Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Asians never talk about automatic choices,” said Pratt.

  Marcus let his face break, counted to ten as Dung’s hands worked the muscles in his right arm.

  “I want to explain why I asked you to meet me here. It is ugly, smells of exhaust fumes and the people are poor. So why did I invite you to such a place?”

  “ ‘So, now the gates are open,’ ” said Pratt, quoting from Coriolanus as if he were ordering another bowl of rice.

  Marcus gave the impression that he had missed the connection. “Gates, fuck the gates. Pham Ngu Lao is controlled by a certain mafia, and they are safe in this part of town. They don’t leave unless they have to or someone gives them a real good reason. And that usually means a lot of money stuffed in a duffel bag. They stay tight with each other, look after each other like family. The man who ate out of your rice bowl would go to your room at the Saigon Concert Hotel, open and close the door real quietly, and slit your throat before you had a chance to say William Shakespeare. The man Calvino’s looking for, the one who killed Drew Markle, works on this street. He’s the one Calvino’s looking for, the one he’s been hired to finger. And that’s all he’s gotta do. Just lift his arm and point the finger. A reflex...” He began to purr as Dung, who was squatting down under the table began to work his fingers on the outer edge of Marcus’s left calf. “...action. But Calvino isn’t necessarily a difficult man; he’s a man who is overloaded by Saigon. So, I thought, if his friend Pratt could listen to the killer confess here. The local mafia runs this street like it’s their own private country. Even the police are afraid of them. Asians don’t come here but foreigners like it. Webb, for instance, likes the action here.”

  “What do you want from me?” asked Pratt.

  “Straight to the point. We Vietnamese like that quality. I figure that if I can explain to you what happened to Drew Markle, and you are convinced, then Calvino will believe in your judgement.”

  “If it is logical, without holes, without agendas behind it, then he might think about it,” said Pratt.

  “Calvino told you about his little problem the other night?” Pratt remained expressionless, not knowing how much Marcus really knew, nor how much he was testing to find out the gaps in his knowledge. Dung was down on his knees, the sweat rolling off his chin and nose, as he massaged Marcus’s leg. His hands were dark, swollen, obscene appendages that looked non-human. He had used those hands inside dark tunnels to slit throats. No massage, just the passage of a sharp blade across a throat, sending the warm blood over his hands.

  “Calvino killed three men in some old abandoned wreck of a bar. He had no choice. I mean, it was self-defense. But, if he hadn’t been supplied with a certain weapon, he would be dead now. And if you ask him how he came to have such a weapon, I believe he will confirm that I played some small role.”

  “What does this have to do with Douglas Webb?” asked Pratt.

  “The men Calvino killed were the same trio who took out Drew Markle.”

  Pratt contemplated the possibility.

  “The word on the street is they were working for Webb.”

  “Why would Webb want to kill Markle?”

  Marcus opened his eyes, removed a cigarette from a pack. It had a broken filter, he smiled, and flicked it toward the street. As soon as the cigarette hit the street, two cyclo drivers made a dive for it. The victor tore off the broken filter and came up with a short cigarette in his mouth, spitting out pieces of tobacco.

  “A vertically challenged cigarette,” said Marcus, pulling out a second cigarette and handing it to Dung whose huge hands pushed the cigarette into his tiny black hole of a mouth.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can’t say broken or damaged in the States any more.”

  Closing in on two decades, thought Pratt. Marcus was showing off his knowledge of America, letting Pratt know who was current and who was living in the past.

  “As to why Webb would have Markle murdered, several reasons spring to mind. Webb had been going out with my niece, Jackie Ky, before Markle came on the scene. They hadn’t been going out all that long. But sometimes a man marks his turf and once marked any other man stepping onto it finds himself with a serious health problem. If the people running Pham Ngu Lao Street thought I was coming to take away what they saw was theirs, I would be dead. I would expect to be dead. In Bangkok, I am certain there are similar places where you could get yourself dead very fast by moving in on the wrong people.”

  The cyclo driver smoking the discarded cigarette butt made another swipe at Pratt’s plate, but this time, Pratt half turned in his chair and handed him the plate. The driver took a couple of steps back, squatted down and ate the rice and chicken with his fingers, taking a puff of the cigarette, his mouth ballooned up, chewing the food and the smoke curling out of his nose. The videotape he had flown in from Bangkok of the Thai-Vietnamese concert had shown Webb sitting with an American woman named Darla, his hand finding her hand. If he was suffering from rejection and jealous over Jackie Ky’s involvement with Markle, Webb was doing a very good job hiding it.

  “You see, with the way people live here, mostly unemployed, dirt poor, it doesn’t take much to find a man, or three men, to kill someone else for very little money. And if you are willing to pay a little more, then you can find men with a talent for killing. There are many men like that in Vietnam. The only talent they ever had a chance to develop when they were young was a talent for staying alive and killing other men. Important qualities to be sure.”

  “Have you told Calvino this theory?”

  “It’s not a theory.”

  “And Webb would have access to such people?”

  “Indirectly, yes. There is a younger, wilder crowd that hangs out at the Q-Bar, they are there every night. They speak Vietnamese. Webb speaks enough to get by, but his friends are fluent. One or two introductions and he was in business.”

  “What proof do you have to connect Webb to the three gunmen?”

  Marcus had been waiting for this one. Dung finished the massage and rose to his feet, taking the cigarette out of his mouth long enough to reach over the table and take a large bottle of beer. He tilted back his head and the beer emptied from the bottle straight down his throat without Dung ever stopping to take a breath. As they watched, the cyclo driver handed back the plate to Pratt. The plate was clean as if it had come out of a dishwasher. Finally, Dung removed the bottle from his mouth, the sweat dripping from his face, smiled and popped the cigarette between his lips. Marcus reached into his pocket, removed a roll of dollars, and peeled off a one dollar bill. Dung accepted the dollar and pulled up a chair and sat down. Marcus reached into his shirt pocket and removed an envelope.

  “Have a look at these,” he said.

  Pratt opened the envelope and removed some pictures. There was one of Webb and Jackie. Another picture of Webb with three Vietnamese, all young men in their twenties, dark shirts and trousers, tough, serious, fit like a commando unit fresh from the field. Webb was in half profile as if he were talking to someone off-camera.

  “It was dark in the bar, Vincent didn’t get a good look at any of the men.”

  “In other words, Calvino thinks that we all look the same,” said Marcus.

  Pratt started to hand back the photos but Marcus waved him off.

  “Keep them. Give them to Calvino. They are the same men. If he sees the photo it will come back to him. You don’t kill a man up close and forget what his face looks like. Even if all you see are his eyes for a moment. You don’t forget that instant when he dies.”

  “Webb seems like the kind of man who likes women. Lots of women. That’s why Vincent may find it difficult to believe that this kind of man would kill because someone else came on the scene. Remember Webb is a farang.”

  “You are a wise man, Colonel Pratt. I didn’t say that the only reason he killed Markle was because of my niece and Markle. He was a good company man. An American company man. Things were done according to the rules. W
ebb is wired a little different like many foreigners who spend too much time in Asia. He was, shall we say, flexible. Winchell & Holly have been working on a mutual fund.”

  “The Vietnam Emerging Market Fund.”

  “You’ve done your homework. So you will know there’s a pipeline of money that will be flowing into Vietnam through the Fund. What will happen to that money? It goes into investments. Land, companies, resources. Drew Markle was doing due diligence, making sure that the companies the Fund might invest in were keeping the books rather than cooking the books, they owned what they said they owned, they had no problems with taxes or the government. That sort of thing. Webb had connections inside one Vietnamese company, one of the State enterprises. Only Markle found out that this company wasn’t really a company at all. It was just a name on a card. It was a division of a State enterprise. Now this defect didn’t bother the Japanese, the Hong Kongers, the Thais. They did business with this non-company as if it were a company. You understand what I am saying, they were flexible. Markle was legalistic. He said this non-company was in violation of Vietnamese law and he would recommend that the Fund not invest any money in it. Markle told all this to Jackie after work. How he had these big fights with Webb and how Webb was starting to get nasty. Push was coming to shove, as Markle told her.”

  “How much money was involved?”

  Marcus shrugged, stretching out his shoulders and arms, feeling the warmth of Dung’s massage. He gave Dung another cigarette, lit it, thinking about the question, letting it hang in the air as a loud motorcycle shot past.

  “Markle told my niece that Webb stood to get about a hundred grand from the head of the State enterprise. But only if the Fund invested in the company. Say, at least one point five million. That was the deal. The one Markle was blowing off over a stupid American technicality.”

  “Calvino was a lawyer,” said Pratt.

  “Yeah? Then he should appreciate the dilemma Markle faced.”

  “Who took the picture?”

  Marcus tapped Dung on the shoulder.

  “Show my Thai friend your camera.”

  Dung, a cloud of smoke obscuring his face, produced a small camera from his pocket and set it on the table. Another bottle of beer appeared on the table and Dung helped himself.

  “Webb’s one of Dung’s customers. One dollar for a massage like Dung’s is exceptional value. And Webb is a man who appreciates value. Another dollar he snaps your picture. Sometimes he takes a photograph on the side and sells it to other people. Like me.”

  “When did Dung take this photo?”

  “A few days before Markle was killed. Here on Pham Ngu Lao Street at this restaurant. Look at the background. See that TV, the fridge, the potted plants with those same huge green leaves against the ugly gray cement. It’s the same.”

  Pratt matched up the background in the photograph with the restaurant. Webb had been sitting in the same seat that Marcus now occupied. Dung must have been seated across the table where I am sitting, thought Pratt. On the street side, a beggar ’s hand reached away from the table. Only Webb wasn’t looking at the camera, the only one who didn’t know that a photo was being taken. Dung was Marcus’s man on the street, his source of intelligence, making contact with foreigners, and probably selling his photographs to the police, local mafia as well as to Marcus. The way the man guzzled a beer, he demonstrated a powerful appetite that needed feeding and one dollar and a lot of sweat giving a massage wasn’t exactly the most efficient way of doing it. The Vietnamese in the photo didn’t look like the kind of men who had to steal food off foreigners’ plates. Young but hard, beyond hard, scary eyes with that dull, dead look. Marcus’s version of what happened had an internal logic, it was a serviceable, workable explanation. Men had been hanged in a hundred countries for a thousand years on less evidence, thought Pratt. And more than one innocent man had been hanged on far less circumstantial evidence. That was the way of the world. You could never be sure, thought Pratt.

  “You are friends with Harry Markle, I believe. Vincent is working for Harry. Why not simply go directly to Mr. Markle and explain to him what you have told me and let him decide?”

  Marcus smiled. “I already have. Harry and I go back a long, long way. Before he ever heard of Calvino.”

  “He’s leaving it up to Calvino,” said Pratt.

  “The farang stick together,” said Marcus.

  Drew Markle did get himself killed on Marcus Nguyen’s watch. If Marcus had the photograph before Markle had been murdered, then why hadn’t he taken steps to warn Markle, protect him, get him out of the country? These were some of the questions which Pratt thought that, if he were Harry Markle, he would be asking himself. Why wasn’t Harry Markle in Saigon himself? Calvino had said Harry had a work commitment. Are farang that different in their feelings when a brother was killed? he wondered. How could work ever come before seeking the murderer of one’s own brother? How could money and career ever be valued above family? Pratt had had these questions from the start.

  Behind him in the street, voices were raised in anger. A fat, young American stood beside an empty cyclo and ten Vietnamese formed a circle around him. The men closed in with clenched fists, one held a metal pipe, another a brick and they were moving fast, shouting at the large farang. The farang was shouting back in Vietnamese and waving a five-thousand dong note in one hand.

  “Street theater,” said Marcus. “Starring a character named Charlie who is from South Carolina.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everyone knows Charlie.”

  Marcus had begun to rise from his chair as the angry crowd pressed in on Charlie. At the same moment, Charlie stepped forward and hit the largest of the cyclo drivers smack in the face with a fist that looked like if you cut it off and tossed it on a scale, it would have weighed no less than ten kilos. The fist drove into the driver ’s face, smashing his nose; his legs buckled and he dropped to his knees, blood gushing everywhere. The others in the crowd froze in their tracks, looking at the damage inflicted on the largest man in the group.

  “He carries a real punch,” said Marcus.

  Charlie put an arm on the shoulder of a young kid, gave him the bloodied five-thousand dong note and the kid took off running. And as Charlie faced off against the cyclo drivers, the kid returned with a soldier in camouflage uniform, steel helmet and carrying an AK47.

  “This should be good,” said Marcus.

  A couple of minutes later, the soldier led away the cyclo driver, his face still leaking blood, his nose flattened to one side. The other drivers drifted away and Charlie climbed up the steps to the restaurant and sat down at the table next to Marcus.

  “Sorry, I’m a bit late. I had a little trouble over the fare.” He was shaking his right hand, rubbing some torn skin over the knuckles.

  “This is Colonel Pratt,” said Marcus, nodding in his direction. “My name’s Charlie in desperate need of a Tiger beer. I’m a South Carolina boy. Sometimes you get these basic misunderstandings over money. I said five thousand dong to Pham Ngu Lao and sure as hell we arrive and he demands five dollars. I speak reasonable Vietnamese.”

  “Perfect Vietnamese,” added Marcus.

  “So I am pretty sure I got the message across that the fee was five thousand dong. Now he has a lot of people who are backing him up. I ain’t been in three fights in my whole life. But I remember what my daddy told me, you get a group of ‘em comin’ at you and all you got to do is find the biggest one and hit him as hard as you can in the nose. You break his nose. He’s gonna have blood flying every which direction.”

  “What did you say to the soldier?” asked Marcus.

  Charlie smiled. “The driver said I stole his cyclo and he had ten witnesses to back him up. So I thought to myself, it’s my word against theirs. Who is the soldier gonna believe? I said to the soldier, he’s right, I took the cyclo. But under Vietnamese law, only the rightful owner can file a charge. Now this caught everyone off guard. I was running a risk. But I know f
or a fact more than half these cyclos are stolen and I figure if this guy had tried to cheat me on the fare, he probably stole the damn cyclo somewhere down the road. I said to the soldier, if this driver has the papers, then you arrest me. Put me in jail. I won’t complain. But if he doesn’t have the papers, then he’s the thief, and you arrest him. Well, that boy didn’t have the papers. I gave the soldier five dollars just so he would know how grateful I was for him enforcing the laws of Vietnam. That boy’s cooling his heels in jail now. And, damn, I think I might have broken my hand hitting him so hard.”

  “The reason I asked you to meet me, Charlie, is for you to tell me again that story about Webb and Markle getting into a fight in the Q-Bar. The night before Markle got killed.”

  “Jesus, that was quite some night. Crazy stuff was in the air,” said Charlie. Then he started speaking to Dung in Vietnamese, and Dung examined his hand, each knuckle at a time, finding one that was dislocated, he popped it back into place. “Goddamn that hurt and felt great at the same time.”

  “Crazy stuff in the air,” said Pratt.

  “Douglas Webb sat at the Q-Bar with a small audience around him. He has a lot of friends who drink there. They usually get drunk together. Well, that night, Webb was getting himself drunk on premium whiskies and was feeling no pain. Drew Markle shows up with Jackie. Kin of Marcus here. And Drew makes the big mistake of pushing into the bar beside Webb. He accidentally hit Webb’s arm, and bingo, knocks the drink out of his hand and all over his suit. The color drained right out of that boy’s face. Drew tried to say he was sorry and all but it was too late. Webb hit him. Not so much as a hit but a slap. Bang across the face. The kind that leaves five red finger marks. Drew looks dazed then he takes a swing at Webb and misses. He was a nice kid but no fighter. Webb ducked, came up with a right hand into Markle’s gut, which knocked the wind out of him. Next thing Webb is saying, ‘Keep out of my way or you will be put out of the way.’ But Webb was kinda drunk, Markle had tried to punch him, so I didn’t think too much about it. Then Markle is dead the next night. Lucky for Webb they caught that ex-RVN sergeant or his tit could have been in the ringer.”