Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “In Brooklyn, we learned to read comic books at an early age,” he said. “And we try to grow out of the habit, you know, move on to TV.”

  “To miss Chekhov is a great tragedy.”

  “Tragedy we had,” said Calvino. “And some comedy.”

  “Then America must be very much like Vietnam.”

  She reached for his can of 333 beer, refilled his glass, and then gently set the can back precisely from where it had been removed. There wasn’t a wasted movement. He had started to cool down in the air-conditioning. He was thinking to himself as he looked at her across the table that this extraordinary woman worked as a secretary in a law office. She read Chekhov in her spare time. They had only met briefly at the offices of Winchell & Holly, and yet she agreed to meet him socially. Webb was willing to bet money she would turn him down. What fragment of memory had he stirred? What turn of mind caused her to reach out to him?

  “Douglas Webb was surprised you would go out for lunch with me,” he said.

  “My social life is not any business of his,” she said. There was nothing hard or stern in her tone; just a matter-of-fact, assured sense of her right to draw such a line.

  He sipped the beer, feeling awkward for a moment. What was the main story line of The Seagull? Why couldn’t Pratt have gone around quoting Chekhov rather than Shakespeare? At least, he would have something clever to say. She sat across the table, patiently waiting for him, reading her Chekhov, and at the end, he sat like a lump, drinking cheap Vietnamese beer from a chipped glass. All he could think of was Father Jim’s slaughterhouse bird stories. That the birds weren’t seagulls but parrots was all he could come up with on the spot. Mai laughed, brushing back her hair, tilting her head back, exposing some emotion in her eyes that baffled Calvino.

  “You’re joking,” she said.

  He shook his head. “And then one neighbor decided he had had enough of the squeaking pigs. So he bought a bird, left it in a friend’s motorcycle shop until it could make the sound of someone working the throttle of a two-stroke motorcycle. They would have these bird wars. The slaughterhouse bird against the motorcycle bird. About a week into the war, a neighbor who was a hitman murdered both birds. Wrung their necks. He slipped in real quietly and killed them. No sound. No evidence, but everyone knew he was the murderer.”

  Calvino could see how happy she was listening to every word. “I love the story very much. But I’m confused. Was this Bangkok or Brooklyn?”

  There he was looking at the Caravaggio painting and not telling Douglas Webb that the painter had not died in a barroom brawl, only to forget who he was and where he was. Chekhov, beer and a beautiful Hanoi girl had had their impact on him.

  “A guy on the plane told me the story.”

  “Still, it’s a wonderful story,” she said.

  “When I open my club, I am going to buy a bird. I’ll call him Chekhov. You can help me choose it. Not one bird but many beautiful birds. We will buy them cages. But there’ll be only one Chekhov. We will keep it our secret. From today, the first time we had lunch.”

  “So far I haven’t seen any food,” she said.

  They both laughed. She ordered without looking at the menu. For a moment, Calvino was thinking, why not open a club? What was really holding him in Bangkok? The easy reasons like dirty air, the traffic jams, the swell of people fighting each other to make a dollar at any and every cost never moved him; but when the old gang had begun to disperse, then, that was different: some had gone upcountry, others back home, and others were dead. The sense of belonging had begun to chip away. People needed to belong. He lived alone in a Bangkok slum and, as far as he could see, he had no more chance of buying himself out of that hole than the noodle vendor on Sukhumvit Road had of becoming Prime Minister. Vietnam might be a fresh start and with a woman like Mai, what had started as a murder case, was slowly shifting into something else he couldn’t quite name. Maybe it was a new way of belonging, the way he saw that Pratt and Manee belonged in the garden that night in Bangkok. Then the food came and they ate French bread, crab soup, a cheese omelette, mixed vegetables, and chicken. Whenever his plate started to run low she spooned more food onto it.

  “When can I see you again?” he asked, looking at his watch. “You have to go?”

  “I have an appointment,” he said, paying the bill. He pushed back the change on the small wooden tray and as the waiter left, he said, “Did you know Drew Markle very well?”

  The question was out of the blue, as he counted out a stack of dong notes on the table.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “A young American guy. I just thought that you and him ...”

  “He was very nice. I am sorry he died. I don’t know what else to say.”

  Calvino watched her eyes. There was a thing that happened with most people’s eyes when they lied. Lying was an unnatural activity—except for his brother-in-law in Brooklyn, who had fielded the call from Douglas Webb about the lotto winning, he lied much better than he told the truth. There was a slight movement, less than a twitch. Certain professionals in the security, intelligence and policing business learned to control this eye movement, they mastered the art of breaking down false material into small segments so that each bit was true but the overall piece of information was a lie. Mai was still looking at the world with her clear, straight, romantic Chekhov eyes, and there was no hint of a lie. She was either telling the truth or she had been well trained.

  Outside the restaurant, a cyclo driver stopped in front of them. “You, where you go?” asked the driver.

  Mai turned and said, “You must be very careful. Many of these drivers are mafia, and their cyclos are stolen. I think it would be better if you had a car or a motorbike.”

  “A motorcycle,” said Calvino. “I like that idea.”

  Mai’s new Honda Dream was parked outside. “You go in a cyclo. I will meet you there,” she said. She arranged his fare and told the driver the location, then disappeared on her motorcycle.

  She was waiting for him at the rental stand opposite the Rex Hotel when his cyclo driver pulled up to the curb. It would be easier to shake his minders who had been following him if he had a motorcycle, he thought. They went up to the rental stand and a rat the size of a cat ran over Calvino’s foot. He thought of Marcus’s story about the refugee camps and how they had raised rats for ten cents a head. That rat had to be worth about a dollar, he thought.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t take you on my motorbike,” she said. “A Hanoi girl cannot,” he said.

  She smiled. “You know a lot for someone from Brooklyn.”

  “I know that Saigon and Paris both have a Notre Dame Cathedral,” he said. He had passed the Cathedral which was like an island fortress squeezed between Chau Van Liem Boulevard and Phung Hung Street.

  “Not everything you know is in a guidebook,” she said.

  They walked along a row of rental motorcycles, Mai leaning down to check the tires, working the brakes, starting the engine of a couple.

  “I think this one is okay,” she said, turning to the Vietnamese man with a pointy black beard at the end of his chin. They had a brief discussion, then she turned to Calvino.

  “Five dollars a day.”

  Calvino stuffed fifty dollars cash in an old man’s pocket, took the keys out of his hands and walked over to an old green Honda 50cc selected by Mai. The bike looked like it had been in some Japanese museum a hundred years. But it worked. It was transportation and was slow enough to make it a challenge to lose those who were following him. Because Mai had been along he hadn’t exchanged a word with the old man who just looked at the cash, then he walked away and stood near Mai.

  “Tonight for dinner?” he asked her.

  “I cannot,” she said, straddling her Honda Dream and starting the engine.

  “Because you are a Hanoi girl.”

  She laughed. “Because I have plans. Tomorrow for dinner, yes. But you haven’t asked me.” She pulled into the street.

  “Di
nner, tomorrow, then,” he shouted after her.

  She looked around, waved, and was swallowed up in traffic. And she never asked why I was late, he thought.

  *****

  HE immediately regretted having made an appointment to meet Jackie Ky. All day he had been running late and his appointment with Jackie was no exception. Being on the back of his rental Honda motorbike reminded him of the time he had been in Phnom Penh, on the back of a Honda 50cc with a bar girl named Thu. It had been after midnight, there had been gunfire from a checkpoint, the driver had made a wrong turn, and twenty minutes later the driver was dead in the mud and someone had tried to kill them. An UNTAC patrol showed up in time. Saigon was thick with bicycles, motorcycles and vehicles made from spare parts and boat engines held together with bailing wire.

  A thousand years in the future they would refer to Southeast Asia of the 90s as the Honda 50cc era, he thought. The era when the peasants hit the streets on cheap second-hand motorcycles imported from Japan. The Honda 50cc would become the metaphor for the state of mental, social, and political development only a small engine away from our ancestors swinging through the jungle canopy.

  Every street swarmed with peasants, workers, office girls— hundreds of people riding in twos, threes, sometimes fours, on motorcycles and each intersection was a chaotic dance, street lights counting for nothing, as everyone looked for a small opening to escape. Five minutes later, he had seen two accidents and blood. A pedestrian hit by a jeep and a girl on a bicycle mowed down by a speeding biker. Blood in the streets. Calvino got the hang of the method, just drive, forget stop signs, lights, pretend you are in a dream, and nothing can harm you. He drove in the direction of Cholon—Chinatown. The pagoda was a few kilometers beyond Cholon.

  Jackie Ky had chosen a Buddhist pagoda which had been around two hundred and fifty years. Giac Lam Pagoda had been around since 1744; before there had been a United States of America. He managed to get lost. He asked one, then another person where the pagoda was. Everyone shrugged and shuffled away. He asked three cyclo drivers, figuring he was far enough away from home base that they were probably exactly what they appeared to be: cyclo drivers and not security people pretending to be cyclo drivers. He guessed that he was right. The drivers knew nothing. If the communists had done anything, they had re- educated the cyclo drivers of Saigon to forget the location of what was probably the most famous pagoda in Saigon.

  By the time he entered the grounds of Giac Lam Pagoda, he was running an hour late and by the time he arrived at the pagoda, had taken off his shoes, and walked into the dark interior, passing rows and rows of dusty framed photographs of men, women and children, he could hear the bronze gongs and chanting from the main sanctuary. The smell of incense stung his nose and eyes. Thick clouds of it hung in the corridor. Jackie Ky spotted him and, half-crouched, came up to him as he entered the sanctuary. She held several sticks of burning incense. By being late, he had interrupted her prayer time, he thought. She had wanted to avoid that, but what was done was done. She walked over through the reception hall and stopped, looking up at the funeral tablets. Calvino walked over and stood beside her. She was looking at a photograph half-hidden in the back row. It was Drew Markle.

  “You’re late,” she said. “Drew was never late. He was very exact. If he said 7.30 pm, you better believe that he would be there no matter what.”

  “Being precise you can sometimes get yourself killed,” said Calvino.

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s easier to kill someone who is predictable.”

  “Drew liked this pagoda,” she said, changing the subject. “Any reason why you wanted to meet here?” he asked.

  “Harry liked this place. He came here to collect Drew’s body. It was a special place for Drew and then for Harry. I thought it would be a good place to talk about them. I would feel more comfortable since I really don’t know you,” she said.

  “You were comfortable to come to my room last night,” he said.

  “I wanted you to know that you were in danger.”

  “And the pagoda is safe?”

  “No, but it’s not bugged.”

  She had the incense sticks pressed between her cupped fingers, the tips of her thumbs touching her nose, her eyes closed, her lips moving. She stayed like that for what seemed like a long time.

  Then she said, “We loved each other. Drew was a decent man. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  Calvino looked at the photograph which had Drew’s name, date of birth and death. He was smiling into the camera when the shot was snapped. Like someone behind the shutter had squinted with one eye and looked through the lens with the other, and said, “Drew, say cheese.”

  “The night Drew was killed he was coming to see me. We were going to have dinner. I arrived early because I wanted to watch the light on the river before the sun set. It’s a nice time to watch the boats, the people, the light, the water. I heard the explosion from inside the restaurant. He was close enough to have seen me sitting at the table,” she said. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and she started to sob.

  “I want to think he saw me that one last time, you know, before...”

  Watching her performance, listening to the words, he could understand how she had inspired trust in Harry Markle. And Harry was someone who had lived in Southeast Asia long enough to know the danger of trusting anyone other than yourself, and then to look at yourself real hard in the mirror before telling yourself a secret.

  “Harry said something about Drew having an ethical problem at work. You know what that might have been about?” asked Calvino, after she had dried her tears.

  “As I told Harry, I don’t know for sure. Drew tried not to bring his problems home. Just for us to be together was a problem. You don’t know how it is here. The authorities see you with a foreigner and they call you a whore. They don’t want any Vietnamese women to even look at a foreigner. But, if you love someone enough then you don’t let it get to you.”

  “Did you get to know the people he worked with?”

  “A little. You know, at a dinner, or I would come and meet him at the office and we would go to lunch.”

  “So you know Douglas Webb.”

  “He’s a shit,” she said. “Forgive me, Lord Buddha. But he is.” “Khanh?”

  “A politician who wants to be a lawyer. Like most people from Hanoi, he’s very small minded about foreigners. Not to mention how he feels about Viet Khieu.”

  “Which is?”

  “Let’s say that he always glared at me any time Drew would take my hand. And he would say things in Vietnamese like, ‘Hanoi girl would never let a foreigner do that in public. Saigon girl, Viet Khieu, okay, they are different.’ Meaning, we are whores.”

  “Jackie, I want you to try and remember,” said Calvino. “It is real important. Did Drew ever say anything about a Hong Kong client named Mark Wang? What did Mark Wang want from the firm?”

  The sound of chanting monks in the sanctuary filled the silent space between them. She turned and was looking at Drew Markle’s photograph.

  “I can’t remember,” she said.

  “You tell me how much you loved this guy. If you can’t remember, no one will ever solve his murder,” said Calvino, in a loud whisper.

  She waited until two visitors walked past and into the sanctuary.

  “Okay, I do remember something Drew said. About how the Chinese avoided banks. One guy had deposited huge amounts at the law office. He thought this was not something a law firm should be doing. That’s it. He didn’t say anything else. It didn’t seem important. There are millions of dollars of gold in the shophouses in Cholon. It’s normal here. People keep money out of the banks. I don’t see what it has to do with Drew dying.” Now she was crying again.

  They walked out of the pagoda and sat down together on a bench under a large bohdi tree. Some Vietnamese were eating, others squatting down, watching.

  “Last night at the Q-Bar, you were spoiling for a fight with Webb. Why?”


  “That crack about being toc dai as if I threw the bomb at Drew. And because he showed disrespect. He came late to Drew’s funeral and left early.”

  “Webb and Drew did not get along at the office, am I right?”

  “I think Webb was jealous of Drew,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “He had made a play for me before Drew came to Saigon. I wasn’t interested. Even after Drew and I were together, he would try and hit on me. He got tickets for one of those Vietnamese-Thai concerts and gave two to Drew. He showed up with this hooker from Bangkok named Darla.”

  “Darla’s not a Thai name,” said Calvino.

  “She’s an ex-nurse from Seattle. Webb flies her in for a screw once or twice a month. Otherwise he would never get laid.”

  “When was she here last?”

  “I told you, at the concert.”

  “How long was that before Drew...”

  “Was killed? I can’t remember. I think about four or five days.”

  “And there were Thai singers?”

  “The usual rock ‘n roll stuff. No one famous enough to remember. At least, I can’t remember their names.”

  Calvino got up from the bench, looked up at the roof of the pagoda which was covered with porcelain plates. In Bangkok, the Temple of Dawn was decorated with millions of broken pieces of porcelain. He had taken his daughter Melody to that place once and they released balloons one at a time, and he told her how this was a Buddhist lesson in letting go. Some people could let go easier than others. Some never released their grip on something they wanted and Douglas Webb seemed to be that kind of guy.

  As he turned to leave, Calvino felt the hard pull of his conscience and arrived at a decision. He whispered, “I am here to find who killed him.”

  She nodded. “I don’t think...” She stopped in mid-thought. “Think what?”

  “Drew ever knew how dangerous it was here.”

  “I think you’re one hundred percent right.”

  They walked out into the courtyard to where he had parked his motorcycle, and he turned to Jackie Ky, as he inserted the key.