Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  Nah walked into his office about eight in the evening of the 5th of July dressed in a tight black dress, high-heels and black nylons. The dress fit her like a body glove that a rock star might wear in a video. Full lips, intense eyes, and with one of those smiles that could pierce the Comfort Zone ice where Calvino had found sanctuary.

  “I was just thinking of Saigon,” said Calvino, doing a double take, taking her in from head to toe. “And in comes a Viet Cong.”

  She blushed. “You don’t like?”

  Calvino smiled. “What’s not to like? Saigon would have fallen ten years earlier if you had walked in dressed like that.”

  “Pahk wan,” she said. Sweet mouth.

  She sat down in the chair, crossed her legs, and removed two Thai-English books from her briefcase and laid them on Calvino’s desk. One was for him and the other was for her. She flipped through the teacher ’s guidebook, her face still flushed red, her concentration a little off. Calvino closed his file and leaned back in his chair. She was some kind of woman.

  Nah was in the twilight of her late twenties, single, university educated and from a conservative Chinese-Thai family who worshipped ancestors and played the stock market. She had always been very careful to dress in a stylish, yet non-suggestive, office outfit for his language lessons. Pure silk outfits with padded shoulders and imported Italian shoes. For the first month of instruction in Thai, Nah had insisted that Ratana, Calvino’s secretary, stay inside the office. Her request was standard operating procedure for a riap roi, or respectable Thai woman who had been taught to avoid being alone in the presence of a man. When the man was a farang, the alarm bells didn’t just ring, they exploded.

  “You okay?” asked Calvino. From the way she set her jaw, she looked distracted, deep inside herself, carried away on some ribbon of thought.

  She didn’t answer at first, pretending she was looking for the right page in the book. Then she looked up, biting her lower lip. “I forgot where we left off.”

  “I’ve always wanted to learn how to say that in Thai,” he said. “Give me a minute please.”

  His mind drifted as she stared at the book. On the other hand, Harry might have thought he had already instructed him to fly to Saigon, thought Calvino. After all, they had discussed a fee and the number of days. Harry had even thrown in a one-day paid vacation. So what did he want? A written contract, Calvino was thinking.

  She was playing it a little on the dangerous side but not so much that she couldn’t handle it if someone raised a question. Nah knew some of her friends were asking themselves, “Has that private eye ever tried to hit on you? Suck you into the Zone?”

  The question never passed between their lips. It got stuck deep inside their minds, but when you are Thai, you can read that dead space between thought, desire, intention and the air space between them crackles with information. But no Thai would ever ask such a direct question.

  Nah reported that Vincent Calvino was a well-behaved student with an interest in the Thai language. And the listener danced around that image like someone around a camp fire trying to see what was cooking inside the pot lost in the flames.

  “Your minute’s up,” said Calvino. “After all, I am paying by the hour.”

  “I think we stay to the book.”

  “How to go to the post office, how to go to the train station stuff,” said Calvino.

  “It’s the way everyone learns Thai,” she said.

  “We were making progress on what people really want to know,” said Calvino.

  Her Thai nickname, Nah, translated into English as “face,” and sometimes during the first two weeks of lessons she would blush red and Calvino would think how her name had given the right hint of the kind of person that she would grow up to be. Kind, patient, sincere, respectful, and painfully shy at any reference to sex. That was until Ratana no longer was in the office. Gradually she relaxed and let her hair down. Two months into the lessons, Calvino noticed that nothing much bothered her, she taught him some of the raunchy words in Thai. She liked the freedom to say whatever she wanted. There were no witnesses; there were no rules which applied inside Calvino’s office during the length of the lesson. Calvino allowed her to rebel, didn’t judge her, didn’t criticize her. For a few weeks the relationship had started the long march which looked like it might take them beyond the invisible boundary between student and teacher. It was never clear where it was going, but Nah made it crystal clear that she was in control. It was her call to make. So, when this shy product of a Sino-Thai family who had spent her life under virtual house arrest walked into his office dressed to kill, Calvino thought she had reached some kind of decision. Taking a farang private eye as a student had been another in a series of small acts of personal rebellion. Nah, on this night, looked like a revolutionary ready to storm the barricades.

  “What’s the Thai word for train station?”

  “I never take trains. Ask me something else.”

  “For airport.”

  “Airport,” he said. “That’s English.”

  Her dress rode up to her thigh.

  “Are you going to a party?” asked Calvino.

  “You think I look evil?” she asked.

  He smiled, wondering how she had picked that English word.

  “What’s wrong with a little evil between teacher and student?”

  That made three questions in a row. Calvino’s law was that three consecutive questions about liking a woman’s sexy dress is not about the dress but about who is going to make the first move. Nah was looking for someone to help her break down a family prison wall. But there was something more than this working in her mind. Like romance. Chances were that Nah was a virgin and, the way he saw it, she was offering the one thing she had been taught her whole life was the most valuable thing a woman possessed. This was the first sound of confusion and frustration which would later be amplified into an emotional thunderstorm. But to be warned was to stay dry.

  “Tell you what, after the lesson, why don’t we go out for dinner to celebrate the transformation of the new Nah?”

  That seemed to shut off the steam coming out of his ears. She leaned back in her chair, looked over at his .38 Police Special inside the leather holster looped over the back of his chair. She didn’t look all that happy. Like a boxer who had thrown his best punch at the opponent and the guy takes it smack in the middle of the face and doesn’t even blink.

  “Dai sia, say it,” she said.

  Calvino sat in his office, head back, eyes focused on a small house lizard which hung upside down on the ceiling eating mosquitoes. A small tongue flicked.

  “Khun Vincent, if you don’t pay attention, then you will never learn to speak Thai,” she scolded, her eyes slowly moving up to the spot where he was looking. She let out a heavy sigh and started to get up from her chair.

  “Whoah, it’s coming to me in a flash, yeah, I’ve got it. Dai sia.”

  “The tone’s wrong,” she said, repeating the phrase with the right tone.

  “Tone, tone. It’s like taking a music lesson. I can never hear the tone.”

  “But it’s so easy, if only you would try.” He tried and failed again.

  “Okay, maybe it would help if you told me what Dai sia means.”

  She clapped her hands together. “That was perfect. And you weren’t even trying.”

  It was what farang called a tonal accident, like a monkey hitting the middle C note with its tail.

  “You think it would help if I thought learning the tones was like love making? Don’t think too much. Just let it happen?”

  Her eyes looked away and she shook her head.

  “Dai sia, Dai sia, Dai sia. You know, if you say that more than three times, you could go crazy,” said Calvino.

  “I think you have said this many times,” said Nah. That was an out of character false note; because one of the five rules to be strictly followed in order to survive in Thailand was never under any circumstances, criticize someone to their face.
That was what the back was made for.

  “Meaning, you think I am crazy?”

  “Let me tell you the meaning of Dai sia. It means win and lose. Winner and loser. With sex, the man always wins and the woman always loses.”

  She had said the “S” word without any prompting but, again, in a political rather than erotic context. This time she did not blush.

  “Dai sia, I like that, Nah.”

  “And if you turn the word order around then you have sia dai. Which means, what a waste, what a sorrow. This is life. A man is always the winner and the woman is, well, sorrowful. I think it is true. Do you, Khun Vincent?”

  The phone rang and Calvino reached over to pick it up. His hand hovered over the receiver. He was thinking it was after office hours. Let the phone ring. And he was looking at her breasts under the revealing glove thing she wore.

  “So sex will turn a woman into a loser?”

  She looked at the phone.

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

  He picked up the receiver. “I’m in the middle of a Thai lesson,” he said, without waiting to find out who was on the other end.

  It was Pratt. “You had better turn on CNN,” he told Calvino.

  “Pratt, I’m learning Thai.”

  “Trust me, Vincent.”

  “My Thai teacher is going to murder me. And because I am a farang, your department won’t even give her a ticket. There will be insufficient evidence that I’m dead,” said Calvino, looking across his desk at Nah.

  She liked the word murder. It made her smile. What kind of smile he couldn’t quite decide, but the grin probably had something to with the kind of revenge that was packaged in phrases like Dai sia and sia dai. He pointed a remote control at a television set in the corner. There was a map of Vietnam and, inserted in a box in the left hand corner, was the photograph of a gray-haired reporter with loose skin, wrinkles flaring out from the corner of his eyes and a lipless smile. A high mileage face. In the photograph, the veteran reporter had a tiny microphone clipped to his safari shirt. The reporter was talking by phone to the anchor. The transmission made that crackly noise like the voice was being filtered through a bad line.

  “Vietnamese authorities have been seriously embarrassed by a grenade attack about three hours ago in the heart of Saigon. The attack comes three months after the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The 30th of April came and went relatively quietly. How the Vietnamese Government will react is difficult to say. We have tried to speak with local authorities but, so far, none have been available. It is all very confused here on the ground, Ted.”

  Then the screen was filled with the news anchor, a woman in an austere dress and glasses, looking like a sixth grade teacher listening to the report of a fairly dull student.

  “Thank you, John,” she said in an English accent. “Please stand by in Ho Chi Minh City. Our latest report is that a young American named Drew Markle from Los Angeles, California, has been killed in a grenade attack. And five Vietnamese civilians were injured. The murder of the American in Saigon has caused an international uproar. His murder has been condemned by two members of congress who have called on the president to cancel the normalization of US relations with Vietnam. Vietnamese authorities have not made any arrests. We have Julia Read at the State Department. Julia, what are officials at the State Department telling you about this tragic death?”

  Julia Read smiled into the camera. “One theory is that Markle was not a target but got in the way of a gangland type killing.”

  The anchor appeared on the screen again.

  “John, now that our relationship with Vietnam has been normalized, is this incident going to set things back between Hanoi and Washington?”

  “Not if it is an isolated incident. There have been Germans killed in the state of Florida. No one is seriously suggesting that Bonn and Washington have damaged their relationship as a result. I think it very much depends on who was involved. If it turns out to be that Markle was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, then I doubt if there will be much political fallout. Some groups and individuals might try to gain some political mileage out of this, but I don’t think they will get very far. Domestic crime is an issue in most places and Vietnam is no exception. It is likely they will cite the Oklahoma City bombing to show that Americans have their own home-grown terrorists.”

  “Sia dai,” said Calvino into the phone. He pushed the off button on the remote control. And he was thinking, “Harry Markle hasn’t called today and he’s sitting home feeling pretty bad right now.”

  He looked up at Nah.

  “You have a problem?”

  He dialed Harry Markle’s number but the line was busy.

  “I’ve got a problem. About dinner...”

  “You changed your mind.” There was a sadness in her voice, the kind that comes from rejection.

  “Something’s happened in Saigon, Nah.”

  “I don’t understand, Khun Vincent.”

  He looked at her sitting across from his desk wearing her designer Viet Cong dress, looking dressed to kill. All he could think about was why someone would have killed Harry Markle’s younger brother in Saigon.

  “I have to cancel dinner,” he said. “I’m sorry about that, Nah. I wish...”

  “It’s better not to wish,” she said. “You got a point.”

  Her expression didn’t change. She simply got up and walked out of his office, slamming the door behind her. She had her kind of hurt, he thought. Harry had another, and the chain of hurt went round and round like bad weather circulating around the globe, touching everyone and everything in a haze of gloom. He tried phoning Harry for another thirty minutes before he decided that Markle had probably taken his phone off the hook.

  He dialed Pratt’s number. Pratt picked up after the first ring. “I’m going out to Harry Markle’s house,” said Calvino.

  “Let me know if there is anything I can do,” Pratt said.

  “By the way, what happened to you at the picnic yesterday?” “Business,” said Pratt.

  ******

  HARRY Markle’s family lived in a four-story shophouse on one of the nondescript sois behind the Victory Monument. Noi’s New Age pharmacy was on the ground floor. They lived a variation of Chinese shophouse style: family business on the ground floor, family living quarters on the two floors above. On the top floor, Harry had enough computer and telecommunications equipment to rival the nerve centre of a major company. It was his space to jack in, and drop out. Wedged between the high-tech electronics on the top and the high-tech drugs on the bottom, the gravity of family hovered in cyberspace between machines and drugs.

  When Calvino arrived at the shophouse he found the metal shutter had been pulled down to the pavement. Nearby, a beggar with stumps for feet sat in the dark; old, bloody rags wrapped around the stumps, the beggar, with no nose and a caved-in face—the withered mask could have housed either a man or a woman— cradled a baby. The child was less than a year old. The baby looked listless, eyes glazed over, a crust of snot around the nostrils. Living in Asia for years, Calvino had learned the trick of looking through, over or under beggars. He had stopped seeing them on some level. They became like abandoned furniture on a Manhattan street, castaways stranded in a walkway, with no use, no value. This time he saw the beggar and thought this person was a marker of suffering, the kind of suffering Calvino knew was going on inside Markle’s shophouse. He pulled out his wallet and put a hundred-baht note in the plastic cup near the child. As he got closer, he saw the woman was nursing the baby. She pulled the baby from her breast, laid it on the pavement, raised her hands in a wai and fell down at his feet as if to kiss the ground. The odds were three to five that some local gangster would take the money away from her by the end of the night. It didn’t matter, thought Calvino. You did what you could and hoped for the best. Otherwise the Zone ice covered your soul, freezing it into a solid block, nothing getting in, nothing getting out and that was the same as being dead.r />
  Calvino took a step forward, turned right and then rang the outside buzzer which had been placed at eye-level on the gate to Markle’s shophouse. He waited and, not long after ringing the buzzer, Calvino heard the distant sound of footsteps running down stairs, and the sound of bare feet jogging along the corridor just inside the main door. Then the metal gate came up and Calvino found himself staring at Harry’s teenage daughter who stood in the door with her eyes puffy and red from crying. Her face was twisted with grief and she pulled a wadded tissue from a pocket and blew her nose.

  Calvino said, “It’s Vincent Calvino.”

  “Uncle Vincent,” she said, adjusting her eyes to the dark.

  She waited a moment, then pulled up the metal shutter. With her eyes all swollen and red from crying, she looked much different. Like a small child who had been disciplined. She started to blubber, covered her mouth with one hand, and gestured for him to come inside and up the stairs.

  “I know about your uncle. I am sorry.”

  “It’s just. Just I never got to meet him. I never saw him. Only a picture.”

  They walked up the stairs together. What was he going to say? How do you give comfort to a kid who had lost something she never knew? The answer is that you can’t, he thought. Harry Markle was in the living room with a bottle of Kloster beer in his hand and a dozen empty bottles at his feet on the floor.

  “Vinee, sit down. You wanna beer? Get him a beer. We are having, shall I say, some family shit going down.”

  “I saw the television report.”

  “Fuck T V. Fuck the press. Those bastards came to Vietnam before. They never gave a rat’s ass about anything or anyone. All they wanted were close-ups of bodies. They called that news then. TV people invented body counts. That’s a fact. Distort, make up, fuck up, whatever makes you and the reviewers happy. It all comes out the same. All fucked up.”