Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “You know anything about a fund? An investment thing?”

  “You mean the Vietnam Emerging Market Fund?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Drew was assigned to work on the Fund. I am even investing some money in it. The timing is right. With all the business activity happening here, how can I possibly lose?”

  As Calvino rode away, he thought about Father Jim’s story, about the slaughterhouse birds kept in cages in Klong Toey. They had heard the sound of losing so long that they could mimic the final shriek of a death rattle with blood curdling accuracy. He had started to wonder if Drew Markle had repeated something he should not have heard. He might have been a slaughterhouse bird who made the right sound in the wrong place and found himself on the wrong end of a grenade. Jackie Ky was putting money in the Fund. Drew Markle had been assigned to do legal work connected with the Fund. Some connections were sexual, others were financial, and yet others, perhaps the majority, were a mixed connection of money and pleasure. He picked up speed, getting the feel of the machine. If there was anyone following him, they would have their work cut out. He was riding a crest, a wave in his mind, he could almost see the beach where it would crash.

  Halfway back, he passed a second-hand bookstore on the ground floor of a shophouse. He doubled back, parked the Honda and spent nearly an hour going through shelves and boxes of old books. A flotsam of stories, ideas, hopes, and dreams abandoned in Saigon, yellowing, curling and falling apart in the tropics, as if being reclaimed by the heat and humidity. Soon they would be pulp. He twisted around a stack of magazines, then found what he was looking for in the bottom of a box and paid without bargaining for a copy of Chekhov’s collected plays. The Russians had been in Vietnam for years. Chekhov had been one of the few good things left behind. He stuffed the book inside his shirt and entered the traffic again, Chekhov riding high against his belly. His spirits sailed like someone who had found a neglected masterpiece overlooked by the shop owner. Chekhov had a new dimension: He offered to show Calvino an emotional course with a woman who had nothing to do with the Zone. Someone who didn’t know that the Zone existed. He was riding high and he was happy to be in Saigon.

  CHAPTER 7

  BACK STAGE

  PRATT HAD CIRCLED around the old Opera House a number of times and each time there was something disturbing him about the structure. The one hundred years of French rule in Vietnam left its mark in the buildings and boulevards of Saigon. Dropping an opera hall onto an island like setting a perfect pearl into a gold necklace was something only the French would have thought to do in the tropics. While the French had come and gone, the buildings and streets remained. The farang had not marked Bangkok in this way. He wondered, how does a country take pride in the sense of beauty that other people impose on them? What is to be done with the legacy after the farang have left? Tear it down? That would violate the unspoken rule that one destroyed only that which was no longer practical. The old Opera House could be made practical, so it survived; the classical scalloped front entrance looked faded, worn, like a once beautiful woman after years of an abusive relationship.

  On the corner of Dong Khoi Street and Le Loi Boulevard stood another French building directly opposite the old Opera House. On the ground floor was the Givral Patisserie & Cafe. The entire building was the mixed symbol of old Saigon and modern Ho Chi Minh City—a three-story J&B bottle designed as a bright green neon sign stuck onto the side of classical French architecture. The J&B bottle cap half obscured the window to the room where Marcus Nguyen kept a mistress, a vantage point that provided him with a Lee Harvey Oswald view of the old Opera House. He stood in the window with a pair of binoculars, watching Pratt stopping before the steps of the Opera House. What thoughts would be inside the mind of this Thai policeman? Marcus thought. What eyes was he using to look at the street? To turn the old Opera House into a shopping mall, or club? Thai police had a knack for business. Harry had told him that this Pratt had an appreciation for the arts, in particular, for Shakespeare. Perhaps the Thai policeman viewed the old building as a piece of history which had survived all kinds of dramas—tragedy and comedy.

  Before the fall of Saigon, the government had used the Opera House as the National Assembly. Then the government not only fell, many of the politicians had fled before April 30th, 1975, leaving the communists to turn the main hall, where the National Assembly had met, into a people’s theater. In the rear of the building, there was a small hotel. Next door was the Q-Bar. On the Continental Hotel side was another bar. People’s Theater, People’s Hotel, and a New York City bar with Caravaggio murals on the wall. Change was in the Saigon air the twentieth year of the liberation of the city.

  Pratt, as he walked alone, had wondered if some communist committee, filled with people who had spent half their life fighting in the jungles, had been given the job of making practical use of the old Opera House without compromising the principles of the new regime. Who had served on the committee? A collection of fighting men, ex-soldiers and cadres whose reward for winning was a chance to take revenge on the building where the old regime had resided. This might have explained why a number of rooms had no windows. The architecture of war predominated and the Saigon Concert Hotel—its name evidence of the schizophrenic character of the city—was like a blueprint of underground tunnels and chambers. Calvino had come up with the idea that Pratt should move into a room within the vast complex of the old Opera House. He would have music, he would have privacy, and more importantly, there was a place they could meet in secrecy. Calvino had discovered that the cheapest room in the hotel was also the largest. There were special rooms located at opposite ends of the fifth floor, each with a private staircase and landing; the giant space which was left over had been converted into three rooms.

  “Why so cheap?” Calvino had asked the assistant manager behind the front counter. After he asked the question, he knew that he had automatically lapsed into expat-speak. He had made a literal translation into English from the Thai tum my took?

  The assistant manager flashed an official smile, as if she had been asked that question many times by farang new to Saigon. The smile a mother bestows on a child who asks why there is a sky, why are there clouds, what happens when I die?

  “Some people think too much noise. But if you like music, then you should take. I think room very cheap for Saigon,” she said thoughtfully.

  The rough corridor between cheap and expensive had squeezed out just about anything in the middle. Calvino nodded that the room would do fine for the right person after an inspection. It was perfect, in fact, for the purpose he had in mind. On the left of the small entrance leading to the fifth floor room was a door, one of those Alice in Wonderland, tiny doors. All that was missing was the rabbit. Calvino played the role of Alice as well as was to be expected, he hunched down beside the door and discovered that a piece of copper wire had been used to fasten the door. One end of the wire disappeared inside the room. He needed less than a minute to pick the lock and open the door. Inside was a narrow walkway about forty meters above the main stage and large backstage area. On the scaffolding it was dark and below some musicians were practicing. From the look of the wooden walkway no one had been up there in years. No guest was going to complain and the performers and musicians below could not have cared less. It may have been one of the few unbugged areas in the entire building.

  Pratt checked into the room sight unseen; he had based his move solely on Calvino’s recommendation. He stood in the doorway and looked around a reception room. On one wall was an eight foot by fifteen foot painting of Mount Fuji capped with snow. He looked over his shoulder at the bellboy.

  “Beautiful,” said the bellboy in a soiled shirt with a Mao collar, grinning at the painting.

  “Splendid,” said Pratt, thinking the decor was the ultimate revenge on the French sensibility, on the old regime, on everything an educated, cultured farang would have held in high esteem.

  The final destruction of the Western
sense of artistic beauty, the desecration of the high temple left by French culture. In the bellboy’s eyes, he was gazing upon a masterpiece. This bellboy spoke the language of the modern Saigon, a place which had sealed its fate twenty years earlier when the tanks rolled into Saigon and the National Assembly was no more. Only the building was left behind once again, like it had been left by the French, as it had been left after the Americans had gone.

  ******

  AROUND two in the morning, Pratt slipped out of his room, quickly entered the small side door, edged his way along the scaffolding toward a figure in the shadows. Calvino squatted in the dark like an Isan laborer, staring into the dark and drinking a 333 beer. Pratt pointed his flashlight and Calvino lifted his beer as a kind of salute.

  “It’s not exactly front row at the Met,” said Calvino.

  “But then Saigon isn’t exactly New York City,” said Pratt. “New York is five floors down in the Q-Bar,” he said.

  Pratt looked around the vast space below, the empty stage, curtains and rows of seats.

  “It would be difficult to bug this area. Not impossible. But what would be the point?”

  “Exactly. No point. So how’s your new room?”

  He had worked out the math in his head. The cost of two glasses of the 1987 La Tour Sauterne at the Rex was roughly two nights in the Mount Fuji room on the fifth floor. When it came to the division between investors, there were those who drank the cost of a hotel room before dinner, and there were those who drank 333 beer and dreamed of one day affording the corkage charge on an expensive bottle of wine.

  “From the art on the wall, I have the strong feeling that management made a decision to appeal to the Japanese investor,” said Pratt.

  “I doubt there are any Japanese in this hotel. Too down-scale for them.”

  “That also crossed my mind,” said Pratt. “But there’s always hope.”

  “How did your meeting go with Khanh?”

  “Another boc phet session that ran an hour. He spent half an hour complaining about wasting days and days with State Department officials and American Consulate officials from Hanoi. They came alone or in twos. They asked the same questions about Drew Markle. They asked him if he had ever had an argument with Markle. This upset him. Who did these Americans think they were? Did they know where they were? State Department people in Saigon treating him like a criminal suspect.”

  “Sounds like he let his hair down.”

  “He said that the farang didn’t understand the Asian mind. It wasn’t useful to kill an American lawyer. It wasn’t useful to kill any American. They were trying to open up their economy, their country. They wanted American technology. Killing an American was the last thing any Vietnamese would do. Why were the American State Department people so stupid? he asked me.”

  “Khanh has a point, Pratt.”

  “In police work you find most criminals have a point.”

  “You think he’s covering up something?”

  “What do you think?” asked Pratt.

  “The word on the street is that Markle was capped by a Vietnamese. Someone brought down from Hanoi for the job. But I don’t know what to make of the theory. The Vietnamese way of thinking, loyalties, fears, are divided between North and South. It’s hard to know the direction on the compass to find the truth. Of course, whoever did the job must have followed Markle. Tracked him. That takes some skill. Of course, the fact that Markle was never late made the killer ’s job easier. But someone had to give the hitman the information. That Markle was going to the restaurant that night and give him the time.”

  “Any idea who that might have been?”

  “He was meeting someone special for dinner that night.”

  “A woman,” said Pratt.

  Calvino nodded, finished his beer and put the can down on the scaffolding.

  “A Viet Khieu named Jackie Ky.”

  “Kee?” asked Pratt.

  The English word translated into Thai, depending on the tone, as either “shit” or “ride”. Pratt waited until Calvino repeated Jackie’s last name in a neutral tone, playing the name over in his mind. How would his superiors in the Department in Bangkok react if the killer they had to turn over to Mark Wang’s family had such a name? The Hong Kong Chinese would think that the Thais were playing a joke on them. So much rested on family names in Asia, so much more than any farang ever knew.

  “Yeah, Ky,” he said again. “She’s as American as they come, and a babe, Pratt.”

  “What was her relationship with Markle?”

  “Close enough. She made a point of letting me see her go through the usual rituals. The lit incense sticks she put in front of his picture at a wat. She shed the right amount of tears. All the time I am looking at this framed photo of Markle in the second row of a hundred photos of other dead people.”

  “Sounds impressive.”

  “It was intended to be.”

  “So she was putting on a good act?” asked Pratt.

  Calvino wavered, balancing all he knew about Jackie Ky, which wasn’t a great deal, and each time he came down on a different side.

  “She’s pretty broken up over Markle’s murder,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an act.”

  He had been on this side of the Jackie Ky equation before. Pratt waited a beat, taking in Calvino’s observation. “Did you ask her about Mark Wang?”

  Calvino nodded, pulled another beer from a brown bag, popped the tab, and drank from the beer can.

  “She said that she met him once. But she didn’t remember Wang’s name until I reminded her.”

  “Maybe he was using another name,” said Pratt.

  “I thought of that. So I asked her if Markle had mentioned anything about Chinese yuppies from Hong Kong. And she said, yes. There had been a Chinese guy who hated banks and wanted Douglas Webb to hold a lot of cash for him. She said Drew was against taking cash into the office. She said Markle told her that lawyers didn’t do that sort of thing. He thought it was unethical for a law firm to keep cash like a Chinese laundry.”

  “She said Chinese laundry?”

  Calvino smiled. “I added that.”

  “Cute.”

  “Markle also worried about violating Vietnamese currency regulations.”

  “How much cash are we talking about?”

  “Don’t know. But I think we can assume it was enough to get two men killed,” replied Calvino.

  “Someone in the law firm overruled Markle and told Wang they would keep his money.”

  “Khanh seems hungry,” said Calvino.

  Pratt knew that in Vietnam, like in Thailand, there was a vast difference between those with hunger in their belly and the few with the opportunity to fill their rice bowl.

  They had worked together for so many years, Calvino could see what was bothering Pratt about this suspect, and he said, “Khanh wouldn’t have the connection to get someone like Wang killed in Bangkok. If Wang had been killed in Saigon, I could go with it.”

  “Then that leaves Webb,” said Pratt.

  “Webb told me he had been in Bangkok for five years,” said Calvino.“ He speaks Vietnamese. And Thai. And Japanese. That’s a good enough reason to hate the bastard. Americans aren’t supposed to speak anything but English.”

  “Five years,” said Pratt. “That’s more than enough to make the kind of local connection to get someone killed.”

  “Jackie said they had gone to a Thai-Vietnamese friendship concert a week before Markle was killed. She said that Markle and her went along with Webb and some bimbo who was from Bangkok.”

  Pratt rolled his eyes, expecting the worst. Calvino let it hang for a moment.

  “The bimbo was a mem-farang,” said Calvino. “Who lives in Bangkok.”

  Calvino nodded, “So Jackie Ky says.”

  “I’m thinking out loud now...”

  “You’re on stage. That’s permitted.”

  “Thanks. But what I was going to say is, sometimes Channel 9 or 7 sends a crew to rec
ord a concert. Then they show it on TV. My kids watch them. And sometimes the camera scans the crowd.”

  “Maybe you should check it out.”

  “You have a safe phone yet?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Nothing is one hundred percent.”

  “It’s a figure of speech.” Pratt hunched forward and looked down at the stage below. “If I were at home, I could deal with Webb.”

  “The distance been Bangkok and Saigon is a short flight given they seem to be a million light years apart,” said Calvino.

  “I know. We have no back-up in Saigon. It’s just you and me. And I have been thinking it’s not such a good idea for you to pal around with Webb. Forget about giving him the cash you brought in.”

  “That’s why I brought the cash, remember. You were the guy who said, ‘We might need some spending money to get someone out of trouble,’ ” said Calvino.

  “The idea was to bait a trap not feed a rat. That’s different. You don’t corner a dog and expect him not to come at your throat.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors. Rats and dogs.”

  But Pratt was right, thought Calvino. If Webb were a cornered dog he would come out all claws and fangs. What had Webb been doing in Bangkok? He claimed he spent five years working in-house for a large Japanese bank. Maybe. Before that, he had been an associate at Winchell & Holly in New York City. He had gone to the minor leagues, showed that he could hit the ball, and they called him back to the majors. Not an ordinary career path but then Winchell & Holly wasn’t exactly an ordinary law firm. The lawyers shared a common specialized tax background. This was a perfect fit for a tax law firm boutique, handling offshore business for extremely wealthy people. Maybe after he signed on in Saigon, Webb was treated like a minor leaguer. By then, Webb would have gotten his nose into some of that wealthy lifestyle and decided he was tired of waiting for real respect out of New York.