Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  ******

  “YOU gave Webb the entire two hundred grand?”

  “The whole enchilada,” said Calvino. He had a stupid grin on his face.

  “And I have this awful gut feeling this is the best news I am going to hear. That there is something else even more insane,” said Pratt.

  Pratt covered his face with one hand and rubbed his eyes. He was tired, not sleeping well. He had phoned Manee just to hear her voice over the phone, to talk to his kids about school. The conversations had cheered him up at the time but the good cheer had faded within the hour as he had waited for Calvino to arrive at a French restaurant on Dong Khoi Street. He missed them.

  “I am going to marry Mai,” said Calvino.

  So that was it, the reason he was acting crazy, laying all the fake money on Webb.

  “You once said you’d never remarry. That you might make it a week, maybe a month, outside the Zone but it would always pull you back. The ice was in your blood.”

  Calvino nodded. “True. I also once said I’d never take another drink.”

  “If women are the addiction, marriage isn’t the treatment.”

  “Is that from Shakespeare?” asked Calvino.

  “No. And it’s not from Chekhov either.”

  “I want to thank you for that quote.”

  “I knew it was a mistake to quote Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard just cost the Royal Thai Police Department two hundred grand. And I signed for it.”

  “The money’s counterfeit,” said Calvino. “Webb doesn’t know that.”

  “That’s the whole point. If he had Drew Markle and Mark Wang killed over a cash deposit, then we should know pretty soon.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “That’s what?” asked Calvino.

  “Since you have a pretty good idea someone will try to kill you in the next seventy-two hours, you can talk about marriage.”

  “I’ve been married for seventy hours before,” said Calvino.

  “The average duration of a Zone marriage.”

  “And for less than twenty hours as I recall.”

  The smile dissolved from Calvino’s face as Marcus Nguyen stood at their table, holding out his hand. In his other hand was his mobile phone. “Vincent, I thought that was you.”

  Calvino introduced Pratt to Marcus, making sure he kept Pratt’s cover intact, there was no need to involve Marcus any further than he was already involved. By the time the introduction had finished, Marcus had slid into the booth next to Calvino.

  “I saw your old villa this afternoon. Your niece showed me around. She’s done wonders with the decoration and the garden. Out of Town and Country,” said Calvino, having a reasonably good idea that Marcus already had learned of this from Jackie Ky.

  “As I tried to teach Jackie, you have to learn to let go of the past. It is a hard lesson and some people learn quicker than others. Some just turn bitter,” said Marcus Nguyen. “For example, take a look out of the window.”

  Pratt and Calvino looked out and saw a beggar eating a sandwich, squatting in front of a row of carts loaded with bamboo and coconuts. The beggar was looking in the window, his head tilted up. Calvino turned and saw the TV on the wall. A Charlie Chaplin movie was playing on the VCR. Charlie the little tramp being watched by an old Vietnamese tramp.

  “See the building across the street? There is a sign that says Hotel Catinat. Before 1975 the entire block was the Hotel Catinat. The street had the same name. And what is left of all this now? It’s been chopped up into dozens of shops selling Marilyn Monroe bead curtains, lacquered bowls and chopsticks. The Hotel Catinat no longer exists. The street has a new name. It is all in the past as if it never existed. Only the words carved in that part of the building survive. Not even all the King’s men and all the King’s horses could put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

  “Or Drew Markle,” said Calvino.

  That caught Marcus a little off guard, the sweep from disintegration of property to the destruction of a life. He recovered with a wave of his mobile phone. “But we can ask for justice in the case of Drew Markle. Or, if we wish, we can do the work of justice.”

  “And the man who owned the Hotel Catinat, what became of him?”

  “He never let the loss of his hotel turn him into a bitter man. He moved on. He was smart. He never asked who the new owners were, where they came from, what right they had to split up his hotel into hundreds of shops and apartments. It didn’t matter. Might has always been right. He didn’t own it any longer, the title had gone to strangers. It was enough that it had once been his. No one could take that away from him.”

  “What kind of work did you say you did?” asked Pratt. “It’s there on my name card. Consultant.”

  “My company sometimes employs consultants.”

  Pratt had read the name card. It said consultant and he thought about this English word. Southeast Asia was crawling with consultants, a title that meant almost nothing. You consulted fortune tellers, your friends, your old teachers, a wise monk, but the modern Western consultant was like a hired gun from the old West, making connections, wiring networks, using the phone, fax, and computer to move funds, designs and secrets around the world, as if offshore bank accounts, investors, managers, and corporate offices were all intermingled on a vast international grid. Consultants were hired by someone who wanted to break a grid-lock in the system, or break someone who was breakable. Who hired Marcus Nguyen and what had they asked him for his fee?

  “What’s your speciality, Mr. Nguyen?” asked Pratt, keeping the conversation on a formal level.

  “Finance,” said Marcus.

  “You still think the communists financed the killing of Drew Markle?” asked Calvino.

  Marcus stared at the window, his eyes on the old Hotel Catinat. His eyes swung back to Calvino’s and he sipped on a gin and tonic which a waiter had brought over from where he had been sitting.

  “I think maybe he got in the way of a lot of money,” said Marcus. “That gets you killed in Asia no matter who you are.”

  “That’s why there is such a big demand for financial consultants,” said Pratt.

  After Marcus left the restaurant, Pratt and Calvino watched him get into a car, the driver holding the door for him.

  “What do you make of him?” asked Calvino.

  Pratt shrugged. “I don’t think too much of his history. Rue Catinat changed names after the French left in 1954. I can’t remember, I think the name was Tu Do . And the Catinat Hotel had been divided into shops while the Americans were still in Saigon.”

  “That’s the problem with Vietnam,” said Calvino. “Everyone personalizes the history.”

  “Not unlike America,” said Pratt.

  “Not unlike Thailand,” said Calvino.

  ******

  IN the early evening, Calvino sat on his balcony, thinking about what Marcus had said about how Drew Markle had got in the way of a Brink’s truck of money and that had been the reason Drew had been killed. Mark Wang had left a lot of money in the offices of Winchell & Holly. Calvino thought about how little money was enough to get in the way of and how quickly the dead were forgotten by those who divided the spoils. Cash, a hotel, a villa. It all got divided, redivided, and the original owners were dead, fled to another country, or fighting the illness of bitterness and plotting their revenge. That much was human nature. Then someone rang the door buzzer to his hotel room. He swung around and looked back through the French doors. Pratt wouldn’t be that stupid, he thought. He got up and walked through the French doors, across the room, and opened the door a crack. Jackie Ky was standing outside, holding her handbag with both hands. Calvino’s law said a woman who comes to your hotel room unexpected, holding her handbag with both hands does so because it’s heavy, either with the stuff she plans to move in with or with the gun she plans to use because she plans to move you out.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Why don’t I step outside?”

  They stood in the narrow hallway w
ith the peeling lino.

  “You’re right. Inside we have your invisible audience plugged in. Even sometimes I forget and act as if this place is really normal.” She opened her handbag and took out a handgun. “I thought you might need this.”

  He pulled a Smith & Wesson .40 caliber handgun out of the leather rig. It was loaded with a full fifteen slug clip inside.

  “It’s a beautiful lady,” he said.

  “But she has a bad temper. Kind of like me. Hey, I’m sorry for what happened.”

  He smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “You certainly know how to make up.”

  This Smith & Wesson was one of those modern guns made out of hard plastic. A killing machine should be made out of steel, he thought, as she dug out two extra clips and handed them over. Killing a man is bad enough, but insulting him with a plastic killing machine is another thing altogether. But Calvino wasn’t going to let a bit of plastic stand in the way of accepting a gift in a place where an insult was the least of his worries. He looked up from the gun.

  “Why are you really giving me this?”

  “Because I acted like a real shit. And you didn’t do what Douglas Webb would have done. Try and take advantage of me when I am obviously willing to throw myself at you.”

  “Was that some kind of test back at your place?”

  She smiled. “I’m a testy girl. Gotta run now. Hey, watch yourself with that beautiful lady you’ve got between your hands.”

  “Did Uncle Marcus put you up to this?”

  “He likes you, Vinee. I like you. He promised Harry to look after you. Harry knows, like Marcus, that this isn’t your turf. You have no idea how crazy you are playing private eye in Saigon. Nothing is private here. It’s all public. That’s what communism stands for. You just don’t go around asking all sorts of questions about someone getting killed without attracting attention. Bye.” She pushed the button for the elevator and, before he could say anything, the door to one of the other rooms opened and Calvino ducked back inside his doorway. When the door closed, he looked out in the hallway but Jackie Ky had gone. He slipped the leather rig on for size. Perfect fit, he thought, looking at himself in the mirror. Already he was starting to feel better. He leaned his head against the back of the door to his room, and thought about the darkness of the elevator when the power had gone out, and how Mai had sounded and smelled. He remembered everything as if it were the last chance for a memory to occupy his mind.

  ******

  WHEN Mai said she had to be home by ten, her fingers ran up and down his hand across the table. She lived in a shophouse with an assortment of relatives from Hanoi and Hue—uncles, aunts, cousins—he couldn’t keep track of all the connections, as his eyes watched her lips move. What it all meant, in the end, was that a Hanoi girl had strict family orders to be off the streets before it was late.

  “After ten, the Saigon girls claim the night,” she said. “And if I am out, then my family feels it sends the wrong message. Foreigners can become easily confused. They don’t see the difference. So I have to be careful.”

  “And pray for blackouts at ten in the morning.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, squeezing his hand.

  “Were you Drew Markle’s secretary?” he asked. It was a question that had been bothering him for some time and he had wanted to ask her as they were riding up in the elevator and the power gave out, and the question slipped his mind in the total darkness.

  “Yes, I was his secretary.”

  “Did Drew use a computer for letters, agreements, that kind of thing?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened to all of his computer files?”

  “The Intelligence people came to the office after it happened. Khanh said they took the diskettes. He didn’t have any choice, you understand. They just took all of them for the investigation.” “No one kept back-ups? For instance, did Webb keep copies?”

  “I don’t think he had time to make copies of Drew’s files. It happened very fast. An hour after Drew was killed, the security people were in our office. They wouldn’t let Webb in. It was okay for me and Khanh and the rest of the Vietnamese staff, but no foreigners were allowed.”

  “Very efficient,” said Calvino.

  She was stroking his hand and smiling. “Except one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “I kept a private set of his files. The diskette is at home. It was Drew’s idea. And, as it turned out, he was smart to have thought something might happen.”

  “Did you tell anyone at the office or the police about this?”

  She shook her head. “I was too scared. I didn’t know what to do. Or who to trust.”

  “What about Khanh? You don’t trust him?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, withdrew her hand from across the table and drank her cola.

  “It doesn’t matter. You trusted me enough to tell me.” “I don’t see what Drew’s death has to do with you.”

  “Could you let me have a copy of the diskette?”

  She had made love with him as they stood in the dark elevator, he had been holding her hand in public in a restaurant, it was all happening so fast, too fast. She needed time to think. Think about what she wanted, who she was, and who she was with. Everything had seemed clear and certain when they had sat down at dinner together, and now she couldn’t find the right word to describe the sudden unease she felt. It was like the night when she heard that Drew Markle had been murdered along the river. She had cried and the next morning her eyes had been bloodshot and people asked her all kinds of questions. She told them her eyes were red because she hadn’t slept well. She didn’t tell them that she had been crying her eyes out. Calvino didn’t push her any further, feeling her withdraw, folding back into herself.

  “I’m going to ask you to believe one thing.” “What is that one thing?”

  “I will make it work for us,” he said. He reached for her hand but she moved away.

  He stood beside her as a guard rolled out her Honda Dream. She straddled the saddle, brushing her long black hair away from her face. This was no way to end the night, he thought. He grabbed the handlebars and leaned forward, his lips touching hers. She didn’t stop him this time. She gave him a long, passionate kiss and froze a little as she brushed against the Smith & Wesson.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pulling back.

  “A way to communicate with people. Except you only use it as a last resort.”

  “Like a mobile phone.” She smiled.

  “Yeah, when you want to deliver a message.”

  He didn’t say anything, having made up his mind that he would not lie to her. If asked, he might be as indirect as possible, but he would not tell an outright lie.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Ho Chi Minh City isn’t New York.”

  “New York is much safer,” she said, twisting the ignition key in the Honda.

  They both started to say something at the same time. They laughed the way lovers laugh, filled with joy and happiness, that’s where it starts, but the heart of such a laugh is in the feeling of hope it carries. Like a piece of music that inspires, such a laugh is a song, a duet of shared hope.

  “Okay, I will do it. I will get you the diskette. If that’s what you really want. If it’s important. I won’t even ask why it is important to a man who wants to open a nightclub. But you must have your reasons.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said. He had never felt better or worse in his life. A woman he loved was willing to do what her basic instinct told her not to do, and she would do it simply on the basis of trust, an offering given to a man she loved.

  He stood watching her motorcycle until it disappeared into the night and then he took a taxi to the Q-Bar.

  ******

  RUNNING a cover story about wanting to open a Saigon bar made for a good excuse, but changing the cover story to opening a nightclub gave him a perfect reason to be hanging out in a swank District One bar; it wasn’t just dri
nking, it was studying how the competition made it all come together, the layout, the staff, the furniture and, above all, the way they handled the clientele. Calvino eased onto an empty stool at the first bar, the Caravaggio wing, just inside the front entrance to the Q-Bar, and no sooner had he settled in and ordered a drink, than some guy in his late 20s, blonde hair, red-eyed, his jaw a little slack from drink, leaned over and pressed his shoulder against Calvino.

  “I remember you from the other night. You’re Doug’s friend, right? He said you’re gonna open a bar in Saigon. Not an original idea but it seems cool.”

  “I’m thinking about it real hard,” said Calvino.

  “Well, you should think real hard about putting your money here,” he said, taking a long drink out of the Tiger beer bottle.

  “What’s your name?” asked Calvino. “Josh.”

  “Vincent,” extending his hand.

  The young, well-built American shook it. “If you really want to know what I think, it’s that opening a bar in Saigon is a fucked idea.”

  “Yeah, you got a bar?” Josh shook his head.

  “No, but I got an English school. In Saigon, running a bar is easier than operating an English school. Fewer people to pay off. I taught English in Jakarta before coming here. Jakarta is corrupt but it’s not a patch on Saigon. One day I’m painting the walls in one of my classrooms and some asshole guy from the government comes around. He says, ‘What are you doing? Painting walls? Drinking beer? Listening to music? Teachers don’t paint walls in Vietnam,’ he said. He couldn’t understand how a teacher could paint a fucking wall with one hand, drink beer with the other, listen to music and rap with his students. Get students to help paint their own school. It was unheard of. You know what he was afraid of?”