Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “About last night. I wanted to keep it strictly business. I hope you don’t hate me for wanting to make love with you last night. I have been thinking ever since: what happened? I have never, I mean not ever, had a man who said no to me unless he was gay. And I don’t think you are gay. So I don’t get it.”

  “I would hate to take advantage of my professional position. I like to separate business from pleasure. Otherwise, I would be out of business before I started,” said Calvino.

  “Really? I’ve never known a farang who separated business from pleasure in Bangkok,” she said, pulling one of her long legs up and examining the painted toenails.

  “You ever kill anyone, Darla?”

  The question didn’t unnerve her as she unscrewed the cap from the fingernail polish. “There was a German once. You know, we were doing it. Mixing business and pleasure. And he had a heart attack. I guess you could say I killed him. But then, at the same time, you could say he killed himself. I went to the German Embassy for an interview and explained what had happened. He wrote down in the space for cause of death—Act of God. Who said the Germans don’t have a sense of humor?” She had finished painting the nail on her big toe and was blowing on it.

  She had some professional delivery, cool, controlled and smooth.

  “But if you were going to kill someone, how would you do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A gun, a knife, drug overdose?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “You mean just kill someone?”

  “Just like that.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe poison. Snake venom. You know that little green snake in Thailand that, after it bites you, you have about forty-five seconds before you go into shock, then your heart stops? I’d probably use that snake.”

  “That’s dangerous. The snake might bite you,” said Calvino, watching her on her middle toe with the tiny, wet, red paint brush. “That would be a bitch,” she said. “You wanna go up to my

  room for a drink?” She looked up from her toes.

  “I want to go to your room... but I gotta see someone about the club.”

  “Maybe later,” she said. “When you’re not so busy.”

  He got up from the chair.

  “One more thing, Darla.”

  “Yeah?”

  “After that Thai-Vietnamese concert, did you make it with Mark Wang?”

  She shook her head.

  “But I think Jackie Ky fucked him.”

  ******

  SHE had done what he had asked of her on the phone. When he arrived at the villa, she had a fresh battery pack loaded into a laptop computer. They only stayed long enough for Calvino to check out the software, and then turn it off, and slip it into the carrying case. Jackie Ky was not all that happy walking beside Calvino in Cong Vien Van Hoa Park. On a Sunday afternoon, the park was filled with people. The masses came to eat, talk, walk and watch each other. It was a perfect place to get lost in a huge crowd of people. A gray pony pulled a wooden cart, the blue tassels on the canopy flopping as the cart wheels rolled over the pavement. A tangle of children and adults were inside looking like they had just transferred from one of those overcrowded Bangladesh ferries that sink a couple of times a year. As they walked to the right, they passed a roller skating rink with hundreds of kids skating inside a small enclosure. A chain-link fence made the rink look like a minimum security prison. Jackie Ky stopped next to the fence. She looked angry as she watched the skaters try to gather enough speed to climb a small, plastic-moulded hill. They hit the hill in waves. Some wouldn’t make it, falling back and knocking down others behind them. Sweaty, determined, exhausted like the Caravaggio faces, they had a doomed, haunted expression as they approached the hill. Another wave hit the hill, knocking and bumping against each other, tripping and falling like soldiers mowed down by a machine gun. They came back around again and again, never stopping, a relentless wave of bodies. It was difficult to defeat such people in a jungle war. They skated through the jungle. They skated through the tunnels. They never gave up.

  Jackie Ky turned away from the fence and stared at him.

  He wasn’t sure whether it was her reputation she was worried about, as the Vietnamese eyed them as they passed along the pavement, or whether it was the stifling heat or the hopelessness of the young skaters.

  “I don’t understand. You said you wanted to use my computer, not take it.”

  “I said that I needed to borrow it.”

  She sighed. “We should have stayed at home,” said Jackie Ky. “Drank some white wine. I hate this park. This skating rink. And the people who come here. They smell.”

  Calvino moved away from the fence and started walking across the park.

  “You know that was what Harry said about his brother. He should have stayed home,” said Calvino, as she caught up with him.

  “I hope they don’t end up saying that about you,” she replied. If it hadn’t been for the Smith & Wesson she had delivered to his hotel room, that is exactly what they would be saying in Bangkok today, as the news whipped through the Bangkok Comfort Zone like one of those forest fires, leaping from Washington Square bars, to Soi Cowboy, over to Soi Nana, and breaking out from the Zone and jumping to all the other clubs like the Sports Club, the British Club, the Foreign Correspondents Club and spreading through the halls of various embassies.

  They followed the paved path toward an elevated shrine. A small building painted white and red was on a raised platform. Calvino walked up the steps and through the entrance first, then Jackie Ky followed him to one side. A woman who was kneeling at the shrine held up between her clasped hands several incense sticks, the smoke curling lazily above her head. Her offering tray of fruit, flowers and tea was between her and the monk, an old man, who sat on a stool beside a bell. He rang the bell as the woman prostrated herself on the bamboo mat.

  As the monk rang the bell, Calvino turned to Jackie. “Did Drew know that you screwed Mark Wang the night of the Thai- Vietnamese concert?”

  She dropped her head as if someone had whacked her on the back of the neck. She stood still on the grass, her head slumped and her hands balled up into fists. A paleness spread across her face. She had lost her edge. He had kicked an emotional stool from under her and she swung back and forth as if she were suspended at the end of a hangman’s rope. Calvino had scored a direct hit and he knew it.

  “Who told you that?” she asked. “Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Webb told you.”

  Calvino shook his head. “No, it wasn’t Webb.”

  “I want to go back home.”

  He reached for her wrist and she pulled away, walking fast.

  “Just let me go, Calvino.”

  He kept pace with her as she cut through the grass and broke into a run.

  “You slept with Wang because you thought Drew was making it with Mai.”

  This time it was as if he had hit a deer with a single round and the 30.06 slug passed through the lungs and heart, tearing them into shredded, useless pulp, causing the legs to go out from the body. Jackie Ky stumbled and fell on the grass outside the shrine. Calvino ran after her, then knelt beside her, listening to her sob. She buried her face in her arms, whimpering and moaning, like she had been mortally wounded.

  “He was so stupid. Men are so stupid about women. They can’t see when they are being used. Mai only wanted to use him. She wants to find a way out of Vietnam. I told him that. I was the one who came back to Vietnam. I was the one who had made a commitment. She was the one who wanted to use him to leave. He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t talk about it. I talk openly about my feelings. But Drew closed down. The more I asked him to be open, the more he ignored me. We had a fight the night of the concert and he asked why didn’t I let him lead his own life? Why was I always pushing him? He said, I never push you. I give you freedom. Why do you want to take mine? During the concert he was pawing Mai right in front of my eyes. Do you know how that hurts? The man you
want to marry is making a play for a woman right in your face. What I did was stupid and wrong. Fucking Mark Wang meant nothing.”

  She raised up on her arms and looked at Calvino. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  Calvino didn’t know what, or who, to believe in Saigon, whether truth was left at the doorstep as if the entire city operated on make-believe stories like the kind told inside the Zone. The way Jackie Ky could turn on and off heavy emotions and hand out state-of-the-art handguns made her difficult to put in a pigeonhole. Her eyes were wet and red and she had some grass stuck to the side of her cheek.

  “In Bangkok, a woman has been known to kill an unfaithful boyfriend.”

  “This isn’t Bangkok. And I’m not a Thai,” she said.

  “But you wanted to hurt Drew.”

  She sighed as if filled with frustration.

  “No, you don’t understand much about relationships, do you? There’s a big difference between a woman wanting to get back at her man and wanting to kill him.”

  “You didn’t kill Drew Markle?”

  “No, I didn’t kill Drew Markle. I know how it looks. He was coming to meet me when he was murdered. We had this big fight. I slept with that yuppy. But you goddamn know well that I didn’t kill him. I loved Drew. I told him things he would never have known to show that I loved him. The sonofabitch didn’t deserve my love, but what kind of strong emotion ever makes any sense?”

  Calvino helped her to stand and brushed the grass off her cheek. He wished he knew that for sure. But he owed her the benefit of the doubt. Without her gun, there would have no consciousness of the realm of benefits and doubts. He would have been dead in a place once called Karen’s Bar.

  “What kind of things did you tell him?”

  “None of your fucking business.” Her anger flashed, hot and raw.

  “If that’s the way you want to play it.”

  She wasn’t sure how she wanted to play it. “The night Drew died was the worst night of my life,” she said.

  Somehow he believed her.

  “When someone makes you feel small and dirty, you sometimes act irrationally. It’s a mistake. Mark Wang was a mistake.” She started to laugh as her mood swung back to the top of the pendulum. “You know, I made Mark Wang use a condom. I bought a package before I went to his room. He said he had never used one before. Here was a guy going off to Bangkok who had never used any protection. I told him he was insane. I asked him if he had a death wish. But you know how guys are. I’m sure next time he’s in Saigon he will phone me. Oh, remember me, this is Mark Wang. Why don’t we have dinner for old times’ sake?”

  “Mark Wang’s dead.”

  She grabbed his arm and made him stop and repeat what he had said.

  “Dead? But how?”

  “Someone shot him.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re trying to fuck with my mind.”

  “Ask your uncle Marcus. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.”

  “God, that’s awful.”

  Jackie Ky had no idea Mark Wang was dead. Why should she? It wouldn’t have been in the newspapers in Saigon. Harry Markle would not have mentioned anything. Score one in her favor. Also, she had no idea that Calvino was going to Karen’s Bar. Drew Markle’s killer would have had access to that information and a reason to stop any further investigation into the circumstances of the murder.

  “Why do I get the feeling Marcus doesn’t like me?”

  “He’s never said anything bad about you. Except for one thing.” She had caught his attention, distracted him. “Yeah?”

  “Nothing really. Only when Harry mentioned your name, he made a remark about your initials being ‘VC’. He said it was a bad omen.”

  “If it makes him feel any better, my undercover initials are ‘VD’. You really didn’t know about Wang being murdered?”

  Whatever control she had over her emotions fell apart and she stepped away from him. She stared at him as if he were dangerous, someone to avoid, to fear. “Why are you trying to hurt me? Hurt my uncle?”

  Before he could react, a group of kids cut between them.

  “Hello, how are you? Where you from? What’s your name?” A rapid-fire of questions from the faces gathered around him. Before Calvino could respond, both Jackie Ky and he were surrounded by a half-dozen youngsters who came running up with cameras, wanting their photos taken with him. He clutched the computer in one hand and stood in the centre of the group as one boy looked through his camera. After the boy snapped several shots, he shoved the camera into a friend’s hands, ran toward the circle of kids surrounding Calvino, grabbed Calvino’s arm, demanding his turn to be photographed with the foreigner. Jackie Ky slipped away and when Calvino looked around, he saw her running across the grass toward the far gate. He lost sight of her as she passed a row of cyclos.

  CHAPTER 12

  DOI MOI

  A BONY-CHESTED Vietnamese man, a cigarette dangling from his lips, massaged Marcus Nguyen’s neck. The masseur ’s hands and fingers were knotted by highways of tendons and veins as he worked them deep into Marcus’s muscles. Pratt sat at the outdoor table opposite Marcus, a plate of untouched rice and chicken in front of him. The masseur was tiny, whiplike, thin like a jockey, though his hands were out of proportion to his body, as if they belonged to a much taller, bigger man. It was late Sunday afternoon and the street was choked with cyclos, bicycles, motorcycles, heavy Russian-made trucks, and a few cars honking at anything that moved. Pratt thought this place was much closer to Calvino’s world in Bangkok than anything in his own world; Thais didn’t frequent the farang ghettos.

  On one stretch of Pham Ngu Lao Street, the shophouses had been converted into cheap, rundown expat restaurants and bars with bright neon lights, tables and chairs on the pavement. Farang customers in shorts and T-shirts sat at the tables eating hamburgers, talking, watching the street action, scoring drugs. These were the same backpacking travelers who checked into the cheap guest houses around Banglamphu in Bangkok, thought Pratt. One or two of them turned up dead every year. There were investigations into the cause of death—drugs, a knife, a gunshot, a twenty-five year old loaded up with enough speed to fly to the moon and back. Patches, as Calvino said the Zone people called them. They hit the Zone looking to patch into overload, all circuits opened on amphetamines, searching for that final tap pushing them over the top. Patches on their clothes, nervous system patched together with a combo of designer drugs, speed, bring- me-downs, grass, and hatched from broken families which could never have been patched back together. They patched into the Zone. They patched into Saigon.

  Pham Ngu Lao was littered, noisy, dirty, a strange place to suggest as a business meeting area—no privacy, for instance. None of this computed, thought Pratt. On the telephone, Marcus had said he had something important he wanted to talk to him about, that is new information, which Pratt might find useful. He had used Pratt’s police rank on the phone. Just dropped it out there, no follow-up, leaving Pratt to make the next move.

  Marcus’s eyes were half-closed, a purr of enjoyment in his throat, as the masseur worked him over.

  “During the war, Dung worked for me,” said Marcus. He pointed up at the masseur.

  “That’s Dung. When the end came, he didn’t get out. He spent almost four years in a re-education camp. That’s where he lost most of his teeth. Every time he smiled, they hit him in the mouth. But he kept smiling for almost four years. Isn’t that right, Dung?”

  Dung, his narrow shoulders hunched over, looked up, nodded, the gray ash from his cigarette falling and grazing Marcus’s shoulder before hitting the pavement. The small masseur wiped the ash away. A cyclo driver in the street below took the distraction as a chance to scoop two large spoons of rice and chicken from Pratt’s plate into his mouth. Marcus yelled in Vietnamese at the cyclo driver who laid down the spoon, grinned and walked back to his cyclo.

  “And Dung is the reason you asked me to come here?” asked Pratt.

  Marcus, his eyes narrowi
ng as the strong hands worked on his shoulders, nodded his head. “In a way, yes. Dung works for me. During the war, Dung went down tunnels armed with only a .45 and a knife. He’s killed a lot of VC in the dark, smelling the earth, far away from the surface. Now he gives tourists a massage for one dollar and a bottle of local beer.”

  He watched as Marcus succumbed to the pleasure of the deep massage. Ever since he had first met Marcus at the restaurant with Calvino on Dong Khoi Street, he had started re-reading Coriolanus. While the farang had gone around raving about The Quiet American as the embodiment of the truth about the tragedy of Vietnam, they had missed a genuine masterpiece. Marcus had banished himself just like in Coriolanus and was one of literature’s first modern anti-heroes. To update the story, this Marcus returned to Saigon but was he a pawn of Rome? Substitute Washington, D.C. for Rome and the drama became closer to the original, thought Pratt. Although he knew his Shakespeare, the more difficult part was to know whether the man at the receiving end of the massage, who sat opposite him, was leading an army inside the city. Was he simply following orders? Or, as Calvino assumed, was he a friend in need who had been set in motion by Harry Markle?

  “Much bitterness remains after any war. ‘You souls of geese, that bear the shapes of men, how have you run from slaves that apes would beat!’ ” said Pratt, quoting Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, as if the Saigon Marcus would see the reflection of himself.

  “Was that English?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  “Tragedy? Or comedy?”

  “Tragedy.”

  “That reminds me of Calvino. Tragedy in the making.” “Vincent can take care of himself.”

  “We are Asians, you and me. Military men. We think like Asians. No one can take care of themselves alone in Asia. Without friends, a network of friends, where would you be in the police force? You don’t have to answer because I already know. You would be nowhere.”

  “Who said he was without friends?”

  “Harry Markle tells me you work for the police. I respect that. I wish we had something like a real police force in Saigon. Instead we have an occupation army strutting around with AK47s, big swinging dicks, looking for ideological infractions. You Thais are pragmatic. You don’t vote on principle. You don’t choose your friends or enemies on principle. Whatever fits and works becomes the automatic choice.”