Comfort Zone

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Mercy? Or some other noble gesture?” asked Marcus from a distance.

  Part of the room had been barricaded with furniture and mattresses turned on end. From the other side of the barricade was movement.

  “Marcus, it’s over.”

  “When Harry said he was sending a pro, I said to myself, Harry is sending some guy from Bangkok. He can call him what he wants. But I gotta tell you, Calvino, Harry was right.”

  What Calvino remembered next was the mattress flying through the air and the sound of an M60 shooting round after round into the room. If hell had a soundtrack, it would have been the blast of an M60 inside the confines of a small room in Saigon. The M60 stopped and the room became silent, filled with death, smoke, bodies. In the distance he heard voices speaking in Vietnamese. For the first time, Calvino realized that he had been hit; his shoulder was numb, the sleeve of the jacket had been torn away, exposing flesh and bone. Marcus was coming to finish him off, he thought. The shock from the wound ran through his body like a network of electrical charges, short-circuiting the brain. He willed himself not to pass out. The Vietnamese who had taken part of the grenade blast and lost a leg had stopped moaning and lay very still. He didn’t want to die like that, he thought. He focused on the voices. “What mercy did you Americans ever show us?” asked a far away voice belonging to Marcus.

  “You came to this country and promised us hope. When you left, you didn’t even have the decency to promise us mercy.”

  Then there was another voice joining Marcus.

  The other voice was that of the Hanoi girl, Mai. His vision had gone blurry; he blinked his eyes, focused again, and saw Marcus standing a few feet away with his hand raised. Mai was behind him holding the .38 pointed at the small of Marcus’s back.

  “If you move, I’ll kill you,” she said in English. There was no doubt that she would do it.

  Marcus stood quietly watching as Calvino pulled himself across the floor until he reached the window. He lifted himself up and looked down at the entrance to the Continental Hotel. He saw a line of limos with doors opened, unloading men in expensive suits. Soldiers were squatting down all around the limos, rifles pointing in every direction, including at the window above with smoke pouring out. On the steps of the Opera House he saw Pratt and, one step below and to his right, Harris stood with a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes.

  “How did you get in?” Calvino asked Mai, as he pulled away from the window.

  “From the next apartment. They share the same bathroom.”

  “You came in through the bathroom?” Calvino asked.

  “Yes. I did,” she said in all seriousness.

  There was movement outside. Soldiers were coming toward the building.

  “They will be here any minute,” said Calvino.

  “One night leaning against a royal barge is worth more than a lifetime inside a fisherman’s boat,” said Marcus, smiling.

  “Great pick-up line. But I don’t see you sailing away from this.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Enough people have died. So let’s leave it alone.”

  “You can never begin to understand,” he said.

  “No more than you can ever begin to forgive,” said Calvino. That was the last of any English conversation Calvino could remember; the rest was in Vietnamese between Marcus and Mai. Then their conversation stopped. Marcus Nguyen stared silently at Calvino on the floor, walked over to the window, opened the shutters and stood on the window sill. He screamed at the soldiers below. All they could see from the street below was a middle-aged warrior bathed in green neon, wearing bandoleers over his naked chest, his hands raised above his head, screaming at those in the street. He leaned his body halfway out. And when the first rounds from the street hit Marcus, he lurched and fell. Suddenly he was gone. Mai, who was right behind Marcus, stepped forward. Calvino had grabbed her ankle just as an AK47 round struck her in the chest, knocking her back. At first, Calvino didn’t know that she had been shot; he thought that he had pulled her back, and it was only as he kissed her cheek and whispered that he loved her, that he knew. The Hanoi girl was dead. He wouldn’t believe it, rocking her in his arms, touching her face, brushing away the hair from her forehead.

  “Don’t leave me,” he whispered, sitting on the floor. More rounds crashed through the window, pounding the wall behind him.

  ******

  WHEN Pratt arrived in the apartment, this was the way he found Vincent Calvino, his head buried in a dead woman’s hair. Pratt squatted beside him, reached out his hand and touched Mai’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He tried the other side. He looked at her eyes.

  “She’s dead, Vinee. We must go now,” Pratt.

  Harris spoke Vietnamese to a ranking Vietnamese officer. “Either we get him out now, or it’s no go,” said Harris.

  It may have been the hardest thing Pratt had ever done. He reached down and lifted the dead woman from Calvino’s arms. He had no strength to resist, the arm wound was no longer masked with the after-effect of shock and the full brunt of pain shot through Calvino’s body, pain beyond the will of a man to control. He fought against the pain, against Pratt taking Mai and against losing consciousness. Then he was somewhere else, a strange desert with a green neon sky. A metallic object flashed against the horizon, coming closer, he could see that it was a fighter plane, a MIG21. Through the cockpit he saw the pilot’s face as the plane screamed overhead. Mai’s face. He ran over the dunes, chasing the plane. The MIG21 banked right, the wing tip touching the desert floor, and Calvino watched as the fighter did cartwheels, spinning flames and metal across the green sky. He fell to his knees and watched the column of black smoke rise in the distance.

  Pratt carried Calvino in his arms down the three flights of stairs to Le Loi Boulevard.

  He was glad Calvino was not awake to see the hot tears streaming down his face. When you carry a wounded man there is one thing you can’t do: you can’t wipe away his tears. There is no wind to dry them, there is no place to hide them. These are the tears which are like a shadow that never leaves you, night or day, for the rest of your life. Then Pratt reached the street where Harris’s car was waiting. The last thing Pratt remembered seeing as they put Calvino into the back of the car, was the group of soldiers standing around the crumpled body of Marcus Nguyen in Le Loi Boulevard. Some were smoking cigarettes, others talking. Inside the main ballroom, the Vietnam Emerging Market Fund was being launched.

  CHAPTER 16

  COMFORT ZONE

  VINCENT CALVINO OPENED his eyes in a room filled with bright sunlight streaming through the windows and spreading across the foot of his bed. Outside the window was a garden with tropical flowers and palm trees. Pratt sat in a chair near the foot of the bed, his head slumped to one side, sleeping. At first, Calvino wasn’t sure where he was or how he had arrived in this place. All he remembered as he opened his eyes was not of this earth; he had been in the desert running in deep sand toward a column of black smoke. His arm was bandaged and when he tried to move it, the pain shot through his shoulder and bounced off his jaw. A nurse, an older woman with a kind Chinese face, wearing a white uniform, quietly slipped into the room. She set a silver tray down near the bed and poured a glass of water. Pratt looked up from his chair and saw Calvino looking at him. Pratt looked more than ordinarily tired, he had a worn-down, bone-weary expression. Then, Calvino caught him smiling at the nurse; one of those smiles of relief.

  “Where am I?” asked Calvino.

  “Bangkok Nursing Home,” said Pratt.

  “Please take these pills,” said the nurse in fluent English. “They will help take away the pain.”

  He put a green and a yellow pill in his mouth and took the glass of water from her hand, raised his head, took a drink from the glass and swallowed the pills.

  “How long have I been in Bangkok?”

  Pratt glanced at his watch. “About twenty-seven hours.”

  “How did I get out of Saigon?”

  The n
urse and Pratt exchanged another glance, the kind shared by conspirators.

  “Medical evacuation. The American Consulate in Hanoi processed the papers.”

  Calvino shifted his head on the pillow, closed his eyes.

  “Khun Pongsarn escorts farang all over the world. Sees that these wayward farang get back to their home. She has seen most of the world. America, Canada, Australia, England, Germany, Denmark. Your case is unique for her in two respects. You are the first non-psychiatric patient she has ever escorted. And the first farang who has ever been escorted from another country to Thailand.”

  “How far did you have to move heaven and earth to get Harris to help?”

  Pratt moved closer to the bed.

  “He’s a fan of yours, Vincent. You saved him from one very large headache in Vietnam by doing what you did.”

  “When can I leave the hospital?” asked Calvino. “That’s up to the doctor,” said the nurse.

  “And the doctor will leave it up to you,” said Pratt.

  “I’m home,” whispered Calvino.

  “I can hardly believe it, Pratt. You got me out.”

  “You’re home.”

  Calvino thought about this for a moment as the nurse left the room. He turned his head on the pillow and looked out at the green garden, he kept thinking about that column of smoke, a mushroom-shaped column pouring out of a crash in a green desert. The pain was like a ragged sound cranked up full volume, blasting and assaulting, bending and pulling, leading him down a blind alley. He waited for the pills to kick in, to pull him back, turn down the volume, slowly until it was a muffled noise lost in the buzz of all the other sounds of living. It was so quiet and peaceful, he thought. Then he turned his head back to Pratt, looked at him hard before he reached out with his good arm to Pratt who bent forward, taking his hand.

  “Pratt, thanks.” It was all that he could say.

  The tears swelled in Calvino’s eyes and spilled out, running onto the white pillow case. He wanted to say more, a lot more, but he couldn’t speak, he didn’t want to remember, and he didn’t even want to ask. He squeezed Pratt’s hand and didn’t want to let go.

  ******

  ON the top floor of the shophouse where Harry Markle had his office, Calvino stood in front of a wall looking at the citations from the Vietnam War which Harry had framed and hung in two rows. There were two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, campaign ribbons and, in the center with nothing on either side, was the Congressional Medal of Honor. Marcus Nguyen had been right about Harry being a warrior, a man of honor and bravery. Harry’s study was a private place and after all the years they had known each other, it was the first time that Harry had invited him into this inner sanctum, a place which Harry Markle had reserved for himself against the rest of the world. The room was filled with computer equipment and a huge screen flickered on his desk, the screensaver images were naked mermaids swimming and cavorting across the color screen. Harry had taken him surfing on the Net, locking into Vietnam vet discussion groups and data bases.

  “The first time I was shot here,” said Harry touching the back of his right thigh.

  “Some sonofabitch almost hit my ass. Eight inches over and it would have been goodbye to my balls. Instead the round hit flesh, passed right out through, missing the bone. I was out of hospital and back in the field in two weeks. You know what I lost that first time I was shot?”

  “No, but you’re gonna tell me, right?” asked Calvino.

  “I lost ambition for anything more than to survive. Monkey brain ambition. To survive and fuck. That’s what being in the field did to you.”

  Calvino turned away from the wall of medals, his arm in a sling, and looked at Harry sitting behind his desk. He had been waiting for this moment for days and now that it had arrived he felt that, like most things you wished for, the wishing was always a greater emotional ride than actually having the moment arrive.

  “Harry, I know that you killed Wang.”

  Markle took a cigarette from a pack on the desk, lit it and inhaled deeply, smiling as he let the smoke roll out of his mouth and nose. Harry the dragon slayer had become the dragon.

  “It seemed like the right thing at the time,” he said, pushing his glasses back on his nose.

  “The lesson of Vietnam,” said Calvino.

  “You want another drink before dinner?” Calvino shook his head.

  “You don’t mind if I have another one?”

  The assassination plot had spun out many more questions than anyone in Bangkok, Saigon and Hanoi could answer. Who was involved? Marcus had been the ring-leader. But had he acted alone, out of a sense of betrayal, or were there other forces who had rendered assistance for other purposes? Drew Markle had sent the answer with Mark Wang with instructions to deliver the diskette to Harris. Wang never got the chance. Harry took out Wang in Bangkok.

  “I did it as a favour to Marcus,” said Harry.

  “Marcus had promised to look after my brother in Saigon. He was on the Net. We exchanged e-mail almost every day, he let me know how Drew was doing. Real friendly things. Personal messages. We took no precautions. Like having sex with someone you trust, there’s no need to suit up, right? Well, it’s wrong in sex, it’s wrong in friendship. Marcus didn’t use any encryption. A high-risk act right up there with unprotected sex. You can get unlucky because any hacker can read messages from the Net. Marcus must have thought that he had covered his tracks. His message had bounced off the four walls of the web, filtered through the Finland node, zipped through Amsterdam, and God knows how many times it crossed Europe, before it came to rest. When it turned up in my mailbox, I knew in my gut that this message was from Marcus. He had gone through enough nodes to strip away his identity. But on the Net you can always reconstruct identity, trace back the message to the sender, given enough resources and time. Having gone through Vietnam we should have been paranoid about message interception. Or, at least, I should have been. As I said, Marcus was on the emotional side. e-mail boxes in cyberspace. Sounds impressive, but I’m in the shit. I know it, you know it.”

  “Does Noi have any idea Wang’s family might find what Marcus put in your e-mail box? You know how the Chinese love their revenge, Harry. That’s why Pratt was sent to Saigon. To lay off the heat Wang’s murder had brought down on the Department. You happen to have killed one very well-connected Chinese businessman.”

  Harry took a sip from his glass and shook his head. “You know what Marcus put on the Net? He says a Hong Kong guy named Mark Wang had intentionally infected his niece with HIV. Jackie Ky was sleeping with Drew. Marcus didn’t have to be a genius to know that I would take Wang for something like that. Christ, it’s my own brother ’s life. So I hit Wang. And stripped his computer hard disk and took away the floppies which might have linked him back to Marcus, Drew, or Jackie. It was a precaution that Marcus suggested. It made perfect sense. Fuck, I had no idea about his plot to kill Judson. And I sure as hell didn’t know that Marcus was going to kill my brother.”

  He watched Harry finish his drink and roll a chunk of ice around in his mouth.

  “You should have told me, Harry.”

  “If I had known what Marcus was doing, I would have. I trusted the sonofabitch.”

  Calvino stared at him through the smoke and ice crunching.

  “You have to believe that,” said Harry.

  “I have done some bad shit in my life. But one thing I’ve never done is let down a friend. Someone who would die for you. Do you know what I am saying?” He knew what Harry was saying alright. He thought of how Mai had held the gun on Marcus in the dark room rimmed out with green neon light. How he had awakened in hospital and seen that Pratt had spent the night looking over him like a guardian angel. Harry was right, thought Calvino. He believed that Harry Markle was telling him the truth. God, he needed not to question that belief right at that moment. Vietnam had always been a place where people shifted in and out of maximum amoral overdrive. What to believe was one of those issues which never di
sappeared; on one side were the ideas bigger than any one tribe, ideas so big that a lot of different people could believe that they were worth fighting and dying for, ideas that could unite many tribes into a whole fabric of shared belief of good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust.

  The big ideas were no more. Just like Marcus, they had gone into oblivion. What had Vietnam left behind? Generations of people who questioned whether any idea was big or important enough to die for, to make others suffer for. In the shattered ruins of the old ideas emerged the god of consumption. Harry had escaped into cyberspace; others were following him. A wall of medals for ideas buried in the past, a computer terminal and screen to establish contact with the survivors from those old times and plans to create a rescue mission to the future. Harry had believed that Marcus had let go of the past and had gone back to Vietnam for a fresh start. Maybe Marcus had, but something happened to pull him back to the past. Once back in-country, it happened without Marcus knowing at first, as the old residue of repugnance, resentment, hatred and anger, smouldering hot, lay just under the surface and the heat sucked Marcus down until all of the last twenty years had burnt off and it was again April, 1975 and he was waiting to be pulled out. Only this time he knew that he would be betrayed and he had time to plan an action to strike first.