Back Bay Blues

by Peter Colt

  The garrote is simple and, like most of my weapons, inelegant: wood handles and piano wire. I whipped it over the sentry’s head. Crossed my arms fast, hard, and pivoted on the balls of my feet, a deadly version of “about-face,” under the wires, dance moves. Disco of death.

  I pulled him off the ground, back to back. He flailed against me. We were an obscene version of Shakespeare’s “two-backed beast.” He couldn’t make any noise.... The piano wire was fast and unforgiving. His windpipe was just flesh and cartilage. Physics was unarguable. He was slightly built, like a lot of VC. I felt the life drain out of him. When it was done, I lowered him to the ground. His head lolled to one side and let out a rasping noise—air, gas escaping. He looked at me with Thuy’s face, distorted by a horrid death. Somehow, I managed not to scream in the middle of the night in the bed in the Hay-Adams. I managed not to wake her. I tossed and turned the rest of the night but never really slept. Thuy lay next to me, snoring slightly, like a kitten.

  Chapter 11

  When we woke up the next morning, we were polite to each other. We were wary about fighting. She was being nice, overly polite, and I was being polite and noncommittal. We got dressed and made our way downstairs for breakfast. I was tired after a night of nightmares. I wanted coffee and plenty of it.

  The restaurant in the Hay-Adams did not disappoint. The tablecloths were of the whitest linen, and the floral centerpieces were tasteful bouquets of real flowers. The waitress brought us coffee and menus.

  “Andy, what is a milkshake?”

  “What, are you kidding? You grew up in California.... You must have had one. Milk and ice cream all mixed up. You drink it through a straw. Do we have to have your parents arrested for child neglect?” Her smile faltered.

  “No. I just never had one. My parents were very . . . very strict.” She bit her lower lip.

  “Oh, if you have never had a milkshake you should have one.... It is a life-changing experience.”

  The waitress came and we ordered. Thuy ordered the fruit bowl and a coffee milkshake, and I ordered a cheese omelet, breakfast sausage, and wheat toast. The waitress was unsure of making a milkshake for breakfast but that was the nice thing about being in a five-star hotel. They reluctantly do what you ask them to, then charge you a lot of money for it. My plate was garnished with a half slice of orange and a bit of parsley, which seemed an odd marriage. She enjoyed her milkshake. We ate in companionable silence.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “I am not sure. We know that your uncle and another man were murdered. We think it is about gold that was smuggled out of Saigon in 1975. We were just at a front company for the CIA, and they know about us.” I was summing up the obvious bits.

  “The gold must exist. Why kill two men if it doesn’t?”

  “Someone doesn’t want anyone to know what happened to it?”

  “Or find it?” She was looking at me over the straw of her milkshake, head slightly tilted down but eyes up, her black hair framing her face, all of it making her look like a teenager.

  “Or maybe someone wants it to fund a counterrevolution. I bet the Committee would love to get their hands on it, Colonel Tran and his boys.”

  “The Committee is like a club for veterans of the war. Or maybe a bunch of old criminals. Who knows?” She was right. There was no great uprising, no big political movement either.

  “Maybe they don’t have it. Or do you think they are still sitting on the money? Why?”

  “They can’t do it without America. They weren’t going to do it after the fall of Saigon. Jimmy Carter wasn’t going to help them invade the People’s Republic of Vietnam. But Ronald Reagan . . . Reagan might . . . he hates the communists.” She looked very serious as she said it.

  “So, they have been waiting for the right time, which you think is now.”

  “Yes.”

  “But where is the gold, the money? I can’t see them putting it in a bank.”

  “Andy, what if it is still out there? What if Hieu figured out where it is? What if that is why they killed him?” She put her hand on my arm, a warm gesture after a very frigid night.

  “What about the other guy?”

  “He knew too. They had to silence him.”

  “Okay, it’s a stretch, but okay. Where would you hide the South Vietnamese treasury and not put it in a bank? We know it fit on a cargo ship or ships.... That is a lot of gold.”

  “I don’t know. Would it be hard to unload by hand? Or at a pier?”

  “By hand, probably not practical. On a pier, it would be crated, but there is a much higher chance of being seen. Was it in crates or pallets?” I was chewing over the idea. It was hard because we had no idea how much gold there had been. There had been a run on gold leading up to the collapse, but much of that had been sold, stolen, or purchased from Chinese currency dealers, banks, or in shady spots on Tu Do Street. How much had there been to begin with? “Maybe it is in a storage unit in some small town. The South Vietnamese gold behind one of those orange doors with a padlock.” She giggled at the thought of it.

  “Andy, that would be funny. Bars and bars of gold in some nowhere town protected only by a padlock.” I had to admit the idea was amusing.

  “What do we know? We know that there was gold loaded onto a ship or ships sometime around April 27 or 28 of 1975. We know that the flotilla of ships made its way down the Saigon River and to Can Tho island during the evening of April 29. From Can Tho, they would have steamed under their own power or been towed east to the American fleet.” I had this vision of the former Vietnamese Navy, then the ragtag flotilla of cargo ships, Liberty ships, and yachts that comprised Nguyen’s “flotilla of defeat.” I wondered what he was feeling as dawn broke on the deck of the Adams, the sun coming up, angry, orange, and hot, and he realized—knew—that he had survived but had forever lost his home. Poor Nguyen.

  “What are you thinking about?” It was a singularly feminine question.

  “I was imagining what it was like to be on the flotilla of boats leaving Saigon. Could they hear artillery landing? Were they close enough to smell Saigon burning? What did the morning look like to them as they neared Can Tho and the American fleet? Were their eyes filled with defeat, or were they filled with hope for a new chance?” For men like Nguyen, it must have been bittersweet. He had saved his family but lost his war and lost his home.

  Did he weep privately, like I did in front of the small black-and-white TV? Watching the helicopters on the embassy roof over and over again. Each jolt of Chivas making Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather look a little more human as they talked numbers, statistics in front of their increasingly red-colored map of Vietnam. Cronkite and Rather, two trusted names, reeling off the manifest of defeat, manifest of towns and cities fallen to the NVA. Their manifest of woes.

  “That’s it!” The thought, when it came to me in a moment of clarity, hurt my tired head.

  “What is it?”

  “Records.”

  “What?”

  “There will be shipping records. Each ship. Maybe not as complete as peacetime, but ports of entry, etcetera. There are maritime records that can be checked, and then we can check all the corporate records for Global Sea Transport imports. We might even be able to cross-reference ships that they have now to ten years ago.”

  “It seems like a lot of work.” She said it doubtfully.

  “Oh, it is,” I assured her cheerfully.

  The nice thing about being in Washington, D.C., was that we had access to the world’s best libraries. The Smithsonian would put the Great Library of Alexandria to shame if it were still around. It took a little work with the telephone and phone book to figure out where to go to find the last ten years of maritime registries and shipping records. We were also on the hunt for the business incorporation records for Global Sea Transport, and they were here in DC also.

  We ended up at the public library. It was a huge task, and I expected it would take hours. We split up. She went to look for anything to do wi
th Global Sea Transport in the old business records. I went to the national ships registry and looked up Liberty ships that we transferred over to the Vietnamese Navy. The list wasn’t very long, and I noticed that the John Q. Adams was one of them. She was renamed in Vietnam, but her name was changed back in 1976.

  The Adams and the rest of her cohorts left Vietnam in 1975. One was scrapped in the Philippines. The other two were sold to a Panamanian cargo line that seemed to specialize in cheap ships that ended up at the bottom of the ocean floor.

  But the Adams and one other ship made it to the United States. There the John Q. Adams reverted to her old name. She ended up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, the Mothball Fleet in Suisun Bay, California, where she appeared to stay for the better part of the last decade.

  The Mothball Fleet were a bunch of ships that the navy kept around in case there was another full-scale war and the government needed to rapidly enlarge its sealift capabilities in a hurry. Depending upon the ship’s age and upkeep, they could have old ships seaworthy in weeks or months. The ships were moored in rows and rows in different bays and rivers in the lower forty-eight.

  It might also be a neat place to secure a bunch of gold you didn’t know what else to do with. The fleet was patrolled and guarded. They had maintenance crews that kept them afloat and ensured that they could be brought back to seaworthiness. It would be simple to leave some cargo on board and to guard it. It would keep it away from prying eyes, away from people who watch government facilities and warehouses. It would keep it out of banks and gold exchanges, where there would be records. In short, it might allow it to become an invisible type of currency.

  Later in the afternoon, she found me in the library, hunched over a table with copies of registries open and photocopies of various pages. She told me what she had found out about Global Sea Transport . . . which was not much. It had been incorporated in 1980. Before it was Global Sea Transport Import Export it had been called Near East Imports, then before that Far East Imports, and before that it was US-Asia Export, Inc. They had the office in Fairfax, and they had an office in San Francisco. Suisun Bay was part of the San Francisco Bay, but it was to the east or inland of San Francisco. Also, the army had the Presidio army base in San Francisco, and the navy still had some real estate there, too. They had Treasure Island, which was a man-made island. It had been made for the San Francisco World’s Fair, but the navy grabbed it during the outbreak of World War II. Neither branch was giving back precious San Francisco real estate. If the company and some version of Air America was involved, they couldn’t have chosen a better place to be. Travis Air Force Base was across the bay as well. There was also Naval Air Station Alameda just outside of Oakland. The Mothball Fleet made more and more sense. It would be close to government facilities, government support, and Southeast Asia. It was an excellent version of hiding in plain sight.

  “You did good work.”

  “Thank you. How about rewarding me by taking me to dinner? I haven’t had anything to eat in hours.” She was right; we had worked through lunch.

  “Of course.”

  It had taken us all morning and afternoon to find out not very much. We decided to head back to Boston in the morning. She said that she wanted to enjoy the Hay-Adams hospitality for one more night. I think she was a little taken with the four-poster bed and the wealth of pillows. I certainly had never slept in such luxury. Or maybe it was the hope of tonight being better than last night.

  We gathered up our photocopies and notes and went outside for a cigarette and to find a cab. We got one and went to the hotel to drop everything off and freshen up. In the cab, she leaned against me and held my hand. Her head was against my shoulder and she smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and shampoo. It was nice to hold hands in a cab with a pretty girl. It had been a while.

  The cab took a circuitous route, as they do a lot in Washington, D.C. The city, in its infinite wisdom, had set up zones for fares instead of making it mileage based; you paid by the number of zones you went through. If you were going from one zone to the end of another, it might be a long trip, but they couldn’t charge by mileage. This led to either cabbies not wanting to go to certain locations or driving around to ensure they hit enough zones to make it worth their while.

  We decided on Chinese for dinner, and the hotel recommended a restaurant a short walk away. Thuy had changed into a black dress that was clingy without being too clingy and low heels. She threw on a denim jacket that came down to the bottom of her rib cage. I changed my shirt and washed my face. I slipped the .38 into the waist of my khakis and wondered if the gun would leave oil on the light blue shirt. I had on my denim jacket and trench coat.

  A light spring rain had started to fall and huddling under an umbrella for the short walk felt romantic. For some reason, Washington in the early evening always felt like a romantic city to me. It wasn’t Paris or even Boston, but it was romantic. Maybe it was the cherry trees and their pretty blossoms? As an added bonus, we weren’t being followed, as far as I could tell.

  We found the restaurant. If The Blue Lotus celebrated its tacky, faded, New England take on Chinese food then Jade Dragon took itself very, very seriously. There was no cliched neon but instead a sign that was simply a green dragon, swinging above the door. The door was flanked by what were supposed to be two terra-cotta dogs that sat chest high. Inside, the lights were soft, and the black lacquered wood shone. There were koi ponds and water effects, paper lanterns, and green bamboo seemed to grow strategically around the room. There was the ubiquitous golden cat, one paw raised, looking for a high-five that would never come. This one was two-thirds the size of the one at Nguyen’s.

  We were seated at a table, and Thuy and the waitress, who could have been twenty or forty, hit it off. Thuy spoke to her in what I assumed was Chinese. I was no expert, but it seemed that she spoke fluidly with few pauses. The waitress wrote things down, laughed politely, and turned on her heel and headed for the kitchen.

  “Do you speak Chinese?” I was curious.

  “I speak some Mandarin but not fluently.”

  “You could have fooled me. Where did you pick it up?”

  “Oh, growing up in California there were still big Chinese communities. I learned it there.”

  “Oh. Cool.” I was not a linguist. I spoke German, because of my mother; English, because of my father and Our Sisters of Perpetual Piousness; and some Vietnamese, because of the army.

  “I ordered for us. I hope you don’t mind.” The waitress arrived with a glass of scotch for each of us, then a steaming wooden container of dumplings.

  “No, not at all. I trust your judgment.”

  “Andy?” She was looking down at her dumplings.

  “What?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” She looked up at me with large, brown eyes.

  “Sure.”

  We both used chopsticks, each of us nimbly, and dipped the dumplings in soy sauce with ginger and scallions before eating them. They were fantastic. Balls of steamed pork mixed with garlic and scallion, inside chewy dough. The sauce brought out the flavors, and the ginger rounded it all out.

  “You promise you won’t get mad?” She looked at me with an earnestness that even Meryl Streep couldn’t perform.

  “Well, I . . .” Never, in my short life, had that request indicated something good was about to happen.

  “Andy, do you promise?”

  “Sure, doll.” My best Bogie to the Vietnamese equivalent of her Bacall. I liked her. Possibly a lot.

  “Why don’t you want to go to the memorial?” Her large brown eyes looked at my face, looked in my eyes for something that wasn’t there.

  “It’s complicated.” I wasn’t ready for this.

  “Does it remind you of the bad things you did, had to do? The people you killed?” She was so earnest she didn’t realize what a raw nerve she was tugging on.

  “No . . . not so much that. That was war. The NVA and Cong were doing their best to kill me. . . . I am pre
tty sure they don’t feel bad about that or the friends of mine they did kill. I am not saying I don’t think about that, but it is just one part of it.”

  “Then what . . . ? You seemed so angry yesterday,” She was persistent.

  “Thuy, it is tough to explain.” It wasn’t tough to explain.... Having to think about it, talk about it . . . give voice to it, that was tough.

  “Please, Andy, please try. . . . It is important to me.”

  “Okay. . . . It isn’t about what I did or had to do. I am not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it. There is no glory in killing. That was just the war, my small part of a small war.”

  “Then why don’t you want to go see it? It looks magnificent and haunting.”

  “Thuy . . . I don’t want to see it because I lived, many of my friends and brothers didn’t.”

  “Isn’t that good? You are alive.”

  “No, it is . . . and it isn’t. Most of my friends, men who were my brothers, . . . they died. Their names are on that wall. Why did I live? Why me? How come I am not on that wall instead of them? I wasn’t any better than them or any more deserving than my brothers. Or, for that matter, just the average guys who got drafted who are on that wall. Why them and not me?”

  “Andy, you couldn’t control that. Any of that.”

  “No, I couldn’t, but that doesn’t change anything. They are dead and I am alive. They didn’t particularly deserve to die, and I didn’t particularly deserve to live.” I didn’t add that I was trapped with memories of them, that I saw a lot of my old friends at night when I should have been asleep.