Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  Harris rocked back on his heels, biting his lower lip.

  “What is it that I can do for you, Sir?”

  “Unofficially, quietly, as a friend. Perhaps you might make an exception to the official policy.”

  The steam of anger had cooled to a chilling mist in the engine room driving Harris’s emotions. He was thinking about this and not wanting to think about it at the same time, a train trying to run the rails of two separate tracks.

  When he thought of Calvino out in the night, on his own, or more likely with Mai, he remembered King Richard’s words, “Look, what is done cannot be now amended: Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes, which after-hours give leisure to repent.” Shakespeare had the soul of a Buddhist, thought Pratt.

  And Calvino, what about his soul? For the first time in years Pratt thought he had seen inside the soul of a man who had successfuly escaped from the Zone. A man who had found a way out, a man who had found himself, a man who was reborn with a new wisdom. This wasn’t the time he wanted to lose an old friend. But he knew Calvino had taken flight after the bombing, but what he wasn’t certain about was whether Harris, or anyone else, would be useful in helping him find Vincent Calvino in the confusion of that evening. Soon the cars carrying the Fund directors would pull to the curb alongside the entrance to the Continental Hotel and deposit the men who had returned to find some piece of themselves which had been left behind. They had come to find investments for the Fund, they had come back to find themselves.

  CHAPTER 15

  ROOM WITH A KILLING VIEW

  IN THE CORRIDOR, they passed beneath a naked light bulb tangled in spider ’s webs and dust, creating a strange yellow halo of light. A halo suspended from an ancient electric cord. The building was of pre-electricity construction, with narrow corridors, wooden banisters with a worn, polished feel. Calvino turned at the end of the corner, looked up at the next staircase, but he couldn’t see much because the halo of light did not reach that far, leaving a trail of shadows that terminated in near darkness. He had to make a decision before moving forward. He assumed the clandestine operation organized by Marcus and his friends would have included a contingency plan to deal with intruders. Calvino checked out his .40 Smith & Wesson which had been a gift from Marcus. It had saved his life at Karen’s Bar though Marcus was probably as surprised as anyone could be that Calvino had walked out of that shophouse alive. With his free hand he pulled Mai closer, felt her body pressing against his on the staircase.

  “Where’s an elevator in the middle of this blackout?” he whispered.

  “We cannot.”

  “Don’t worry, I was just jesting. Thinking, what’s on the next floor?”

  “I’m thinking, too.”

  Like a couple of outlaws on the run, faced with an ugly situation, they stopped at each doorway, listening before going up the next staircase. On the second floor Calvino, had quickly spun around, pushed her down, scaring her nearly to death, as he pointed the Smith & Wesson at each point of the compass; he stared ahead, surveying the corridor, not letting Mai move, as if he had felt the presence of someone following. But the hallway was hot, empty and smelling of cigarette smoke. Politics are local. War is local. And fear is local, he thought. This was the last staircase. Marcus and his team were so close he could almost feel their presence.

  “Wait for me here,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t wait.”

  How do you tell someone who has never witnessed the instant of violent death, that pure insanity of the firing, the curses, the awful screams? She had been through the war so she knew fear. But Mai had no idea of how dangerous someone like Marcus was, his guns, his mission, his hatred and, above all, his lack of fear of dying. That was what Calvino felt was waiting for him on the next floor. A man who had prepared himself to die.

  “Go to the Continental Hotel. Find Colonel Pratt and tell him that I’m here. Will you do that for me?”

  She shook her head.

  “Please, Mai.”

  “You think a Hanoi girl is afraid of anything?”

  “Fear is something you should never lose.”

  “Then you stay and I go up.”

  She pulled up his hand, the one which was clutching hers, and rested it on her breast.

  “I give to you,” she said. “All I have inside here, I give.” She pressed her hand, the one he held, against her heart.

  He started to pull his hand away but she stopped him.

  “There isn’t much time. You won’t even have time to miss me.” If Judson was on time, his car would be pulling in front of the Continental Hotel in about ten minutes.

  “That is what my father said to my mother the last time they were together,” Mai said. “She stayed behind and she regretted that more than any other thing in her life. She taught me many things. But I think the most important thing she taught me was never to live your life with regret. Regret is the only bad thing because, once you have it, then it stays inside you until you die. Do you understand?”

  He smiled, leaned forward, kissed her.

  “In half an hour we will be out of here, on our way to get married...”

  She put her finger to his lips. “Never promise beyond the moment. Because you cannot say what is your future. Or my future. Now we go together. Or we stay together.”

  A child passed down the stairs as they stood together.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Marcus would bring to bear all of his strength, intelligence, experience and discipline like a laser beam of light as he stared through the telescopic night sight mounted on a sniper ’s rifle. Who stayed and who left, who went inside and who stayed outside, the basic, fundamental decisions that separated the dead from the living, soldiers from civilians. What act of biological structure had coded the revenge instinct into mankind? Once the seed of that grudge was born, it grew inside, developing a head, arms, legs, a torso, and was ready to come into the world, ugly, nasty, and mean. Some finely honed survival mechanism was at work. We remembered the wrongs, thought Calvino. Wrongs were used to identify enemies, and enemies were others who were feared and killed. Those who had no memory of wrong, no appetite for revenge, they herded together in the Zone like cattle. They were not selected to survive; they would die out, overtaken by men like Marcus who never forgot. To break free of the Zone, you had to face a man like Marcus. You had to find a woman like Mai, Calvino thought.

  *****

  MARCUS Nguyen sat alone in the darkness near the window. He quietly smoked a cigarette, flicking the ash onto the floor. Greenish hues radiated off the J&B neon sign outside the window, washing his bare chest and face neon green. He leaned forward, looking down at Le Loi Boulevard. Soldiers, jeeps, police. No private cars, motorcycles, or cyclos anywhere. The street had been sealed. A film of sweat covered his body, dripping from his nose onto the cigarette clenched between his lips. The whisky and oil companies had come rocking and rolling back into Saigon with their big money, projects and neon signs, doing business with the communists as if there had never been a war. He wiped his face with a towel, closed his eyes, breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. Two bandoleers crisscrossed his bare chest. It was like old times. The companies had come back, he had come back. The twentieth anniversary party had come and gone. Everyone spoke of a fresh start in relations, even the Americans had their consulate in Hanoi. They had forgotten one thing, he thought. A man without dignity is like a company without assets; he is bankrupt. Judson had taken away his dignity by treating him like someone who didn’t matter, like a servant, a dog. How do you make a fresh start when you have nothing but your anger to start with?

  He had stockpiled enough weapons to start a small war. What he had in mind was to start a very private, limited war. Not even war, he thought. He hated the American word—assassination. It was dishonorable, cowardly—everything a professional soldier was not. But then Judson had not been a professional soldier. He was a CIA operative analyzing and reporting on military intelligence
operations. In the end, he ran, turned and fled, leaving behind those he had promised to lead, help, and protect. What it came down to, Marcus thought, was that while a celebration had been held on the twentieth anniversary of the end to the war, this was a fraud. The war had not ended. There had been too much unfinished business in 1975. The cadre who owned his villa, for instance, was the real assassin. By stealing everything he had owned, the communists had done as much as stick a knife in his back. People say it is in the past. But the past, present and future are clumped into one trip-wire of time; hit that wire and everything blows up at once. He thought for a second about Calvino. He had liked him and was sorry he had to be killed. He had warned the man but he wouldn’t listen. It had been wrong of Harry to send him in the first place. But, then, Harry fit within a certain class of SOG: a malcontent, misfit, independent thinker, someone who could not be controlled. But Harry had been a warrior with specialized training and skills, someone who worked well with him and other Vietnamese soldiers. Looking through the telescopic sight mounted on the rifle, Marcus thought of himself as a warrior, too. It was one of those terms which had meaning once, before it had been perverted into the same category as a cold-blooded killer. Warriors knew honor, courage, decency and, above all, warriors never ran away, never abandoned a comrade in the heat of battle. His greatest accomplishment was saving a life and not taking a life. A warrior was not afraid to die; he knew fear, yes, he tasted it, Marcus thought to himself as he sat in the dark, waiting.

  He had booby-trapped the door to the apartment, using a stun grenade, a weapon designed to immobilize an enemy without killing him. The beauty of such a weapon was that the disabled intruder no longer presented a threat, and, a moment after the explosion, Marcus would emerge into the room and have the pleasure of watching the initial expression of shock, surprise, turn to anguish before melting into utter fear in those final moments before he shot several rounds into the head. There was a purity in that final moment, two men looking at each other with an intensity unlike any other shared moment in the life of two beings, one with the power of life and death, the other powerless, waiting for that long march into nothingness. A soldier ’s memory. No one who killed another man ever forgot that man’s face. Vietnamese practicality welded with American creativity was a powerful combination: invention in the service of a concrete, fixed object. And, above all else, the Americans believed in the underdog, giving the hunted a chance. He could have sent Calvino to Karen’s Bar without any protection; but he had Jackie supply him with a .40 Smith & Wesson. Three men with AK47s would easily win that battle. Confrontation is unpredictable in the real world. Who would win was never certain. Calvino, who had no military training, had emerged without a scratch, leaving behind three well-trained, well-armed men. He was almost glad to find that Calvino was that lucky...or that good.

  Marcus Nguyen had thought of every eventuality because he had planned out the moves, countermoves, anticipated the possible mistakes and made contingencies for them, and he knew the strengths and weaknesses of those he hunted and those who had hunted him. No one could trace him to the apartment which was in the name of another Vietnamese, a woman who played tennis and had gone the three hundred fifty odd kilometers to Dalat on a visit to her mother. The visit had been planned months before; the elements of Saigon Concer t had required precision, refinement, back-up systems. He had invested in the Americans, they had returned to invest in Vietnam. They had missed one piece of the equation: Marcus Nguyen had some old war bonds he wished to redeem.

  ******

  CALVINO remembered that smell. It was the same cologne he had worn the day of the Fourth of July picnic. He froze for a moment.

  “You smell that?” he whispered to her.

  In the shadows, a slender Vietnamese male slouched back against the staircase railing, lighting a cigarette as Calvino approached. Mai was a step behind. Before she could answer, the well-dressed Vietnamese male bounced off the railing and made a grab for Calvino. He was close enough for the full power of the cheap cologne to sting his eyes. The Vietnamese, with a fleshy middle-aged face, was half a step too slow to plunge the knife into Calvino, giving Calvino sufficient time to see the glint of a long knife blade. Calvino shot him twice in the mid-section, shoving the barrel point blank into the body of the Vietnamese. Both rounds slammed through his body and passed out the other side. The sound of the two .40 rounds was partially muffled by the flesh. The force of the bullets knocked the Vietnamese back, his eyes full of shock and surprise, blood leaking from the wounds in his chest and spilling out of his mouth as his lungs filled with blood. He was dead before he slumped to the floor.

  Calvino looked back at Mai. Her face was expressionless.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  They walked past the dead man and continued up the staircase. Mai let go of his hand as he was thinking that, if Karen’s Bar was any guide, Marcus had more than one gunman assigned to a job. She doubled back five feet. As he glanced around, he saw Mai kneeling over the dead man. Then she stood up, showing what she had found and smiling like she had won some kind of a prize. The blood, the smell of death had no effect. The man was dead. Death, even violent death, was part of life. Brutality affirmed the nature of the world she had been raised in. And what was her prize? Besides the knife, the dead man had a handgun. In the darkness it looked like an old .38 six shot model.

  “Keep it and stay here,” he said, his hands on her shoulders.

  “I have better idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We stay together.”

  “Marcus is a professional,” said Calvino. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because you are a professional, too.”

  He looked at his watch, thinking that Judson had better be late or he would be dead.

  She took his hand and put the .38 into the palm and then walked ahead.

  “Where are you going?”

  “It’s better if I go first. They will think nothing is wrong if they see me.”

  Who was the professional, he thought, following behind her holding a gun in each hand. She was right, of course. A sentry was posted near the door to an apartment on the fourth floor. Mai went straight to the Vietnamese who wore a Seattle Mariner ’s T-shirt and jeans and started to speak Vietnamese. The man started to smile, then shake his head, looking behind Mai, finding Calvino in the dim light near the top of the staircase. He put two fingers to his nose, squeezed and then blew a line of snot onto the floor. Mai giggled, keeping up her one-sided conversation in Vietnamese.

  “He say I a bad girl,” said Mai, in broken English. “But I say you drunk and you bad boy, too.”

  Calvino, watching the man’s hands, inched forward, hands in his pockets, a gun in each hand. No heroics, he said to himself. Stay cool, stay alive.

  “Come on, I don’t have all night,” said Mai.

  She stepped back and reached for him. Marcus’s guard, his last line of defense, started to laugh, hands on his hips.

  “Why waste yourself on this foreigner?” he asked.

  Before Mai could answer, Calvino had smashed the hard metal of the .38 revolver into the side of the guard’s head. It was one of those windmill swings which made a loud crack as the metal struck the skull. Blood splattered across the wall and Mai’s face. She touched her face and then looked at her hands, they were sticky wet and red. Slowly she showed her hands to Calvino and though it was dark, he could see that her face and hands had blood on them. They looked at each other for a moment, then Calvino dragged the unconscious man across the line of snot he had shot on the floor to the far end of the corridor and dumped him. He wasn’t dead but would have one crashing headache when he finally woke up again. The question was whether he would be facing Marcus Nguyen who would certainly kill him for not stopping Calvino or whether Marcus would be on the other side and no one would ever know, suspect or care that one night he had been assigned to kill anyone trying to go into the apartment. When he came back, Calvino put his finger to his l
ips, handed her the .38 and ran his fingers along the outside of the door.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Looking for a wire.” He glanced back at her and then returned to his search.

  Her eyes followed the line of the door frame. “Above you,” she whispered softly.

  He looked at her, then slowly rose to his feet. Sure enough, Marcus had run the wire above the door this time. Through a gap in the upper part of the door, the green neon bled through. As it flashed, he saw what her eyes had seen—a small wire stretched at the top of the door. Inside the apartment it appeared to be dark, empty.

  “Amway is gonna love knocking on doors in Vietnam,” he whispered.

  Inside his jacket pocket Calvino put his hand around the grenade that had been planted inside his hotel room. He pulled it out and looked at the pin.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Mai.

  He pulled her away from the door and motioned for her to walk down the corridor.

  “Make a house call. And hope that I am right about this fuse.” He pulled the pin, counted one, then two. And on the count of three he kicked the door with all his strength and tossed in the grenade. He swung back away from the door, his back against the wall, his hands pressed hard against his ears. The stun grenade exploded, making an ear-drum shattering explosion, showering blue flame and smoke through the doorway and into the corridor. Two beats later the grenade exploded, but this time the report was a deafening boom which combined with the other sounds—splintering wood, breaking glass, then in the dark, came screams of the wounded. He had blown up the room. The soldiers in Le Loi Boulevard would have heard the explosions. Calvino rolled through the doorway. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. Some light came through the broken windows. Enough for him to spot two men who were covered with debris and blood. One man was dead outright, half of his face had been blown away and brains leaked from the shattered skull, his tongue wedged between yellow teeth. Two other men lay with their faces away from the door. They were further inside the room and one of the twisted, broken bodies didn’t move. The other man had no leg and moaned, rolling over on his side. Calvino quickly kicked away his gun. There was no fight left in him. Calvino pointed the .38 at the man then lowered it.