Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “What kind of work you do in Saigon?” asked Pratt.

  “I am a consultant,” said Charlie, smiling. “Same business as Marcus here.”

  “You think Webb killed Markle?”

  “I’ve lived in Saigon long enough not to know what I think any more. He might have done it. He was pretty pissed off that night. But who knows how pissed off you have to be to kill someone? I’ve never done that. Hitting that driver in the face is as close as I ever hope to come to murder.”

  CHAPTER 13

  SAIGON CONCERT

  BRUTALITY IS THE way of the world. At first this Marcus twist of phrase had sounded like one of those T-shirt sayings. But, on reflection, Calvino had been thinking there was some basic truth in what Marcus had said. Brutality wasn’t an isolated exception, floating to the surface now and again and dragging down the less fit, the less prepared. Brutality was the main operating procedure and, if there were a lull in the blood and violence, the nightmare had not ended, the silence which fell was a rest between rounds. Then a bell rang, and a deeper mechanism of cruelty intervened, and blood and bodies, the visible evidence, the trail of death, began all over again. Brutality was like one of those creatures in a horror movie that had been eliminated only to return again in the darkness of night. Markle existed half of the time on his information superhighway out there, somewhere, making new hook-ups, establishing connections, surfing in cyberspace, but in the electronic world there was nothing that could ever pave over that mud road of hatred, jealousy and greed which ended at some juncture in death and violence.

  “Corruption is a necessary evil to fight brutality.”

  Another one of Marcus’s sayings. Without corruption, the brutality would have been much worse. There would be suffering, more bodies, more grief and despair. “You Americans don’t understand this. You call us corrupt. You want to eliminate corruption. You don’t understand it is our shield, a way for us to survive. When America ends brutality, then come and talk to us about corruption. The time will be right then. So we make you a deal. We leave you with all your guns and you leave us to make what payments have to be made.”

  His arguments rumbled through Calvino’s mind as he walked back to his hotel. He was reasonably certain that Marcus’s discussion about brutality and corruption was intended to explain how Markle got himself killed in Saigon. He was a young American who simply didn’t understand the nature of the game and when the brutality machine descended on him, it was, of course, too late. What Marcus didn’t know, however, was that Drew Markle had left a trail on the diskette.

  Calvino wanted to read the thoughts of a man who had been stalked, who knew that the veil might be lowered at any time, a young man, an American, who had been raised to believe that brutality could be mastered, tamed like a wild animal.

  At the same time Calvino arrived at his hotel, Marcus and Pratt were sitting at a table on Pham Ngu Lao Street, listening to Charlie’s version of what had gone down in the Q-Bar between Markle and Webb, on the eve of Markle’s death. Calvino paid his cyclo driver, an attendant opened the sliding glass door, he picked up his key at the desk, walked through the lobby and straight into the elevator. As the elevator doors opened on his floor, he stepped out, carrying the laptop in one hand and his room key in the other. The corridor was empty. As he set down the laptop on the old carpet, a strand of wire caught his eye. The copper wire stretched about four inches above the floor and had been strung tight, spanning the base of the door. It was a professional job, the kind of trip-wire anyone going through the door wouldn’t be able to miss hitting. Open the door and take one short step forward; one last step forward and the big sleep, he thought. He was on his hands and knees, his eyes following the thin, copper wiring.

  “Brutality is the way of the world,” the words ran through his mind like a mantra, and when it comes from you, then you are surprised because you think it doesn’t belong to your world. But what other world does one live in? he thought to himself. His heart was racing. Had whoever done this job might also have booby-trapped Pratt’s room? He sat on the floor, staring at the wire, slowly he leaned his head back against the wall, took a deep breath. He stared at the wire. One more step and...the void. He saw himself coming out of the elevator, his mind somewhere else, back in the Winchell & Holly elevator when the power had cut out. If he hadn’t been carrying the laptop and hadn’t bent down as he set it on the floor, he would have opened the door, taken that one step forward over the threshold and tripped the wire. Would the local police have arrested another one-legged ex-RVN sergeant on crutches?

  Now what? Go down to reception, and do what? Lean over and address the young girl in the white ao dai, “Excuse me, could you have the maid remove the bomb from my room?” Then they would phone the police, and that would start something he didn’t have time to finish. The investment fund reception was starting in a couple of hours. Leaving the door wired was not a good idea. A maid might go through the door with his laundry. He tried to imagine if there was more than one way to trip the wire. He rose from the floor, his legs still shaky and tried the door to the room next to his. He knocked once, then again, but there was no reply. With a Swiss army knife he picked the lock, let himself into the room. There was a plastic cup of half-eaten rice and lentils overrun with ants. He quickly crossed to the French doors, slipped out onto the balcony and climbed over the railing to his own side of the balcony. He let himself into his own room. He set the computer down on the bed on his way over to the door. A grenade had been fixed to the inside wall and a wire was attached to the pin. The wire would have yanked out the pin if he had tripped over it, or if he had opened the door. The force of the blast would have unleashed hundreds of jagged metal fragments, scattering the shrapnel with enough energy to dismember legs, hands, arms.

  Some thought had gone into this fail-safe system. He leaned down and marveled at the mechanism that had been intended to end his life. The grenade was a newer pin type, the kind with coiled springs inside, and the explosion shattered the springs along the score marks, releasing the bits of spring out as deadly shrapnel. The first thing Calvino did was to check the pin—it was a cotter pin with the shaft pressed together. A little tug on the wire and the pin would have pulled out. With the Swiss army knife, he bent each end of the cotter pin, folding each shaft back. Then he sliced the electrician’s tape and carefully pulled the grenade away from the wall, releasing the tension of the wire, then he cut the wire. He stared at the grenade, wondering whether the fuse had been removed. In a normal booby-trap, the fuse was removed, the cotter pin was pulled and the grenade blew up immediately. Calvino looked at the door. Chances are enough fuse would have been left to let him go through the door so that his body would take the full impact of the blast. He was betting three to four seconds of fuse had been left in the grenade. If he were right, the grenade might come in handy later; if he were wrong about the fuse, then the grenade would explode in his face. He looked at the door one more time and then slipped the grenade in the pocket of his suit jacket. It was heavy and made his jacket sag. He looked at himself in the mirror. Here was a man with a .40 caliber Smith & Wesson slung in a leather rig on one side and a grenade stuffed in his jacket pocket on the opposite side. He looked like an Orchard Street merchant on a chilly New York afternoon in late November, standing in the doorway of his shop with a thermos of coffee shoved deep in one pocket.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, flipped open the case of the laptop, hit the power switch and watched the screen come alive, scrolling protocols, before the windows filled the screen with icons. Calvino then inserted the small plastic floppy diskette in to the side of the computer. He looked at his watch: it was nearly five o’clock. He opened the Word Perfect program, changed to the floppy disk drive. There were dozens of files arranged in a methodical order: Saigon.1, Saigon.2 and so on. Then the numbering skipped, went out of sequence, jumping from Saigon.24 to Saigon.33. Either files had been deleted, or he hadn’t had time to download them. Saigon.33 had last been o
pened and saved on the day of Markle’s death. Over two hundred thousand bytes combined in all of the files. Saigon.33 was the Fourth of July file and bore the time marker 6.32 pm, followed by the notation: 9,762 bytes. Markle must have updated the diskette and given it to Mai just before he left the office, an hour before a grenade had blown him apart. Calvino opened Saigon.33 and glanced over the text which appeared like a conversation that Drew Markle was having with himself. Calvino started to read the file on the screen: SAIGON CONCERT.

  “By the time you have gone through Saigon.1 to Saigon.24 you will have the evidence to support the conclusions contained in this final file. And also my personal observations, for whatever they are worth. Winchell & Holly was instructed to do the due diligence on several Vietnamese companies on behalf of the Vietnam Emerging Market Fund. My task has been to coordinate the due diligence, not a term which has much history and even less meaning in Vietnam. I scratched the surface and what I found were bad loans, bogus bookkeeping, and directors whose only qualifications were their mafia connections. I am told by Webb that a lawyer can’t apply the same standards of due diligence in Vietnam otherwise the Fund would have not a single company which would meet the test. He’s probably right. The investors are a cosy, small club of people who have a history of doing business in this environment. They know what they are getting into. It’s a commercial decision where no one expects transparency. Jungle law! You fly over the jungle in a chopper and you look down and what do you see? asked Marcus. Just a lot of green. You know there is a hell of a lot happening on the ground but you can’t see it, man, sez Marcus. Emerging markets, but emerging from what?

  “Since April when Harris starting coming in every two weeks from Bangkok, he’s been dropping some big hints...”

  “And Marcus’s name came up? ”

  “As a matter of fact it did. He sez Marcus and some ole buddies from the pre-1975 days have been talking about old times and what they might do to bring the old times rolling back again. One of those ole buddies is my own brother. If Harry knew what was going on... I tried to phone him all afternoon, and then remembered it was the Fourth of July and he was probably at the picnic. Harry never missed a Fourth of July. It is just as well, the news I have would only spoil his celebration. Mark will get hold of him if I don’t and let him read the Saigon files. He has the key files loaded on his hard disk.

  “And I came to Vietnam because I wanted to prove myself, like Harry had proved himself. Harry once told me that he grew up in Vietnam...he grew down as well. Harry smiled when I asked him what he meant. He said you find the heaven and hell, the animal and the angel walking a jungle path... Frustration, boredom, and death in the 90s isn’t in the jungle; it’s in a law office, my law office...

  “I talked with several people in New York City. Excuse me, I am a lawyer. I didn’t sign to be a live feed to the CIA. You hit that web and you never get unstuck. Like a fly waiting for big momma spider to climb down for her dinner. It’s just a matter of time. And what does Wallace, my mentor, in New York say? He doesn’t say, ‘Fine, son, we understand, we will pull you out. Fly you home. Go to the airport, we will have someone waiting to escort you home.’ Or he could have said, ‘We are on your side, fuck Harris, ignore him, forget him. Do your job as if you were sitting on the twenty-fourth floor of our offices on Park Avenue. And I am one hundred percent behind you.’ But what he does say is something altogether different, ‘Drew, sometimes a lawyer has to act on faith. This is one of those times. I didn’t have to double check on Harris. It wasn’t necessary. I know his boss in Washington. Way back when you were in grade school we worked together.’ Worked together! Shit. I should have been doing due diligence on the partners in Winchell & Holly. Revolving doors are sometimes attached to companies you would never think of. ‘Harris,’ sez Wallace, ‘is not involved in some rogue operation. That’s TV-land stuff. Our interests are his interests. And the interests of our client. The Fund. You have to do what you think is right. But helping Harris is the right thing, otherwise, I wouldn’t be asking you to give a hand. This is your first really big deal. You pull this off and you will be a partner of this firm.’

  “Give them a hand, no problem. A hand I would give, but Harris wants a leg, arm, the head, the soul. Do I want to be a partner in this law firm? The answer is hell, yes, I want it. To say I don’t would be bullshit. Christ, I would be Webb’s boss! That alone would make it worth the effort. But there are so many problems to overcome. Every time I turn around there is one more new hitch. For instance, to complicate my life, Jackie Ky is Marcus’s niece. She’s living in his old villa. Basic information for anyone winging through the background of Saigon.33. That’s what Marcus calls this crazy plan. Saigon Concert.33 to be precise. It’s perfect, he uses a code word based on a cheap beer that isn’t even called 33 any more. It’s called 333. The number 33 is also printer ’s talk for the end. Throughout the Vietnam war, someone was saying at the Q-Bar the other night, thousands of reports were filed with 33 at the bottom. It was a number that journalists used and the Vietnamese thought this was a lucky number so they named their beer after it. Of course, it is a bullshit story, but it sounds good. Kind of like the stories Marcus tells or a lot of the other vets who are still living twenty, thirty years ago in the past. All this goes to show how far in the past Marcus is living, out of touch with reality. Harris doesn’t really know what Marcus is planning. If he did, then he would shit himself.

  “ ‘Jackie Ky knows what her uncle is up to,’ sez Harris. ‘Use her,’ he sez. ‘It’s for the good of your country. Too many bad things have happened between Vietnam and America. You have the chance to do what few people ever have offered to them: You can make a difference in the history of millions of people. Think of it, Drew. What you will be doing for your country is right and moral. Something to make up for the damage my generation did to the people here.’

  “Does that mean the CIA will make me a partner? I thought. “ ‘You have the run of Jackie’s place. Sooner or later you will find something,’ sez Harris. I found it sooner, and what I found was Saigon Concert.33. A cell of three men who had missed the final evacuation and were left behind on 30th April 1975. All three are Viet Khieu who later escaped on boats. They kicked ass together in the old days in something called SOG. Special Operations Group is what SOG means. Someone told me at the Q-Bar. The villa was a perfect place for them to meet. A perfect place for me to plant a listening device. I had access to every room in the place. I had Jackie’s trust. No one would suspect...Drew Markle, a lawyer, Jackie’s boyfriend. What a joke that turned out to be. You know why I decided to help Harris? Jackie was using me to feed her information about the Fund. Tit for tat. All is fair in love and war, they say. Also, I have this fear that somehow my brother is connected to this crazy thing. I’ve got to know, find out before Harris does. When I finally get the tapes from the villa, what do I find? A lot of the conversations are in Vietnamese. I can’t understand anything they are saying. Marcus would sometimes switch into English. I think there is someone in the room who doesn’t understand English, an official, a mole in the government and he wants to keep that person in the dark. Or maybe he is showing off, the Viet Khieu thing equivalent of the big swinging dick act. Hey, man, I speak English. I am not just some local cyclo driver talking out of my ass. I am special. I can talk about taking out a man in his own language. He said that on tape. You shouldn’t kill a man unless you know his thoughts and his dreams. Otherwise, what have you destroyed? It is like cutting down a tree, sez Marcus. I don’t understand him any more than I trust him.

  “Bottom line is that Marcus Nguyen has planned to kill an ex- Deputy Director of the CIA, named Rodney Judson, who had a significant connection, a personal pipeline into SOG during the war. Twenty years after leaving Saigon, Judson will return as one of the directors of the Fund. Twenty years before, Judson had run away from Saigon and left Marcus and a lot of others hanging out to dry as the NVA were at the edge of the city. ‘What price has Judson paid? He lan
ded on his feet. He’s coming back to Saigon as a hero. Think of that! I think we will have a welcome for him. I intend to blow the motherfucker away,’ sez Marcus on the tape. Marcus’s story was simple. Judson had promised that Marcus would be airlifted out of Saigon on April 28th but it seems that Judson left without him. Left without two of the other men in the plot as well. Rather than a simple bullet in the brain, Marcus wants to plan a big, grandstand play. Saigon Concert.33 has coordinated the assassination of Rodney Judson the night of the Fund launch. Marcus will shoot him as he gets out of his limo at the Continental Hotel. This was the place Marcus had gone to meet him by prearrangement twenty years earlier. This was the place he wanted to kill Judson.

  “ ‘I will kill the sonofabitch,’ sez Marcus on the tape. ‘Rodney Judson threw us away like a piece of shit. You know how some of the GIs called the VC monkeys without tails. Hey, man, I gotta tell you the VC were Vietnamese. I am Vietnamese. I wasn’t living in some kind of fucking zoo, man. I was putting my ass on the line because I really believed that Judson would be behind us, no matter what happened, we were in it together. If it turned to shit, then, we were knee deep in the same shit. On April 28th, what do I hear? Oh, Judson, well, Sir, he’s not available, Sir. What do you mean not available? He’s on a carrier conferring with his staff. What the fuck does that mean? I am part of his staff. He’s not conferring with me. Well, Sir, all I can say is that Judson isn’t in Saigon any longer, and, no, he didn’t leave a message for you. Next.’