Back Bay Blues

by Peter Colt

  More whiskey arrived without my asking for it. The empty bamboo steamer was removed and a dish with rice arrived. Shrimp in a brown lobster sauce packed with vegetables, and strips of chicken in a sauce that had flecks of red pepper in it fought with broccoli for room on another platter. Thuy served us both, putting a bed of fluffy white rice on my plate then hers, then covering the circle of rice half with shrimp and half with chicken.

  “Is that what you are dreaming about when you wake me up in bed at night?”

  “Usually.” There were some dreams from when I was a cop, but they were not as vivid.

  “Do you talk to anyone about it?”

  “A shrink?”

  “Anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It isn’t my thing.”

  “It might help?”

  “It isn’t for me. My father and his generation, guys who fought the Nazis, jumped into Normandy, friends of his who had been in the Pacific . . . they had it far worse, and they didn’t talk to anyone. They didn’t need to. They came home and went about the business of starting to live their lives.”

  We spent the next several minutes eating and the conversation was limited to the food, which was excellent. We didn’t need to talk about the war, my role in it or my dreams about it. I was happy for the respite. I needed R&R from a war that I wasn’t even fighting in anymore.

  Another scotch later and dinner was done. I had turned down my fortune cookie. I knew what my curse was. She ate mine.

  We walked back to the hotel arm in arm. We talked about the things that new lovers talk about as we made our way back to the land of four-poster beds. We shared a cigarette under the umbrella in the rain and generally said romantic things to each other.

  We decided against the hotel bar in favor of the mini bar and bed. In the elevator up to our room, she kissed me deeply and clung to me. Once inside, she took off her jean jacket, started to undress me, then, satisfied with the results, peeled her dress over her head. She led me to the bed and pushed me on my back. She put her mouth on me and after a few minutes, she climbed on top of me. She rode me, moaning, hands on my chest until we both came to a shuddering climax.

  Later in bed, legs intertwined, drinking mini bar whiskey from mini bottles and smoking cigarettes, she said, “Andy?”

  “Yes, Thuy.”

  “The war? Did you ever get over it?”

  “Sort of . . . It is over for me, but it is also a part of me. It’s like cancer.”

  “What about killing a person, do you ever get over that?”

  “I don’t know. I know that it got easier to do it after the first time. I know that I never liked it. Maybe it isn’t that it got easier—it was just better than being killed. I know that as I got older, I learned to live with it but . . . my hands will never be clean. You don’t get over it; if you are lucky you learn to live with it. The men I killed were trying to kill me, my friends, or other Americans.”

  “Women.” Her cigarette tip glowing in the dark.

  “What?”

  “If you killed Viet Minh, you would call them Viet Cong. If you killed them, you probably killed women, too.”

  I knew that. Intellectually I did. I had memories of it. I didn’t like to think about it. What type of shitty war puts you in that position, to kill women?

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” She was looking at my face as though there were answers to be gleaned.

  “No, it is true. I just don’t like to think about that part of it.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “I don’t know. Most of the women I knew were either wives or kids of the Montagnards; we loved them. Or they were Vietnamese women who cooked and did laundry near bases, or they were whores. It seems shameful now, but there it was common. You are the only Vietnamese woman I have slept with who I didn’t pay.” She didn’t recoil in horror, at least.

  “I am not surprised but . . . I don’t want to think about that.”

  “Good, me neither.”

  She pushed her face into the hollow of my shoulder. Her hands tracing my old scars, probing old wounds until she found her way down my body. My breathing changed as she took me in her hand. Then when I was ready, she pulled me on to her, and we made love again slowly, gently, sweetly.

  Chapter 12

  The next day the sun stabbed into our four-poster cocoon. She was wrapped around me, and it felt fine and warm. I was getting used to having her around. We got up and showered. We decided that we had time for breakfast and coffee.

  We were smiling and giggling like little kids at each other. We held hands on the way to Union Station and bought our tickets to Boston. We sat in the main part of the train in our airline-like seats. We snuggled close and watched the scenery flick by as we made our way back to Boston. We traded stories about our childhood. We held hands in the station and then outside, where we found a cab to take us back to my apartment.

  It was early evening by the time we got home, and I didn’t think anyone was following us. I wasn’t sure I even cared. The garage had done me a favor, and the Ghia was parked in its spot in front of my apartment building. The keys were in my mailbox along with a few days’ worth of bills and a supermarket flyer.

  We went up into the apartment. Sir Leominster let out a plaintive howl to let me know that he hadn’t enjoyed being alone for a few days. Thuy hung her big puffy coat on the hook on the wall. I put my bag down by the bedroom door, and she dropped her shoulder bag on the table. Her duffel bag went on the floor. I threw the keys on the table and hung my jacket on the back of a chair.

  She went to the bathroom, and I went to get a whiskey. “Do you want a drink?” I asked the bathroom door. Her voice came from the other side of it. “Sure, whiskey and ice.”

  I poured the drinks and then went to get a cigarette. My pack of Luckies was empty. I crushed it and dropped it on the table. I picked up Thuy’s handbag hoping to find some cigarettes in it. It was heavy, and after rummaging, I found out why. There was all the usual purse stuff—money, wallet, make-up—but also a zippered pocket that wasn’t able to close. It had a flap, and if it hadn’t been open, I would never have seen it. I would never have seen the butt of a pistol.

  I pulled it out mostly out of curiosity. It was a CZ, a Czechoslovakian copy of the Walther PPK in .32 ACP. It was the Iron Curtain’s version of the James Bond gun. They were also known as Czeska, and outside of Langley or maybe Fort Bragg they just didn’t exist in this country. This one had a long, thick silencer screwed to the front of it. The CZ was well oiled, and I was sure it was loaded. I dropped it on the table next to the bag and sat down heavily in a wing chair with my whiskey.

  Suddenly I felt very, very old and all my scars and bruises were individual aches. The air in the room had somehow changed, and I wasn’t sure I understood what I had just stumbled upon. She came out of the bathroom and was saying, “Andy, when this is all over, we should go to Cali-for. . .” She trailed off. She saw the pistol on the table.

  “Andy . . .”

  “I was looking for cigarettes,” a man said with a voice like mine.

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “You were in the bathroom. I was out of cigarettes.”

  “Andy . . . I . . .”

  “I am sorry. I should have picked up on it sooner. Maybe it was the beating, or maybe I am getting old. Never had a milkshake . . . District of Columbus . . . you definitely aren’t from here.”

  “No. I am from Vietnam.”

  “But you aren’t a refugee or a tourist?”

  “I had a talent for languages. A district commissar thought I would better serve the revolution by learning English rather than learning to dig tunnels.”

  “What was the assignment?”

  “Andy, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does a hell of a lot to me.”

  “When the imperialists fled . . . they took a lot of money with them. Lots of gold. We knew that Colonel Tran or men
like him were going to set up the counterrevolution. They needed the money. If we could get it back, it would cripple them. The two dead Vietnamese men were an indicator. I was sent to get it or find it. I reported back that I had hired you and what I knew about you. They sent further instructions. They wanted me to kill you if I could. Preferably at the monument at night to make it look like suicide. I would leave a note—you would denounce your war crimes.”

  My laugh sounded like a sick dog’s bark. “You people pay someone to come up with ideas like that? Veterans kill themselves so often no one even notices anymore. Did you kill Thieu? Pham?”

  “Andy, I couldn’t do it. I’m not . . . I am not . . . like you.”

  “Not like me?”

  “No.”

  “Now what?” I still had the .38 on my hip. Maybe I shifted or maybe she figured there were not a lot of options. She stepped to the table and the CZ was in her hand, all in one fluid motion. She had moved with the speed and grace of a cat. She pointed the pistol at me but without much actual intent. A .32 ACP isn’t much of a round, but I could attest to its lethality. I had shot a man in the face with one once a lifetime ago. I wasn’t in a rush to get shot with one.

  “Andy. I don’t want to kill you, but I don’t like the thought of being in one of your prisons. I am leaving. I am taking your car.” She flicked the safety off with her thumb. She picked up her pocketbook and my keys.

  “Please don’t follow me, Andy. I will shoot you if I have to.” She backed to the door and let herself out. I got up and slowly followed. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I didn’t love her, but I liked her a lot. Or maybe I just didn’t want this to be why she was here. It wasn’t love but I didn’t want to be just an assignment. I didn’t want to feel like a john with a whore. There had been plenty of that in Vietnam and afterward I felt empty. It was little more than scratching an itch. Maybe she reminded me of Leslie and the possibility of having a normal relationship. Maybe I was just getting so sick of coming home to an empty apartment most nights that the possibility of something more had become important . . . had clouded my judgment.

  I started after her, through the door and down the steps. There was a coughing noise and the plaster by my head erupted in a plume of dust. There was the tinkle of the shell casing on the tile floor. I heard her footsteps moving rapidly, then the outside door opening and closing. I crossed the foyer and made it outside and down the steps. She was pulling away in my Ghia. I made it to the sidewalk when she braked at the intersection.

  The inside of the car was lit with an orange light. There was a roar that turned into a whooshing noise, and then I was smashed by the heat and a giant’s fist. I sat down hard on the sidewalk and rolled in the gutter between a solid Ford LTD and some New England granite. Pieces of Ghia peppered the cars. Windows were smashed out, and all I could hear was ocean roaring in my ears. I had been near explosions before, just not in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

  I got up slowly. I started to walk on baby deer legs to the Ghia. It was fully engulfed in flames. The tan interior, the soft top, the green paint . . . all gone, swallowed by intense fire and heat. Thuy . . . Thuy was in the car. . . . Thuy was gone. I had seen enough burning trucks to know. I moved closer to the car, but it was too hot. The smoke was acrid and made me cough, my lungs aching, each cough reminding me of a hundred bruises that I had forgotten I had. I backed away.

  I sat down on the steps of a brownstone. I started to shiver as the sweat chilled in the cold night air. Blood was coming down my face from a cut that I just realized I had on my forehead. It came to me that there must have been sounds but all I heard was the sound of surf in my ears.

  Because it was an actual fire, the fire department arrived before the police, instead of staging and waiting for the police to tell them it was safe, their red lights turning everything into crazy disco with surf noises in my head instead of music. Then there were some rescue people putting me in an ambulance, then getting mad when I didn’t want to stay in their magic bus for a ride to the hospital. I think they were trying to tell me that I needed stitches. I was trying to tell them that I didn’t care about stitches. They wiped my face down and put a dressing on my forehead.

  Then it was a cop in his blue uniform and the ubiquitous notepad and ever-poised pen. My statement was my girlfriend got in my car to go get cigarettes. The car blew up. He pressed for more, like why I went out after her. Why was I bleeding, and why did I have a .38 on my hip? I showed him the photostat of my license. He wanted me to come downtown. I told him to fuck off, and I would wait for the grown-ups to come by and make my statement. He looked at me. He wanted to hit me in the head with a nightstick, handcuff me, and stuff me in the back of a police car. It was a reasonable response for a cop in that situation. He also had been on the job long enough to realize it wasn’t worth it. He knew that the detectives were going to be all over this. He stalked off to talk to someone. Fuck him. He hadn’t been blown up tonight.

  There was a bar across the street. It was a neighborhood joint that I almost never drank in. I got up and started over to it. The cop tried to stop me, to say something. I couldn’t hear him over the ocean waves in my ears. I told him I would be in the bar, and the dicks could talk to me there. My statement would be just as brief after a couple glasses of whiskey.

  If the music stopped when I walked in, I didn’t notice. I couldn’t hear it. It wasn’t too crowded for a school night. I put a twenty on the bar. I said what I hoped was whiskey. The bartender held up a bottle of Jameson’s. I nodded. He brought me a tall whiskey, neat. He took my money. When he came back it was change, a bowl of steaming water, and a clean bar towel. He motioned to me to clean up my face. In the mirror, someone who survived to the end of a slasher movie stared back at me.

  The hot water didn’t feel good on my cuts and scrapes, but I didn’t care. I daubed my battered face mechanically. I watched my face slowly emerge from the horror movie and thought about what a waste it all was. I was the target, not the girl. She was a spy and it wasn’t love, but it had been nice for a time to think it might have led to a few less lonely nights. It was a waste of a young life. All the more so because the bomb had been meant for me.

  My face was drying, and I could hear a little through the ringing in my ears. I didn’t look so bad, and my second whiskey was helping. I still couldn’t make sense of the last hour. Someone wanted me dead, dead enough to blow up my car. It seemed unlikely that Thuy would have blown up my beloved Ghia with herself in it. I was watching the lights flashing in the mirror above the bottles. The fire department was leisurely rolling up its hoses. In the mirror, staring at me, was a vision. A woman. A woman with honey-colored hair.

  Special Agent Brenda Watts slid onto a bar stool next to me. She motioned, and the bartender brought her a glass with ice and poured from a bottle of Jack Daniels. She turned and rested an arm on the bar. I had to pay close attention to understand her, which wasn’t hard.

  “Are you okay?”

  “As good as can be.”

  “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks . . .”

  “Most of the time you look kind of a disheveled mess, but tonight you look like shit that got run over or something.”

  “You say the nicest things.”

  “I have a list of names. Priorities, in case something happens. Shootings, bombings etcetera. Your name is on that list, you and a bunch of mobsters and their friends and a certain lawyer. I had forgotten all about you, Andy Roark. Then my phone rings, my home phone, and only my mother calls me on that. The duty agent called me. Your car blew up. He thought I would want to know.” I nodded at her. My head felt like it was going to fall off.

  “What’d I interrupt, a hot date with a lawyer or accountant type?” Even after watching my car blow up, I was trying to be a comedian, my new career instead of detective because I obviously was not good at that. She laughed, it made her chest heave, and I appreciated the white blouse, a few buttons open.

  “You know
what is funny? Really funny, Mr. I am too short to be Magnum?”

  “What?”

  “As I was changing to get here, my home phone rang again, my pager went off. I answered the phone, and do you know who it was?”

  “J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “No, asshole. It was the deputy director. The number two man at the bureau called me to tell me that this was not a bureau case, it was not of interest to me, to leave it alone.”

  I nodded, trying to process the information.

  “The DD does not call supervisory agents at home, much less lowly field agents, like me. Someone is putting the squash on this. BPD and Metro can fight out whose this is. The bureau officially is not interested in who is trying to kill a Mafia-affiliated PI. You are radioactive.”

  “Hey . . . thanks.” In her career “radioactive” meant I was not someone she should talk to. The bureau has high standards and expects their agents to as well. “Brenda, in the hulk of my car, next to the remains of a Vietnamese woman are the remains of a rare Czechoslovakian pistol with an attached silencer.”

  “What the fuck are you into?” She had nice eyes.

  “It has to do with the dead Vietnamese guys in Chinatown and Quincy. I am just not exactly sure how. She was a communist spy. I know that.” It sounded funny coming out of my mouth, overdramatic.

  “What, like James Bond? Jane Bond. Jesus. You don’t fuck around, do you?”

  “Well, if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.” I tried to smile, but my face was a mess, and my mouth just couldn’t make it work.

  “I think the Company is behind the squash on this. It might be our counter intel guys, but my money is on the Company.” She said the Company, the universal euphemism for the CIA, like it was a dirty term.

  “Great. I saw Three Days of the Condor, and I don’t like how it ended for him.” Dana Hersey and the Movie Loft on TV 38 were heavily responsible for my cinema education.

  “Get serious.” Either shock was setting in or the third whiskey was working some serious magic.