Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Darla,” said Jackie Ky, coming out of the shadows.

  “Ask sweet, perfect, Mai, where she was the night Drew died.”

  Mai looked icy cool, as if one of those Zone breezes was blowing over her as she sat on a bar stool.

  “I was still at the office,” Mai said. “You’ve got to believe me, Vinee. I love you.”

  “Love. What a joke. What a great alibi,” said Jackie Ky.

  “So you let Khanh kill him for you. He never liked a nice Hanoi girl playing nurse with an American.”

  Mai came off the stool and pushed Jackie against the wall. It was a sudden, unexpected action.

  “Like all overseas Vietnamese,” said Mai, “you think you were the only ones to suffer. That’s a lie. We suffered as much as you. No. We suffered more. We don’t go throwing money around, pretending we are better than anyone else. You Viet Khieu aren’t real Vietnamese. You aren’t American. You are nothing. That’s what eats you. Your California university education, your perfect English. So what? This is Vietnam; it is my country. You don’t belong here in Ho Chi Minh City. It is no longer your place.”

  Mai sighed and drank a straight orange juice from a straw. With her free hand, Mai took an AK47 from her handbag. Calvino kept watching as the long automatic weapon slowly came out of a bag a fraction of its size. She sprayed the mirror with gunfire. Darla reached out and pulled the AK47 away by the barrel. Mai didn’t put up much of a struggle. Basically, she just let Darla have the weapon.

  “You get to choose, Calvino,” Darla shouted from behind the bar. Then she aimed the AK47 and fired a burst at the table.

  “Did you kill Markle?” he asked, sitting behind the table. He caught her image in a fragment of the mirror.

  “Why would I do that? Dead men don’t use my services.” “Jackie?”

  She started to cry like at the temple in front of Drew Markle’s photograph.

  “I loved him,” she sobbed. “I told you it was Webb. Why don’t you believe me? He killed Drew because he was going to tell New York about the money from Mark.”

  Tan skated across the bar top on his wooden platform and skidded to a stop right next to one of Darla’s huge breasts.

  “It’s been a long time since I have been that close to heaven’s gate,” said Tan, looking up at the breast.

  Pratt stood in the door, looking at his watch.

  “Time’s up, Vincent. Who is it gonna be?” asked Pratt.

  “I know that Thai game. You assign me the responsibility. You’re off the hook. If there’s a mistake, then, it is the farang who takes the fall.”

  Pratt smiled, then started playing the saxophone real mellow and smooth like a single malt scotch that had been inside a barrel for thirty years. Bamboo sticks picked up the beat. Darla tapped a series of glasses with a spoon, blending into the rhythm.

  “Soup’s ready,” said Tan.

  “You gotta believe me, buddy,” said Webb. “I didn’t kill Drew.” “Time’s up,” said Pratt, lowering his sax.

  Calvino rose up from behind the table, holding the Smith & Wesson out, pointing at everyone behind the bar. Sweat rolled down his face, stung his eyes. Someone had to die. He swung around and aimed at Pratt.

  “Don’t make me do this, Pratt.”

  “I’m not making you do anything. It’s the way of the world.” The handgun turned into a sword with a long, sharp blade.

  “The blade of Solomon,” said Darla. “Where’s the baby?” asked Tan.

  Each of the women held out a newly born infant and Calvino raised the sword above his head, weeping as the blade started down. The loud cracking sound made Calvino turn. Again the pounding thundered and he opened an eye. He was still fully dressed, his necktie half undone, and he had a gun in his hand.

  Someone was at the door to his room. He put the gun under this pillow and went to the door. It was the cleaning woman, small and serious, in a gray uniform.

  “Can I clean your room?”

  “No,” he said, slamming the door and leaning against it, his head up, looking at the ceiling. He looked down at his watch, swallowing hard. It was nearly eleven in the morning. Pratt would have already had his appointment with Khanh. He himself would, with any luck, soon be having lunch with Mai. He wanted to tell her about the dream. And he wanted to know if she would have the diskette with her.

  CHAPTER 11

  FEE FOR SERVICES RENDERED

  WATCHING HIS EYES, Mai handed a photograph to Calvino at lunch. She wanted to judge his reaction and then she could decide what to do next. She had retained vivid childhood memories of living in the countryside and the terror she felt upon hearing American bombers approaching. This had been the first time she had ever revealed that time to anyone outside of her family. She had been evacuated by her parents from Hanoi when the bombing made life too dangerous. Her father had been a MIG fighter pilot. At age twenty-seven years, he was killed in action; in the same year, Mai turned five years old. An American fighter had shot down her father ’s plane. He had been a hero of the People’s War of Liberation; a handsome, young man, eyes squinting a slight smile as he looked into the camera for his official photograph. Then he was gone. Only the photograph remained. She sometimes dreamed of seeing that face trapped inside a MIG at the exact moment it exploded in the sky and, in an instant, the face was replaced by twisted metal, burning flesh, and shards of bone raining down on the jungle canopy. Her mother, a practicing Catholic, still lit candles in his memory at the church. Mai thought of her mother praying, kneeling before the altar, eyes closed. It had been a long time since the war, since his death, since she had moved to Ho Chi Minh City. She was now older than her father had been when he had died, but the thought of this young man in his flight uniform in the photo never left her for more than a few days. She had quickly wiped away a tear as Calvino studied the photograph, finding a hint of her father ’s face in hers.

  “You’re on a flight path that would have made him proud,” he said.

  She took back the photograph.

  “Sometimes,” she paused. “I don’t know. I think I feel him nearby.”

  “Watching over you.” “That’s it.”

  In the middle of eating a piece of pizza, Mai slipped a brown envelope across the table. He already had come to recognize the meaning of the smile: The one that says, ‘I’m taking care of you, baby. Making my man happy, giving him what he asked for and feeling good about it.’ He took the envelope, folded it in half, feeling the plastic diskette inside and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “You like pizza?” he asked her.

  “I love pizza. Not as much as Chekhov. Maybe not as much as you. But I love pizza,” she said, covering her mouth as she giggled.

  Markle had been five years or so older than her father when he died. He couldn’t help himself from wondering what had been the nature of their relationship. He had gone through every frame of the video from the concert, asking himself one question.

  “Did Drew Markle ever hit on you?” It was the question he had wanted to ask from the moment she sat down at the table. The image of Markle reaching for her hand at the concert had burnt into his memory.

  “Hit?”

  “You know, make a pass at you.”

  As the message sank in, it wiped away the smile. “He wasn’t like that with me.”

  “All I am asking is, did he have a thing for you?”

  She thought about this, as she used her fork and knife to put another piece of pizza on Calvino’s plate—serving a man food was one of those things a Vietnamese woman did to show her feelings toward him.

  “I will be honest with you. He was very smart. And in his legal work he was totally honest. He was straight with the clients. He wouldn’t have anything to do with dirty money. He said that a lawyer had to put ethics first. Even above his client. No Vietnamese thinks like this and I think it caused him some trouble. But with women, he had no honesty or ethics. He was a playboy. He had money, a good job, he was single. So he had lo
ts of girls chasing him. Why not? For me an unethical lawyer and ethical lover is much better than an ethical lawyer and unethical lover. I think commitment to the woman is more important than to the client. What do you think?”

  In the Zone, deep inside the ice, seven days a week, such a distinction made no sense—the premise contained in the question exploded like Mai’s father and his MIG. Love, ethics, devotion, loyalty were slipped under the glacier wall of ice maids, ground into a fine dust, blown into a storm of lust and passion. Comfort Zone hearts, all cold, hard, and dead had crashed, and the ash was carried inside the chest of people neither living nor dead. Could a sense of commitment ever return to someone who had lived that long inside the Zone? What did he think, he asked himself.

  “I think you and I...you know, should get married.”

  She blinked, her hands holding the fork and knife suspended over her plate.

  “Are you proposing?”

  He swallowed hard. “What I’m saying is: You’re single. I’m single. What do single people do when they have certain feelings?”

  “What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess they get married.”

  She looked at her watch. “It’s late. I have to get back to the office. Since I met you, I am always running late.”

  “Aren’t you going to answer my question?” She was already on her feet.

  “I need some time.”

  Next thing he knew she was gone, floating into the traffic stream on her Honda Dream, turning on Dong Khoi where it converged with Le Loi Boulevard. Outside the restaurant window, a boy walked past carrying a wooden model of a seventeenth century sailing ship on his shoulder. The ship had masts and sails and the wind caught the sails. The model ship dwarfed the boy. Another street kid ran up with a tray of American attack helicopters and F14 fighters made from empty Tiger and 333 beer cans.

  Calvino wondered what went through Mai’s mind when she saw a Tiger beer can replica of the fighter which had killed her father. Maybe she didn’t make the connection, or something inside her refused to allow her to make a connection. There were no MIGs being hawked on the streets of Hanoi. Saigon had been liberated but there was no tourist market for souvenir MIGs formed from discarded beer cans. Marcus Nguyen, the financial consultant, had lost a villa and, having returned to Saigon, Calvino had begun to wonder if a second liberation of Saigon was under way. Everyone needed time in this divided city. He had proposed to a woman and she had answered with a request for more time. With enough time old wounds healed, enemies were reconciled, but, somehow, he had a feeling that not enough time had passed in a divided city, among a divided people, for the woman he loved to make a choice she knew that she would never be able to change.

  ******

  CALVINO had half an hour to kill before Pratt arrived at the hotel for their meeting in the courtyard. He had re-run the videotape of the concert inside his mind. Pratt would want to know what he thought about the row of the living and dead. Calvino paid the bill at the restaurant and walked through the reception area. Two farang stood together at the front desk and one was saying to the other in an American accent, “You got to know the date of the first recorded blow-job in Saigon after 1975.” His friend didn’t know. Calvino slowed down to catch the answer.

  “The first post-fall of Saigon blow-job took place inside the Casino Bar. That’s a bar opposite the square from the Rex. It happened on the staircase of the Casino at six pm on March 14th, 1979. That’s a little known fact. But it’s true. I was there. The guy who got the blow-job was a friend of mine. We wrote it down in his journal. No one should forget the important stuff.” Comfort Zone talk, thought Calvino. Cold enough to ice the wings of any approaching lover.

  Calvino kept on walking, letting the conversation between the two farang fade into garbled, white noise as he reached the waiting area in the lobby. He could feel the ice...Bangkok Comfort Zone ice, an avalanche of snow tumbling from the front desk. He stood in the doorway, looking out at the courtyard, there were a few people at tables. It was hot in the courtyard. He decided to wait for Pratt in the air-conditioning and read a newspaper.

  The small waiting area in the main lobby had a few cherry wood ornate benches with small, flat red cushions that looked like too many fat people had sat on them and they hadn’t been changed since 1975. Fresh cut flowers were on glass tables. Persian carpets had “Continental” stitched in a blue weave pattern. This part of the lobby was empty. He sat down on one of the benches and opened a copy of the International Herald Tribune. This was not the place nor the newspaper one would expect to conform with the image of a wiseguy from Brooklyn, who was going into the Saigon water trade. One of the Calvino laws, written in large print in the expat bible, was this one: To stay alive you keep the other side off-balance. Every time they think they have you figured out, you throw them a curve ball, pushing them back from the plate.

  He spotted Fred Harris as he walked across the lobby. Harris had passed him as if the guy behind the Herald Tribune didn’t exist.

  “Staying in the Graham Greene suite, Fred?” Calvino asked. Harris stopped, turned around, not quite believing his ears.

  He took a couple of steps down to the lobby and pulled down the newspaper, exposing Calvino’s face.

  “Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?” asked Harris. “Catching up on the financial news,” said Calvino.

  “What did you say to Webb about me?”

  “That I thought you were a G-man.”

  “What did he say?” He sounded guarded, not sure whether Calvino was being ironic, or whether he was telling something that approximated the truth.

  “He didn’t believe me.”

  “Your problem, Calvino, is that you are way over your head. And that’s not healthy.”

  “I didn’t know you were concerned about my health,” he said, folding his newspaper. “Why don’t we go out into the courtyard and have a friendly cup of coffee?”

  What was Fred Harris going to say? “No, I don’t have time for coffee, asshole.” He could have said that, but he didn’t and instead he said, “Calvino, what the fuck were you doing at Winchell & Holly’s?”

  “You will get your salary docked for using such language.”

  “What’s with the Demato bullshit?”

  “Danny Bryant, come on, baby. You are asking me if I’m having an identity crisis. I didn’t hear you calling yourself Fred Harris, Central Intelligence Agency, Bangkok Bureau.”

  “Will you lower your voice? I am here on a routine investigation.”

  “Yeah, is that so? It seems like a long-standing routine.” Fred Harris looked around.

  “Let’s get some coffee,” said Calvino.

  Harris followed Calvino out of the hotel lobby and into the courtyard. One step out of the lobby and they were hit by the wall of afternoon heat. The next thing they hit was Pratt seated at a table near one of the large gnarled trees festooned with Christmas tree lights. “Look who’s here, Fred Harris,” said Calvino. Calvino pulled up a chair and sat down. Pratt said nothing as Harris pulled up another chair. A waiter arrived and took the order for two black coffees.

  “It’s a Fourth of July Bangkok picnic reunion,” said Calvino. “Lieutenant Colonel Prachai, good to see you,” said Fred Harris. Calvino sat back in his chair.

  “You didn’t say you were glad to see me, Fred. I’m hurt,” said Calvino. “Never mind, it is not healthy to walk around with a hurt heart.”

  “I want to thank you, Colonel Prachai for your cooperation in Phuket,” said Fred Harris, ignoring Calvino. In the courtyard of the Continental Hotel, suddenly, Vincent Calvino no longer existed. Harris sat talking with Pratt, using his rank and formal first name, as if the two of them were at the table planning an official operation. This was standard operating procedure in the Zone when a Zone worker pushed her way between two friends, looking for a lady’s drink. Calvino smiled at Harris. The man had tried to break his face.

  “Mark Wang’s name was on your list of
people going to Phuket,” said Pratt. “But we’ve drawn a blank on who killed him.”

  “So have we, Lieutenant Colonel Prachai. But we will find whoever did it. That much you can count on. We have deployed resources. Military and security resources. Wang’s case, like Markle’s, has the highest priority.”

  Fred Harris was starting to sound like an asshole again. All that was missing were the black and yellow Bermuda shorts.

  “What’s the official theory on Markle’s murder?” asked Calvino. Harris forced a smile, but didn’t look at Calvino. He addressed

  the response to Pratt as if he had asked the question. “Saigon has its problems. Along the river you have a turf battle between some veterans from the North and some locals who fought for the South. It’s no secret there’s no love lost between these two groups of people. It was just a matter of time before something like this happened. Someone made a move. The night before Markle was killed, there was a fight along the river. A guy from the North had a knife. He used it. No one was killed but one guy got himself cut up pretty bad. The next night was revenge time along the river. Markle just got in the way. No one was looking to take out an American. Are you kidding? The Vietnamese have been on their fucking knees for years for us to lift the embargo and now they are going to set back their economic development ten years for what? To hit an American citizen in the middle of Saigon?”

  “So if you’ve got it all figured out, why have you deployed resources?” he asked, trying to sound like Harris. “And what are you doing in Saigon working for a mutual fund company under a fake name?”

  “Let me ask you something, Calvino. Are you an American taxpayer?”

  Calvino brushed off the question and looked away.

  “No, I am serious. Do you pay taxes to Uncle Sam?”

  “Since when does the CIA care who is paying taxes?”

  “You don’t pay my salary. That’s what I’m getting at. You’re a civilian and you are in the way.”