Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “He was mine, too. But now I’m not so sure. There’s something that doesn’t come together about Jackie Ky. I don’t know what it is. But that pack of condoms falling out of her handbag the other night in my room.”

  “She’s being careful, Vincent. Condoms are practical.”

  “Inside, she’s got the wiring of any other American woman. If she really had been that tight with Drew Markle, someone who’s been dead less than two weeks, I can’t figure where she’s coming from. Living in a villa confiscated from her uncle. She has a lot of money and connections. Home delivery of handguns.”

  Pratt nodded. “She looks in love with Markle on the tape. And the other woman on the tape, the one with Webb, she most likely is the woman who was in your room tonight.”

  “Something, isn’t she?” asked Calvino. “A Zone queen bee.”

  “I could’ve...”

  “What?”

  “What time is your appointment at Winchell & Holly tomorrow?”

  Pratt handed Calvino the envelope. “Ten in the morning.”

  “Meet me for lunch afterwards,” said Calvino. “The Italian restaurant at the Continental Hotel.”

  “One more thing, Mai, the girl who has got you acting like a teenager on hormone injections, she’s on the tape. She’s sitting beside Markle. You tell me what you make of the body language between them.”

  Calvino nodded, leaning forward on his hands.

  “I forgot. I’m having lunch with Mai tomorrow.” Pratt rubbed his eyes. “Never mind.”

  “Don’t say, never mind. Thais say never mind when they are totally pissed off.”

  “I am Thai.”

  “Do you know she studied nineteenth century Russian literature at the University of Hanoi? How can you not love someone who did that? She’s never heard of an MBA degree. She’s untouched, unclaimed. Innocent, Pratt. She thinks the Zone is a place you park your motorcycle.”

  “The claims come later.”

  “Don’t sound like a cynical, married man. I love this woman.”

  “We’ll get together after lunch. The courtyard of the Continental Hotel at two. If that gives you enough time for lunch.”

  “No problem,” said Calvino.

  “Thais say that whenever they really have a problem,” said Pratt.

  “But I’m not Thai.”

  “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”

  “Never mind,” said Calvino.

  This crack—the English translation for mai pen rai— made Pratt laugh. “You should be dead.”

  “I know. It feels great being above an empty stage when I should really be in a morgue. I am going to miss this scaffolding after you leave.”

  “What do you mean after I leave? You’re staying in Saigon?” “It’s starting to look like a possibility.”

  In two days they would leave Saigon. Pratt would then meet with his superiors in the Department and they would take a decision. Then, a general would make a call to Wang’s family in Hong Kong. They would take care of the rest. Your relative gets whacked in Bangkok, what do you do? Call the police? Ask for justice? There was no rule of law. There was only a closing of ranks. Whoever killed Mark Wang would receive a visit from someone with excellent skills in dispatching members of the human race to the other side, joining the ranks of all those dead Chinese ancestors. Calvino only hoped that Markle’s killer was the same person, or persons. Because this was as rough as justice got, and Pratt and he were all the due process the killers would get in this life.

  “Mai knew Markle was scared. I think I can find out why,” said Calvino.

  “Tomorrow I have another meeting with Khanh. The Vietnamese lawyer who doesn’t much care for Thais or Chinese or Americans. He might know why Markle was afraid.”

  “Markle might have been afraid of Khanh, for all we know.”

  “Khanh is playing everything very close to his chest,” said Pratt.

  “I saw your friend Fred Harris at Winchell & Holly,” said Calvino.

  This caught Pratt off guard. “Doing what?”

  “Remember Marcus Nguyen’s card?”

  “The financial consultant card.” There was a snicker in Pratt’s voice.

  “Well, your buddy Fred had the same kind of card. Only his name was Daniel Bryant. I thought he worked for the American Embassy.”

  “He does,” said Pratt.

  Calvino’s law said anyone who makes more than one international flight a month in Southeast Asia is on a mission of either conversion or subversion.

  “Before tomorrow we should have a talk with him.” “Why before tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow is the launch party for this Vietnam Emerging Market Fund. Remember, he had you checking out the security for the investors who were going to be in Phuket? Same guys will probably be at the party. Remember the sting like a bee, float like a butterfly outfit he wore at the Fourth of July picnic. He’s a party animal.”

  It was Pratt’s turn to go pale and silent.

  There was even less to link Harris to the murders, thought Calvino. He was just another of the free-floating suspects in a sea of suspects. He guessed that the Fund was cover for some kind of black-bag operation but that had been American policy toward Vietnam since the time of the French reoccupation after World War II. Covert actions, war, more covert actions. It was a cycle, like the weather or the stock market and, like each of them, you never knew what exactly would happen next because chaos prevented any ability to predict with any degree of accuracy. Guys like Harris believed and had absolute faith in predictability and charting the future. That was what separated them from the old hands of Asia who gained that status only once they put predictability behind them like the toys of a child. Murder was a snake’s head that usually rose out of hate, anger or another strong emotion or it rose out of a cold-blooded business decision to eliminate a competitor. Principle was sometimes used to justify murder in either case. Khanh hated the Chinese and he hated the Americans. He could have accumulated enough hatred to have both Drew Markle and Mark Wang killed. If Mai, the Hanoi girl, had been tempted out of Winchell & Holly and away from Saigon, that would be enough reason for Khanh to kill.

  “In Saigon, there is no shortage of suspects who had a reason to kill both Markle and Wang.”

  “Let’s give it a rest tonight,” Pratt rose to his feet. It was nearly three in the morning.

  He should have been tired but he wasn’t. For some reason, he didn’t want to leave the inside of the empty theater. He liked the feeling of isolation and quiet inside. It was a good place to play cop, jury, judge and executioner, talk about what character might have done what to whom. The theater was a place where people came to work out their doubts through the players, who let them into the story and, if they were good enough, then the characters would keep them awake for nights afterwards. The Opera House had the ghosts of the past, returning back with an accusing finger and saying, you got the wrong man and the wrong government. Or, Calvino thought, the ghost might say, he had fallen for the wrong woman.

  “Pratt. What do you make of the Vietnamese?”

  “They live in a no-man’s land. Between peace and war. Between communism and capitalism. And between revenge and forgiving. That’s what I make of them.”

  “People focused on killing foreigners and each other. People addicted to the absolute power that killing gives. Living like that for more than half a century gives them an edge. That’s what I make of the Vietnamese,” said Calvino. “That’s what makes me uncomfortable trying to find a killer in a place where so many people have killed and been killed. Saigon is filled with too many ghosts. It makes me uneasy.”

  “The farang disease is not believing in ghosts,” said Pratt. “Maybe you’re finding a cure in Saigon. Talk of ghosts. Talk of love. I am discovering a whole new side to you.”

  ******

  CALVINO shoved the videotape into the old VCR and turned down the volume on the TV set. He collapsed in a chair, holding an open beer in one hand, the remote control in t
he other. Okay, entertain me, he thought. The tape had been brought to Saigon by Pratt’s contact who had flown it in from Bangkok tucked inside a diplomatic pouch. The tape flickered with some numbers and weird spots, then a wobbly pan shot of the audience came onto the screen. It had been shot on video and had a cheap, porno- like quality to it. Yet it was the ultimate music video: no performers, no stage, no light and smoke show. Instead what you had was stripped down to the audience reaction to the music being played off-camera. He found the volume button on the remote control and increased the sound. He could hear a male vocalist singing the song “Cocaine,” the unofficial national anthem of the Golden Triangle, shared with a few Latin American republics. Whoever was behind the camcorder must have been a male. When he spotted Darla the wobbly camera became immobile, still, as if it were resting on a platform, like the camera Andy Warhol used to film the Empire State Building for six hours without ever moving the camera. Darla sat with her legs crossed and her 37” breasts looking like they might be ready to climb the fence and make a break for freedom, jump right out of the top of a low-cut, red blouse and she was wearing the translucent pants of an ao dai . Her long thick blonde hair cascaded down her shoulders in waves. The camera eye stared at her with the intensity of a voyeur. Whoever was holding the camera must have forgotten he was at a concert, on the job for his TV channel. He no longer cared, he just wanted an excuse to watch this woman, to take the film back and show his friends what he had discovered in an audience in Saigon. It was obvious from the way she glanced at the camera, smiling, that she was fully aware of what the camera man was doing, and that she was loving the attention.

  The camera was positioned far enough back to pick up those seated around her. Webb had a hand on her left thigh, massaging it to the tune of “Cocaine” and smiling at Darla who was looking at the stage. On her right, Mark Wang sat motionless, as if in some deep, meditative stage where a series of tiny Alpha waves lapped softly against the shores of his consciousness. What images were rolling across his brain? Cocaine memories? The business in Hong Kong, Saigon, or Bangkok? On Webb’s left was Jackie Ky and next to her was Drew Markle. Two dead men like bookends and sandwiched between were two beautiful, young and desirable women and Douglas Webb, who was looking pleased with himself for securing what was probably the best seat in the concert hall. A few seconds before the sequence ended, Mai came into view: she was sitting in the seat next to Drew Markle.

  The emotion in Jackie Ky’s face turned sour like she had drunk some bad gin, blinking her eyes as if she might be going blind. Drew acknowledged Mai by brushing his hand against hers, and in a quick reflex action she pulled hers back, her face flushed. She smiled at him, ignored Jackie Ky’s presence and then stared straight ahead at the stage.

  Calvino ran the video two more times. Second time around, he punched the still, freezing Darla’s mouth in a provocative half- open position as if she had just spotted Barry Manilow on stage. He studied the row, going over each face, looking at the hands, the legs, trying to read the language of the body. Who was relaxed, laid back and into the music? Who acted like they belonged to someone seated next to them? Where were the loyalties running? Markle was between two women who refused to look at each other. He studied the way Markle’s hand touched Mai’s and Jackie’s reaction. Some adrenalin kicked in. He could tell by the way her breathing changed. He watched her chest. Her breathing was heavier. Where were her hands? She was squeezing Drew’s hand. This is mine, she was saying. Calvino kept track on the touching, the shoulder rubbing, neck positioning. The way a person sat in a public place spoke volumes about his state of mind, his intimacy level with the person next to him. The camera panned the audience beyond them but the lens found its way back to Darla and Jackie as if it were steel filings flying into the head of a magnet. There had been three women at the concert. And three men. The women were doing a whole lot better at not getting whacked.

  A picture was two things. The fine details of the scene and the larger perspective of all the details included in the scene. And one more thing often overlooked. What was absent, what was the missing element which should have been in the scene? he wondered. Calvino studied the TV image and asked himself what was missing. It was like the Caravaggio on the walls of the Q-Bar. Something had been left out by the painter. There was not a single woman in the scene. Caravaggio was gay and liked painting tragic, young men from the bars and streets. Images of angels could be found in the gutter. What wasn’t in the picture was the most powerful message and the answer to what had been excluded colored the painter’s motive. Khanh was excluded from the video. He hadn’t been at the concert. The key Vietnamese lawyer at the law firm had missed a chance for an all expenses paid night on the town with Darla. His absence didn’t make sense.

  Calvino lay back on the bed and hit the off button on the TV. There was a sliver of light under a blanket of gray sky outside his balcony. There was that sound again. The beat of the bamboo sticks as some soup boy looked for the first sale of the morning or the last sale of the night. The sound made him smile because, for the first time, the bamboo sticks reminded him of the slaughterhouse birds with their eerie death shrills from a pig being killed. Could you teach a slaughterhouse bird to made the sound of the bamboo sticks? Of course you could, he thought. You could teach it to make the sound of a two-stroke motorcycle, why not the bamboo stick melody that the soup was ready? This was the kind of moment which cut between those times in Bangkok and his life at that second in Saigon. Just like there was a moment that cut between the living and dead. A realization of a state of being that was passing from one form to another. Lt.Col. Pratt said they would have to make a choice. The case had become “political” and somewhere high in the chain of command, out of sight, out of mind, a decision would be made. Whatever his superiors decided, that would be the end of the Wang murder case. All that anyone expected was for Lt.Col. Pratt to do his best. File his report. He had other work in Bangkok. Other murders, other crimes that faded the memory of those that came before. Harry Markle wanted the ass of whoever killed his brother. Marcus would do the job. Assuming the same person had killed both Drew and Mark Wang, Harry would be satisfied if the Triad would do the job for him. Like Lt.Col. Pratt’s superiors, Harry asked for no more: Do your best, he had said. In Asia, doing your best was pretty much always good enough to pass for doing it right.

  Again he watched Mai on the video and each time she had withdrawn her hand from Drew’s touch. Calvino remembered touching her hand in the restaurant, and she had responded with a warm, encouraging smile. The Bangkok Comfort Zone—that strip running between Patpong, Soi Cowboy and Nana—was a huge bank of ice, thick as a glacier. Only you had to be around the scene for years and years to see and feel the deep chill, and by the time you had, it was too late, the glacier had already dragged you under. Then you could never escape the gravity of the place that pulled them back from all over the world. Comfort Zone ice like a narcotic made you feel invincible. Zone veterans lived inside a solid block of ice. Zone workers, who were teenagers in chronological years, were soon aged inside the ice. The night ice crystals formed a thick fog over the Zone veterans and workers, creating an ice bridge; these ice people knew they could no longer live outside the Comfort Zone. They looked as normal as anyone else on the street because no one can see the ice, it’s carried inside, around the heart.

  Calvino had gone through the event horizon of the Comfort Zone, and lived in the Zone’s ice age so long that it had become a habit. Addiction, baby. He had become Zone dead like the others. Ice so thick that nothing touched the heart: the slaughterhouse birds’ death cries, child beggars, child prostitutes, broken bodies on the road. It don’t matter, none of it, drink your drink, eat your food, buy out your women by the hour, read your paper; and remember that ice shields you from pain, from expectation, from any anguish or worry. Some entered the Zone looking for a wife or a relationship. Opinion was divided. Some said Zone workers could never shed the ice; others said they had thawed out a
Zone worker, turned her into a wife. Yet others said the Zone was like a black hole, once a worker was sucked in, her fate was sealed and she was lost forever. All that Calvino knew for sure was the Comfort Zone shielded him from what non-Zone people called love. You checked love at the door. And, by the time you checked out, you forgot about it. One day it was gone. Love vanished. You couldn’t take it back. He looked inside himself and found an ozone hole above that Zone ice which Mai had formed with a look, with a touch...and when she pulled her hand away from Drew Markle on the video, yeah, he felt a chunk of the Zone ice slough off. He experienced some feeling in that region called the heart, and the downside of that feeling—of being vulnerable to some force one could never control.

  The beer can fell out of his hand and hit the floor.

  As he reached down to find the can, he heard a noise, looked up and saw someone behind the bar counter, moving fast. He rolled behind a round table and flipped it over so that the surface area faced the bar. In the mirror he saw old Mr. Tang, combing his hair and smiling. The comb was missing as many teeth as the old man using it.

  “So what’s your problem, Calvino?” he asked in perfect English. “Who you got back there with you?”

  “Rats. Didn’t I tell you to watch out for the fucking rats?”

  “That you did, Mr. Tang.”

  “But you didn’t fucking listen.”

  Darla walked across the room, hands on her hips, wearing a white nurse’s uniform. She carried a syringe with a large needle. Walking straight up to Mr. Tang she plunged it into the side of his neck and pushed the plunger down. The old man’s face froze in the mirror and he collapsed behind the bar.

  “What are you drinking, Vinee?” Darla asked him.

  He pointed his Smith & Wesson at her, fixing a target about nipple high on the right side. She leaned over the bar and smiled. “You’re gonna kill me? That’s a mistake. It’s this bitch who killed Markle.”

  Jackie Ky sat on the bar, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.