The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

“Are you a fighter pilot or a little girl?”

  “Fighter pilots wear helmets.”

  “This is not a fighter jet. It is a motorcycle. If you want to go to where the body was found, I suggest you get on because I am not walking, not on these knees.”

  I sighed, straddled the Harley’s rear saddle, and propped my feet on the hinged passenger pegs. In a throaty flash, Phu Dung had us rocketing through traffic in complete disregard of the posted speed limit—not that there are any apparent speed limits in Hanoi, not that are obeyed, anyway. We got to the lake in less than two minutes. I’ve flown airplanes on fire that induced fewer heart palpitations than that motorcycle ride.

  V

  Hoàn Kiếm was the lake where Mr. Wonderful’s body was found. The name in Vietnamese means, “Lake of the Returned Sword.” As near as I could discern from Phu Dung’s somewhat flowery explanation, an ancient emperor was boating there one day when a giant sacred turtle surfaced and demanded that the emperor return some magic sword the turtle had loaned him to help defeat China’s Ming Dynasty. I wasn’t so much interested in local Vietnamese legends, however, as I was in studying the location where Mr. Wonderful met his end.

  Phu Dung pulled up onto the sidewalk, turned off the Harley’s engine, and deployed the kickstand directly in front of a no-parking sign featuring the image of a motorbike in a red circle with a slash through it. As I dismounted, a scrawny policeman with a bullhorn who reminded me of a Communist Barney Fife strode toward us, ordering Phu Dung to move his vehicle. Phu Dung smiled and sweet-talked him in Vietnamese. Whatever it was he said, the cop seemed to apologize, then went on his way, barking at others to move their scooters.

  “Very impressive.”

  “Let us just say I know a few people,” Phu Dung said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He flashed an enigmatic smile and said nothing.

  The lake was an oval, about a mile around, and sat squarely in the historic center of Hanoi. It was surrounded by manicured flower gardens and lush leafy trees under which young lovers strolled arm in arm and new brides posed in their gowns for wedding pictures. Kids chased each other, laughing. People sat on concrete benches, reading books and eating ice cream cones. A toothless street vendor tried to interest me in an assortment of cheap folding fans. Phu Dung gently shooed her away, but not before taking pity and slipping her some paper money.

  My initial suspicions aside, I found myself starting to like the guy.

  There was a gracefully arched foot bridge painted bright red that extended about twenty meters into the lake from the northeast shoreline where we’d parked, connecting the lakeshore to a tiny island upon which was built what Phu Dung said was the ancient Temple of the Jade Mountain. We didn’t get into the historical specifics of the place; I didn’t care one way or the other.

  “Two old women found him there,” Phu Dung said. He pointed to where the bridge’s round, telephone-like supports, also painted red, extended into the water. “He wasn’t in the water long. An hour, perhaps.”

  “Which side of the bridge?”

  “North side.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Phu Dung smiled. “Let us just say I know a few people.”

  “What time did the old ladies find him?”

  Phu Dung held up all five fingers of his left hand. Five o’clock.

  “I’m wondering if he drowned or bled out, the actual cause of death?”

  “Bled.” Phu Dung patted his chest. “No water in his lungs.”

  “You’ve seen the autopsy report?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say—”

  “—You know a few people. Do you know if the police have any witnesses?”

  “That I do not know.”

  “Do they have any hard evidence tying any of the Americans to the crime?”

  “That I do not know.”

  “Well, what else do you know?”

  “I know they do not believe he was stabbed on the bridge.”

  “What makes them think that?”

  “There was no blood on the bridge.”

  “So he was stabbed elsewhere and thrown in.”

  Phu Dung didn’t say anything.

  “Do they have an approximate location where the stabbing occurred?”

  “Somewhere between the Metropole,” he said, “and where we are standing now.”

  I did the math.

  “He leaves the Metropole around 2200 hours. His body is found in the lake at 0500 the next day. He’s been in the water about an hour. Where was he, what did he do, in the hours he was still alive?”

  “I do not know.”

  A gauzy haze obscured the late afternoon sun but not the heat. The winds were warm and light, out of the north. I gazed at the water. A thought hit me.

  “Which direction does the wind in Hanoi typically blow this time of year?”

  Without hesitation, Phu Dung pointed north. Any good pilot is also an amateur meteorologist. He learns to read the sky and to study local weather patterns, because it’s at whims of the weather gods that he can easily die or live to fly another day.

  By Phu Dung’s reckoning, the Metropole hotel, where Mr. Wonderful was last seen alive, was a half mile southeast of where we were standing beside the lake. Given the location of where the body was first spotted and the prevailing winds, the theory that Mr. Wonderful had been murdered somewhere south of the bridge made little sense. His corpse had been discovered floating on the north side of the bridge. A body dumped into the lake north of the bridge would have drifted south on the wind—directly to the location where it was found. In other words, the police theory of where Mr. Wonderful had been stabbed made no sense.

  I headed north along the lakefront.

  “Where are you going, Logan?”

  “I’ll be back shortly.”

  “I will wait for you here.”

  “Roger.”

  He got out his phone and made a call, straddling his motorcycle, while I walked on.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for—some bit of evidence, I suppose, to confirm my theory that Mr. Wonderful had been killed in a location different than the one the authorities asserted.

  Aside from the occasional Caucasian tourist taking vacation snapshots, mine was the only non-Asian face among the milling throngs of Vietnamese. I paused a few times, pretending to retie my shoelaces, checking to make sure I wasn’t being followed, but discerned no tails. A street vendor approached me, offering bootlegged, first-run Hollywood movies for sale. Another tried to sell me counterfeit US military dog tags, circa 1968. Beyond those two capitalists, no one appeared to pay any attention to me.

  I explored several hundred meters along the banks of the lake’s north shore, as close to the water’s edge as prudence would allow. I climbed over gnarled tree roots, scrutinized stains on concrete walkways, and studied the ground. I looked for fresh scars in tree bark and disruptions in the dirt, any anomaly that might suggest a violent scuffle had occurred there. I came up empty. The shoreline itself offered no overt forensic insights, either, littered as it was with discarded soda straws and coffee cups, tin cans and candy wrappers, and pieces of newspaper. The random, universal detritus of urban life. The only thing that caught my eye worth noting was a man’s dress shoe trapped about three meters offshore in a stand of lily pads. Mr. Wonderful’s shoe? It was impossible to know without knowing more about what he’d been wearing that night.

  Phu Dung came roaring up the lakeshore on his Harley, deftly weaving through old people and families with small children.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  “To see the police officer.”

  “Which police officer?”

  “One of the ones who pulled the body from the lake.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew the cop or where to find him. He wouldn’t have told me, anyway. Maybe because we’d both flown fighters, or maybe because I was a stranger in a strange land and would�
�ve been lost otherwise, I let him call the shots. For the time being, anyway.

  I climbed onto his Harley. We accelerated from zero to warp speed in about three seconds, rocketing through traffic. The guy knew how to drive a motorcycle, I’ll give him that much. If he hadn’t, we would have both been dead ten times over before we got to where we were going.

  EIGHT

  The cop was shirtless and head-lolling drunk, but seemed to sober up somewhat as soon as Phu Dung told him who he was. He came to attention, offering a clipped, respectful bow and nearly spilling the bottle of Tiger beer in his right hand. He said something in Vietnamese. Then he tried to shut the door in our faces. Phu Dung blocked it with his boot.

  “The money,” Phu Dung said to me, struggling to hold the door open.

  “Say again?”

  “Money. Give him some money. This is how it is done.”

  Quickly, I peeled fifty thousand dong off the cash roll in my front pocket and handed it over.

  The cop grinned and let us in.

  He was close to my height, tall for a Vietnamese. He didn’t offer us a seat or a drink and I didn’t mind at all, considering that the cramped hovel he called a home smelled like a landfill. Phu Dung said the cop would remain nameless for his own protection. He spoke no English. I’ll call him “Pigpen,” because that’s what he looked like.

  Money aside, the only reason he said he agreed to let us in was out of respect for Phu Dung, whom he regarded as a national hero. A “famous combat aviator who helped save the motherland from the imperialist pirates” is how Phu Dung, beaming, translated the cop’s words for me.

  I didn’t much cotton to him using those kinds of terms to describe my fellow servicemen who’d honorably answered their nation’s call to duty, regardless the merits of the war in which so many gave their lives. But standing there in that rancid-smelling apartment was not the place to engage in geopolitical debates.

  Pigpen said he recognized Mr. Wonderful the minute he and his partner dragged his body out of the lake.

  “We knew he was a big deal because he was in the newspaper,” he told Phu Dung. “We knew we would have to work to find who killed him.”

  “Who do you think did?” I asked.

  The cop polished off his beer, set the bottle on top of a dorm-size refrigerator already crowded with empties, and uncapped a fresh bottle. “Somebody who had planned it out,” he said. “Somebody who knew he would be there, walking by, and was waiting for him.”

  “Ambushed him, you mean?”

  Phu Dung translated. The cop nodded.

  “Ask him if he thinks one of the Americans did it.”

  He guzzled his beer, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Americans like to shoot with a gun, not stab with a knife,” he said. “To pull the trigger on someone is easy. To plunge the blade is not so easy. Stabbing is much more personal. Americans do not have the stomach for it.”

  “So he thinks the killer is Vietnamese?”

  Pigpen shrugged noncommittally.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Phu Dung said.

  The place smelled of spoiled vegetables and raw sewage. The stench was starting to get to me. “Ask him who else we should talk to.”

  Phu Dung asked. Pigpen scratched his head, thinking. Finally, he said, “The guard’s wife. She knows a lot.”

  “The guard. Does he mean Mr. Wonderful? Mr. Wonderful’s wife?”

  My interpreter nodded.

  “See if you can get her address from him and let’s get out of here,” I said.

  I waited outside where the smell was barely more tolerable. Piles of garbage were heaped on the street. Motorbikes slalomed around them like so many pylons. Phu Dung emerged from the building a minute after me.

  “A famous combat aviator,” I said, teasing him. “I didn’t realize I was in the presence of greatness.”

  It was the one and only time I ever saw him blush.

  V

  Mr. Wonderful’s widow, Giang, lived in a windowless, one-room apartment down a dank, covered passageway just off Hanoi’s fashionable Bà Triệu Street with its high-end boutiques and coffee houses. As the crow flies, it was less than a mile from the lake where her husband’s body was found. She was hunched barefoot in purple pajamas over a small, coal-burning hibachi, grilling chicken in the passageway just outside the industrial steel grate that served as her front door. If her cataracts and wrinkled countenance were any measure, the woman had led an exceedingly hard life. She was in her seventies, but appeared easily thirty years older than that. She didn’t look up from her cooking as we approached.

  Phu Dung addressed her softly, with obvious reverence, as the Vietnamese are inclined to do with the elderly, I came to discover. Mrs. Wonderful answered his questions in a high-pitched voice and never once made eye contact with either of us. I stood by impatiently for approximately three minutes, not having a clue as to what either one was talking about, before injecting myself in the conversation.

  “What’s she saying?”

  He ignored my question and continued conversing with the old lady in Vietnamese. It might’ve been the Buddha who said patience is the greatest prayer, but I wasn’t in the praying mood.

  “You’re the interpreter, Phu Dung. I’m the interrogator. I’d like to ask her a few questions.”

  He turned slowly toward me, perturbed by what he regarded as my intrusion.

  “Would you care to know what she has said so far?”

  “Read my mind.”

  “She says she has not lived with her husband for many years. She says she does not know where he was or what he was doing the night he died. She says he was a very good father, but a very bad husband.”

  “Why was he a bad husband?”

  “He enjoyed the ladies. Too much.”

  “Ask her if she knows whether he had a current lady friend?”

  He asked. Mrs. Wonderful flipped a sizzling piece of chicken with a fork and replied to the hibachi, her eyes downcast.

  “She thinks the woman’s name is Bach Tuyet,” Phu Dung said, smiling.

  “Why’s that funny?”

  “Bach Tuyet means Snow White, a popular singer many years ago.”

  “Ask her where we can find this Snow White.”

  Mrs. Wonderful professed not to know the woman’s address. She said something else in Vietnamese, still squatting beside the hibachi, never looking up.

  I waited for the translation.

  “She says she thought we were from the insurance company.”

  “What insurance company?”

  Phu Dung asked. The old lady responded.

  “Cathay Life. She says he told her he would buy a policy about a month ago, but she has heard from nobody.”

  I told Phu Dung to thank the widow for her time and to tell her that if we found out anything relevant about the insurance policy, we’d let her know.

  She nodded her thanks to the hibachi.

  “You want to eat?” Phu Dung asked as we walked out.

  My stomach was all turned around, what with the fourteen-hour time difference. I honestly wasn’t sure if I felt hungry or not. But in the military, you learn to chow down appetite or no appetite because you never know when, or if, you’ll ever eat again.

  “Starving,” I said.

  V

  The restaurant was on Phố Hàng Thùng Street and anything but elegant. Six metal tables open to the busy boulevard. A wobbly ceiling fan. A trifold menu with thumbnail photos and mangled English translations of the eatery’s many native dishes. My choices included “Corn Beef Spinach Dummy,” “Flowers of the Ceiling,” “Baked Fish With Fever Language,” and something called “Rang Me.”

  Our waitress was about twelve and wore her dark tresses in a ponytail, pulled back with a pink Hello Kitty hair bow. She stood over us with pen and notepad in hand, waiting for us to order.

  “Try the pho ga,” Phu Dung said.

  “The what?”

  “Chicken soup. Hanoi is fa
mous for it.”

  I took him up on his suggestion along with a Coke. Phu Dung went with a glass of Tiger beer and something that looked from the menu photo like crispy spring rolls with shrimp. We watched the traffic on the street go by.

  “Mr. Wonderful tells his wife he’s taking out a life insurance policy and gets murdered a month later?” I asked rhetorically. “Sounds to me like he knew he was in trouble.”

  Phu Dung said he knew an insurance broker out by the airport who was well connected.

  “I will talk to him. He may know something.”

  I asked him who he thought killed the former guard.

  He shrugged. “My job is not to know. My job is to help.”

  Our drinks came. Phu Dung sipped his beer and checked his watch.

  “What did that thing set you back?”

  He looked at me, not understanding.

  “The watch. How much did it cost you?”

  “Captain Jack Fincher. F-4 pilot. It was his watch.”

  “You took that watch off a downed pilot’s body?” I could feel my pulse jump.

  “You think I would do something like that?” Phu Dung responded, scowling at me.

  “I have no idea. Did you?”

  “Fincher fired three Sidewinders. Couldn’t hit me. Fourth Sidewinder, boom. Big fire. I punch out. Fincher sees my parachute floating by. Many years go by. He always wondered what happened to me. One day, he writes to the Vietnamese embassy in Washington and says he wants to find me, but he doesn’t even know if I am still alive. The embassy finds me. Fincher comes to Vietnam to visit. Now we are good friends. He gives me this watch, the one he wore that day.”

  “Is that where you got that scar,” I said, nodding toward his forearm, “when you got shot down?”

  “Broke both arms when I ejected. The one never worked good after that. Fincher told me he would have it fixed.”

  The American pilot who’d shot him down, Phu Dung said, paid for an airline ticket and covered the cost of reconstructive orthopedic surgery at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, then put his former adversary up at his horse ranch outside Lexington while he recovered from the operation.

  “Heartwarming story,” I said. “It’d make a great movie.”

  Phu Dung said nothing, still steamed over my insinuation that he’d stolen the watch.