The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  “You mean the war? Yes.”

  “Of course you are,” Ernst said. “Then tell me, does this information mean anything to you?”

  “Not a lot. I was in-country most of my time. Didn’t see much of Saigon except the Yankee bars and tattoo parlors. The guy was a police captain, should it mean something to me?”

  “I suppose not. So let me tell you. As a captain, Binh ran the police department’s vice unit.”

  Bosch thought about that and said, “Okay, he was probably as corrupt as everything else that went with that war.”

  “I don’t suppose, coming from in-country, you know much about the system, the way things worked in Saigon?” Ernst asked.

  “Why don’t you tell us about it? Sounds like that was your department. Mine was just trying to keep alive.”

  Ernst ignored the shot. He chose to ignore Bosch as well. He looked only at Eleanor as he spoke.

  “It operated quite simply, really,” he said. “If you dealt in substances, in flesh, gambling, anything on the black market, you were required to pay a local tariff, a tithe to the house, so to speak. That payment kept the local police away. It practically guaranteed your business would not be interrupted — within certain bounds. Your only worry then was the U.S. military police. Of course, they could be paid off as well, I suppose. There was always that rumor. Anyway, this system went on for years, from the very beginning until after the American withdrawal, until, I imagine, April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell.”

  Eleanor nodded and waited for him to go on.

  “The major American military involvement lasted longer than a decade, before that there was the French. We are talking many, many years of foreign intervention.”

  “Millions,” Bosch said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You are talking about millions of dollars in payoffs.”

  “Yes, absolutely. Tens of millions when added up over the years.”

  “And where does Captain Binh fit in?” Eleanor asked.

  “You see,” Ernst said, “our information at the time was that the corruption within the Saigon police department was orchestrated or controlled by a triad called the Devil’s Three. You paid them or you did not do business. It was that simple.

  “Coincidentally, or rather not coincidentally, the Saigon police had three captains whose domain corresponded, so to speak, quite nicely with the domain of the triad. One captain in charge of vice. One narcotics. One for patrol. Our information is that these three captains were, in fact, the triad.”

  “You keep saying ‘Our information.’ Is that trade and development’s information? Where are you getting this?”

  Ernst made a movement to straighten things on the top of his desk again and then stared coldly at Bosch. “Detective, you come to me for information. If you want to know where the source is, then you have made a mistake. You’ve come to the wrong person. You can believe what I tell you or not. It is of no consequence to me.”

  The two men locked eyes but said nothing else.

  “What happened to them?” Eleanor asked. “The members of the triad.”

  Ernst pulled his eyes away from Bosch and said, “What happened is that after the United States pulled military forces in 1973 the triad’s source of revenue was largely gone. But like any responsible business entity they saw it coming and looked to replace it. And our intelligence at the time was that they shifted their position considerably. In the early seventies they moved from the role of providing protection to narcotics operations in Saigon to actually becoming part of those operations. Through political and military contacts and, of course, police enforcement they solidified themselves as the brokers for all brown heroin that came out of the highlands and was moved to the United States.”

  “But it didn’t last,” Bosch said.

  “Oh, no. Of course not. When Saigon fell in April 1975, they had to get out. They had made millions, an estimated fifteen to eighteen million American dollars each. It would mean nothing in the new Ho Chi Minh City and they wouldn’t be alive to enjoy it anyway. The triad had to get out or they’d face the firing squads of the North Army. And they had to get out with their money. . . .”

  “So, how’d they do it?” Bosch said.

  “It was dirty money. Money that no Vietnamese police captain could or should have. I suppose they could have wired it to Zurich, but you have to remember you are dealing with the Vietnamese culture. Born of turmoil and distrust. War. These people did not even trust banks in their homeland. And besides it wasn’t money anymore.”

  “What?” Eleanor said, puzzled.

  “They had been converting all along. Do you know what eighteen million dollars looks like? Would probably fill a room. So they found a way to shrink it. At least, that’s what we believe.”

  “Precious gems,” Bosch said.

  “Diamonds,” Ernst said. “It is said eighteen million dollars’ worth of the right diamonds would easily fit in two shoe boxes.”

  “And into a safe-deposit box,” Bosch said.

  “That could be, but, please, I don’t want to know what I don’t need to know.”

  “Binh was one of the captains,” Bosch said. “Who were the other two?”

  “I am told one of them was named Van Nguyen. And he is believed to be dead. He never left Vietnam. Killed by the other two, or maybe the North Army. But he never got out. That was confirmed by our agents in Ho Chi Minh after the fall. The other two did. They came here. And both had passes, arranged through connections and money, I suppose. I can’t help you there. . . . There was Binh, who it seems you have found, and the other was Nguyen Tran. He came with Binh. Where they went and what they did here, I can’t help you with. It’s been fifteen years. Once they came across they were no longer our concern.”

  “Why would you allow them to come across?”

  “Who says we did? You have to realize, Detective Bosch, that much of this information was put together after the fact.”

  Ernst stood up then. That was all the information he would decompartmentalize for today.

  Bosch didn’t want to go back up to the bureau. The information from Ernst was amphetamine in his blood. He wanted to walk. He wanted to talk, to storm. When they got in the elevator he pushed the button for the lobby and told Eleanor they were going outside. The bureau was like a fishbowl. He wanted a big room.

  In any investigation, it had always seemed to Bosch, information would come slowly, like sand dropping steadily through the cinched middle of an hourglass. At some point, there was more information in the bottom of the glass. And then the sand in the top seemed to drop faster, until it was cascading through the hole. They were at that point with Meadows, the bank burglary, the whole thing. Things were coming together.

  They went out through the front lobby and onto the green lawn where there were eight U.S. flags and a California state flag flapping lazily on poles posted in a semicircle. There were no protestors on this day. The air was warm and unseasonably humid.

  “Do we have to walk out here?” Eleanor asked. “I would rather be upstairs, where we’d be near the phones. You could have a coffee.”

  “I want to smoke.”

  They walked north toward Wilshire Boulevard.

  Bosch said, “It’s 1975. Saigon is about to go down the sewer. Police Captain Binh pays people to get him and his share of diamonds out. Who he pays, we don’t know. But we do know that he gets VIP treatment all the way. Most people took boats out, he flew. Four days from Saigon to the States. He is accompanied by an American civilian adviser to help smooth things. That’s Meadows. He—”

  “He may have been accompanied,” she said. “You forgot the word ‘may’ there.”

  “We’re not in court. I’m saying it the way I see it might’ve been, okay? Afterward, if you don’t like it, you say it your way.”

  She raised her arms in a hands-off kind of way and Bosch continued.

  “So, Meadows and Binh are together. Nineteen seventy-five. Meadows is working ref
ugee security or something. See, he’s getting out of there, too. He may or may not have known Binh from his old sideline, dealing heroin. The chances are he did. He was probably, in effect, working for Binh. Now, he may or may not have known what Binh was carrying with him to the States. Chances are he at least had an idea.”

  Bosch stopped to organize his thoughts and Eleanor reluctantly took over.

  “Binh takes with him his cultural dislike or distrust for putting his money in the hands of bankers. He has an additional problem, too. His money is not kosher. It is undeclared, unknown and illegal for him to have. He can’t declare it or make a normal deposit because this would be noticed and then have to be explained. So, he keeps this sizable fortune in the next best thing: a safe-deposit vault. Where are we going?”

  Bosch didn’t answer. He was too consumed by his thoughts. They were at Wilshire. When the walk sign flashed above the crosswalk they went with the flow of bodies. On the other side of the street they turned west, walking along the hedges that bordered the veterans cemetery. Bosch took over the story.

  “Okay, so Binh’s got his share in the safe-deposit box. He starts the great American dream as a refugee. Only he’s a rich refugee. Meantime, Meadows comes back after the war, can’t get into the groove of real life, can’t beat his habit, and starts capering to feed it. But things aren’t as easy as in Saigon. He gets caught, spends some time in stir. He gets out, goes back, gets out, then finally starts blocking some real time on federal raps on a couple of bank jobs.”

  There was an opening in the hedge and a brick walkway. Bosch followed it and they stood looking at the expanse of the cemetery, the rows of carved stones a weather-polished white against the sea of grass. The tall hedge buffered the sound from the street. It was suddenly very peaceful.

  “It’s like a park,” Bosch said.

  “It’s a graveyard,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  “You don’t have to whisper. Let’s walk around. It’s quiet.”

  Eleanor hesitated but then trailed him as he followed the bricks beneath an oak tree that shaded the graves of a grouping of World War I veterans. She caught up and continued the dialogue.

  “So we have Meadows in TI. Somehow, he hears about this place Charlie Company. He gets the ear of the ex-soldier-slash-minister who operates the place, gets his backing and gets early release from TI. Now, at Charlie Company, he connects with two old war buddies. Or so we assume. Delgado and Franklin. Except there is only one day that all three of them are at Charlie Company at the same time. Just one day. Are you telling me they hatched this whole thing on that one day?”

  “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Could’ve been, but I doubt it. It might have been planned later, after they made that recontact at the farm. The important thing is that we have them together, or in close proximity, in Saigon, 1975. Now we have them together again at Charlie Company. After that, Meadows graduates, takes a few cover jobs until he finishes parole. Then he quits and disappears from view.”

  “Until?”

  “Until the WestLand burglary. They go in, they hit the boxes until they find Binh’s box. Or maybe they already knew which one was his. They must have followed him to plan the job and find out where he kept whatever was left of his share of the diamonds. We need to go back to the vault records and see if this Frederic B. Isley ever visited at the same time as Binh. I bet we find that he did. He saw which box was Binh’s because he was in the vault with him at the same time.

  “Then during the vault break-in, they hit his box and then all the others, taking everything as camouflage. The genius of it was that they knew Binh couldn’t report what was taken from him because it did not exist, legally. They knew this. It was perfect. And what made it that way is them taking all the other stuff, to cover for the real target. The diamonds.”

  “The perfect crime,” she said, “until Meadows pawned the bracelet with the jade dolphins on it. That gets him killed. Which brings us back to the question we had a few days ago. Why? And another thing that makes no sense: why, if he had helped loot the vault, was Meadows living in that dump? He was a rich man not acting like a rich man.”

  Bosch walked in silence for a while. It was the question he had been formulating an answer to since halfway through the meeting with Ernst. He thought about Meadows’s eleven-month lease, paid in advance. If he were alive, he would be moving out next week. As they walked through the garden of white stone, it all seemed to fit together. There was no sand left in the top of the hourglass. He finally spoke.

  “Because the perfect crime was only half over. By pawning the bracelet, he was giving it away too soon. So he had to go, and they had to get that bracelet back.”

  She stopped and looked at him. They were standing on the access road next to the World War II section. Bosch saw that the roots of another old oak had pushed some of the weathered stones out of alignment. They looked like teeth waiting for an orthodontist’s hands.

  “Explain that to me, what you just said,” Eleanor said.

  “They hit several of the boxes to cover that all they really wanted was what was in Binh’s box. Okay?”

  She nodded. They still weren’t walking.

  “Okay. So in order to keep that cover, what would be the thing to do? Get rid of the stuff from all the other boxes so it would never turn up again. And I don’t mean fence it. I mean get rid of it, destroy it, sink it, bury it for good, somewhere it would never be found. Because the minute the first piece of jewelry or old coin or stock certificate turns up and the police find out about it, then they’ve got a lead and they’ll come looking.”

  “So you think Meadows was killed because he pawned the bracelet?” she said.

  “Not quite because of that. There is some other current moving through all of this. Why, if Meadows had a share of Binh’s diamonds, would he even bother with a bracelet worth a few thousand bucks? Why would he live the way he lived? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re losing me, Harry.”

  “I’m losing myself. But look at it this way for a minute. Say they — Meadows and the others — knew where both Binh and the other police captain, Nguyen Tran, were, and where each of them had stashed what was left of the diamonds they had brought over here. Say there were two banks and the diamonds were in two safe-deposit boxes. And say they were going to hit them both. So first they rip off Binh’s bank. And now they are going for Tran’s.”

  She nodded that she was following along. Bosch felt excitement building.

  “Okay. So these things take time to plan, to put the strategy together, to plan it for a time the bank is closed three days in a row because that’s how much time they need to open enough boxes to make it look real. And then there is the time needed to dig the tunnel.”

  He’d forgotten to light a cigarette. He realized now and put one in his mouth, but started talking again before lighting it.

  “You with me?”

  She nodded. He lit the cigarette.

  “Okay, then what would be the best thing to do after you have hit the first bank but before the second one is taken down? You lie low and you don’t give a goddam hint away. You get rid of all the stuff taken as cover, all the stuff from the other boxes. You keep nothing. And you sit on the diamonds from Binh’s box. You can’t start to fence them, because it might draw attention to you and spoil the second hit. In fact, Binh probably had feelers out, looking for the diamonds. I mean, over the years, he was probably cashing them in piecemeal and was familiar with the gem-fencing network. So, they had to watch out for him, too.”

  “So Meadows broke the rules,” she said. “He held something back. The bracelet. His partners found out and whacked him. Then they broke into the pawnshop and stole the bracelet back.” She shook her head, admiring the plan. “The thing would still be perfect if he hadn’t done that.”

  Bosch nodded. They stood there looking at each other and then around at the grounds of the cemetery. Bosch dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. At the same moment they
looked up the hill and saw the black walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

  “What’s that doing there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s a replica. Half size. Fake marble. I think they move it around the country, in case somebody who wants to see it can’t make it to D.C.”

  Eleanor’s breath caught sharply and she turned to him.

  “Harry, this Monday is Memorial Day.”

  “I know. Banks closed two days, some three. We’ve got to find Tran.”

  She turned to head back to the bureau. He took a last look at the memorial. The long sheath of false marble with all the names carved into it was embedded in the side of the hill. A man in a gray uniform was sweeping the walkway in front of it. There was a pile of violet flowers from a jacaranda tree.

  Harry and Eleanor were silent until they were out of the cemetery and walking back across Wilshire toward the Federal Building. She asked a question Bosch had been turning over in his mind and studying but had no good answer for.

  “Why now? Why so long? It’s been fifteen years.”

  “I don’t know. Just might be the right time, that’s all. People, things, unseen forces, sort of come together from time to time. That’s what I believe. Who knows? Maybe Meadows forgot all about Binh and just saw him one day on the street and it all came to him. The perfect plan. Maybe it was someone else’s plan or it really was hatched on that one day the three of them were together at Charlie Company. The whys you never really know. You just need the hows and the whos.”

  “You know, Harry, if they’re out there, or I should say, under there, digging a new tunnel, then we have less than two days to find them. We have to put some crews underground and look for them.”

  He thought that putting a crew in the city’s tunnels looking for a possible entrance to a bandit tunnel was a long shot. She had told him there were more than 1,500 miles of tunnels under L.A. alone. They might not find the bandits’ tunnel if they had a month. The key would be Tran. Find the last police captain, then find his bank. There you find the bandits. And the killers of Billy Meadows. And Sharkey.