Chapter 14 — The Journey of the Missing Bronze Drum

That night, Diem did not return home immediately. She asked Hai to drive her to the Heritage Tracing Team headquarters, where she could use the small conference room to spread out all the documents on the table—time sheets, old autopsy records, the current Vinh Sa port terminal diagram, and Mr. Trac's worn leather notebook—trying to assemble them into a logically acceptable sequence.

"We need to reconstruct the hypothesis," she told Hai, pinning each piece of paper to the whiteboard in chronological order. "Not to officially conclude, just to know what kind of evidence I'm looking for next."

Hai nodded, pulled out a chair and sat opposite the board, holding a marker ready to take notes.

"Start with what we're sure of," Diem said. "That afternoon, my teacher received a source of information, urgent enough that he decided to drive down to the port that night without informing any of his colleagues, including me, his closest assistant. What that source is, we don't know, but based on the last note in his notebook, it is highly likely related to the unusual train schedule at yard No. 4."

"Next," Hai said, writing on the board, "he arrived at the port, entered yard number 4, right in the hidden corner between the two camera coverage areas. This is the key point: either he happened to choose that hidden corner, a low possibility because he was not familiar with the port's internal security arrangements; or someone had arranged to meet him at that exact spot, or led him there under some other reason."

"Vu Bach Long, then a young warehouse manager, was present at the port that night," Diem continued, "but when he left his shift, he did not record the exact time, just wrote 'personal business'. If he was the teacher I arranged to meet, or the teacher I happened to encounter while inspecting the area in question, then that 'private business' may have been a meeting that was not as simple as the handwritten line shows."

Diem pasted a photo of the old harbor on the board, circling the water's edge near wharf 4. "The autopsy report said he slipped, hit his head on a concrete wall, and died from drowning and trauma. There were no clear signs of a fight recorded. But 'no clear signs of a fight' does not mean 'no fight happened'. A sudden push, a fist struggling in the dark, is enough for a person to believe." The teenager lost his balance and fell into cold water, hitting his head on a concrete wall while struggling — all of which could have happened without leaving obvious bruises on the body, especially if the body had been in the water for many hours before being recovered, obscuring the marks that were not so obvious.

Hai wrote quickly on the board, his voice lowering with each word. "So our hypothesis is: an encounter, possibly not intended to cause murder, led to a fight, leading to the unintended deaths of both parties. Then, either Long himself, or someone higher up than him at that time, took advantage of the camera's hidden angle to stage the scene as a simple accident."

Diem flipped through the old crime scene photos in file 48A, looking for photos of the water edge area where the body was found. She placed them next to a photo of the same area that she and Hai had just taken a few days ago, comparing every small detail.

“Look here,” she said, pointing to a low concrete structure near the water's edge in both photos. "Twelve years ago, this structure was there, used to anchor the cargo winch cables. If someone were pushed or lost their balance from their normal standing position on the wharf, the natural trajectory of the fall would cause the head to strike this very structure before hitting the water — completely consistent with the description of 'head injury' in the autopsy report, but not necessarily meaning that the injury could only have been caused by an accidental slip."

"A good defense lawyer will argue that the injury could have completely occurred due to a natural slip and fall, without any intervention from others," Hai said, playing the role of a critic to test the strength of the hypothesis. "We need something beyond pure physical reasoning."

"I know," Diem admitted. "That's why I still need Vu Bach Long to admit it himself, or at least a third witness who was present near this area that night but has never been interviewed, because then no one thinks it is necessary to expand the scope of the investigation beyond the team directly working at yard No. 4."

She turned to another page in the file, a list of all the staff on duty that night throughout the port, not just yard number 4. "Uncle Khoat has noted down the names of a few stevedores working at yard number 3, next to the wall of yard number 4. If any of them are still alive and can remember anything unusual that night, even if it's just a sound, a glimpse of a person, that could be the witness we need."

"I'll have someone follow this list," Hai said, taking a photo of the page with his phone. "Twelve years is a long time. Many people may have moved away, changed careers, or no longer remember clearly. But we have nothing to lose by trying."

Diem nodded, then sat quietly looking at the whiteboard for a long time, with words, arrows, and photos pasted on top of each other like a mosaic full of cracks. She thought of the afternoon when Mr. Trac taught her to see the spiral patterns hidden under the bronze patina, of his saying about how each pattern was a story that needed people to be patient long enough to hear it.

"Perhaps," she said, her voice quiet, "even my teacher's death is a kind of pattern that needs to be read properly. Not by looking at it directly, but by looking at everything around it—the hidden camera angle, the flawed timesheet, a suspicious prospecting call, a stream of money flowing through three layers of intermediaries. The individual details tell nothing for sure, but taken together, they tell a story that twelve years ago no one had the patience to listen fully."

Hai looked at her, there was a quiet respect in his eyes, an emotion that did not need to be expressed in words between two colleagues who had been through enough together to understand each other without needing a long explanation.

"So now let's read the next chapter of that pattern," he said, standing up and gathering his documents. "Tomorrow, we return to the port, this time with a specific target: the actual container number."

Diem turned off the meeting room lit, but before locking the door, she looked back at the whiteboard one last time in the dim darkness, where the red ink lines still appeared dimly under the hallway light shining in through the glass door. Twelve years, she thought, finally no longer a silent void. It had begun to have a shape, a name, a specific direction to continue.

"That's the hardest part to prove," Diem said, sitting down, suddenly feeling exhausted. "If it was just an unintentional altercation, without the intention to kill from the beginning, then legally, this will never become a murder case that can be prosecuted with the harshest penalty, even if we prove that this entire sequence is correct. At most, this could be the crime of concealing the scene, making false statements, or in the best case scenario, manslaughter."

"Does that discourage you?" Hai asked, his voice softer.

Diem looked up at the whiteboard, where each piece of hypothesis was connected by red ink lines, forming an almost complete shape of a truth that had been buried for too long.

"No," she said, after a long silence. "I used to think what I needed was a harsh sentence for someone, a punishment commensurate with the loss I suffered for twelve years. But sitting here, looking at this board, I realized what I really needed was not a punishment. The truth. To know exactly what happened to my teacher that night, instead of having to live forever with an unanswered question mark."

Hai was silent for a moment, then put down his pen, sat down in the chair next to her, did not say anything more right away, just let that silence exist between the two of them as a silent companionship.

"We'll find out," he said finally, his voice firm. "It may not be enough to put Vu Bach Long on trial for the most serious crime related to your teacher's death. But if we catch him guilty of smuggling antiques red-handed this time, with enough irrefutable evidence, at least we have the legal leverage to force him to confess everything that happened twelve years ago, even if the sentence for the old crime is no longer as severe as you want."

Diem nodded, stood up, looked at the whiteboard one last time before turning off the meeting room lights. "So we need to focus all our efforts on only one thing at hand: finding the real container number, the container carrying the bronze drum, before it leaves Vinh Sa port forever."