Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  He mentioned in passing to Jackie Ky that he had bumped into Fred Harris before his meeting with Webb at Winchell & Holly. Only he didn’t call him Fred Harris, he called him Dan Bryant.

  “Yeah, I remember the name. He was one of Drew’s clients. I am not surprised you saw him. He has run up a huge legal bill for that new fund. Drew was getting rich on client credit points.”

  “What did Drew say about Dan?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t remember all that well. It’s not like we sat around talking about his cases, you know.”

  “Try and remember.”

  “I’ve had Washington, D.C. investigators flashing badges in my face ever since Drew was killed. Asking me to remember, I’m sick of trying to remember. I’ve had it up to here. I want to start forgetting. Isn’t that what it means to get on with your life?”

  “I can’t blame you, Jackie. All I want to know was if Drew ever said anything about this client.”

  “He might have said that the guy was a bit of a cowboy. Whatever that means. He said Vietnam was like the badlands in America over a hundred years ago. Indian country. Every man, woman and child walking wounded. That’s what I told this guy from the State Department.”

  He shook his head, thinking she was about to start crying again. The waiter came to their table with a tray of drinks and bucket of ice.

  Calvino watched her drain half the glass as he ordered the crab and shrimp salad for two.

  “And you’ve told them everything?” asked Calvino.

  “I hate that question. It’s a dumb cops question. If it were a movie, I’d walk out. Of course, I told them everything. Why wouldn’t I tell them? I want the person who killed him cut up and used as fish bait. Am I making myself clear?” She was watching a fishing boat pass on the river.

  “I am not a cop. And it was a dumb question. Sorry,” he said, drinking from the whisky and coke. He looked at her carefully, trying to understand what was in her head, what she had seen, what she had remembered, what she might have forgotten.

  He didn’t let up. “You think that the hitman was Vietnamese?” asked Calvino.

  “I suppose so. This is Vietnam. Why would a Cambodian or a Thai bother? But anything is possible in Saigon. And it happened so fast. There are a zillion motorcycles on Ton Duc Thang Street the time of day when Drew died. How long does it take to throw a hand grenade? Two, three seconds? By the time it explodes you have no idea where it came from. Who threw it or where he went.”

  “Are you sure it was one guy, or were there two?”

  “It happened so fast.”

  “In the movies you have one guy riding a motorcycle and shooting or throwing a grenade. Not so in real life. Once you pull the pin on the grenade, then you hold tight on the spoon. If you have to brake hard to avoid an accident, the next thing that happens is you need two hands, the spoon slips off the grenade because you are reaching for the handle and you are blown up.”

  “So there were two guys, does it matter?”

  “Given the authorities said one man threw the grenade, yeah, you could say it makes a difference.”

  She was right about one thing: how short the distance was between the act and reaction in the world of bombs hurled from the street. No question about it, Calvino thought, that in real life no one is clocking traffic flows, looking for two guys on the motorbike carried on a sea of motorbikes, except for one difference: this one was armed with a grenade. No one thinks or lives that way. There were certain sections of New York where kids lived this way, thought Calvino.

  “I want to know about the concert. The night you went with Drew and Webb and Webb’s friend.” “What do you want to know?”

  “Like who was sitting where. You know, the seating arrangements.”

  She took a sip from her Bloody Mary. “That’s a funny question.”

  “Did Drew sit on your right or your left? Who sat next to him? Who sat next to you?”

  “Wait, you are going too fast. Okay,” she said, closing her eyes. She moved her hand to her left and pointed. “Drew sat here.”

  “And next to Drew?”

  “I guess it was Webb,” she said. “Take your time. Don’t guess.”

  “No, it was Mai, the secretary from Hanoi.”

  He felt someone had kicked him in the stomach.

  “And where was the bimbo from Bangkok? Next to Webb?”

  “Yeah, she was. It’s true. I am starting to remember now.”

  “And next to the bimbo?”

  “It was dark in the concert hall. And I spent most of the time talking with Drew. You know how I feel about Webb. I can’t even look at him without feeling like a worm attack in the gut coming on.”

  “So you don’t know who was sitting next to the bimbo.”

  She closed her eyes again. “I think it was a client of the firm.”

  “American?”

  “Asian,” she said. “You’re sure?”

  “There were hardly any whites at the concert. They were mostly Vietnamese and, of course, some Thais. If the client had been white, I would have noticed. Since I didn’t, he must have been Asian.”

  Calvino sipped his drink. Women’s powers of deduction were immense, he thought. And it was because women noticed the small detail and then pulled back and looked at the larger picture. Most men just tunnel down the middle, missing the detail and the overall perspective. She probably had come to the right conclusion and for the right reason.

  “The client was male.”

  “I guess so. I would have noticed if the client were a woman.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” said Calvino.

  “I haven’t done anything,” she said, finishing her drink. “I am not really hungry. Why don’t we go back to my place? I hate it here. Do you mind?”

  How could he mind? He paid the bill and they walked together down the gangplank.

  Walking out of the restaurant, Calvino headed toward the spot where Markle had died. Jackie Ky tried to pull clear of him, but he had her hand. He wasn’t exactly certain where it had happened but he stopped on the grass and faced her.

  “Do you know an overseas Vietnamese named Marcus Nguyen?” he asked.

  She started to smile, then shook her head.

  “You are bizarre. Know him? He’s my uncle.”

  ******

  JACKIE Ky paid two thousand dollars a month to rent a villa which was near the Cong Vien Van Hoa Park end of Truong Dinh Street. She told him the full story of how she had put another thirty grand into the renovations. She unlocked the door. Calvino walked inside the entrance and then into the living room. He had the feeling that he had been transported to somewhere in Southern California. Chrome furniture with floral pattern cushions gleamed in the sunlight streaming through sheer curtains with tiny, pink lotus buds. A scruffy looking parrot with feathers missing around one leg squawked as it jumped around a large cage suspended from the ceiling. Potted plants six feet tall and tropical flowers in full bloom shot an aura of blues and reds and greens, a Fourth of July night sky exploding with a hundred fireworks, showering an arc of colors across the sitting room, spraying the ceiling to floor mirrored wall in reds and greens. Opposite was a sliding door that led out to a small garden, with well-manicured lawn and flower beds. She turned on the overhead fan which rotated slowly, and then she walked over to the liquor cabinet, one of those black-lacquered Chinese chests with bronze hinges and inlaid mother of pearl depicting epic scenes of family, war, seduction, weddings, and death. Only this black box stood over six feet high. If one were going to shoot a single object into deep space, this piece of furniture would have been a prime candidate for the mission as an artifact of life on earth.

  “You live pretty well,” said Calvino, looking out at the garden, before turning back and taking in the room.

  “Meaning, I wasn’t after Drew for his money,” she said. Jackie Ky had the ability to read minds, he thought.

  “Pre-1975 my uncle owned this villa.”

  “Marcus own
ed this?”

  “Twenty years ago, the People’s Committee confiscated the property. He wasn’t alone. A lot of people lost everything. But it is understandable,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “The revisionists say we lost the war. I don’t believe that,” she said. “But the war is in the past. Now I rent my uncle’s old villa from someone who is a Party member.”

  “When did you leave Saigon?”

  “I was seven years old. 1973. My life changed. I still remember being a tomboy. Going around the neighborhood topless at seven, playing football with the boys. I was a roughneck. Big for my age and tough. Next thing I knew, I was in America. I was suddenly small for my age and not so tough. Big change, huh?”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “My father beat my hands with a rattan stick if I misspelled a word or screwed up playing scales on the piano. I remember the stinging. My face all flushed, and the tears going down my face, but I never cried out. That would be giving in. I held it all here,” she said, pointing to her stomach.

  “I swallowed the fire.”

  “What does Marcus do?”

  “He’s a consultant. Why?”

  Calvino loved the word “consultant”: it was one of those titles heard from one end of the Comfort Zone to the other. Men with vague titles were drawn to the Zone life. There were others, though, like Fred Harris who used the title of “financial consultant” as his cover. Every grifter in Southeast Asia was some kind of a consultant. Jackie Ky said it so innocently as if her uncle Marcus were a doctor or a professor. This wasn’t the time or place to rattle her bones about her uncle’s business in Saigon. He was more interested in how she was making ends meet.

  “And you have no problem coming up with two grand a month for rent?” asked Calvino, moving around the living room. No expense had been spared. The curtains, the chairs, tables, cabinets, mirrors, plants, all had the touch of first class attached. “Don’t tell me you’re a consultant as well.”

  “It wasn’t just curiosity which killed the cat, it was irony too.”

  “Yeah, is that so?” he said, looking at a photograph of Drew and her. It was the same photograph that Harry had given him of the two together at Cu Chi Tunnels.

  “My father did very well in California real estate. We were not poor yellow trash,” she said.

  “Did Drew live here with you?”

  She had taken a cigarette from one of the drawers in the Chinese chest and lit it. “What possible business can that be of yours?”

  She exhaled the smoke which the overhead fan blew away.

  “Because that’s what I do. Ask a lot of questions. Like a man who can’t hear trying to figure out how jazz sounds.”

  “You like jazz? I love jazz.” And without waiting for his reply she took three steps over to the stereo and slipped a CD disk into the CD player.

  “You know how you get Fusion Jazz?” asked Calvino. She shook her head.

  “By putting a CD into a cassette player.”

  This was the first time that he had heard her laugh, and it surprised him. Then the first track of the CD kicked in. It was the Miles Davis and Marcus Miller Siesta album. Lost in Madrid Part I had the sound of death at a bullfight. As it played she made him a drink. A double Chivas with ice and a tall gin and tonic for herself. She walked across the room and closed the curtain over the sliding door to the garden. The room went from brilliant light to twilight. She stood next to him, touching her glass to his.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “You didn’t answer my question. Did you and Drew live together?”

  At first she looked stunned, then her lower lip started to tremble.

  “We didn’t see other people,” she said.

  Calvino looked around the room and saw a photograph of Drew with an arm wrapped around someone dressed in a yellow, fuzzy big-foot outfit with a monkey-like headgear attached. She followed Calvino’s eye line.

  “We were in Dalat on holiday. Why don’t I just come out and say it? I hate playing stupid games, you know. Drew stayed in the villa often enough to qualify as a live-in.”

  She suddenly reverted to her state in the restaurant: all pain, raw and open, the kind of pain that feels like it is eating you alive and nothing you throw in its tracks is going to slow it down. Now he understood why she had asked him back to the villa. There was a lot of pain in the room, even more memories, a past that hung in the air, hovering in every plant and flower in the garden. Maybe she was hoping Calvino might have some idea of how to wipe the pain of Drew Markle from her life. Or maybe she just wanted someone else to understand what it was like stranded between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Looking at her standing in the sitting room, fighting back tears, he remembered a time in Bangkok when the wife of an ex-client phoned him one Sunday evening. She was crying and could hardly talk. She needed to see him immediately. She had checked into a short-time hotel not far away. He went around and found her waiting for him, half-undressed. She was crying and half-drunk. Her husband had beaten her, and she had the bruises to prove it. She was scared and angry and confused. She didn’t know what she wanted and the only person in all of Bangkok she could think to phone was a private eye named Vincent Calvino. The only one she could trust to come around and find her in that condition. She was going to take her revenge on her husband who had disappeared deep into the Zone one too many times. And, at the same time, she was going to rub that pain out of her life. A woman was no different than a man in looking for the easy solution. In her case, he had been selected as the man who could blot out the memory of the smell and touch of her lost man.

  Jackie Ky snuggled up to him, purring, then reaching around his waist, holding her glass against the small of his back. “I want you,” she said. Jackie Ky was the person who had taught him that phrase in Vietnamese, he hadn’t told Mai about that.

  That night at the short-time hotel, the wife of the old client had said the same thing. But what the woman wanted in Bangkok and what the woman in front of him that moment wanted in Saigon was something beyond sex, something he couldn’t give her and live with himself. They wanted someone to save some small piece of pride, to make good on a personal promise that by doing this one act the pain would go away and never come back. That there was a man who wanted, desired her. Her tongue was inside his mouth. That time in Bangkok and this time in Saigon. Lost in Madrid was still playing when he pulled her back.

  “It’s not how to deal with it,” he said.

  “You think that Douglas Webb would pass up the chance to fuck me?”

  “I’m not Douglas Webb,” he said.

  She was hurt, wounded in her pride which was already on low voltage from batteries worn down by Markle’s murder. She slapped him hard on the face.

  “Get out,” she said.

  Calvino sat down on the sofa, stretched his arms out. Now they were getting somewhere. The gloves had come off and, for the first time, she had lost that controlled, balanced, intellectual distance she had been using to put galactic space between herself and the rest of the world.

  “Are you going? Or do I have to call the police?”

  “Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon branch?”

  The question drained away her anger and she started to giggle.

  “What was the first word you learned in English?”

  She flopped down, blowing her nose into a tissue, wadding it up in her hand.

  “Contempt,” she said. “I was young at the time. It’s the first English word I remember learning. I was at a movie with Uncle Marcus in LA. The movie was Chariots of Fire, and I heard the word. Contempt. I asked my uncle, what does it mean? He said it means how the people in America treated us Vietnamese. And how the communists who had taken away Saigon treated us Vietnamese.”

  ******

  OUTSIDE, in the hot Saigon afternoon, Calvino walked towards the park. She had talked about her childhood as if it were a record still playing over and over again inside her head. Once
he left the villa, Calvino needed some fresh air and some time alone to think. He had done the right thing, he thought. Contempt was a good word to learn in any language. It was the kind of word you learned over again as you grew up. He remembered another woman, the wife of an ex-client, who had used that word. She was in Bangkok, a battered woman who had begged him not to leave her that night. Just stay in the room, she said. He sat in the corner of the small, mirrored room all night while she slept on the round bed. At six in the morning he left, took a taxi to the ex-client’s house, rang the doorbell and when the door opened he punched the husband in the face, breaking the man’s nose and sending an arc of blood over the carpet.

  “Don’t ever touch her again,” Calvino had said. The husband and wife split up a month later. She went back to the States, the husband slipped into some outer reach of the Comfort Zone, and he never saw either of them again. He hated the domestic stuff, it was evil, violent, demeaning, and senseless. He walked into the park, passed lovers sitting on the grass and on benches, wondering whether Douglas Webb was planning to kill him. He had murder in his eyes when he stood in the window of the villa housing Winchell & Holly. Mai had been there a second earlier, then vanished, replaced by a face which wanted him dead. Another grenade. Nah, that would be boring. A knife? Maybe. A single shot in the head. Or two shots in the chest, like Mark Wang. There were so many ways to die in Saigon, he thought. So many lovers in the park, huddling together, as if death never stalked the earth.