Chapter 3 — The Journey of the Missing Bronze Drum

That night, after leaving Go Lang Uyen, Diem did not go straight home. She stopped by the Heritage Tracing Team headquarters, submitted a preliminary scene report, sent a sample of the metal dust streaks collected on the velvet pedestal for composition analysis, and then drove back to her fourth-floor apartment, still smelling of wet soil and camera oil.

She didn't turn on the big lights. There was only a desk lamp, and a worn leather notebook placed in the middle of a small area of yellow light on the wooden table top.

This notebook was received by Diem from Mr. Trac's wife exactly one month after the funeral, when she cleaned his office and found it mixed in with a stack of unprinted manuscripts. "Keep it," she said, her voice drained of tears after four weeks of crying, "he often reminds you that the student understands my handwriting the best." Diem did not open it right away. She was afraid. Not afraid of what was written in it, but afraid of the feeling of hearing his voice again, and then having to learn how to let him go a second time.

It took half a year for her to have the courage to open the first page.

Luong Viet Trac is not the type of person who writes an emotional diary. What he recorded were facts: dates, locations, abbreviations, container numbers, and sometimes an unanswered question for himself, like "why did the shipment declared as fine art ceramics weigh exactly the same as a pair of medium-sized bronze drums?" Each page is a piece of the picture that he did not have time to completely assemble before he died.

Diem turned to the last pages, where the handwriting began to become more frantic, with some passages written so hastily that he was almost unreadable, as if he was racing against time.

*Vinh Sa port. Warehouse No. 4, Eastern container yard area. The ship's arrival and departure schedule did not match the public customs declaration book three times in two months. The same shipping company is named, but the person signing the documents is different each time — it seems they rotate the names to avoid constant attention.*

*Talked to Khoat this afternoon. He agreed it was unusual but told me there wasn't enough evidence to request a search. Yes, that's not enough, according to the law. But I believe in my enough more than the enough on paper.*

*There is a young person working as a warehouse manager in yard number 4, named L., very skilled at his job, too proficient for his age. The way he dispatches the forklifts, the way he knows exactly which containers need to be "checked carefully" and which containers "don't need to be opened" — not the kind of knowledge learned after a few months of working as an employee.*

Diem stopped at that line and read it three times. The letter "L." Do not write the full name, as is the prudent habit of the investigative diary writer — never write down a full name that could become evidence against yourself if the notebook falls into the hands of someone else. Twelve years ago, she read this line without paying any attention, just one letter among hundreds of other abbreviations. Now, after just seeing the row of red symbols on the piece of paper at Go Lang Uyen, the letter "L." It seemed to glow on the yellowed page.

She took out the evidence bag containing the piece of paper, placed it next to the notebook page, and compared the handwriting. It's not the same person writing - the handwriting on the piece of paper is square and somewhat stiff, different from Mr. Trac's liberal slanted writing. But the way a slash is placed between two groups of letters, the way the number three is written with a distinctive hook at the end — that's a system of symbols, not the random handwriting of an individual. A system is passed down, shared within a network, over many years, by many different writers.

Diem closed her eyes and let the memories of twelve years ago flood back, the memories she had tried to keep at a distance over the years through work, field trips, and by never volunteering to receive any documents related to Vinh Sa port.

*

That year, she was twenty-two years old, had just graduated, and was accepted as a research assistant for a project to survey lost antiques led by Mr. Trac - an unofficial project, mostly due to his own overtime efforts, taking advantage of the name of scientific research to track down smuggling suspicions that at that time there was no specialized unit with enough manpower to pursue them to the end.

He was the type of person who could sit for hours in front of a piece of broken pottery, turning it around and around under the light, just to find the angle of the light that revealed a faint, almost invisible engraved line. He taught Diem that each pattern is a saying of the ancients, it's just that the saying needs people to be patient long enough to hear it. He also taught her something else, less poetic: that the antiquities black market operates no differently than any supply chain — there are sources, there are intermediaries, there are outputs, and each link has its own logic of profit, not just pure evil.

"There are people in the archeology industry who are so poor that they have to sell field information to brokers, just to have money to buy medicine for their children," he once told her, his voice not condemning, just thoughtful. "There are people who sincerely believe that bringing antiques abroad, into the hands of wealthy collectors, is better preserved than keeping them in moldy warehouses without funds in their home country. They are wrong, but not all of them are monsters. You have to learn to see their logic, to hope to be one step ahead of them."

She remembers a particular afternoon, less than a month from the night he died. The two teachers and students sat in his cramped office in the museum's basement, the cold white neon light shining down on a fingertip-sized piece of copper rust that he had just bought from a bottle seller, paying exactly the same price as three bowls of pho, just because his professional hunch told him that piece of rust was not ordinary. He gave Diem a magnifying glass and told her to find out for herself what he saw. She struggled for nearly an hour, and finally exclaimed when she noticed a spiral pattern that had almost disappeared under a layer of green patina — a sign of an earlier bronze casting technique than she thought. He smiled, not the smile of praise like an adult gives to a child, but the smile of a colleague who is truly happy because someone sees something beautiful with him. "There," he said, "this job won't make you rich, but it will let you see things that other people pass by all their lives without realizing it. Just keep that perspective, don't let a desk job blunt it." Diem did not know that it was one of the last afternoons she would be able to sit next to him in such a peaceful way.

The night he died, Diem was not present. She was in Hanoi, preparing a report for a conference, and he drove alone to Vinh Sa port to check a source of information he had just received in the afternoon - a source he had not had time to tell anyone, including her, his closest assistant. The next morning, people found him at the foot of wharf number 4, not far from the container yard, his body soaked in water for many hours.

The autopsy report concluded: slipping in the dark, hitting his head on a concrete wall when falling into the water, died due to drowning combined with trauma. There were no obvious signs of a fight, no witnesses, and no security cameras covering that area at the scene - a coincidence that at that time Diem was too young, too hurt, to question why the exact area he inspected was the only area without a camera.

She asked, many times, over the years that followed. The answer is always the same: the file has been closed, the conclusion has been reached, there is no basis to reopen it.

*

Diem opened her eyes and looked down at the letter "L." once more, then closed the notebook, not because she had finished reading it, but because she needed some quiet time for the pieces in her head to rearrange in a new order.

She pulled out her phone, didn't call Hai, but dialed a number she rarely used - the number of the person who used to be Mr. Trac's immediate superior, now retired, living alone in a small house in the suburbs, the only person still alive who fully understood the context of the unfinished project that year.

The bell rang three times before someone picked up the phone, their voice was sleepy but quickly regained consciousness when they heard her name.

"Diem? Calling you at this hour is probably not a funny thing."

"Uncle Khoat," she said, trying to keep her voice calm even though her hand was clutching the worn leather notebook. "I need to see you. Tomorrow, as soon as possible. A bronze drum was just stolen in Go Lang Uyen, and I found a piece of paper with symbols identical to the symbol system in Mr. Trac's notebook."

The other end of the line was silent for a long time, long enough for Diem to clearly hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in his house.

"I always thought this day would come," he said finally, his voice quiet. "I just didn't expect it to be so late."

"What do you know that I don't know?"

"There were many things I knew but didn't have enough evidence to say at that time, and now the memory of an old man nearly seventy is no longer as reliable as paperwork. But there's one thing I'm sure of: the case file that year was never destroyed, even though everyone thought it was closed. I kept a copy, stored it carefully, waiting for the day someone had the courage to ask again." He paused, then added, each word slowly as if reconsidering an old promise to himself. "When you come over tomorrow, I'll show it to you. But Diem, I'll tell you first so you can mentally prepare: there are names in there, after reading it, you won't be able to pretend you never read it."

Diem tightened her grip on the phone, looking out the dark window, where the last few drops of last night's rain were still clinging to the glass.

"I'm ready," she said. "Preparing for twelve years now."