Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Why don’t you come down and open up?”

  The old man shrugged.

  “The rats...” Then he stopped himself.

  “What about the rats?” Calvino sensed the landlord and forgot himself for a minute. Having stopped short of explaining the rat problem was a good sign, thought Calvino. If you are trying to rent a bar, then you leave the rat problem for the new tenant to discover for himself after he has signed the lease. That’s why he wanted him to come upstairs. He probably had someone to go down and clear the rats out before he allowed Calvino to go inside.

  “I’m from Brooklyn. I grew up with rats. I had two hundred kills with an air-rifle the summer I turned eleven. I had two hundred notches on my rifle butt.”

  There was a light to the old man’s back making him look about a hundred years old but, in reality, Calvino guessed he was about sixty, with a couple of missing teeth, flabby arm skin and weepy eyes that looked like yellow piss holes in the snow. By the time he got down to street level, he was coughing, one of those deep smoker’s hacks. Calvino watched him bring up a lunger, and spit the contents of his lungs into the street. Stepping on a landmine or one of Mr. Tang’s lungers would be registered about equal on the horror meter. At ground level, Mr. Tang looked like he had shrunk to half size. His skinny legs stuck out of baggy shorts. He carried an oil lamp with a broken glass pane on one side and a large metal ring with keys. He didn’t look like a landlord, a man of means.

  “You own this building?”

  Mr. Tang looked up from the keys. “I am the manager,” he said.

  “Who is the owner?”

  His face turned to a Halloween black tooth smile. “Someone from Hanoi. I rent it for him.”

  “Beautiful place like this. You shouldn’t have any trouble.” “In Vietnam there is always trouble,” he said.

  Mr. Tang turned back to the key chain and the padlock which was in the middle of a fistful of chains pulled around the metal grates in the shophouse gate. After he unlocked the padlock, he unwrapped the chain and pulled up the metal gate. Then he reached down and picked up the oil lamp.

  “Remember, watch out for the rats. The Australian was no good with rats. Mr. Evans complain very much. Say too many rats. Too much rent. Say Mr. Tang no good. He fight with everybody. He fight with police. No good. Police beat him up, break his balls, and take away his wife. She’s in prison. Next month she have baby,” said Mr. Tang, making a gesture over his stomach to show how fat she had been at the time of her arrest. “But he was the bad one. Not her. The police let him go. Said she was selling girls. Communist don’t like prostitution. Say old regime have Saigon girls fucking foreigners. No good. Fucking no good, they say.”

  “I don’t plan to run girls from the bar,” said Calvino.

  Mr. Tang looked him up and down. “Yeah, if you say so.”

  He didn’t sound so sure and snorted back a laugh and brought up another lunger which he coughed up in stages, dragging it like a snake from his lungs, before spitting it on the sidewalk. Then he stepped inside the main room. Calvino followed a step behind. The oil lamp cast light about the height of a man against the floor, falling just short of the bar.

  “How much is the rent?” asked Calvino.

  “Very cheap price. Three thousand dollars a month. Two years paid in advance.” He rolled off the finance part of the deal straight away without blinking an eye. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had pulled out a lease and pen and asked him to sign it on the spot.

  “You want it?”

  “And you will throw in rat traps as fixtures?” asked Calvino. The old man pretended not to hear him. He looked at Calvino

  as if he had already decided it was a mistake to come down and open up for him. But he had gone this far and decided to go ahead and show Calvino the premises.

  “You fight with police, they break your balls,” he said as a kind of half warning. “The police come here and break Evans’ balls.”

  Drew Markle had more than his balls busted, thought Calvino.

  What had been on the diskettes? And why had he asked Mai to keep copies at home? Why didn’t he ask Jackie Ky to help him out? She was American... The thoughts crashed through the gates of his mind, and ran, and ran. He was distracted, lost in thought as Mr. Tang crossed the floor and put the oil lamp on the bar. Out of the corner of his eye, Calvino caught a movement as the light danced in the mirror behind the bar. A quick blur of motion which pulled him out of his thoughts and back into the moment. In the stinking, dark bar. The flash of motion could have been anything. A head, shoulder, arm or an extremely large rat standing on its hindlegs checking out a potential new owner. In less than a second Calvino dived out of the light, rolling over the floor and aiming for cover behind an over-turned table outside the arc of the lamp light. He crawled on his belly as the first shots ripped through the darkness. Tang groaned, said something in Vietnamese, then thumped like a fish that had taken a hook deep in its gut, and disappeared under the surface for one last, final dive. Calvino wasn’t sure how many of the shots had been fired, and whether all of the shots were intended for Tang. The firing stopped, and silence engulfed the bar. A long, tense quiet waiting for someone to make the next move. In the darkness he pulled out the Smith & Wesson from the shoulder rig. The feel of a gun was as good as the feel of a woman, and gripping the gun in the expectation of killing, choosing the moment, waiting with a finger pressed against the trigger, was unlike any other wait on the planet. A death watch. He won the advantage, and whoever had shot at him was exposed with the light to their backs. But, as in his worst nightmare, they had enough fire-power to blow him across the street.

  He didn’t have to wait long before he saw a head pop up from the side of the bar. “Rats,” he thought. “Big, motherfuckering rats.” Calvino watched as the barrel of an AK47 came around the corner. The gunman exposed his head slowly, then he rose shoulder high, directly putting himself in the line of fire. Calvino squeezed three quick rounds, hitting the man in his left eye, jaw and the last round passed straight through the neck and shattered the mirror behind the bar. Seven years bad luck, he thought. There was silence for a moment which was broken by two male voices exchanging orders in Vietnamese, as he moved back from his firing position. Halfway down the bar, another figure rose up as if he were immortal, an automatic rifle tucked in close to the body and began firing, sweeping the darkness. AK47 rounds ripped into the wall several inches above Calvino’s head. The table top was metal but that didn’t stop a slug from passing clean through. A second burst split the oil lamp in half, and the oil splashed across the bar carrying a wave of flames. Calvino counted one, two, then flipped around the table, his hands around the gun, took aim and dropped the second gunman with two rounds. The man’s head jerked and he fell onto the burning counter top, making a gurgling noise as blood filled his mouth and lungs. The last gunman had meanwhile circled away from the bar, and the fire. Coughing from the smoke, he rolled right in front of the doorway. Smoke had got into the gunman’s eyes, half-blinding him, instinctively, his hands had come up to rub his eyes. Three blind mice. See how they run. Calvino didn’t wait for him to take his hands away from his eyes and back to his gun. Calvino shot him four times and the third gunman fell against the side of the metal gate and was dead before he hit the cement.

  Calvino found a handkerchief stuffed in his jacket pocket, pulled it out, and covered his nose and mouth as he slowly rose to his feet. He edged forward, stopping to check the two bodies of the gunmen who had died at the bar counter. The interior temperature of Karen’s Bar was rising. He turned over the first gunman, who was obviously dead. Then he pushed over the second man whose head was split open, leaking blood like engine oil, bone and brains mixed with the blood. Blown apart by a high- tech piece of plastic in the shape of a gun. Both of the gunmen were young Vietnamese, early 20s, plastic sandals, not badly dressed. In terms of tailoring, the dead men were several cuts above the average cyclo driver parked in front of the Q-Bar. The hi
tman who was dead at the entrance was older. Calvino made him somewhere in his mid-30s when time had stopped forever. It didn’t matter, none of them were ever going to see forty.

  In front of the bar, Calvino stopped and knelt beside the body of Mr. Tang who had been hit by a couple of AK47 rounds and most of his head was gone and his brains were splattered across the floor. A couple of slugs from the AK47 had torn away his face; no one, not even his mother, would have recognized whether this was an old or young man, or if it were a man at all. Tang’s clothes were on fire. There was the sickening smell of burning flesh. Calvino was shaking and angry, thinking how Webb had sent him and this old man to get themselves killed in Saigon. A moment later, he was out the back door, keeping to the shadows, climbing over a wall to the adjacent shophouse. He looked back at the flames leaping into the night. Below the wall, in the light of the flames, he saw dozens of rats were running out of the door. Jesus, he thought. How could one place have so many rats? He knew that the street was no longer silent and empty, but teeming with people running in every direction. These people had heard gunfire, seen bodies with bullet holes, and watched the flames of destruction before. The nightmare had returned to their lives and they rushed to see the carnage and to celebrate that once again they had survived. What they didn’t know was that Calvino was already over one wall, and scaling a second wall, taking evasive action under cover of darkness.

  Calvino, smelling of smoke and fire, stayed on the back streets as he walked back to the Q-Bar. He hoped that in the tropical heat of the night he would lose the smell of death. At the Fourth of July picnic, he had worn the cheap cologne. He admitted to Pratt that he had no sense of smell. But he had been wrong, he couldn’t get rid of the scent of death, burning flesh, which clung to his nostrils. After scaling several more walls, he came to an alley and kept on moving low to the ground until about a kilometer later he finally came to a main street. He ignored a succession of cyclo drivers who came alongside, looking at this man in the wrinkled, soiled suit, smoky hair, and unknotted tie. They just kept on pedaling. He didn’t look like a passenger they wanted to deal with. His return journey to the Q-Bar, with all of his diversions, took about forty minutes and by the time he arrived, he had worked up a sweat, his shirt was soaked, sweat dripping off the end of his nose and chin. Webb had gone and so had Darla. But the Q-Bar was packed with people three deep around the bar, drinking and talking business. Funny thing was the music. The Miles Davis tape Jackie Ky had been playing earlier that day rose above the background chatter around the bar. One of the bartenders had cranked up the sound.

  “What sauna did you find?” asked the schoolteacher.

  Calvino sat down at the bar. “It never gets this hot in Brooklyn.”

  The schoolteacher laughed.

  “You looking for your friends?” he asked.

  “Well, you won’t find them. Webb’s probably fucking her. I wish I was fucking her. Everyone at the bar wishes they were fucking her. But we ain’t. Not tonight. So we are getting drunk. You want a drink?”

  “Yeah, I want a drink,” said Calvino.

  “So how did Karen’s Bar look to you?”

  “A little on the rundown side. Bad neighborhood, too,” said Calvino.

  “You smell like you’ve been eating at a beggar ’s barbecue.”

  Calvino took a long drink out of the beer the bartender handed him.

  “You like Webb?” Calvino asked.

  The schoolteacher ’s forehead wrinkled.

  “Let’s put it this way. If he were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him.”

  “Did you see Webb leave?”

  He smiled, taking a long drink on his beer.

  “Not long after you took off.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?” There was an edge of suspicion in his voice.

  “In case anyone asks, I was at the bar all night. I left for five, ten minutes, then came back, bitching I couldn’t find Karen’s Bar. Can you do that for me?”

  “A real mystery man we got here. What happened? You get in a fight or something?”

  “Something like that,” said Calvino.

  “Hey, you’ve got yourself in some shit. That goes with the territory of Saigon. And you need someone to cover for you, right?”

  Calvino smiled.

  “How about another beer?” he said.

  He gave the schoolteacher a couple of twenties.

  “Take care of my bill.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To see if Webb is on fire. Unlike you, I would piss on him.” Calvino had pulled real hard on the reins of his rage but the four horses kept galloping full speed ahead, cliff or no cliff, those ponies weren’t stopping for any one. The man had sent him out intending him to get killed. Setting him up for a hit. Pratt had said it was going to happen, he had set himself up by handing over that much money as if he had a death wish. His cover was that of a farang who didn’t know the story of how things worked in Southeast Asia, but Calvino had been in Asia for years and years. What he hadn’t known for all his years in Asia was the kind of love for a woman that made a man think stupid things such as love was powerful enough to have won a foothold in the world. Of course it hadn’t even come close. It was novice thinking; the kind of thinking that got you killed. By the time he had walked out the door of the Q-Bar, he had convinced himself not to go straight to Webb’s apartment and kill him. That had been the temptation. He wouldn’t really kill him, but he would make Webb wish he were dead. The sonofabitch, he thought, had finally figured out that Demato was Calvino, a lawyer, who once, in New York City, had represented an English grifter named Gentlemen James, the bed wetter, who had got a huge settlement from Webb’s client.

  ******

  AT the reception desk of his hotel, the room key was gone and the young clerk with thick, black hair had a large grin on his face. Behind him on a Sony TV, a Chinese kung-fu film was playing from a VCR hooked to the TV, and three hotel staff sat on the floor watching an action scene. Two more had sheets pulled over their bodies, curled up, sleeping against the wall. They looked like corpses and the lobby looked like a public hospital morgue. Motorcycles were parked all down the first floor corridor.

  “I give your friend the key,” said the clerk. “What friend is that?”

  The clerk winked. “You know. Your American friend. She’s very beautiful. Very big.” With his hands he gave the universal sign language for very large breasts.

  All the way up in the elevator he was trying to figure out how Webb’s mind worked. Expat lawyers in Southeast Asia, the local hires, were a breed apart from their brethren in America. Those lawyers, who survived on the edges of a world closed to foreign lawyers, made themselves useful because they had learned to understand the importance of the unwritten code of fear and face. How a deal would blow; how someone could get a bullet in the back of the head. Guys like Webb had usually developed a specialized taste, and their experience turned them away from a part of themselves, alienated some inner core, made them hard like steel, not just ruthless, but the moral compass which pointed to right or wrong got smashed along the way. They were usually smart, street smart, that is, they knew where young girls or boys could be found at bargain price. Or who had to be paid to fix a problem. They knew how to work the Zone to their commercial advantage. They were loners who stayed out of the limelight because that kind of attention made them nervous. However, that didn’t make them killers. Killing a man was easy enough to talk about but, even for the hardcore guesthouse lawyer, working the fringes of small-time deals, it was a rare thing for a man to find enough courage to pull the trigger. They worked a bloodless line of words and phrases, making paper trails. This wasn’t just crossing some line drawn in the sand, this was crossing a void with no name, a void which entered the man, and became him in a way he never anticipated. Taking another man’s life marked a separation from everyone else who lived on the other side of the divide; and once that happened, there was no turning
back, no return to the paper trails. Gentleman James had pissed in the richest beds for a living. It was the one link to the past that Webb shared with him, thought Calvino. But Calvino had crossed that line. What would it take for Webb to kill a man? That was the question.

  The elevator door closed behind him as he knocked on the door to his room.

  When the door opened, Darla stood in black high-heels, six- inch heels, and she was wearing one of his shirts unbuttoned to the navel, the sleeves rolled up. She put her arms around him and kissed him hard on the mouth. He held her arms under his own, keeping her hands away from the gun he was carrying.

  He kept his eyes open, looking behind her. The bathroom door was half-open. She opened her eyes and moaned.

  “You taste good,” she said, pulling back.

  Calvino pushed open the bathroom door with his foot, looked inside.

  “Where’s Doug?”

  “Not in your bathroom,” she said, laughing. “Then where?”

  “He went to the office. Where else? All he does is work, work, work. He lives for his work. And it can make him so boring.” She walked back to the double bed, took a cigarette out of her handbag, lit it, raised her head, and let the smoke coil out of her thin nose. “I always charge lawyers in six minute intervals. It makes them feel, well, homey. Hey, you look kinda beat up. Are you okay?”

  “I am having a great night. Does Doug know that you came here?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s none of his business.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why, your charm, of course.” She inhaled on the cigarette until the ash grew long and gray before it fell onto the carpet. “And Doug said you are opening a club in Saigon. I started thinking. Yeah, a bar in Saigon run by an American. It’s romantic. Plus I am getting bored in Bangkok. So I am thinking to myself, Darla, here is a chance for a new start. Everyone knows that Vietnam is about to take off. The Vietnamese love Americans. Don’t ask me why. After all we bombed them for years. But they love us. I want to live in a place where people love us, Mr. Demato.” “You want a job,” Calvino said, sitting on a chair opposite the bed.