“Lau qua, Cong Ly, lau qua! Maybe one month already! Where have you been for so long?”

“Da, bi thuong, phai di nha thuong My,” he said cockily, for in this world wounds were to be bragged about. Wounded. American hospital. It might have been the war itself as he pulled up his shirt and flashed his newest scar. “A gunfight in Bangkok.”

“A gunfight!” They laughed and pointed and gawked, no strangers to wounds and scars. “Rat tiec! But you look strong now, so that is good!”

It struck him at that moment that he had now known these striving, uncomplaining men for more than five years. How could that be? he thought. Where had those years gone, and what had they gained him other than a bone over here and a friend over there? And then he smiled, secretly satisfied with that summation. Bones that were dug up and given an honored burial, bringing solace to forever-grieving relatives. Friends who had given him a strange but powerful sense of peace, so that he might finally bury the furious anger that had sent him out of orbit, into his own space journey for so long.

Or maybe he was just happy to be back.

They surrounded him in their worn clothes and old baseball caps, smiling through wrinkling faces, piercing eyes, and broken teeth, teasing and chattering as they touched his newest scar and celebrated his return. Dzung was not among them at that moment, but Condley was not surprised. It was not yet noon, and Dzung often worked late into the night.

It was as if all of them were shouting to him at once, elbowing each other and smiling with their peculiarly Vietnamese mix of flattery and shrewd ambition. “Hey, you take me, Cong Ly, this time you take me!”

“Maybe someday,” he laughed. “Each one of you, someday!” He spoke to all of them, as a group. It was the same message and he had no need to single out one driver. “You tell Dzung I’m back in Sai Gon, okay? Tell him to come to the Vien Dong Hotel.”

Luong, the driver who had taken Hanson Muir to District Four, stepped forward, hiding secret thoughts behind a wickedly careful smile. “Oh, Cong Ly. Dzung, he don’t work here anymore. So you take me now?”

“Where is he?”

Luong ceased his pidgin English, switching to Vietnamese. “They took him off the street one day and brought him to Xuan Loc Prison,” said Luong as the others nodded. “They interrogated him for many days. He was afraid to tell us everything, because if he speaks too much they will come and put him back in jail. But much of the questioning was about you, Cong Ly. They wanted to know everything about you. Where you go, what you think, who you see. But Dzung, he is your good friend. And he convinced them that you are not a dangerous man, I think.”