Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Go well, come back well,” she had said in Thai. “Pai dii, maa dii.”

  She had had a bad feeling about this trip to Vietnam. She had pleaded for him not to go but once she saw that he had made up his mind, she lapsed into resignation, as if to say, okay, go. But look at my face, this is my widow’s face. The face that you will leave behind to confront the world which no longer includes you.

  ******

  WITHIN the span of three hours, Calvino had been to the law firm twice. After his meeting with Douglas Webb, he had gone back to his room, stuffed five grand into a plastic bag, then waited a couple of hours before returning. This time he had asked to see a Vietnamese lawyer. Webb had sat in on the meeting just in case Khanh, the Vietnamese lawyer, needed any translation help. Believe that and you will believe that his billings are accurate, thought Calvino. But it didn’t matter. He had the chance to see her again. He was already mixing Saigon with Ho Chi Minh City, and forgetting that Hanoi figured strongly into the equation. She didn’t seem all that surprised when he reappeared, as if she halfway expected him to return that day.

  He stood in front of the elevator. His hand covered the buttons so that she couldn’t call the elevator.

  “You make it difficult to get an elevator, Mr. Demato,” she said.

  “Vincent, please. And I want to make it difficult. Because I want a few more minutes. You know, to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I want to learn about Vietnam,” he blurted out.

  “There are many guidebooks,” she said.

  “I want to learn from you.”

  “I think that I am a very bad teacher.”

  “Let me be the judge. How about dinner.”

  “That is difficult.”

  “Lunch, breakfast,... a snack.” “You make me laugh.”

  “You stop me from breathing.”

  She looked at him, her mind doing that woman thing.

  “Lunch,” she said.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  Calvino couldn’t remember stepping into the elevator or the journey down. All he felt was a floating sensation. How can a guy be in Southeast Asia and fall in love like this? he said to himself as the door of the elevator opened on the ground floor. And how to keep this from getting in the way of the job? It was Pratt’s fault, he told himself. Seeing him in the garden with Manee, just watching how happy two people could be. The image had stuck in his mind. Then he found the woman he wanted in his garden telling him not to go, not to leave. Just stay by her side.

  ******

  GETTING off the elevator on the top floor—the fifth floor—of the Rex, Calvino still had the Hanoi girl on his mind, distracting him. He walked into the carpeted foyer, turned to his right, and found himself in front of a small newsstand with foreign newspapers and guidebooks. He stopped and looked for a Bangkok newspaper. There was nothing like going out of town to give an expat an addiction to his hometown newspaper. It was late afternoon by the time that Calvino looked through the papers at the newsstand; all the copies of Bangkok Post and The Nation were a day old. As he glanced around he saw a young Vietnamese woman sitting behind a school desk. She was about eighteen or nineteen. Like Mai at Winchell & Holly, she wore an ao dai—a blue top with sheer white pants—and she wore her black hair back over her shoulders. She had not noticed him, lost inside her own world.

  She had the innocence of a child; her mouth slightly parted, her eyes vulnerable and concentrated. She sat erect behind a small desk, reading a thin, worn book. He could see from his angle that it was a book in English. He took a step and glanced over her shoulder, and watched for a moment, as she read lyrics to herself from a song book. She ran her finger down the words to “Lost in Love” and then continued tracing the words on the next page to the song titled “Love is Blue.”

  “You are learning English from a song book?” Calvino asked. His voice startled her, she blushed, looked at him, and then over at the newspaper rack.

  “It is a good book,” she said, shutting the book as she folded a bookmarker between the pages.

  “When do you get today’s Bangkok Post?”

  “After six, Sir,” she said.

  “You like to learn English?” “Yes, I like so much.”

  “And you study love songs in English?”

  “Sometimes after university,” she said. “I want to know everything about English.”

  Learning the English language of love from a song book made about as much sense as learning the Thai language of love from a bar.

  “What’s your favourite song?”

  She smiled and stared hard at the book and pointed at the title which was “Lost in Love.” There were romantics in the ruins of Saigon, young girls who dreamt of love in the English language. He watched her reading the lyrics, her lips moving as she read. He pulled a day-old copy of the Bangkok Post off a rack and stuck it under this arm.

  “One dollar, Sir,” she said.

  “A dollar. Everywhere in the world are people lost in love with the American dollar. And here I am paying money for day-old news.”

  “I think you are wrong. That’s not the kind of love the song’s about,” she said.

  “Is there a Vietnamese love song book?” he asked.

  “Yes, there are many.”

  “Maybe that’s how I can learn Vietnamese,” he said. “It is a good place to begin.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then he walked away from the newsstand, leaving her to read her song book. She would remember him coming to disturb her in the middle of her English lesson. And that’s what he wanted: a girl to see him coming in alone, having all the time in the world before going to the bar. Whoever was watching and whoever would question the girl later would come to the conclusion that when Vincent Demato wandered out onto the rooftop, he had already started to read the newspaper. His mind wasn’t on the newspaper, but on Mai, as she stood beside him before the elevator arrived.

  ******

  MOST of the tables on the Rex rooftop garden were occupied with tourists, expat businessmen, and some people who fell between the cracks of tourism and commerce. Nursing drinks, reading papers, talking—nothing out of the ordinary, thought Calvino. Half of the crowd looked like those at the Fourth of July picnic: large, awkward, out of place. Tropical caged birds were hung around the bar area. A large Macaw beak opened, releasing a loud scream, and it flapped its wings as a French tourist, tiny chin beard, dressed in a gray silk shirt and jeans, teased it with a peanut. Calvino kept on walking, wishing that Macaw had the chance of throwing the French asshole over the side of the Rex. He wanted to shove the peanut up the guy’s beaklike nose. But he was playing the role of a Brooklyn businessman and that meant he had to forget about the bird abuse, better yet, he should find a way to sell the bird to the guy, to turn a profit. That was business. Taking the advantage faster than the next guy. He had to tell himself that he was on stage and people in the audience might be taking notes. As he passed several tables, he wondered why he had bought the Bangkok Post. It was a small detail, but it amounted to a stupid mistake. A businessman from Brooklyn wouldn’t buy a day-old Bangkok newspaper; only a resident lamenting his time away from Bangkok would bother. It was too late. The paper was tucked under his arm.

  Calvino looked around before sitting in the chair opposite Pratt.

  “Birds, don’t you love ‘em,” Calvino said. “They make a hell’va a racket.”

  A waiter came over to the table and stood a foot to the left and behind Calvino.

  “Bring me a 333,” said Calvino, taking out the business section. “And make it real cold.” Pratt sat opposite with his nose in the newspaper.

  “Do you speak English?” asked Calvino, bending forward and taking a handful of peanuts from a small bowl.

  Pratt lowered his newspaper. “Do you?”

  Calvino cocked his head, narrowed his eyebrows.

  “Does it sound like I’m speaking French?”

 
; “Topiary French,” said Pratt.

  He had scored a direct hit, he thought. Calvino didn’t know what topiary meant and wasn’t even sure whether it was Thai, English or French. And he was dying to ask but knew that it was something he should leave alone. Already Calvino was thinking this idea of pretending not to know each other was not going to work. You might be able to get away with that act, say, with a wife, but with a friend you have known for a lifetime in two countries, that was asking a great deal.

  “I’d like to have a look at the Asian Wall Street Journal when you’re finished. I bought this Bangkok newspaper by mistake. I thought it was the Journal. Funny, when you’re jet-lagged how all the newspapers look the same.”

  Calvino was behaving himself, thought Pratt. “Like all Asians look the same,” said Pratt.

  Conflict. Pratt was provoking one and putting on a good show.

  “My mistake,” said Calvino, starting to rise.

  “Stay, it’s okay. I have finished the paper,” said Pratt.

  “The Bangkok Post is one day old. I don’t want you to think I am trying to cheat you. But I paid a dollar for it.”

  In the exchange of newspapers,they nearly knocked over Calvino’s can of 333 beer. The can wobbled on the table but Calvino caught it before it could fall.

  He held up the can and shouted at the bar for another beer. Calvino opened the newspaper, put the can of beer to his lips and finished it off. He set the empty down and, without looking at Pratt, began to talk as if he were lip-reading the newspaper.

  “The farang lawyer at Winchell & Holly is a guy named Douglas Webb, I can handle him. You should start with a Vietnamese lawyer named Khanh. He’s their guy from Hanoi. We had a little boc phet.”

  Pratt flinched. “What’s boc phet?”

  “Vietnamese for bullshit session. Now we’re even for topiary,” said Calvino.

  “He tell you anything useful?”

  Calvino shrugged. “Not really. Not so far anyway. He asked if I was an American and I told him, ‘Yeah. But I didn’t kill anyone. I gave the war a miss.’ And he said he was a kid during the war. His father was a colonel or something. He’s got relatives in one ministry and school friends in another so he’s got all the right connections in the government. The firm uses him to grease the wheels. My guess is the entire office is full of Hanoi lawyers and staff. They did win the war. Whoever would have thought law offices were part of the spoils of war?”

  “Did he bring up Mark Wang?”

  “No way. But I did throw in the fact that I didn’t think much of how the Chinese did business, and that seemed to please him. I asked him about the Chinese. Whether they would give me a problem. Or who was running the business side of things. The Chinese or the Vietnamese.”

  “And?”

  “He said that he hated the Chinese. The Vietnamese would never let them run the show like in Thailand. That’s what he said.”

  “He sounds like a sweetheart.”

  “You’re gonna love him. His rap on Thailand is that it is the land of crooks and pollution.”

  “Unlike Vietnam where, so far, they have only crooks,” said Pratt.

  “He said corruption was an Asian disease. That observation could earn him sixty days of in-house hospitality in Singapore,” Calvino said, smiling.

  Calvino took out some American dollars and put them on the table.

  “Thanks for the Wall Street Journal,” said Calvino.

  “Thanks for the day old news,” replied Pratt.

  “Careful you don’t get hurt,” said Calvino.

  As Pratt watched him disappear from the roof garden, he thought about how much pressure the force was under to solve the murder of Mark Wang. If they hated the Chinese so much, then why didn’t they have the common decency to murder them in Saigon? Instead, they had a dead American in Saigon and a dead Hong Kong executive in Bangkok linked in death by a common thread—the billable hour at the same law firm.

  ******

  THE streets were congested with traffic outside the Rex. The moment Calvino walked down the steps from the front entrance on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, a heavy wall of street people threatened to collapse on top of him. Some vendors waved toy helicopters crafted from empty 333 beer cans, others sold the usual street food—fruit, soup, fried pork, and still others carted fans, books, maps, and postcards; some wanted to change money, others offered to sell themselves. As a group they were on the move and they homed in on Calvino. One hundred meters away from the Rex, he crossed Le Loi Boulevard and Calvino found himself heading a parade of beggars, children in rags, then as he kept walking, a wall of shoe shine boys joined the black market money changers, cripples, and amputees. H e turned a corner and nearly tripped over the twisted fragment of a human form stretched out stomach down on a flat cart with wooden wheels. Calvino caught his balance and saw this face staring up at him with a smile. How could this guy smile? His skinny, naked legs and bare feet were knotted behind his ass. On his hands he wore dirty pads to propel himself along the pavement, looking for a parade to join. Here was the world at ankle level. All one had to do was to keep the eyes above knee level to miss the last link of the food chain on the streets of Saigon. Calvino recovered himself and dug out some money. He knelt down on one knee as the rest of the crowd gathered around him and stuck a five-dollar bill inside one of the guy’s ragged hand pads.

  “Thanks a lot, Mister Vincent,” said the man in a perfect American accent.

  “You not only speak English. But you know my name. How is that?” Calvino couldn’t believe his ears.

  “I picked up some free English lessons during the war. You a vet?” Calvino shook his head.

  “Who told you my name?”

  “Marcus, who else? Are you an American?”

  Calvino nodded, thinking, what had happened to this guy? What marriage of incomprehensible evil and madness had torn his body apart?

  “Marcus Nguyen?”

  “Colonel Marcus. Me. I stepped on a landmine two months before April 30, 1975. That’s what the communists call Liberation Day,” said the man, reading Calvino’s mind. It wasn’t difficult to do. Most foreigners thought the same thing first time they laid eyes on him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My friends call me Tan. Marcus wants you to meet him for dinner at the Saigon Central Mosque on Dong Du Street. He’s waiting for you now. I didn’t think you were ever coming down from the Rex. You got a whore up there or what?”

  “How did he know I would come this way?” asked Calvino.

  “Marcus knows because you don’t exactly make yourself invisible. You could use some friends like Marcus and me.”

  “I could use a friend,” said Calvino. “Someone who knows what happens on the street. Listens. Watches. Can remember what happened.”

  Tan smiled at the fiver. “I’m your man. But Marcus is the dude in the know. Believe it. Tomorrow, if you are interested, I’ll be at the noodle stand just before the Central Market on Phan Bol Chau. See you around, buddy.”

  He whipped around Calvino’s right-hand side and disappeared into the crowds on the sidewalk. It was the way Tan said Liberation Day that made him think this wasn’t exactly the word he would have chosen to describe the NVA entry into Saigon. And the guy spoke English better than the Vietnamese staff at Winchell & Holly. Marcus Nguyen’s messenger had been the message: Marcus could have used a dozen ways to send a dinner invitation but instead he chose Tan, a street freak, with perfect English. Why would Marcus do that? Harry had said that he was emotional, a bit of a loose cannon. In this case, Marcus was showing that he had a presence on the street, the lowest level was often the most reliable level to plug into and listen for the advance of the enemy. Marcus was plugged in. Tan was his eyes and ears on the street and he had delivered Calvino to him. Marcus had made his point. And Tan had made his, no one was going around Saigon saying that he should be referred to as physically challenged. The challenge was never physical, it was always mental and Marcus had sent the p
erfect messenger to deliver that message.

  ******

  THE bronze plaque on the side of the Mosque on Dong Du Street said that it had been built in 1935. This would have been during the time of French rule. What the mosque needed was another plaque saying it had survived the intervening sixty years in one piece. Calvino walked down a passage and into a courtyard with outside brick ovens and a few tables. Cooking smells of curried goat, beef and chicken were in the air. He saw a middle-aged Vietnamese man stand framed in the doorway of a room in the back. The man was smiling and waving to Calvino. This was Marcus Nguyen, ex-Marine Colonel, thought Calvino, trying to reconcile the image formed in his mind at the Fourth of July picnic in Bangkok with the reality inside a mosque in Saigon. Of course, there had been the nightmare Marcus Nguyen whose severed head had been held high by Drew Markle. Neither Calvino’s conscious nor unconscious imagination had been sufficient. In real life, Marcus had black, gray-flecked hair which was cut short. He looked perfectly ordinary, dressed in a white shirt, dark trousers, and wore gold-rimmed glasses. Marcus would have blended into any group of people; he might have been a government official or a school teacher. What he didn’t have was the look of a jungle fighter. Then what did such a person really look like? Not the guys in a Hollywood film, he thought.

  “Vincent,” said Marcus, extending his hand as Calvino entered the small, private room off the main courtyard. “I have been waiting for you. A friend of Harry Markle is a friend of mine. I saw Harry last week. Not in the most pleasant of circumstances, but then, Harry and I never seem to find circumstances pleasant whenever we get together. It has something to do with our karma, as the Buddhists say.”

  “Then you know why I’ve come to Vietnam.”

  “To find who killed his little brother. Not that Saigon is any more Vietnam than Bangkok is Thailand.”