The Refugees(24)

On hearing of the conversation with Minh Vu from a breathless Arthur, Louis did not open the doors to any number of alternative futures and parallel universes where he was the son of the man who had saved Arthur’s life. Instead, Louis merely sighed and shrugged. He was on his knees, sorting through a new shipment of goods, the boxes shoved up against the walls of the living room and labeled Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Vera Wang. While Arthur sank into the couch, Louis got up and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I suppose it had to come out eventually, didn’t it?” he said. “I’m sorry, Arthur. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Arthur closed his eyes and massaged his temples. In addition to the corkscrew of pain in his guts, a headache was chiseling out a groove in his skull. It made sense now why Louis had always been evasive about visiting Men Vu’s grave. While Louis had attributed this to the bad blood that had run between him and his father, the real reason was that there was no blood at all.

“If you’re not Louis Vu,” said Arthur, “then who are you?”

“Who says I’m not Louis Vu?”

“You just made it up when I called you,” Arthur said. “Louis Vuitton is your idol. And Vu is a very common Vietnamese name.”

“Louis Vu is really my name,” Louis said. “And I’m Chinese.”

“Oh!” Arthur gasped. “I knew it! I knew you were Chinese!”

“But I was born in Vietnam, and I’ve never been to China.” Louis sat down beside Arthur on the couch. “I can barely speak Chinese. So what does that make me? Chinese or Vietnamese? Both? Neither?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Arthur groaned and rubbed his temples. “Why? Why did you do it?”

“Put yourself in my shoes, Arthur.” Louis leaned back and crossed his legs, the feet capped in fake Fendi wingtips. “I get a phone call asking me if I am related to another man who shares my last name. Most people in my situation would say no. But I don’t get your kind of phone call every day, and when I get it, I have to see where it takes me. So I played along. It’s how I’ve gotten ahead.”

“I want you to get your things out of my garage.” The pressure in Arthur’s head and the spike in his gut were excruciating. “Tonight.”

Louis shook his head mournfully. “I’m afraid not, Arthur.”

“What do you mean, you’re afraid not?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Arthur. This is business, not personal, okay? Otherwise, I like you a lot. We’ve had fun, haven’t we? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are not friends,” Arthur said, his voice cracking because he really had considered Louis to be a friend.

“We’re not friends?” Louis appeared genuinely hurt, his lower lip quivering. “Over something like this? Come on, Arthur!”

“Just get your things out of my garage tonight.”

“But where would I put them?” Louis’s lip stopped quivering, and an expression of gloom slowly descended on his face, dragging down the corners of his lips and eyebrows. “No, I’m afraid those things will have to stay. And please don’t think of calling the cops. It might be hard to explain why you have a garage full of fake Miu Miu and Burberry.”

“Then I’m going to take your things out of the garage myself,” Arthur cried. “I’ll take them out to the desert and leave them there.”

“If I were you, Arthur, I’d think very carefully about touching my things.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“You’ve got something on me.” Louis inspected his finger-tips. “But I’ve got something on your brother, don’t I?”

“What?”

“Come on, Arthur!” Louis’s shout startled Arthur, who had never heard Louis raise his voice or seen him lean forward, as he did now, and snap his fingers an inch from -Arthur’s face. “Wake up! Who’s your brother underpaying to clip his lawns and trim his hedges?”

The weight of Arthur’s na?veté pressed him deeper into the couch as he recalled Rubén, Gustavo, Vicente, Alberto, and all those other employees of Arellano & Sons of whom his brother asked no questions, so long as they produced Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, either real or faked well enough to be mistaken for real. Those phantom identities were easy to obtain, as Louis had shown Arthur one day, fanning out on the coffee table five driver’s licenses, each one with Louis’s picture but a different name. Arthur buried his face in his hands as he imagined a raid on Arellano & Sons, leading to arrests and deportations, with disgrace for Martín and defamation of Big Art’s good name.

“I think it’s time for you to go home, Arthur,” Louis said, leaning back into his corner of the couch. His voice was tired, and his face was pale. “Why don’t you just go home?”

The light in the bedroom was on when Arthur pulled into the driveway, although the rest of the house was dark. He was afraid of what Norma would say, so he bought some time by opening the garage door, in case the miracle he had prayed for on the drive home had actually happened. It hadn’t. The boxes were still there, flaxen in the moonlight and stacked to the ceiling and the walls, right up to the edge of the driveway. Louis had conquered every square foot of storage for his fountain pens with their plastic barrels, his sunglasses without ultraviolet protection, his watches that kept perfect time for a day, his designer jackets without linings, his pants with hems that unraveled easily, his discs of pirated movies filmed surreptitiously in theaters, his reproductions of Microsoft software so perfect as to come with the bugs infesting the genuine item, his pseudopills that might or might not help, might or might not harm—a garage crammed with things fashioned by people whom he would never know but to whom Arthur felt bound in some way, especially when he imagined the obscure places from where they might hail.