Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Some real anger was working in that part of the tape. The heavy, black clouds you would see roll in on East Hampton Beach just before a major storm would blow out the lines on every beach house for miles.

  “There is one concession to something called conscience. Doing the right thing. I am going to tell Jackie tonight that she is in grave danger. I don’t think she knows how far Marcus has gone and is prepared to go. She may have fed him some information I gave her about the reception in Saigon. I knew she would pass it along so most of what I told her was misinformation about the arrival of the directors. It doesn’t matter. Marcus would have other sources to double, and triple check against one another. But she needs to cut loose from Marcus before he drags her down with him. He has been using her from day one and she should know that...if she doesn’t already know. Her voice never appeared on a single tape. If I had to make a call, I would say, she really doesn’t know the full extent of what her uncle has planned.

  “Marcus has several rooms overlooking Dong Khoi and Le Loi Boulevard. The night of the Fund reception, he will be there. He will take out Judson. Pick him out on the nightscope. Watch him between the cross-hairs on the pavement in front of the Continental Hotel, and squeeze the trigger. That’s for leaving your friends on April 28th, 1975.

  “A copy of the Saigon Concert files are on Mark Wang’s laptop. He will get them to Harris in Bangkok. Then it will be done. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I am a lawyer. I keep saying that as if I still believe that nothing has changed in my life.

  “Harry once said, do the right thing, and don’t ever forget right stays right wherever you are, wherever you go, whatever you do—foraging for food, nesting, mating. There is right in the world. Don’t lose your moral compass. Because if you forget north, south, east and west, you will wander without direction, not knowing where you are, where you are going and where you have been. Not knowing who you are. Without that compass, you become the man in motion, the man who travels a path suspended by lies, attached to no one, and detached from meaning or value. It ’s up to you, he said. Find something of worth you can hold onto or go nowhere. Go to hell.

  “At the end of the day who can I trust? A Hanoi girl. The only person in the office, maybe in the city, that I can trust. FOR YOUR INFORMATION. WHOEVER IS READING THIS TAPE. Please be advised that Miss Mai did not ever read the contents herein. She gave her pledge. She is a woman with integrity and honor. I warrant and represent that her word is not only her bond, it is more than that. It is beyond price or ideology. Her father was killed during the war. She has only one or two memories of him. He would have been the enemy that my brother Harry would have been sent to Vietnam to kill. How does it turn out that his daughter, Mai, is the one I can rely upon? And my own brother is at a fucking Fourth of July picnic. It’s time for dinner. I must sign off and give this diskette to Mai, my Hanoi girl, the only one I know who will keep this record of what I found, what I have done, and the reasons for it all.

  Drew Markle, Esq.”

  ******

  RODNEY Judson was one of those vaguely familiar names like the off-brand name of a cheap whisky one had drunk to excess and the next morning couldn’t quite recall. Deputy CIA director, Vietnam War. A cog in the memory wheel moved. In the late 60s, at Columbia University, there had been a mock trial and a number of American government officials had been tried by law students from Columbia and NYU. Judson had been one of those charged and convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity. A journalist for one of the wire services testified that Judson was the operational guy for SOG, and that SOG was little better than the Gestapo in their use of tactics, which included assassination, the two in the morning knife at the throat call. True or not, the law students convicted Judson in absentia. The sentence they handed down was death. But it was all a long time ago and it was play- acting by students on a university campus. Marcus was not playing or acting, if Drew Markle was to be believed. And his death was convincing evidence that he should be believed. Drew Markle, Esq. He had signed off using his title.

  There had been a time when “Esq.” wasn’t a designer label, it meant something, a warranty of honor, dignity and loyalty. Drew had signed off in the old-fashioned way. He hadn’t known that “Esq.” would be the last thing he would leave behind. His last mark on the sands. A scrawl less than one percent of the population of the planet would have registered as carrying any meaning. Calvino scrolled back to the top of the file and began re-reading the opening when someone started knocking on the door. He unholstered the Smith & Wesson, and moved from the bed to the corner away from the door. Calvino waited until the second series of knocks started. In the background, the sound waves registered a familiar voice. A soft, hushed plea to be let into the room.

  “Vincent, it’s me. Mai. Please open the door.”

  He slowly shouldered the Smith & Wesson and moved across the room, standing to one side of the door. He swung around and faced the door. If he was making a character judgement then he would rather have blown himself straight to hell by opening the door. It was the Thai way: What will come in the future is not a surprise, it is precisely tailored to match your karma. Twist and turn, duck and dodge, wait or charge—it is all figured in, calculated. No matter how many times you spin the possibilities, it won’t affect the final outcome. The door was open and Mai ran to him, both her arms squeezing, pulling him in, clinging like a frightened child on the wrong edge of tears.

  “What’s wrong, Mai?” he asked, pushing the door shut with his foot. He leaned back against the door, rocking her from side to side.

  “I am very afraid for you,” she said.

  “How did you get past the front desk?”

  “I work for Winchell & Holly. You are a client. I have an important message.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “I think I should throw away the disk I gave to you. I think that maybe it was wrong to give it to you. It is dangerous. You might be hurt.”

  “I was just reading it now. Did you read it?”

  She shook her head, lifted her face off his chest and looked up at him.

  “Mr. Markle, he gave me the disk then he died. I am afraid for you,” she said.

  Calvino smiled, pressed his lips to her forehead. “I am afraid for me, too,” whispered Calvino.

  Talking so openly in this way was taking a lot of getting used to. Life outside the Zone had all kinds of trip-wires, the emotional ones as dangerous as the others. He kissed her gently. This was the one, he thought, the woman who could break him free, melt the ice. He had lived so long with that coldness. Like drugs, it numbed the brutality of the world, as Marcus had called it. He had no more than pulled his lips away from her forehead when the laptop computer exploded. The blast shattered the glass windows in the French doors to the balcony and blew out the mirror and the TV screen. The air was so thick with mattress filling that it looked like it was snowing inside the room. Someone had wired the computer, timed, set and ready for any user who had not punched in the correct sequence of letters and numbers, the code sequence, which separated the living and the dead. Or the computer had gone on fail-safe once he had inserted an alien diskette, any unauthorized diskette lacking a source code. The alien user was to be returned to his basic fundamental, molecular state. Blood and microchips sent to hell for using a system dedicated to a single master. Instinctively, Calvino grabbed Mai, pulled her down and hunched over her, waiting for any secondary explosion. There was none. She was shaking and crying. The sound waves of the explosion echoed deep inside the skull, a dull ringing noise that stayed behind the eyes like someone had struck a huge gong. They only had a few minutes before the room would be crawling with maids, staff, and police.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here before the police come,” Calvino said, rising to his feet.

  Mai was coughing from the blue smoke and a million bits of matting and feathers.

  He shoved opened the door and half-carried her up to the fifth floor, unlatched the sm
all, secret entry door and led Mai out onto the scaffolding. She froze as she looked down at the stage floor a long drop below. When they reached the place where Pratt and he had conducted their off-the-record discussions, he stopped and squatted down.

  “I had this feeling. I knew I was right,” she said, choking out the words.

  “Your timing was perfect. We’ll rest here.”

  “I feel so cold.”

  “It’s the shock.”

  “I was thinking of my father in the airplane.”

  “I’m going to marry you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, kissing him on the nose. “And I am happy.”

  A couple of minutes later and he would have been hovered over the laptop and would have taken the full blast from the explosive device inside, and the room would have been filled with blue smoke, matting, feathers, and bits and pieces of Vincent Calvino, private eye. He looked at his watch. The invitation card to the reception had said seven-thirty. He had another hour. Sixty minutes to make the difference in the lives of strangers whose names he remembered from the Vietnam Wa r. Americans who, as Drew Markle had said, were returning businessmen, ex-CIA and military types who had turned in their uniforms for suits. Across the street, Marcus Nguyen waited behind a high-powered rifle, peering through the nightscope sight; the rifle was fixed to a tripod pointed at the entrance to the Continental Hotel. He would wait until Judson arrived, got out of the car, lining up the cross-wire on Judson. Would he aim for the head? The chest? How many shots would he get off before he escaped into the resulting confusion?

  In the far distance he could hear the faint shrill of sirens. Police, soldiers, ambulances, they all had their air-raid siren-like alerts, as if the sounds of war had never completely vanished from Saigon. Calvino had no idea how long it would take them to piece together what had happened. The explosion could have had a hundred causes. The consequences were always simpler: death, injury, destruction. The sounds in the Saigon night were not the bamboo sticks calling people to order a bowl of noodle soup.

  Blowing up his room was a perfect diversion, thought Calvino. Marcus had not made a mistake from the beginning. The fact that Calvino was alive was hardly a mistake. It was a miracle.

  He hugged Mai, kissed her tears, kissed her eyes, swollen and puffy with tears. She trembled like a child afraid of thunder with a violent storm stalled overhead. They sat in the dark trying not to think how close they had come to being dead.

  “Remember when the power cut out?” he whispered. That’s what death was—one big, final power outage.

  “I remember every second,” she said. “I can never forget.”

  “Anh yew em,” he said, trying to hit the right tones so that “I love you” didn’t turn into something like, “Can I do your laundry?”

  She smiled. “Em yew anh.”

  It had been the first time she had said it in Vietnamese to him. The first time she had ever said it to any man. This was an old, standard, Zone lie. The reflex was to tie those words together with ribbons of hard currency. The more you pay me the more I love you. Zone bumper sticker material. Mai wasn’t a Zone girl, she had lived protected, isolated inside a pocket where love hadn’t yet been dislodged by money.

  Why not just stay together on the scaffolding and wait for the all-clear? he thought. Calvino’s law of life was there was never an all-clear siren or signal you could trust. He felt her snuggle next to him, her head resting against his neck. Their touch was light years away from the way people touched each other inside the Comfort Zone; now, sitting near her, in the half-darkness of the empty theater, nothing really mattered outside that touch, that moment, a closeness that shut down the rest of the world while making it seem distant and insignificant at the same time. If he closed his eyes, held her tight, and pretended hard enough that they were once again trapped in the elevator, then maybe he could navigate through this nightmare. He kissed her softly. Whatever would play out was something between Marcus and Judson; unfinished business from a generation ago and who was he to deny Marcus that sweet meat of revenge, as Pratt sometimes put it. It was as if they had climbed off the wall of the Q-Bar, the Caravaggio youth, the young men of the street, whose sad faces, despite all odds, had escaped death, grown old, world-weary, disappointed but never forgetting a time when they could trust and love.

  “I know I asked you before. But are you sure you didn’t have a small peek at the files on Markle’s disk?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Then you don’t know why he was killed.”

  “Drew made me promise I would not open the files no matter what. He said I would know the right person to give them to. He said I would know. But he didn’t say how I would know.”

  “He trusted you. It was the one thing that Drew Markle did right. To trust you.”

  “I knew when I met you. You were the one that Drew said I would know.”

  It was the simple, direct way she said those words.

  The Markle diskette—files and files of detailed evidence—had been blown into byte-size pieces floating with mattress particles inside a huge cloud inside his room. Nothing remained of what Markle had so meticulously recorded except what had been lodged in Calvino’s memory; and why would anyone believe him? Why should they trust him, who was he anyway? And what had he been doing to get his room blown up? Near the end of the file, Drew was talking about what Harry had taught him—”do the right thing, and don’t ever forget right stays right wherever you are, wherever you go, whatever you do—foraging for food, nesting, mating. There is right in the world.”

  “I have to go,” said Calvino, kissing her forehead.

  “Go where?” The alarm in her voice surprised him.

  “I won’t be long. It’s okay. Everything will work out.” “Drew said that, too.”

  He started to rise. “I want you to wait here. You can’t go back to the hotel. It will be crawling with police.”

  She grabbed his hand. “I’m going with you.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “You don’t tell a woman you want to marry her and then leave her behind.”

  Calvino didn’t say anything because she had taken his Smith & Wesson from his holster.

  “I can cover for you,” she said.

  “You’ve seen too many movies, Mai. In real life you have to cover for yourself,” he said, taking the gun from her, opening his jacket and shoving it back into his shoulder rig.

  She had made up her mind.

  “You may need someone who can speak Vietnamese. And one more thing. More important than language. Love is what people share. You draw a line on what we share, you draw a line on how we love.”

  She was part of this, and had been from the beginning. The computer files which Drew Markle had downloaded had been entrusted to Mai. Just in case something should happen to him, he said to her. He was expecting trouble. It was why he had phoned Harry in the first place, a half-hearted cry for help. As Calvino looked at her, he held her tight, then, together, they found a ladder and climbed down onto the backstage. There were stage hands and musicians milling around. One was tuning a guitar. From their appearance and instruments, the band members looked like a rock ‘n roll group. Calvino walked slowly as if he had a backstage pass, as if he belonged. He crossed the spot where Pratt had played the sax. Squeezing her hand, he led her down to the stairs and hurried down the aisle to the main entrance. The place was filling up with an audience. Outside it was dark and the street lights had gone on. In half an hour, Rodney Judson was about to have the death sentence of almost twenty years before carried out by a Viet Khieu named Marcus Nguyen. Calvino had gone through the files, opening the last one first, it was all there, laid out by a young lawyer trying to the do the right thing. Saigon Concert was opening tonight. On the banners outside the music was late 60s, Vietnam War era music. Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix...some of the ones who didn’t survive...their songs were written on the banners. Sirens wailed. A young boy in plastic sandals walked p
ast pounding out a tune on his bamboo sticks, playing, “The Soup’s Ready” song.

  As they waited for the light to change on Dong Khoi, Calvino looked up at the giant J&B bottle, three stories high, affixed to the side of the building. Neon lights outlined the bottle. The tall shutters were closed on many of the windows in the enormous stylish building which wrapped around the corner of Dong Khoi and Le Loi Boulevard, providing a direct line to the entrance of Continental Hotel. The shutter on one of the windows to the right of the J&B cap was ajar. The street was filled with jeeps and soldiers carrying AK47s. The hotel blast had brought out several squads of combat ready soldiers. At the intersections, they were diverting motorcycles and cars. They were making it easy for Marcus, thought Calvino. They were creating an uncluttered, free fire zone for Marcus Nguyen who was seated behind the J&B bottle cap, looking through the nightscope mounted on his sniper ’s rifle, waiting the last minutes of a wait that had started twenty years earlier. Soldiers watched Calvino and Mai cross the street, hand in hand, staring at them.

  “He’s my husband,” Mai said to a soldier who blocked their way.

  “We’re going to meet my mother for dinner.”

  “What’s he want?” asked Calvino.

  “Just smile,” she whispered.

  The soldier waved them through.

  “You see, speaking Vietnamese helps.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you were my husband.”

  “You spoke the truth.”

  ******

  MARCUS had been at the mosque when Drew Markle was killed. He had a dozen witnesses. He had been with Pratt on Pham Ngu Lao Street when the explosive device in the laptop blew up, leaving a deep crater in the bed. Marcus was very good at being at places away from where bombs exploded. He was methodical, a planner, who anticipated each move as if he had been playing chess. He was grand master in the chess game which ended in violence. He had learned young, and skills established as a teenager and constantly refined through adulthood created a special breed of killer who was very difficult to detect and stop. Marcus still had made enough mistakes to bring Harris and company to town, looking for someone who they knew was planning a high level hit. Mark Wang must have contacted Harris on the phone, or maybe he reached his secretary, or an assistant. Whoever he talked to, Wang must have given enough away for Harris to know he had a problem. That explained why he had approached Pratt at the Fourth of July picnic. He had probably just received the message and Pratt was the first person he knew that he could trust and rely upon to act fast. Harris had been in and out of Vietnam, watching for something like this to break. Marcus had been lurking around the entire time and he hadn’t seen it coming; this wouldn’t look good in Bangkok or Washington. Not knowing was the ultimate sin. Markle had found Marcus, a kid lawyer from the States had uncovered what Harris was paid to find out. One chance blown. One dead lawyer. Then he screwed up the relay team member, Mark Wang, who had downloaded the diskette onto his laptop. Get the message to them, Markle must have told Wang. He never got the chance; he never got out of his room.