Calvino turned around in the half-darkness of the scaffolding and nodded his head. The conversation went into one of those dead-stick dives, neither pilot wanting to try and pull up before the other one. Calvino crumpled up the empty 333 beer can, and looked at it in the palm of his hand. He thought about the little helicopters street vendors had made from the empty beer cans and smiled. And he thought about Marcus’s sidewalk buddy, Tan, who had a body like the crumpled beer can flattened out on his skateboard, sailing at rat-shit level through the streets of Saigon, his life bounded by no more than half a kilometer of mean, dirty sidewalks and gutters. Most of all, he thought about the anguish Harry Markle had felt that night when he was told that his kid brother had been killed in Vietnam.
“I am going to make Webb work for it a little bit more. It’s no good making it look like I am in a hurry to give him the cash. He would get suspicious. All the government types hanging out in the office. If the guy’s dirty, he has to be at max level paranoia right now.”
“I asked Khanh about the expat lawyer.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t feel dong chi with Webb.”
“Meaning Webb wasn’t exactly like a brother or comrade.”
“It’s hard to think of Webb as a fellow comrade.”
“Khanh didn’t like the way the farang looked at the Hanoi girl who works in the office. Like he was undressing her in his mind.”
Calvino accidentally knocked one of the empty 333 cans off the scaffolding and it bounced off the stage. He tried to grab for it and almost fell himself.
“Be careful, Vincent.”
He had asked Mai about Drew Markle. It wasn’t as if he had overlooked the possibility and she said, well, she implied, in so many words, that there had been nothing outside the working relationship. Why would Khanh have made the crack about Markle undressing her with his eyes?
“What’s wrong?” asked Pratt.
Calvino turned in the darkness. “Nothing.”
“Every time you say nothing, it’s something. What is it?” asked Pratt.
There was pause.
“What did you feel the first time you saw Manee?”
The question caught Pratt by surprise.
“For me, it was love at first sight. But she didn’t like me.”
“At Winchell & Holly there is a Vietnamese woman. Webb calls her the Hanoi girl. Her name’s Mai.” Then he stopped.
“What’s this got to do with Manee and me?” Pratt held his breath. He didn’t want to hear. “I am in love with this woman.”
“You know how crazy that is?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Calvino. “She reads Chekhov. Do you know Chekhov?”
“I only remember one piece from The Cherry Orchard.” Calvino raised an eyebrow and he grinned.
“Aren’t you gonna tell me?”
“This is no good, Vincent.”
“Pratt, I want to know the line.”
Pratt saw there was no way, now that he had brought up this piece of knowledge, that Calvino was going to let him off the hook.
“Okay. In The Cherry Orchard there is a failed writer named Yepihodov, who said, ‘Personally, I’m a cultured sort of fellow, I read all sorts of extraordinary books, you know, but somehow I can’t seem to make out where I’m going, what it is I really want, I mean to say — to live or to shoot myself, so to speak. All the same, I always carry a revolver on me. Here it is.’ ”
While he had been inside the Q-Bar with Webb, he had had to hide his knowledge of Caravaggio, and that made him feel humble playing the idiot. Only it was worse with Pratt, he hadn’t remembered a single line from Chekhov, and here was a Thai, delivering a line that hit belly high, one of those emotionally guided missiles with a tiny camera in the nose straight on target. Life should have been structured fair enough so that the Chekhov offset the Caravaggio, but somehow there was a gaping void, he thought. His feet hanging over the edge of the scaffolding. He had felt superior knowing more than Webb. How was it that both Mai, a Vietnamese, and Pratt, a Thai, with their knowledge about a Russian writer, had made him feel like a high school dropout? He did what he could do to salvage some pride.
“That sounds like something I might have said,” said Calvino. “You’re right, Vincent. It does. That’s why I have never forgotten
it. And whoever killed Wang and Markle may try and kill you, Vincent. Don’t forget, at the end, Yepihodov shoots himself.”
“Russians have no sense of humor, Pratt. You know that. And there is one other difference. I know who I am and what I am capable of doing.”
“I don’t think you understand what I said before. In Saigon...” Calvino waved his hand. “We are alone. You and me, Douglas Webb and sixty million plus communists.”
“Something like that.”
“You know that in New York they pulled my ticket to practice law for fraud and violation of ethics,” said Calvino.
“That was a set-up.”
“There is something in the way this Webb looks at me that reminds me of that time. I was thinking it through earlier. Webb would have been working at Winchell & Holly when I was still practicing in New York. There’s something about the guy that’s familiar.”
Pratt turned the flashlight on his watch. It was time for some sleep.
“Same time, same place, tomorrow,” said Pratt.
“I wouldn’t miss the second act for the world,” said Calvino, looking at Pratt and then down at the stage.
As Pratt got up and started to walk away, Calvino called after him, “I forgot to mention Marcus Nguyen, ex-Marine Colonel. Tough guy. Mobile phone. Chauffeured car and claims to know everyone in the Party. He’s a friend of Harry’s who told me to look him up.”
“Has he given you any help?”
“Too early to tell. But he might before it’s over.”
“About the Hanoi girl,” said Pratt.
“Her name’s Mai.”
“What if she’s...”
“She’s not. I know it,” Calvino said, feeling a cold chill go up his spine and shatter into icicles behind the sockets of his eyes. God, he hoped that he was right. After Pratt left him alone in the darkness, he remembered the dream in Bangkok, the one with Drew Markle holding Marcus Nguyen’s severed head. The eyes half-closed in death. Was this a sign of what happened when you got too close to someone you should doubt? He hoped not.
******
UNTIL you have tried it yourself, it is difficult to believe that two hundred thousand dollars, broken down into one-hundred bills, fits perfectly into two Johnny Walker Black Label boxes. The Johnny Walker box appears to have been unintentionally tailored to house exactly one thousand bills. The genius of the design, the genius of the practicality of making a box for either a thirty dollar bottle of whisky or a hundred grand in cash. One thousand individual bills a box. Calvino had bought two Johnny Walker bottles in their boxes at Don Muang Airport and carried the boxes into Vietnam inside a plastic duty-free bag. He had stuffed the bills into the boxes in a toilet cubicle and left the bottles behind. Someone who had gone to take a shit got a two bottle bonus. Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport rarely gave such a deal. But someone was a lucky customer, thought Calvino, as he walked down the long corridor to his plane, carrying the plastic bags with Tourist Authority of Thailand printed in big letters on the side.
Calvino got out of the metered taxi in front of Winchell & Holly’s villa off Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in District One. He paid the driver in dollars. As he approached the front gate, two soldiers dressed in olive green uniforms, carrying AK47s, stopped him.
“What’s the problem? Post-Liberation paranoia?” asked Calvino.
The soldiers said nothing, tightening their grip on the AK47s. He had violated one of Calvino’s cardinal rules for long-term survival—never, ever challenge an armed soldier who gives an order unless you are carrying two hundred grand and are at the door of the branch of a powerful American law firm.
The taller one with a square jaw
waved Calvino over to a table and gestured with the barrel of the rifle at the plastic bag. Calvino opened the bag, the guard looked in, and without any change of expression, waved Calvino through. He was about to open one of the Johnny Walker Black Label boxes when Mai came out the door.
She spoke to the soldiers in rapid-fire Vietnamese. The soldier inspecting his bag handed it back to Calvino. Still he had no smile, no offer of apology, just tiger eyes, watching him as he followed Mai inside the main entrance of the villa. Calvino’s law: men with war weapons never apologized for stopping and searching a foreigner.
“What did you tell them?”
“That I knew who you were. That you were an important foreigner.”
“And they believed you.”
“Of course.” She turned and smiled, brushing her hand against his.
His Hanoi girl had vouched for him, turning a red light into a green light. Winchell & Holly was wired to provide an express lane with only green lights for their clients; that was their reputation, how they made their money. Smooth passage in troubled waters. Even power brokers needed military protection. Sometimes.
“How long were you waiting at the door?” “I saw you come in the gate.”
She had wanted him to taste the power and fear, he thought. “Who are the boy scouts? Khanh’s private army?”
She laughed. “No, it’s not like that. We have always had a guard. It’s normal. And since Mr. Markle died, we thought more protection would be good. Since we don’t know why it happened, Mr. Khanh wanted to protect the office and, of course, our clients. Like you.”
The set-up looked like an idea Khanh would come up with. He wondered if Webb had to restrain Khanh not to park a couple of APCs, flying the red flag, outside the front gate. He followed Mai into the elevator. One of those old-fashioned caged lifts from black and white French movies, the kind with an accordion metal gate pulled closed with a handle. The lift had a fine mesh on the sides and ceiling, exposing the thick wires and cables moving slowly as the lift started to move. Mai stood next to the control lever, pressing it forward. She glanced back at Calvino, giving him a crooked grin.
“Did you say something?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow as the lift shuddered. Yeah, he was about to say something and she had sensed it before he had opened his mouth and this made him nervous. He had never given a speech in an elevator before. Nor did it help that Mai’s ao dai tightly clung to her body, showing each contour, and smelling of perfume.
He had found the speech in his second-hand copy of the Chekhov, the one that Pratt had committed to heart. After an hour, he had memorized it. As the elevator started up, he started, “‘Personally, I’m a cultured sort of fellow, I read all sorts of extraordinary books, you know, but somehow I can’t seem to make out where I’m going, what it is I really want, I mean to say—to live or to shoot myself, so to speak. All the same, I always carry a revolver on me.’ ”
Mai’s eyes beamed, she folded her hand around his. “Chekhov. I so love Chekhov.”
“I know.” His throat constricted, his knees weak. He felt like he was under an attack of teenage hormones, an overwhelming assault on the mind and body. The way she squeezed his hand, and then what seemed like a miracle happened—though he later found out this was almost a daily occurrence in District One— there was a power failure and the elevator came to a halt between floors. They were close enough to each other that their bodies touched in the total darkness. Calvino took a lighter from his pocket and flicked it, the flame illuminating her face, as he leaned down and kissed her on the lips for the first time.
“We are between floors,” she said.
“How long until the power comes back?” he whispered. “One minute, one hour. It’s never the same.”
“Toi muon co,” he said in broken Vietnamese. “I want you.”
She laughed and corrected his pronunciation. He repeated after her.
“You say that well,” she said.
“It took longer to learn than the Chekhov.”
“When did you learn that?”
“Last night.”
“And the Chekhov?”
“Last night was a busy night.”
“What time did you go to sleep?”
“Four or so.”
“I remember looking at the clock at four am. And thinking of you. I’m glad you learned the Chekhov. And the Vietnamese.”
“And I’m glad the power cuts off in Saigon.”
He extinguished the lighter flame. There was a long pause. Neither could see the other. Out of the darkness, or maybe because of the darkness, he felt her hand touch his face, her fingers trace the groove of a scar which ran three inches from his eyebrow to his forehead. It was an unexpected exploration, an assertiveness that caught him off balance. He was in the Winchell & Holly building on business. All this talk about being a Hanoi girl as if to telegraph that she was beyond any sexual expression.
“How did you get this?” she whispered.
“Someone tried to kill me a long time ago,” he said. “It reminds me of someone.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No, not a boyfriend. What happened to the person who hurt you?”
“Things came to an inky end.”
He heard her laughing gently in the dark.
He left out the detail that he had been working a case in Bangkok when he was jumped by a katoey, a lady-boy, who had been positioned upstairs in a Patpong bar, waiting to stick a knife in him. The katoey ended up with a Reynold’s fine ballpoint pen plunged so deep into his eye only an inch of the tip was exposed.
They kissed first with just a brush of the lips. Then with lips parted, and, after that, their mouths opened as if to swallow the other. As they kissed she quietly stepped out of her ao dai pants. Her arms around his neck, he leaned her back against the railing. Her breathing became more irregular, her face against his; as her tongue touched his, she sighed. She pulled her face back for a moment. It was too dark for her to see him. There was some why question in her mind, a fight to ask overcome as her mouth found his again. Her breathing was the only sound as he entered her. Her long fingernails were under his shirt, running up his back. Her legs wrapped around his waist, her back against the side of the elevator, with two hundred grand in fake hundred-dollar bills on the floor, Calvino made love to the Hanoi girl. He was still inside her when the lights came back on, and the power. He reached over and hit the control lever. She quickly slipped into the bottom half of her ao dai, looked at her face in the shiny chrome control panel. Turning around, she rubbed the smudge of lipstick off the side of his face.
“This was an omen,” she said. “The power going out.”
She shook her head. “No, your coming to Vi etnam. I knew you were the one the first time I saw you.”
He looked at the eyes for some trace of irony, of a lie. There was none.
“I came to Saigon because I wanted to open a bar.”
“You came to Ho Chi Minh City because you were meant to.” He had obtained what he had desired, thought about alone in his hotel room, and nanoseconds after he had fulfilled his desire came the terrifying moment of realization he would leave the Zone forever because of one woman. When faced with the solid reality of such a prospect, he found himself asking whether he could ever leave the Zone, or whether the Zone would be carried like a seed inside him, ready to sprout anew sometime down the road and destroy their relationship. He had possessed her, this was what he told himself that he really wanted. Did he believe himself? He touched her hair. He wanted the power to go back off, for time to stop, and for the darkness to surround them again. Then he wanted her to go with him, he saw himself with her in the elevator, as he pushed the control lever and a moment later they reached the ground floor. Then they were in a taxi on the way to the nearest place which performed civil marriages and he said, “I do.” For life and all of the other lives to follow, “I do take this woman.” And then there was the personal vow, “I am declaring myself free of th
e Zone.”
The elevator stopped and she opened the door. “We are here,” she said.
He reached down and picked up the plastic bag with the two hundred grand. He hesitated for a second inside the elevator. From the way she looked at him with full concentration as if she could read his mind.
“You will be late for your appointment with Mr. Webb,” she said.
He had a case to finish. After that, he said to himself, he would be a free agent, then he would ask her.
“After all this business is settled, things will be different,” he said.
“After the war things were supposed to be different,” she said. “But mostly they have been the same.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner,” he said.
She thought about this. “Good idea,” she replied.
“And about Chekhov.”
“Him, too.”
Her English was nearly perfect, and the way she moved walking away from him made his breath snag in the back of his throat. He had just made love to his woman. The Hanoi girl, he thought, the untouchable girl who Webb would have bet the bank would not go to lunch with him. After she led him to the reception area, Mai had turned coldly formal in the presence of the other staff. She disappeared without saying goodbye. Then, they had made love without really saying hello.
Two gray sofas were on either side of a glass table. A man in his late 40s dressed in a gray suit and green tie sat reading the International Herald Tribune. Calvino sat on the opposite sofa. Fourth of July picnic, Bangkok, Thailand, raced through Calvino’s head. He felt a moment of sheer panic. He knew this guy, and more important, this guy knew him and could blow his cover with one word, “Calvino.” He waited like someone looking an executioner in the eye. Do it. Let’s get the fucking thing over. He was almost happy. I go back for Mai and get out of here, he thought. But then nothing happened.
Calvino then recognized the man as Fred Harris, a Bangkok based US Embassy guy. Harris returned to reading his newspaper as if he had never laid eyes on Calvino before. Harris had worked for a couple of years at the US Embassy in Bangkok. Harris had taken Pratt away at the Fourth of July picnic. He had a problem: Something about providing security to investors who were meeting in Phuket. Harris could not have looked more American in Saigon if he had had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his forehead. As soon as he started to worry about Harris blowing his cover, he thought, Harris isn’t going to blow my cover. And there was one very good reason: Harris was working on special assignment himself. He had caught the sonofabitch red-handed in the middle of some black bag operation, thought Calvino. He watched as Fred lowered the newspaper and stared at Calvino, then looked away.
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