Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Learn who killed Wang? Yeah, as easy as calling a Chinese take-out in Manhattan,” thought Calvino. Asia was a learning experience where the lesson kept shifting and the only goal post was power which, like an oasis against the noonday sky, shimmered, dissolved and reappeared in the middle of the night as something with fangs an inch from the neck.

  Pratt could muster a Shakespeare quote at the drop of a foreign body. This time Pratt’s inspiration came from the sight of a Chinese man who had two bullet holes in his chest.

  Mark Wang’s murder could not have come at a worse time. The local English language dailies were running reports about a police gang working out of the airport, kidnapping and murdering wealthy businessmen. These guys had made a business out of murder, privatized the killing and made a handsome profit. More cops had been caught killing fake cops deep in the Comfort Zone. Chaos, violence, and death. That was the view from Hong Kong. What did they know about the nature of ice? Not that it mattered. The Chinese in Hong Kong drove straight to the conclusion that Mark Wang had been killed by the cops and the higher-ups were going to protect their own. Not to mention that Thais were implicated in a coup in Cambodia. In this land of strange alliances and secret pacts, anything was possible. The Wang family wanted satisfaction. It was no different than the Mafia in Brooklyn where Calvino had grown up. The code was the same: you held your turf and revenged your own. The godfather in Hong Kong was unimpressed that the contents of Mark Wang’s wallet were untouched, and that his personal jewelry and other valuables remained intact.

  The Thai police neglected to mention that Wang’s laptop computer had been tampered with; whatever Mark had stored on the hard disk inside the computer had been worth enough to have him whacked. Comfort Zone forces didn’t whack people for data stored on a hard disk. It was cultural factor difficult for a Thai to translate to non-Thai Chinese. The Hong Kong family demanded revenge, fair enough, it was their right under the circumstances, and no one was going to stand in their way, but the only problem was serving up the killer. They didn’t want to hear that the Thai police didn’t know. They knew how to squeeze hard and before they were finished, they called in chits until half the police had blue balls from all the squeezing that was going on. Blue balls for the Department, yeah. But the police were only part of the overall picture. These Hong Kong guys were powerful enough to cause a black eye and a bloody nose to the image of the Land of Smiles. One rule above all rules was not to tarnish the image.

  “I didn’t ask for the job,” said Pratt.

  “But you didn’t tell them that,” said Calvino.

  A mosquito hit the blue electric light and made a zap sound, a little flash, the instant where life passed into death.

  He looked over at Calvino.

  “You’re Thai and can’t say no even though you know in your gut that what they want is something you will be lucky as hell to deliver and live to tell your wife and kids,” said Calvino.

  “They said that it is up to me,” said Pratt.

  “How is it that, when push comes to shove, it is always a ‘they’ who push you around with the Thai expression: it’s up to you?”

  “In Thailand you can always push someone much more with

  an eyebrow than with a gun,” said Pratt.

  “I didn’t see any eyebrow burns on Wang’s body.”

  “He was a foreigner. Eyebrows never work with farang.”

  “Or Hong Kong Chinese.”

  That was how an order was issued to servants in Thailand: an indirect, sideways half-command filled with ancient Zenlike open- ended interpretations, casting out the possibility of more than one right answer, of more than one right way to save face. Sometimes there was no answer at all. To act or not to act would have had equal value. Yet that old world was nearly dead in Bangkok and in the one which took its place the servant had no choice but to act and to find the one answer. Pratt was forced to choose his path and the sadness came from knowing that no U- turn was permitted.

  Before leaving for Vietnam they spent a final night at Pratt’s house in Bangkok with long Zen silences filling the garden, broken when Pratt played a Hollis Gentry piece on the sax, something like The Glass Man. The sound of the sax carried through the garden and into the house. When Pratt no longer had any words he used the sax and found a pathway into the Zen, where language was insufficient to express a deeper level of feeling. His superiors in the Crime Suppression Division had given him one week to find Mark Wang’s killer. Asia contained a lot of ground to cover in a week, and to find the killer in a region occupied by a billion plus people, harboring its fair share of possible suspects, presented a logistics problem.

  How he did his job was up to him. In the Department, they didn’t care, they didn’t ask questions, they didn’t set limits; they only wanted results which showed that someone killed Mark Wang and the murderer was not a Thai cop. Someone who would take the heat off the ice honey business and the eyes away from the workings of the Comfort Zone. When Pratt said he wanted to team with a farang private eye named Vincent Calvino, again, they said, they didn’t want to know. All they wanted was results. How Pratt got to the result was his business. He played the sax with real feeling for about thirty minutes. His wife, Manee, came out to the garden.

  “You have a phone call,” she said to her husband.

  Pratt got up and went into the house and Manee sat back in his chair, her fingers touching the sax.

  “You’ll look after him, Vinee?”

  “You worried, Manee?”

  She forced a smile. “It’s not fair they send him to Vietnam. You know the Vietnamese don’t like Thai people. It’s not good. I don’t like that they make him feel sad, you know, real bad.”

  “Pratt can take care of himself.”

  Manee leaned forward. “I tell you a secret, Vinee.”

  “I like secrets.”

  “I said he should resign. Why should he do this? I asked him. And you know what he said? Kluun may khaw khaay my awk. Can’t swallow it, can’t spit it out.”

  Pratt had come up behind his wife. Putting his hands on her shoulders he leaned forward and gently kissed her head.

  “...‘go, return unto my wife; bid her not fear the separated councils; her honour and myself are at the one, and at the other is my good friend Calvino; where nothing can proceed that toucheth us whereof I shall not have intelligence,’ ” he said.

  Shakespeare in the garden recited with perfection by the sax player. Richard III. It didn’t matter which play. All that mattered was that moment when Manee tilted her head upward, finding her lips touching Pratt. Calvino had never seen two people who had been married for so many years and who were so completely devoted, who cared and looked after each other. Outside the Zone, not every relationship was a dance on the razor’s edge where every man and woman were destined to stumble, fall face forward, draw blood. He envied them. What they had was beyond money, beyond pleasure, they had collected a cache of hope which sustained them.

  “Go to Vietnam. But don’t think that I like this,” she said, tears in her eyes. She looked over at Calvino. “And Vinee, remember what I asked.”

  He remembered already. “Bring Pratt back,” she had said. His body, his soul, his heart.

  “Who was on the phone?” asked Manee.

  “Someone from Apex Steel confirming my title at the company,” he said.

  “You are going into business,” she said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said, picking up his sax. It was a great way to end a conversation. She listened to her husband playing, looked over at Calvino, thinking that the two of them knew far more than they were letting on. But what more could she do? But wait, and hope, and think that somehow the one week Pratt would be in Vietnam would flash across the screen of her life like a couple of jumpy frames in a film and, one day, even the memory of that ache and fear would be lost.

  ******

  CALVINO had gone into Vietnam first, working undercover for about twenty-four hours before Prat
t arrived. His first attempts to contact Marcus Nguyen didn’t work because Marcus was in Singapore on business. Harry had said that Marcus was “emotional.” That was another way of saying a “loose cannon” which, if you could pin down and point in the right direction, would blow a really big hole in the enemy. But don’t expect him to find the enemy in a land which was governed by his former enemy. Twenty-four hours after Calvino had checked into his hotel, Pratt had arrived alone on a flight out of Don Muang Airport. As he passed through immigration and then cleared customs counters at Ton Son Nhat Airport, he knew that he was on his own. No communication was allowed between him and the Royal Thai Police Department in Bangkok. The assumption was that the security and intelligence people listened to every conversation and read every fax between Saigon and Bangkok. If he failed, then he failed on his own. If he succeeded, then there would be those in the Department who would claim the success as their own.

  Pratt wore a business suit and carried a leather briefcase as he sat in the back of the taxi. Playing the sax and quoting Shakespeare were ruled out; businessmen knew nothing about music or art. Pratt glanced at his watch, as the taxi driver laid on his horn, cutting through a sea of bicycles and motorcycles on the way into District One. Calvino would be at the law firm, Pratt thought.

  His name card pegged Pratt as Sales and Marketing Department Vice President of Apex Steel (Thailand) Co. Ltd., a real company with offices on Silom Road run by people close to the Hong Kong operation. They were willing to cover for him when someone from Vietnam began checking out why a Vice President of Marketing had gone to Saigon.

  It had taken a week for them to put their cover story together and get their visas approved for Vietnam. Calvino was a businessman looking to open a bar with a suitcase of cash and Pratt was a respectable businessman from an established company located in Bangkok. Why shouldn’t they strike up a conversation on the rooftop of the Rex? Have a few drinks at a restaurant? After Pratt made several follow-up calls to Mark Wang’s relatives in Hong Kong, it turned out that one of the companies in the family’s empire had a branch in Bangkok. Apex Steel (Thailand) Co. Ltd. The business was reinforced steel rods used in high-rise building construction, and the Hong Kong parent company had opened a representative office in Saigon. The rep office had been set up by the law firm of Winchell & Holly. The Apex Steel CEO in Hong Kong phoned a senior partner in the New York office and instructed him that their Thai counterpart would arrive in Saigon in connection with the death of Mark Wang. He said they expected that full and complete cooperation would be given to a Thai named Mr. Prachai Chongwatana. No mention was made of Mr. Vincent Calvino, who did not exist in Pratt’s universe of high- level business contacts. Apex’s annual retainer paid to the law firm, plus all the other legal work from affiliated Hong Kong companies, guaranteed that the request would be honored by the New York office. Money bought access and Apex had paid a lot of money on legal fees.

  “What about the jerk-offs in Saigon?” Calvino had asked Pratt that evening in the garden.

  He smiled. “That’s where you come in, Vincent.”

  “If they are dirty, they will stonewall.”

  “Every wall has a small hole. And it is the wise man who can find the entrance the size of a pinhole and climb through as if it were a door to the universe,” said Pratt.

  “Did Shakespeare write that?”

  Pratt smiled. “In his next life he might have.”

  That night in Bangkok was a lifetime ago. The Saigon morning was this life, a now, a here, promising a pinhole.

  From his room in the Saigon Concert Hotel, Calvino watched some Vietnamese messing around in the parking lot. The more he observed them the clearer it became the idleness was a cover for street level activities. Pratt had briefed him that Vietnamese security would likely follow him, tap his phone and room, and he had to assume that his every movement was being recorded. If Bangkok was the big sabai, the big easy, a field of ice in an enormous zone of comfort, then Saigon was the big misfortune, the big hardship, as if the echo of wartime suspicion resounded off every street corner. Saigon was the opposite of Bangkok. Here there was no comfort, only many no-go zones. A nervous, edgy tension. The loose-lips-sink-ships mentality was like one large driftnet that pulled in every kind of fish that got in the way. Everyone was a suspect. Foreigners were assumed to be dangerous.

  ******

  CALVINO pulled a can of 333 beer off the fridge shelf, and settled back into his Saigon hotel room. On top of the fridge was his fake American passport which he had bought from one of the Zone’s more specialized operations on Patpong Road Number Two. He pulled the tab on the can and opened his passport; it was a good fake. Under his photograph was the name of Vincent Demato. Shirt and tie, hair combed, smiling into the camera. He tossed the passport on the bed and walked to the French doors, opened them and stepped out onto a small balcony. He sat on a small stool, drank his beer, and looked down at a parking lot wedged between two streets. Four Vietnamese men, dressed in what could have passed for pre-1975 clothes, lounged in the parking lot. He watched them, then studied their movements; the casual attitude, the bouts of smoking, eating noodles and, by the time they had gone to sleep, he went back inside his room.

  Two days in Saigon was long enough to get the picture that a lot of locals had lots of time and few chances to work. Calvino nursed the 333 beer from the can, thinking this was a necessary piece of stagecraft. There were those who drank too much to drown their sorrows and then there were those who drank too much because they saw too clearly, those who knew too much and could not pretend that the reality did not exist. This morning it was neither sorrow nor knowledge which caused Calvino to raid the fridge in his room. Sometimes having beer on the breath made a point. Like a period, or a full stop as the British liked to say. The end of a sentence with that tiny bullet-like dot said: this man could be taken advantage of and he had a weakness. Maybe Drew Markle had a weakness. It might not have been drink. There were non-chemical cocktails just as dangerous for a certain kind of man. Take the belief in professional legal ethics: consumed in sufficient quantity, ethics caused intoxication. In places like Vietnam they might prove toxic, like a fatal overdose.

  Vincent Demato, Brooklyn businessman, had an appointment at Winchell & Holly at eleven o’clock and he was killing time, drinking, thinking and glancing at his watch. On the tape recorder in his hotel room at the Saigon Concert Hotel, Miles Davis was playing. Mellow and dreamy, as if the world of music was one of those escape hatches from the world of Vietnam, or of the world of three-sentence paragraphs where only action mutated along the lines of imaginary reality. But this was Saigon. It was real. The beer had its own taste and the mean streets, like New York City, had a buzz among the assembled legions of beggars, vendors, cripples, spooks, conmen, dropouts, businessmen, police, war vets and common criminals, who fought a hand-to-hand urban combat for their piece of pavement, a piece of dignity, a share of the pie. You have seen it in any big city. The only difference is this city, Saigon, had a history of war and violence which it couldn’t shake loose. Calvino liked drinking beer before an appointment and wondering about history. Saigon. The city with two names; two identities; two peoples living side by side, the winners and the losers. The winners lived in Ho Chi Minh City, the losers scrounged along the margins of Saigon. It was good for the city to have two names, he thought. One name would not have been large enough to encompass the full horizon worth of pain, suffering, brutality, disruption, hate, disillusionment. Within twenty hours of entering the city, he felt the divide. In Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City there was an ache, a concealed wound that flared up at three in the morning, survivers hearing helicopters and gunfire, not remembering whether they had won or lost, whether they were alive or dead, whether they were dreaming or had warped back through time and were still trying to find cover, sanctuary. Where did Winchell & Holly practice law? Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City? He guessed they practiced in both cities, for winner and loser, whoever could hire them.

&
nbsp; Cut me into that pain, he thought. He tipped the beer can back until it was empty then opened another and drank until the beer came back up his throat and into his nose. You didn’t have to be in Vietnam long before you either hated or loved one city or the other. Calvino hated having to choose. It was one of those things which could have gone either way like any relationship; the way you start out is the way you generally end up.

  He had to wait until evening to meet with Pratt who had booked into the Rex Hotel. Pratt had come a day later on a separate flight. It was safer to keep a safe distance, their separate identities. They had drawn straws. Calvino got to go in first, to meet the members of Drew Markle’s law firm. The Drew Markle who had been sent back to the States in a coffin draped with the American flag. The American Consulate, which had been set up only months before in Hanoi, had sent two representatives in business suits and Marine haircuts.

  Calvino lied, and said, “I am looking to set up a business in Saigon. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

  He got his appointment just like that. And why not? Law firms were in the business of giving advice for bags of money.

  He left out some details. For instance, the connection between Drew Markle and Mark Wang. He sipped his beer, wondering what those two had said to each other. What fly on the wall had recorded that conversation? What secrets had been so large as to kill both of them? Here, little fly, come to daddy, thought Calvino.

  Whoever killed Mark Wang had a connection in Saigon and/ or Ho Chi Minh City with that firm. So he had the morning with time on his hands. He was thinking that Asia was a funny place where oligarchs and mafiosi had carved up the markets, monopolies, the geography, and the state enterprises, leaving everyone to get by as best they could, putting together whatever patchwork of relations and rank was necessary to stay alive, to stay in business. All Calvino needed was to think about an appointment with a law firm with blood on its hands and the lesson of Asia; one alone was a good enough reason to drink Vietnamese beer for breakfast. Both together were enough reason to get drunk before noon. Fortunately, his appointment was at eleven. He kept telling himself the drink was for the job and not to forget the job. Not thinking about the job let the mind wander and, in Asia, a wandering mind could be a dangerous thing. For instance, he might start thinking about warlords and, if he were listening to Miles Davis and drinking 333 beer, then he might discover a warlord had landed on his shoulder and was whispering in his ear. Warlords don’t whisper sweet nothings, not in Asia, not anywhere.