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sound, smell, taste, and feel. Because to know when a site didn’t smell right you had to be familiar with all the pieces that fit together to make the whole.
    Nicholas understood the pressure under which Shindo had been operating. It was imperative in paranoid Vietnam to make any inquiries under cover of maximum security. Unstable political factions still vied for power with a fractured military, mountain insurgents, and ethnic vigilantes, so all foreigners were automatically suspect. But beyond that, neither Shindo nor Nicholas knew the identity or the strength of the enemy. Vincent Tinh and those in his operation may have been involved with drug smugglers, black-market munitions specialists, power-crazed Chinese mountain warlords, Yakuza—the list was endless. Still, there was one ubiquitous truth: all of these factions were exceedingly dangerous and all had spies in and around Saigon. Outnumbered and outgunned, Nicholas knew he had to step carefully lest the weight of his unknown enemy come down on him and Shindo all at once.
    “Trang,” he said now, taking a chance, “how long did you work for Vincent Tinh?”
    “Vincent Tinh?” Trang was brought up short, a stone in the stream of traffic eddying around them.
    “Yes.” Nicholas searched Trang’s face looking for duplicity, but finding something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on.
    A deafening roar filled the street as a covey of motorbikes swept past, the echoes of their exhaust thrumming off the shopfronts. A blast of rock ’n’ roll sped like a manic race driver, Mick Jagger wailing about war.
    “You worked for him, didn’t you?” Nicholas said.
    Trang swung his head so that his eyes went blank in the streetlights. “If I had, I’d be dead now.”
    By which answer Nicholas knew he had hit a raw nerve. Even if Trang hadn’t worked for him, he knew some of what had happened to Tinh and why. That made him instantly valuable to Nicholas.
    He reached out. “Just a minute, Trang—”
    But Trang pulled away, darting ever faster through the swelling throng, and Nicholas found himself sprinting after the Vietnamese. What the hell was he up to?
    Trang was hurrying southeast, toward the Kinh Ben Nghe Canal that acted more or less as the southern boundary of central Cholon. A pair of monks in saffron robes, their faces serene and observant, turned their heads as he pushed by. A gaggle of kids tried to grab at him, their outstretched arms like a forest of sea anemones. A streetwalker eyed him from behind outlandish false lashes. She looked like a Carnaby Street tart circa 1969. It appeared as if all of Saigon were caught in a weird psychedelic time warp, desperately trying to reconjure its salad days, which were, perversely, during the height of the war.
    Nicholas had nearly caught up to Trang when he thought he saw Shindo moving toward him at the periphery of the crowd. Then the image was gone, and he hurried after Trang, who slipped through the throng as easily as an eel through a coral reef. Nicholas’s anxiety increased as he recalled Shindo’s warning about this place. This was his turf, not Nicholas’s.
    He slipped past a cluster of people, sprinted across a brief clear section of street, and made a lunge for Trang. Someone was heading toward the Vietnamese from the opposite direction. Nicholas was reaching out to protect Trang when he heard a sharp report.
    At almost the same instant, the head of the man beside Trang blew outward like a cracked melon. A hail of blood, tissue, and shattered bone erupted, and Nicholas found himself prone on the ground. The smells of incense and death mingled in his nostrils. A shocked silence gripped the narrow street, followed by the first wail of a human voice, picked up and echoed by others.
    Nicholas, on his knees, sank into Akshara, spiraling downward toward kokoro, the heart of all things. He chose one of the ages-old rhythms of Tau-tau, beating upon the membrane of kokoro, creating the psychic