Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Exactly.”

  “And this is your idea of an interview.”

  “If you are shy, then no one is going to notice you.”

  “That rule wouldn’t apply to you.”

  She let the shirt open and expose one large, firm breast with a pink nipple.

  “They aren’t silicon. They are real. Natural. No sag. You can touch it. Go on, it won’t bite you.”

  Calvino sighed and leaned back.

  “What are your other qualifications?” he asked.

  This made her laugh, her red painted lips pulled back, showing some very expensive dental work. This woman took care of herself.

  “Any other man would have been all over me. Are you gay, Mr. Demato?”

  “Cautiously heterosexual.” And incredibly in love, he thought. Why is it after you fall desperately head-over-heels in love, you find a Darla standing in your hotel room door, wearing your shirt, showing her breasts, promising every last single Zone fantasy in the privacy of your own hotel room? Why was the universe o rganized to create such misery and confusion? Was it that the world hated love, and whenever it struck, a Darla strike was launched to rub it out?

  “Let’s see, I was born in Seattle. I am twenty-four years old. I am 37-23-34, and five foot seven and one half inches. I am university educated. I worked as an RN in Seattle. One night, on the graveyard shift, I read a magazine article about Russian hookers who were getting four hundred dollars a night to fuck Chinese- Thais in Bangkok nightclubs. I was taking home fifteen hundred a month after taxes. I’ve always had a head for numbers. So I worked out the figures. It was startling. If I worked double shifts in Bangkok like I was working in Seattle, then it would take about two years to make the same money as thirty-three years in Seattle. When it comes right down to it, is there that much more dignity in a bedpan than letting a stranger make love to you?”

  That was one of those Zone questions that no one ever had an answer for.

  “How long have you worked in Bangkok?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “How long have you known Webb?”

  “About a year. He pays like everyone else. I want you to understand that.”

  “Why give up a good thing in Bangkok for a bar which isn’t even opened in Saigon?”

  She leaned forward off the bed, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  “Because I’ve had it up to here with Bangkok. The traffic on Sukhumvit and Silom. The air pollution is so bad I can’t breathe. Bangkok is turning every call girl I know into a raving environmentalist. What I am saying, Mr. Demato, is that it’s time for me to make a change.”

  “Bangkok’s definitely not Seattle, and neither is Saigon,” said Calvino. He got off the chair, walked over to the small fridge, knelt down and took out a beer.

  “Want one?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Honey, I would love one.”

  He took out two cans of 333 beer and snapped the tabs, handing one to Darla on the bed. She had the figure of a catwalk supermodel. The woman didn’t have a bad angle, he circled her looking for that one ugly profile to make him feel that he wasn’t giving up that much but, all he ended up doing was pacing, and working himself up into one of those blacked-out moods that he poured booze into. She leaned forward on one arm, her legs crossed, a relaxed smile on her face, as if she were right at home, no hang-ups, no stress. Good ole West Coast Pacific Northwest ease and grace. She took the beer and drank straight from the can.

  “I’m trying to imagine you as a nurse in Seattle,” he said. “You know, as part of the American health care problem.”

  She held up the beer can.

  “I’m trying to imagine you as my boss,” she said. “And I don’t see any problems.”

  He liked that about her: she was quick off the mark.

  “The other night in the Q-Bar Jackie Ky was giving Doug a hard time,” he said, watching her on the bed.

  “That bitch,” she said, the fire flashing into her eyes. “Whoa, why do you call Jackie a bitch?”

  “Doug probably didn’t tell you. But Jackie Ky is a prime suspect in the murder of that lawyer who was killed here. I liked Drew. He was a nice kid. You know the type. Decent. All-American values. Knew how to treat a woman right. He was much too nice for her, that much is for sure.”

  “Why would she kill someone?”

  Darla rolled her eyes like she had to explain two plus two.

  “Because she found out that Drew was having an affair with some Vietnamese girl named Mai. She’s a secretary or something at Winchell & Holly. Drew had something going with her, I guess. Well, I don’t know how much clothing they had on, but one night, Doug caught them late at the office. Let’s say in a compromising position.”

  He swallowed hard, his face and throat were burning. I don’t believe it, he said to himself. Was this one of Webb’s crazy lies? Or a weird kind of sexual foreplay he used to stoke the fires with Darla?

  “And he told Jackie Ky about it?” asked Calvino.

  “I don’t know who told her. Does it really matter? She found out. Women don’t like cheating men. Men can’t seem to get that message in their head or in their balls. So, if she killed him, then, even as much as I liked Drew, well, he got what he deserved.”

  “You’ve been working in the Comfort Zone too long.”

  She laughed, and gave him a flash of recognition. “Yeah, you got that right. I was a Zone chick. But Jackie’s not. If she were a Thai Zone head, then Drew would still be alive but minus his dick. What do you think is better. Dead? Or dickless?”

  “Wanna another beer?”

  Calvino pulled two more beers out of the fridge. He flipped the same mental coin in his head. The same one he flipped before he went into Karen’s Bar. This time it came down tails. Tails Darla goes... Two out of three, he said to himself. I should have done two out of three at Karen’s Bar, he thought. After two more imaginary flips, he went into the bathroom and hid the Smith & Wesson under a pile of dirty clothes. Thank you for saving my ass tonight, he thought, giving a kiss to the plastic barrel. He showered, combed his hair, looked in the mirror, thinking about Mai with Drew. It made him crazy to think of that possibility. He turned out the bathroom light and walked out wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist. The main overhead lights were off. Only a side light near the bed illuminated her standing naked looking out from the balcony at the night. The sound coming back was from the bamboo sticks of a Chinese soup boy.

  “Soup’s ready,” whispered Calvino, as he came up behind her. “Good, because I’m real hungry,” she said, turning around and flipping the towel away from his waist.

  He took a deep, deep breath, moved slowly away from her, put the towel back around his waist. She didn’t fuck Markle, he said to himself. Faith, he said. It was an old-fashioned word that hadn’t crossed his mind for years. Faith was for fools, for people who lived outside the Zone. It was also for lovers, which was just another word for a fool. If he did not link faith in Mai with his love for her, then it would be lost; it wouldn’t matter. None of this would matter, and he would go back to Bangkok, his slum, his office, his Zone haunts, his missing person cases, and pass time until time finally passed him. He said the word, faith, over and over again, as he walked to the French doors to the balcony. Below, the boy with the bamboo sticks walked across the parking lot, making music. Behind him, Darla dressed and a couple of minutes later she let herself out without saying another word. Four dead men were in a burning building. The woman he loved was at home in bed. He was still alive. Looking into the night, he told himself that in life you needed some act of faith. Something beyond yourself to believe in. There was so much static misinformation in the world, crossing through computers, conversations, entering minds slightly altered, perverted, shuffled along the network, splitting into fragments along the web. This is what Drew Markle and Mark Wang and the men he killed tonight no longer have.

  CHAPTER 10

  FIRE ON COMFORT ZONE ICE

  “YO
U’RE NOT MAKING a lot of sense. Jackie gave you a gun. Mai is going to give you a diskette with Drew Markle’s private files on it. You used the gun but don’t know if you can get the diskette. If I didn’t really know you, I’d say that you have been babbling,” said Pratt.

  “Mai dtem baht.”

  “I know I sound like I am operating at fifty satang. Let me start over, bring in the other fifty satang,” Calvino said. He knew this Thai expression. There were a hundred satang in one Thai baht, about four cents US. Thais used the money metaphor for the slang expression to describe defective mental facilities or full facilities but flawed reasoning.

  Shakespeare had lots of minor characters who were mai dtem baht. Like the fool in King Lear who was whipped by the daughters for telling the truth, thought Pratt. Calvino looked like a whipping boy, sitting too far forward from the edge for his own good. The fool in Shakespeare was the man who told the truth and suffered because only a fool does not understand how truth can inflict misery and pain more damaging than the most gross lie.

  Pratt waited as a silence fell between them. Calvino sat, shifting from one side to the other, not feeling comfortable and not saying anything. It was like he was thinking, straightening out the sequence of events, the order of how the horror had grown legs, crept up on him and grabbed him by the throat.

  Calvino sat forward, rocking, his arms folded around his chest, staring down, his legs dangling over the edge of the scaffolding with a solid air of defeat about him. Someone or something had knocked him into a hyperstate where depression and rage commingled. Pratt had gone easy on him; a farang on the edge could be unpredictable, which made it all the more unnerving since farang claimed some monopoly on logic, control, analysis, so when that snapped, and they looked over the edge at a floor four stories below, a Thai didn’t know what firework of intellect and emotion was at work, if the farang might jump or was content to just think about jumping.

  If Pratt could have looked inside Calvino’s mind, he would have found him thinking about a Vietnamese girl named Mai, and wondering to himself really how little he knew who she was and how little that seemed to matter; it defied every rule he had laid down, applying to a man’s relationship with a woman. Love did that kind of thing, shattered rules, common sense, and then there was duty. He had started to keep things back already, and he was going over in his mind whether to break this cycle, and level with Pratt about Mai’s possible link to the double murder. Easy to think about doing but much harder to do. He wanted to protect her, there was no reason for her to have told him about the diskette, he was certain that she hadn’t told anyone. If he was right about her, then he was the only one other than her who knew about Drew’s legacy.

  Looking down at the stage, he thought about the three men he had killed inside the old Karen’s Bar, an abandoned rat infested room that was on fire as he ran out. Tang’s brain gook on the toe of one shoe. Afterwards, he had vomited in the street. Then, what? Yeah, he remembered. Darla had been waiting for him to return, all nice and cosy inside his room. A Seattle nurse turned high- price call girl to the wealthy businessmen in Bangkok, and their friends from the neighborhood—Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She had yanked off his towel and he had pulled back from her. Sitting in the dark beside Pratt thinking about that scene, it was like it had happened to someone else. Why had he done that? It wasn’t because she was a mem-farang; was it simply because of Mai? So far with the Hanoi girl, nothing had been simple. Chipping through the deep ice in Zone haunts like Patpong all the way to the Q-Bar, he had emerged with Mai at his side. No one would have believed this was something that Vincent Calvino would have done. Not even Vincent Calvino could quite believe what he had turned down in the name of love. Next he would be thinking of a building an up-country cottage, white picket fence, and having kids and a dog.

  These were some of Calvino’s nonlinear links that threaded his thoughts together as he sat on the edge of the scaffolding. The ability to weigh and value events had been blasted apart, he couldn’t think straight, it had been a night where death and sex had been strung together like the rough cuts in a dream. He was floating out in the middle of the stage, seeing himself out in the center of that empty place, surrounded by the darkness, with nothing below him and no one in the audience, suspended, wanting to fall back to earth but unable to move. It was no wonder that Pratt had questioned whether he was playing with a full deck.

  All he wanted to say to Pratt was he had this ache deep inside and he no longer knew who he was, what really mattered.

  “Did I tell you that Darla came to my room?” asked Calvino. He looked down at the stage, the exhaustion of the night slamming into him like a sumo wrestler dropped from a crane.

  “Who is Darla and why did she come to your room?” asked Pratt.

  “Darla’s a ten thousand baht a night call girl from the high-priced ice end of the Zone. Webb treats himself to her once or twice a month. Flies her into Saigon and puts her up at the Rex.”

  “Lawyers are paid that well in Saigon?” asked Pratt.

  “That’s what I’m getting to. If you dip into the cash, then you can fly someone like Darla in every other day.”

  Pratt had the attitude of an interrogating officer, that same tone in his voice that Calvino had heard him use after collaring a suspect. He deserved this, Calvino thought. He had brought it on himself, walking straight into an ambush. He should have known better.

  “This happened after you went to Karen’s Bar?”

  He repeated the name to himself, thinking of Mr. Tang with his funny hair standing in the window and, a few minutes later, part of Mr. Tang’s head had been blown away by an AK47.

  “And?” Pratt asked after Calvino had gone silent for a minute. “You know, she’s resourceful. Must be that nurse’s training.

  She got the key from the front desk. She was already in my room, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Calvino grinned, turned and looked at Pratt.

  “She was applying for a job in my Saigon club. Webb told her about it. He went back to the office, left her off at the Rex, and she...Well, she has native skills that go beyond the normal interview.”

  “Or Webb used her to set you up like he did Wang,” said Pratt.

  “I thought about that. But I had the feeling she was for real.”

  “Right, you’re an exception to the rules of the game. From everyone else she demanded money, but she really liked you. The money was a side issue.”

  “I am not that crazy. She was playing an angle.” Pratt was only half buying the response.

  “Did it occur to you she might have had the same effect on Mark Wang? She could have gone to the hotel, walked straight in, no one would have stopped a mem-farang, maybe he was waiting for her because he had this feeling she was for real, then she pulled the gun, shot him twice, cleaned his computer hard disk, took the back-up diskettes, and then disappeared. She sounds like a pro to me. Webb hits Markle in Saigon; she takes care of Mark Wang in Bangkok. It’s a nice fit. They split the money.”

  All Calvino had to do was to agree and that would have been the end of it. He would be finished with the case, he could get on with his life. Pratt only wanted him to say that was how it happened. Wang’s family would take care of Darla, the heat would be off the Thai Police Department, no small army of reporters fanning out through the Zone to bring international disgrace down on their head. He knew how badly Pratt wanted to put an end to the case. But he couldn’t and, deep down, he knew that Darla, whatever else she was or had done, hadn’t killed Mark Wang or anyone else.

  “She was a nurse, Pratt. In the healing profession.”

  “A nurse has never killed anyone? Is that what you think?”

  “I’m saying Darla didn’t kill Mark Wang.”

  “Then who killed him?”

  Calvino shrugged drank from his can of beer, swung his legs back onto the scaffolding and faced Pratt. She had said that Dr
ew had had an affair with Mai, the Hanoi girl. The words were in his brain but he couldn’t make them come out. He didn’t want Pratt to start on Mai. And he would have had every right to do so. If she were having an affair with Markle, and Jackie Ky found out what would Jackie have done? She would have had a motive to have him killed. Markle was going to meet her at a restaurant on the river on a road where getting in and out fast was possible that time of night.

  “Wang’s family would kill Darla. I know that and you know it. We got to be certain before you make that phone call. I know they have turned up the heat on the Department. They want a quick fix. I am not all that happy working on the case. Believe me, it would make my life a lot easier to put this case in a closed file. So, it kind of depends on who we really are, Pratt. If we want to deliver up a head, no one is ever gonna know except you and me that Darla had an opportunity, she had a motive. But there is not one piece of evidence to show that she took the opportunity or was even aware of the money that Wang had stashed with Webb.”

  Pratt shook his head and opened an envelope he had been holding.

  “What’cha got there?” asked Calvino.

  “Some footage of the audience the night of the Thai-Vietnam friendship concert. The Saigon concert where everyone sat in the same row. A friend of a friend had a camcorder and filmed the audience. Markle, Webb, Wang are on the tape. Three men. Two of them are dead.”

  “I killed three men tonight, Pratt.”

  Pratt ignored the comment. His mind was still on live suspects. “Webb is still my first choice.”