Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  The touch of excitement and adventure, along with his friendship with Markle, someone of his own generation, doing deals, talking the same language, all of this would have been enough to bring Wang into the loop. Mark Wang was stretched out on the king-size bed with two bullet holes in his chest. Red suspenders and gold-rimmed glasses and a computer with an empty hard disk. Marcus had a hit put on both Markle and Wang to silence them. Whoever hit Wang in Bangkok had to have a good knowledge of computers; that left out the seven hundred baht Klong Toey gunman who never would have got into the front door of the five-star hotel. Funny, Harry Markle was a computer man, and Harry and Marcus went way back to the killing days in Vietnam, fellow SOG members...Marcus had been cut loose, left behind, abandoned. How much guilt mileage could Marcus have drawn out of the bank and laid on Harry Markle? Had Harry done a favor for an old friend?

  CHAPTER 14

  OPENING NIGHT

  THE MAIN BALLROOM of the Continental Hotel was filling with guests, foreigners who had worked the region, experienced in making hot deals and travelling light, travelling fast. The money crowd. Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, London accents filtered around the ballroom, as members milled from one group to another like bees drawn by pollen, the promise of honey. Hung behind the podium was a large, red banner with gold lettering: Vietnam Emerging Market Fund, and underneath were two words which sounded out of a NASA publicity campaign, “The Launch”—something borrowed, something new, something old, something blue. It could have been a wedding. The marriage of vast Chinese and Western money with a willing Vietnamese bride who was tired of being poor. Another half an hour until the formal lift off, thought Pratt, looking around the room, cupping his wine glass between his fingers. The financial astronauts, the Fund’s directors, would walk into the room and a small band would play something resembling “Hail to the Chief.” He tried to guess who the guests would be. Spot an American. Spot a journalist. Twelve o’clock high a New York investment banker. They dressed and acted as types, performing their expected public role: business people, investors, bankers, lawyers, government people mingling together, a drink in one hand, handing out name cards with the other, drinking and sizing each other up. Pratt had circled the room twice looking for Calvino. The second time around, he found Douglas Webb at the bar ordering a double Black Label on the rocks.

  “Have you seen Vincent Demato?” Pratt asked.

  Webb took his drink from the bartender. “You mean Vincent Calvino?”

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “So are we,” said Harris.

  Pratt showed no surprise, registered no expression, almost as if he hadn’t heard, or if heard, had ignored the fact that Calvino’s cover had been blown. Glancing at his watch, he had started to worry about Calvino who was running late for the opening ceremony. At the hotel the staff had been in a panic, police and soldiers searching everyone who came in or out of the door. The key to Calvino’s room wasn’t at the reception desk, creating an inference that Calvino had not left the hotel. Only his floor had been sealed off. No one answered the phone in Calvino’s room. Someone at reception had mentioned an explosion on Calvino’s floor. No bodies had been carried out. So far as anyone knew, no one had been killed or injured. Calvino had disappeared into thin air. Pratt assumed Calvino had gone through the small door leading to the scaffolding above the backstage and left through the Opera House in the confusion. It was what he would have done. Had Calvino gone into hiding? Who had set the explosive device? Had Marcus really believed that Douglas Webb was behind the killing of Drew Markle and Mark Wang? If so, wouldn’t it be logical to assume that Webb had planted the bomb? Only Webb had been at the reception early. He would not have had time. Could a farang like Webb have enough power in Saigon to hire someone to plant a bomb in Calvino’s room? These questions circled inside Pratt’s mind like ducks at high altitude, looking down at a motionless, blue glass-like surface that was a lake, deciding whether to keep on flying or to land.

  “Someone tried to kill Calvino tonight.”

  “I’m surprised they waited so long,” said Webb, sipping his drink.

  “It wouldn’t have been your people?”

  Webb smiled and shook his head.

  “No, I missed my chance to get him twenty years ago. About the time of the fall of Saigon.”

  “You knew Vincent in New York?”

  “Perceptive, Colonel Prachai. I was in my first year of practice and as green as they come.”

  “You’ve obviously developed some very impressive powers of perception since then.”

  “There was something about Calvino that stuck after all those years. I will tell you what it is. He’s no good at lying. It shows on his face. You know how I found out it was him in Saigon?” asked Webb. He had moved in closer, stopping within whispering range of Pratt. “Years ago, in New York City, I represented a woman in a divorce case. Calvino was on the other side. His client was an Englishman who made his living wetting the bed of wealthy women. A professional. Of course, he married them first. Then wet the bed. A specialized conman if you like. I got someone at Winchell & Holly to dig out the old files and, sure enough, the lawyer on his side was Vincent Calvino. Last anyone heard, he was working as a private eye in Bangkok. A professional bedwetters’ paradise. No offense to you personally, Sir. I have two hundred grand of Calvino’s money sitting in my office safe.”

  “Haven’t you just breached your client-attorney confidentiality?”

  “Given the two hundred grand is bogus, I don’t think so. But it was a good try.”

  From Webb’s blind side an Englishman joined them. He was holding a brandy glass half-filled with brandy, he had a crooked smile and the creased face of a man over fifty. James Lee Fitzgerald worked for an oil company in Saigon. “Bogus, you say, Mr. Webb. Do you think the explosion at the Saigon Concert was bogus?”

  “Mr. Fitzgerald is a client, Colonel Prachai. He is with the Police Department in Bangkok, Thailand.”

  “A Thai police colonel? How impressive. The Fund is attracting the attention of the Thai police. It must be well connected,” said Fitzgerald. “We foreigners can be out of our element in Asian finance. We are much like the African bushwoman I once took to my room years ago. This was in the early 70s. She had never been in a room in her life. Mud hut, yes, room in a building, no. Of course not. I took her to my room for a screw. I mean, she had a lovely face, a lovely body. She smelled of the bush but her body looked like it had been made from lacquered Chinese figure. I walked over to one end of the room to find my bottle and pour us a drink. As I reached around for the bottle and found the glasses, I turned back in time to watch her to go to the chest of drawers. I didn’t think much of it. Then she pulled out the bottom drawer, turned around, hiked up her dress. She wasn’t wearing underwear. She squatted over the drawer and took a shit. I poured myself a stiff scotch watching her shit in the chest of drawers where I kept my things. I heard this plop, plop. She had this wonderful look of contentment on her face as if shitting in a white man’s drawer was about as natural as peeling a banana. Then she finished and used her foot to shut the drawer. After another couple of drinks, I made love to her. Then I packed up my things, except for what was in the bottom drawer. That I left behind. I checked out of the room. Somewhere in Africa is a chest of drawers that no one wants to talk about or to deal with. It is, I imagine, pretty much the way I left it.”

  “What did you leave in the bottom drawer?” asked Pratt.

  Fitzgerald cocked his head to the side as if trying to remember, his eyes narrowing to slits.

  “Two packs of crisps, some letters and a copy of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.”

  “Are you buying units in the Fund, James?”

  “If I knew what they kept in their bottom drawer, I might take a flutter.”

  Pratt moved away from Webb and Fitzgerald, letting them both see that he held up an empty glass. He walked toward a table converted into a bar and asked for another glass of Bord
eaux. Were they going to cancel the opening ceremony or go ahead? This question was being discussed across the room. The explosion across the street had caused chaos among the local authorities, military and the members of the Fund’s Board of Directors. What had been planned as a party to celebrate the opening had suddenly shifted to soldiers in the streets and a closing.

  At the bar, Pratt found the Hanoi lawyer, Khanh, taking a gin and tonic from the bartender. “I have been looking for you,” said Khanh.

  “We are all looking for someone tonight,” said Pratt.

  “One of our secretaries has gone missing. Her name is Mai. I am wondering if you might have seen your friend Mr. Demato?”

  Pratt smiled to himself. The Vietnamese were straightforward people, he thought. Calvino was in love, he remembered. He was with the girl, probably with a glass of Mekhong in one hand, explaining how they were going to live happily ever after, and he was going to turn in his keys to the Comfort Zone. And, for the first time since he arrived at the Continental Hotel, Pratt relaxed.

  “I haven’t seen Vincent tonight. He may miss his chance.”

  “History is filled with Americans who missed their chance in Vietnam,” said Khanh.

  Pratt raised an eyebrow.

  “Americans had a chance long before the American War to help us. During the King Minh Mang Nguyen Dynasty the Americans had a chance. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson sent Mr. Edmond Roberts to Southeast Asia. He landed at Phu Ye n Port in central Vietnam that December. The Emperor dispatched an official to invite Mr. Roberts to have an audience with the king. Before the official arrived, Roberts’s ship had lifted anchor and sailed to Siam. To your country! He could not wait for our king. Four years later, Mr. Roberts returned to Vietnam. The Emperor sent another delegation to meet him at the Tra Son Gulf. When the officials arrived, Mr. Roberts was ill. He couldn’t speak. That same day, the ship left Vietnam for America. Mr. Roberts left before we had any chance to talk with the Americans. By the time the Americans sent someone else, it was too late. The French had come with their army and officials. They didn’t ask to see our Emperor. They demanded. If Roberts hadn’t been sick, then what would have been the course of our history? If he had rallied, met the Emperor ’s delegation, stayed for a year, two years, taken a Vietnamese wife, convinced the American Government to trade with us, then think of the possibilities! The deaths averted. The tragedy which would never have been. You see how one man’s sickness can change the destiny of history, of people, of nations? The absence of one man can make a ripple in the waters of history for centuries.”

  “I doubt that Mr. Demato’s absence is on the same level as Mr. Roberts’s illness,” said Pratt.

  “How does one know? At the time of Roberts’s sickness, who knew that his personal disease would spread a virus of doom down the generations for millions and millions of my people?”

  “If Mai is with Vincent, then she is safe,” said Pratt.

  Khanh shook his head as if he was not believing what he was hearing.

  “Her father was killed during the American Wa r. His MIG21 shot out of the sky. Since that time I have been responsible for her. I brought her to Ho Chi Minh City. I promised her mother that she would have a future.”

  “I am a Buddhist, Mr. Khanh, and a Buddhist lives in the present. To want a future is to invite suffering.”

  From a door behind the speaker’s podium, Harris emerged with two other men in business suits with tiny American flags on their lapels. None of them looked happy, expressions disclosing shadings which ran from fear to anger and crash-landed in resignation. Pratt spotted the tiny wire for an earphone disappearing into the ear of one of the men. One of them shook his head and returned into the inner sanctum of the background; the private room where the VIPs could meet beyond the gaze of the investors who were left to stand around, eat free food, and elbow each other at the bar. Pratt saw Harris take a deep breath and then cross the room, stopping to shake a hand, then another. He walked straight toward Pratt and put his hand on Pratt’s shoulder.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  Pratt looked long and hard at the hand on his shoulder until Harris removed it.

  “Sorry, but it is very important.”

  “Your friends look unhappy,” said Pratt, glancing back at the two men, hands folded like church ushers, who continued to watch Harris.

  “If you will excuse us, Mr. Khanh. And thank you for the history lesson.”

  They walked together out of the reception room and into the courtyard where they had coffee that afternoon along with Vincent Calvino. The two men with the unhappy, scared faces were Americans attached to the American Liaison Office in Hanoi. They had been sent to Saigon as a show of support for those launching the Fund.

  “They came into Saigon last night,” said Harris. “I briefed them.”

  “Perhaps you might brief me, Mr. Harris.”

  Harris sat in the same seat as he had sat in that afternoon. The outside lights made the courtyard into a fairyland ancient pavilion and from a bar inside the hotel someone was playing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on the piano. Harris wasn’t the kind of man who liked Vivaldi, thought Pratt; he was a man of a single season, his youth, which he had spent as a soldier in Vietnam, and he was back and in trouble, like before, out of control, confused, without a clue as to what should be done to extricate himself from an impossible situation.

  “Calvino’s screwing up everything. Why, Sir? What is in it for him? Who is he working for? Why did someone try to kill him at his hotel an hour ago?”

  “Those questions cover a lot of territory, Mr. Harris.”

  Harris covered his face with both hands, leaned forward on his elbows on the table, rubbing his eyes as if he hadn’t slept for a week. He took a long, deep breath and nodded.

  “Right, I did ask too many questions. Perhaps you might answer only one. Where is Calvino?”

  Pratt replied, “I don’t know.”

  “If you did know, would you tell me?”

  Pratt weighed the answer in his mind.

  “Given what is at stake, I believe that I would.”

  For the first time Pratt saw a look of relief in Harris’s face, who seemed to ease up.

  “They have decided to proceed tonight. I think it’s a mistake. There is a definite security risk involved. Remember when I asked you to provide security for our people in Phuket?”

  “I remember the money people,” said Pratt without any hint of irony.

  “We believe one of the directors is at risk. He was with the group in Phuket and he is in Saigon now. Nothing has changed. If anything, Saigon is exactly the place a lunatic would want to choose.”

  “Choose for what?” “To kill him.”

  “And you have expressed your concerns to this man?”

  “He thinks I am being paranoid. ‘Everyone is looking to the future, Mr. Harris,’ he said to me. ‘Why are you living in the past?’ Christ, someone just blew up Calvino’s room. Lieutenant Colonel Prachai, I know that he is your friend. Someone out there is trying to create an international incident. To destroy American and Vietnamese relations. Sir, I can’t let that happen. Not on my watch. I am asking you to help me bring Calvino in. Otherwise, he is going to get himself killed. He is in way over his head, with all respect. I served in Vietnam. I know something about how tough these people are. Sir, we are military people and we understand that, in a military situation, you work as part of a team.”

  “May I speak frankly to you?” asked Pratt.

  A broad smile crossed Harris’s face as if to say, “Finally, we are getting somewhere.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “I believe Calvino is in trouble.”

  “That’s an understatement even coming from you, Sir.”

  “I want you and your friends to help him if that should be required.”

  Harris shook his head and coughed out a laugh like he had heard a sick joke.

  “Help him? He’s done everything in his power to
sabotage an intelligence operation we have had in place for eighteen months. Who paid him to do this to us?”

  “He has a private client. I can assure you that Vincent, to use your expression, did not set out to sabotage your intelligence operation. If he has caused you inconvenience, it would not have been his intention.”

  “I can’t help a private citizen who has broken the law. Sorry, official policy.”

  Pratt let a long pause follow as Harris withdrew into his official mode.

  “When you asked me to arrange security in Phuket on a moment’s notice, I might have said ‘Follow the official procedure.’ But you said it was an emergency. You didn’t have time to go through normal channels. I could have said that was your problem. But I didn’t. You asked me for your help. I gave that help to you.”