying facedown in the road. Three sets of truck tracks had squashed it from hips to ankles. Condley stood over it for a moment, taking deep breaths to control his seething fury. Then he grabbed it at the shoulders, turning it over so that he could see Deville’s face. Dzung’s bullet had exited just below the left eye, but other than that small hole, the face was smooth and oddly unlined. Life after Viet Nam had apparently treated Mr. Deville pretty well, despite his venal journeys.

“Hello, Salt,” he finally managed to say. “Marines are like elephants. We forget nothing.” And then he took off the dead man’s left hand with one smashing blow of the machete.

He dropped the machete and picked up the hand by its thumb, a slick angry nausea growing within him. Inside the makeshift house just behind the man’s carcass he found an old green knapsack. He did not know it, but he had just put Theodore Deville’s hand into the pack that Dzung had left behind.

Muir had managed to stand and was leaning against the wall of the slaughter pen, testing his leg. He watched with amazed eyes as Condley walked back across the street and dropped the knapsack on the wall. And then he spoke quietly, in the careful tones of a nervously empathetic counselor.

“And just what compelled you to do that, Brandon?”

“I thought you’d want a set of fingerprints.”

“That’s very kind, actually.” Muir looked down the dirt path toward the river. “Who was that man?”

“He looked Vietnamese,” said Condley.

“Where did he possibly come from?”

“I have no idea, Professor. But the boy could shoot.”

Manh had prepared him well. Dzung jogged easily down the dirt path, familiar with its bumps and contours from the afternoon’s visit. At the riverbank he heaved the pistol with all his might into the muddy river. No one would ever find it in the turgid waters and the hog-drenched mud. Then he turned upriver, measuring his steps until he had gone as close to a hundred meters as he could estimate. At that point, as an afterthought, he removed his black pajamas, wadding them into a tight ball and then wading into the river, placing them underwater inside a thick bed of water hyacinths so that they would not float downstream. He then made his way uphill along another dirt trail until he reached the road.