Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Unlike most Viet Khieu who can speak five or six words of Vietnamese,” said Webb, not letting the slight go past without a rebuttal.

  “So who is your new friend, Webb?” asked the Vietnamese woman, who looked to be late twenties.

  “A new client,” said Douglas Webb, looking nervously away at the bartender.

  She turned to face Calvino. “Webb doesn’t like me that much. Ever since Drew was killed, Webb hasn’t missed a night at the Q-Bar. He did come to Drew’s funeral but he didn’t stay around long, did you, Webb?”

  “Jackie, give it a rest,” Douglas Webb said under his breath.

  “Vincent Demato’s my name. I am from New York. I’m staying just around the corner at the Saigon Concert.”

  “A fellow American,” she said. “My name is Jackie Ky.”

  It was dark in the bar but he remembered that oval face. She was in the snapshot with Drew Markle. He was holding an M16 in one hand and had his arm around Jackie Ky with the other and the barrel of her AK47 was touching the barrel of his rifle. If ever there was a look of contentment it was on Drew’s face. Every man should experience that feeling once before he died. Drew Markle had his one shot and this was the woman who had shared the moment with him.

  Douglas Webb got off his stool. He grabbed Jackie by the arm and started to move her away from the bar. “I’m trying to have a private conversation with a client, if you don’t mind. Phone me tomorrow. We can talk.”

  “I want to talk now, Webb.” But she didn’t stop him from leading her across the room and then outside. Calvino watched through the door as they argued outside. She burst into tears and Webb came back into the bar, sliding back onto his stool.

  “Sorry about that. She’s Viet Khieu and, like most of them, she’s a nut case,” said Webb.

  “She hung around poor Drew like a bad smell. He certainly had better taste than to go for a Viet Khieu like Jackie Ky. None of the Vietnamese trust the Viet Khieu. They cause trouble. They make problems for themselves. Misfits. They don’t fit in the States. They don’t fit here.”

  “What’s she do?” asked Calvino. He wondered if Douglas Webb knew about the photograph at the Cu Chi Tunnels with the dead lawyer and his girl.

  “Some kind of bullshit interior design business.”

  “A bar needs interior design. Otherwise, you get all those damn vomiting beer drinkers,” said Calvino, peeling off a twenty and then a ten from his wad of notes and putting them on the bar.

  “See you later, counsellor.”

  By the time he was out the door, Jackie Ky had vanished into the night. Street people were sleeping on the lip of the concrete fountain. Other figures leaned against motorbikes. People of the night on their patch of turf. On the short walk back to his hotel he heard a distant sound closing in on him. The sound of bamboo sticks keeping a jazzy beat.

  “That sound, it has a meaning,” said Jackie Ky.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, soup’s ready,” said Jackie Ky, stepping out of the shadows.

  “Basic, isn’t it? You’re hungry. You can eat. You hear the sound and your stomach moves. You can’t help yourself because this sound is so deep in your blood.”

  CHAPTER 6

  SLAUGHTERHOUSE SONGS

  THE HOTEL RULES included a strict no-guest rule, meaning no women were allowed in the room of a male guest. The hotel was government owned so the rules had the force of law and the doormen acted like civil servants. Jackie Ky explained to Calvino the hotel would not allow her to go up to his room. Calvino put on his best Zone face and walked to the front desk and asked for his room key. The Vietnamese counter guy eyed Jackie and, keeping both hands flat on the counter, he leaned forward and spoke in broken English.

  “Cannot have Vietnam girl go to room,” he said. “Cannot.” The switch from cannot to can has no mystery; it lurks deep inside the inner folds of a wallet. Calvino turned around and saw Jackie Ky fumbling with an American passport.

  “I’m American,” she said, slapping the passport down.

  “Vietnam girl,” the clerk said, ignoring the American passport.

  Calvino laid a fifty-dollar bill on the counter next to Jackie’s passport. The clerk looked at the passport, then at the $50 bill. There was little doubt which carried more authority. Fifty bucks was a month’s salary for a university professor. Fifty dollars would buy a bowl of pho for six months with change left over for beer. The bamboo sticks were keeping a beat outside. In the beginning, there was only sound and no listeners, rules, no cannots. And later, the sound found an audience, and in Saigon, the sound of “soup is ready” never ceased.

  “Give me the key, close your eyes and think about Liberation Day. ”

  There was a tense moment as the counter guy looked at the note. His hand edged forward, pushing the room key toward Calvino. He touched the money and lowered his eyes. Jackie Ky snatched back her passport. “Bastard,” she whispered under her breath.

  In the elevator a Russian air-conditioner blasted a Siberian wind. As the doors closed, Jackie Ky collapsed against the railing, throwing her head back under the cold airvents.

  “How did you know I would come looking for you?” asked Calvino.

  She didn’t say anything, the run-in with the counter clerk was eating at her, he thought.

  “In America, I got discriminated against because I was Vietnamese, and in Vietnam they discriminate against me because I am an American. What’s left? Where is it that I belong?”

  It wasn’t the kind of question which required any answer. Maybe she didn’t know where she belonged, or who would come looking after her, maybe she just guessed, taking a step at a time. Maybe she was hoping that Webb would follow so she could stick a knife in his guts. The toc dai comment suggested the threat of violence. The beautiful long-haired girl with a market basket full of explosives flung into the belly of a helicopter on an LZ. Calvino had witnessed her behavior in the Q-Bar: she had one of those out-of-control rages, whirling threads of hate with despair, a tsunami of violence erupting into a brawl like the legendary one that had killed Caravaggio. Reaching the third floor, the elevator doors opened and Calvino walked out, unlocked the door, stood back, and let her go in first. He switched on the lights. It was a large room with green, musty carpets, two double beds and heavy curtains. Nothing quite matched, like a different bureaucrat had been in charge of each item ordered two years in advance from a state-run factory. He went over to a small fridge, took out a cold 333 beer, and popped the tab.

  “You wanna beer, Jackie?”

  “You got anything stronger?”

  “Let’s start with beer.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed near the balcony doors. She put a finger over her lips, then opened her handbag, took out a piece of paper and pen, and wrote for a moment before holding up the paper. He looked at her open handbag on the bed. A package of condoms had fallen halfway out, along with a pack of cigarettes and a tube of lipstick. The woman was prepared for a Saigon night. Was this chance meeting at the Q-Bar the same way that Drew Markle had found her, or had she shifted into the bar scene after his death? wondered Calvino.

  She had written, “ Your room’s bugged. They can hear everything you say.”

  Calvino gave her a thumbs-up. She handed him the piece of paper and pen.

  “Do you know who I am?” he wrote.

  “Of course, I know who you are. Harry said you would come,” she said without sound, letting him read her lips.

  “Let’s have a drink,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have come up here with you,” she said. “You will get the wrong idea about me.”

  “It’s not a state crime to talk business in a hotel room, is it?”

  “You have no idea what prudes people are here. It’s like living in the middle of the Bible Belt.”

  Her torso was twisted in a provocative way on the bed.

  “Only the locals wear a lot less polyester,” said Calvino.

  She laughed, the kind of la
ugh that relaxed her, made the tension go out of her face. Tear streaks still stained her cheeks, cutting rivulets through the make-up, but she was okay now.

  “You get used to the rules after a while,” she said.

  He opened a second can of beer and handed it to her.

  “I am thinking of opening a bar in Saigon. I will need an interior designer. Webb said you had a business. I pay cash. No problem about that. But I want it real classy. Not for beer drinkers. I want the single-malt guys in red suspenders and Italian shoes.”

  “I think I can help you,” she said.

  “I mean really help.”

  “I was hoping you might.”

  She looked at her watch as he opened the balcony doors. He could see how Drew Markle might have fallen head-over-heels in love with this girl. She had the cultural thinking pad of an American woman but she was packaged in a slim, tall perfect body. A woman like Jackie Ky could have just about any man she wanted, he thought. She chose a young American lawyer from Winchell & Holly, and the man she picked won the grenade lotto. A small, hand-thrown bomb had arched skyward like a Fourth of July rocket, and when it burst, a pinkish mist of flesh, muscles and bone rained down on the lawn and street. Drew Markle’s life had ended that fast. The time it took sound to travel is the distance between life and death. The bamboo sticks echoed somewhere beyond the parking lot below.

  “Soup’s ready,” said Calvino.

  “Twenty-four hours a day you hear that sound,” said Jackie Ky.

  The young children were sent out like African bush beaters to draw the game out into the open. “Yeah?” he asked, turning away from the balcony.

  “After a while you hear them in your sleep. You dream of soup,” she giggled. “You know that you aren’t in America.”

  She picked up her pen and started to write again. He watched her, thinking about his friend, a Catholic cleric, Father Jim, who lived in the Klong Toey slums of Bangkok, talking about the sounds of night; one neighbor, an old woman, wanted to exact revenge on the neighborhood; she used parrots. These parrots created an overpowering dread. She had raised these two parrots for years. The parrots had grown old and cranky like their owner. They had acquired their sound track of parrot calls from the slaughterhouse. When the old woman was angry she left the cage uncovered, and the pair of old slaughterhouse birds cried out all night in the high-pitched screams of pigs being slaughtered. The parrots would shriek and follow this with a sharp intake of breath and finally, the gurgling noise of a throat being slit. On those nights, Father Jim never dreamed of pork chops. Instead, he dreamed of terror and pain, and the void that followed.

  She handed him a name card. On the back she had written:

  “Meet me at Giac Lam Pagoda tomorrow at 3.45 pm. I will be in the main sanctuary. Don’t be late.”

  “You ever designed a bar before?” asked Calvino. “No, but like sex, there is always a first time.”

  “A bar takes skill not innocence.”

  “But a great bar draws the best of both.”

  She was a shrewd lady, he thought. Quick, bright, and too smooth not to understand that fine sensibilities and correct manners bought you nothing. It was like an American passport, it got you in the door but not into the right meeting.

  ******

  MARCUS Nguyen’s messenger, Tan, lay on his cart, a bowl of pho in front of his face, spooning in noodles when Calvino came up from behind. But he had a rear-view mirror on his cart and saw Calvino before Calvino had seen him. “Pull up a chair. Take the weight off your feet,” said Tan. “And then ignore me.”

  Calvino pulled back a wobbly chair and sat down at a table. He ordered a bowl of pho from the waiter.

  “The owner says I am bad for business,” chuckled Tan.

  “So he gives me a bowl of pho every day and I promise to stay away.”

  “Business is business,” said Calvino.

  Marcus Nguyen, carrying his mobile phone and wearing sunglasses, appeared from a crowd and sat down at the table.

  “Business is friends, connections, money,” said Marcus, as if he had been following the conversation.

  “That’s the way I see it at street level,” replied Tan, looking up at Marcus. “How does it look up there?”

  “The American who got himself killed a week ago...” Calvino started to say to Tan.

  His bowl of pho, with strange pieces of meat and green vegetables in watery noodles, arrived. The waiter gave him the soup and left.

  “Markle,” said Tan, slurping his noodles and interrupting Calvino.

  Calvino was impressed. “Yeah, Drew Markle. What’s the buzz on the street?”

  Tan looked up at Marcus, as if to ask for permission. Marcus nodded.

  Calvino leaned down and pushed a twenty-dollar bill under the bowl of pho Tan burped and kept on eating. “Someone didn’t like him. You know how it is with lawyers. You either love or hate them.”

  “Who didn’t like him?”

  “Twenty bucks buys a lot but not that much.”

  Calvino found another wad of twenties in his coat pocket. He unfolded them and stuck one between his fingers and lowered them until they touched Tan’s hand. Tan stuffed the crumpled bill under his belly. He picked up the bowl and drank the soup.

  “Who didn’t like him and who killed him could be different.”

  “The newspapers say he got killed in a dispute between security guards and beggars in a turf war near the river. And an ex-RVN sergeant threw the grenade,” said Calvino. “The government says Markle just got in the way.”

  “Got in the way of whom?” asked Marcus. “Surely not some river beggars. These people know how to survive. They are clever. I spent time in a refugee camp with a lot of other boat people. Authorities came to the camp one day and offered to pay ten cents for every rat, dead or alive. It didn’t take long for a half dozen RVN soldiers to figure out how to breed rats. Soon they were in business, raising rat colonies, cages hidden throughout the camp. It took months before the authorities found out that huge sums were being spent on the rat eradication program and every week there were more rats to pay for. So, when the government says an ex-RVN sergeant threw a grenade, I don’t believe them. We know how to survive. Killing a foreigner is throwing yourself headfirst down the rat hole. Where’s the profit in that?”

  Tan shook his head, raising it as high as he could.

  “The guys following you are talking into their walkie-talkie,” said Tan, checking his rear-view mirror.

  “How many of them?,” Calvino asked.

  “Two,” said Marcus. “Another across the street.”

  Calvino was starting to understand why Marcus had used Tan to send a message the first time. And why he made a point of coming separately from Tan this time. Marcus had been right.

  “Life on a skateboard puts your face in more shit than you would ever believe possible,” said Tan.

  Marcus peeled off some dong notes, put them on the table, rose and walked away. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t say anything, because once again, he had found a location which did all the speaking for him, saying “Marcus was here.”

  Calvino pushed the half-eaten bowl of noodles away. Here was a ruin of a man with a healthy first-class brain living at a rat’s-eye level in Saigon. Bangkok had its share of street beggars and cripples hanging around hotels and on concrete pedestrian overpasses. But if you pooled all their brains, they would have fallen short of Tan whose broken body hugged the meat cart he called a skateboard.

  “You don’t think Markle’s death was an accident?” asked Calvino, looking out at the traffic, like a man talking to himself. “Like Marcus is always saying, the universe is the only accident. Everything else has a reason, a cause, a purpose. Meaning, Markle was capped by a pro. Someone brought down from Hanoi. That’s all I know. See you around.”

  Calvino called for the bill and counted out some thousand dong notes. He pulled back his chair, as Tan rolled off, chasing after a couple of tourists wearing cameras over their �
��Lift the Embargo” T-shirts. The embargo had been lifted but the stock of T-shirts remained. The American law firms were among the first to hit the new beachhead. Drew Markle, the first new casualty in the ranks of the new American army. That was the way it was. Peace or war, people getting in the way of someone with power and discovering that, in the real world, power and influence were always backed by guns and bombs and the will to use them.

  ******

  MAI wore a Western-style jacket, a white blouse underneath and black slacks. She sat alone at a small table, reading an old, tattered Penguin edition of Chekhov Plays. A set of earphones were plugged into her ears and a Walkman lay on the table. As Calvino walked into the restaurant, he spotted her immediately. Sweat ran down his neck, the collar of his shirt was wet and stuck to his neck. He had finally lost his minders behind a huge stack of chicken thighs in the back stalls of Ben Thanh Market.

  “I’m sorry that I’m late,” he said.

  She didn’t hear him. With two fingers he slowly pushed down the book, and as she looked up and saw Calvino, she smiled, then pulled off her earphones.

  “I love Chekhov’s The Seagull,” she said.

  He was trying to remember the last time he had heard a woman say that on a first date after he had arrived forty minutes late. He sat down at the table and ordered a beer.

  “This part, here, listen, ‘What a wonderful world you live in! How I envy you—if only you knew! ... How different people’s destinies are! Some just drag out their obscure, tedious existences, all very much like one another, and all unhappy. And there are others—like you for instance, one in a million—who are given an interesting life, a life that is radiant and full of significance. You are fortunate.’ ” She closed the book, her eyes half-closed, as if she were remembering another time and place.

  “In Hanoi, everyone learns to love literature from a very young age,” she said, as the waiter brought Calvino’s beer. “It becomes part of our lives.”