by AD Davies
Once the cigarette smoldered to a stub, he dropped and crushed it and undid a chain on the railing beside him. Mopeds, motorbikes and pushbikes—all were secured there. He heaved his vehicle to one side. I couldn’t get the camera to focus on the moving figure in low light. He looked around once more, then swung his leg and pulled into the road on…
A ladies’ push-bike. It even had a basket on the front. Either he borrowed his wife’s or he’d stolen it.
Jacket flapping behind, he merged with the traffic and I fired up the moped. I gave him a one-minute head-start, then rolled after him. Which was stupid. I caught up in seconds, and when I tried to slow down I wobbled and brought the irksome honks of a million horns. I sped up and passed my target without looking at him. In my mirrors, he didn’t appear too perturbed.
The road bent to the right and ahead of me was a flat street lined with offices and banks, turns feeding off it every few hundred yards. I couldn’t tail him this way. I got three junctions ahead, gambling that he wouldn’t turn off one of them.
Down the fourth street, a club pumped music out of tall doors and the familiar collection of young people with spiky hair and loose clothes gathered outside to laugh and dance and smoke. Over the club’s door, a black plastic sign read “đỏ phòng” in red writing. I pulled up to the young people, and when I removed my helmet I drew half a dozen curious looks and half a dozen aggressive ones. A twenty-something bloke in a white silk shirt spoke in macho Vietnamese, pointing his cigarette. I heard the word “American” and shook my head and said, “British.” That seemed to placate them, but then turned their backs to me, engrossed in their own conversation.
I said, “Anyone speak English?”
No one made a move to acknowledge me. I took out five twenty dollar bills and held them in the air.
“One hundred dollars for anyone who’ll lend me their bicycle.”
It made me feel like such a pig. I was swimming in money, but these people, well-dressed as they were, couldn’t even afford to get into a nightclub. Flashing my cash around seedy joints felt right, but playing the slick foreign savior, handing out cash for favors, it left me feeling dirty.
“Lend?” said one girl. She was pretty with heavy hips, tight Daisy-Duke hot pants and a vest. “Like, you bring it back?”
“Yes,” I said.
The cigarette-pointer said something to her. Again, I picked up “American” and he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. She waved him off. “So, you give me hundred dollars, I lend you bike, you bring bike back here, I keep hundred dollars.”
“Correct. And …” I patted the moped. “If I don’t come back, you keep this.”
She frowned. If it looks too good to be true…
“Okay,” she said. “Keys first.”
I gave her my keys and she unlocked her bike, a rickety-looking thing with no gears and one brake.
“Thank you.”
“Welcome.” She led eight of the group toward the door to the club.
I cycled back up the street, feeling the drain of two thousand dollars on my bank account.
The old bike was stiff, and I lumbered rather than rode. By the time I got back to the main road, the man with Gareth’s credit card was way ahead. At least he hadn’t turned off the street. I probably appeared ridiculous keeping the helmet on, but if he spotted a helmeted cyclist in his vicinity it would likely raise less suspicion than a Caucasian face.
I pushed myself hard, my shirt sticking to me as if I’d come out of a downpour. I remained about three hundred yards behind for the first mile, then he steered into a street. I reached that road in time to see him pull into an apartment complex of grey concrete.
His neighbors consisted of four residential blocks and a few shops and cafes, all closed. Streetlamps lit the road in a yellow hue, and as I left the main drag, the horns and engines sounded a long way away. Nothing moved except me. The squeak of the bike’s wheel was the loudest noise.
I trundled past the complex and the entrance led to an underground parking structure. No sign of the man. I stopped at the next junction. The building was six stories. Small balconies hung over the pavement. No lights. Open windows. No air-conditioning units.
On the pavement opposite, a raised bed held shrubs and plants and a couple of trees, and made a decent hiding place for both me and the bike. It wasn’t directly opposite the man’s home but as uninterrupted views went, this was pretty good.
I removed the helmet. Steam literally floated above my head. I folded myself behind a bush and sat in the dry soil. I watched as a dim light on the third floor came on for ten minutes and then died.
He was home for the night.
As night faded into dawn, a chugging tuk-tuk misfired. I jerked upright, my head shifting from a horrible angle on my shoulder. I hadn’t been asleep, but my body was crying out for it. Now alert thanks to that squirt of adrenaline, I crouched in the bush for another hour, traffic growing steadily, but there was no movement in the apartment. Commuters passed by, the occasional glance my way made me feel ridiculous, and proved this wasn’t an effective hiding place after sun-up. Most of the women wore traditional gear—long, colorful áo dài, the silk tunic over pantaloons, while the men seemed far more westernized in shirts and trousers. Three schoolgirls in dazzling white áo dài and conical leaf-hats giggled as they saw me emerge from the bushes to continue my “surveillance.” I use the term loosely, of course, because I was behaving like an amateur right now.
Out in the open. Taller by a head than ninety-five per cent of the foot-flow, with every person on the street giving me a wide berth. If the grinning fraudster on the third floor happened to look out, I could expect a posse of faithful barflies trotting up the road, settin’ fer a lynchin’.
Or something.
I crossed the road and popped into a clothes shop and browsed for an I Love Vietnam cap or some such, but this wasn’t a tourist area. Instead, the excitable old lady behind the glass counter placed a non la on my head, a cone-shaped hat much like the schoolgirls were wearing but this one was made of straw rather than leaves. I bought it and went to a café and sat at an outdoor table, where a bored teenage girl in shorts and a vest asked in Vietnamese what I wanted.
Without thinking I said, “Coffee, please.”
“You wan’ drip coffee or Nescafé?”
“Nescafé?”
Inside the café, behind the counter, sure enough, jars of Nescafé instant lined up behind the sweaty bloke with a red, bulbous nose and the approximation of a chef’s outfit.
“Drip coffee please,” I said, whatever that is.
Back home, the proliferation of American sitcom-inspired coffee-shops gave me great places to take prospective clients who didn’t want to meet in the office or in a wine-bar full of hooray-Henries, and also to take Harry if I wanted to watch his jaw hit the table when he saw how much a venti soy latte cost. He called me a coffee snob, which I did not take as an insult. Actually, he once fainted at the price of his white-chocolate and raspberry muffin. True story.
My drink this morning arrived in a metal filter placed on top of a large espresso mug with a jug of what appeared to be milk beside it, only thicker. Cream, perhaps? I must have looked as green as any first-timer, as the girl lifted the top off the filter. The coffee slowly dripped through to the cup.
Aha! That’s why they call it “drip” coffee. Good detective work.
While it dripped, I watched the apartment complex, a fruit and veg stall setting up between us. When my filter was empty, I watched what the other coffee-drinkers were doing. They poured in the white gloop, which turned out to be condensed milk, testing it for taste. I copied them and sipped. It set my mouth alive with sweetness and the kick from the coffee was like a thunderbolt. I drank it slowly and when my target failed to emerge, I ordered another along with something from the menu called Xoi Lac. It was the only thing I dared try to pronounce.
More waiting followed. I could call Jess to see if she could run a list of peopl
e registered at this address, but it would take hours and might not even work. I had no idea what systems the government used here. It’s not like hacking is an exact science, either. One government agency is not like the one in the country beside it, which can be like an English-speaker trying to order breakfast in Vietnam without pointing at pictures.
Adam’s Smug Travel Tips #45: Take a chance on food. Even if you don’t usually like “foreign food” back home, you might surprise yourself.
My breakfast was a sticky rice dish with roasted nuts and strong garlic, which was nice enough but my stomach flipped at the second coffee. I needed the loo, but didn’t dare risk losing the guy for a day. It was Saturday when I left England, and Benson set the deadline as midnight Friday, which made today Tuesday or Wednesday, I wasn’t sure. I was ahead of the UK here, so if I was experiencing Wednesday morning, Jess and Caroline and Jayne were still in bed on Tuesday night.
Then something caught my eye. In the periphery, over my shoulder. An actual car trundled up the road. I had seen only a smattering of them in the country, and this one was moving slowly.
It was a police car.
The men inside, one mustachioed, the other young and clean-shaven, slowed as they neared the café. I bowed my head to my cup, and pretended to drink. The last thing I needed was to draw the attention of the local constabulary. Any serious examination of my documents would mark me as an illegal, and I didn’t dare think how a communist police force would treat me.
The car passed at a leisurely pace and stopped outside the complex. It gave three blasts of the horn. No mistaking it for a polite moped-driver. The man I’d been following stepped out wearing a suit and tie and checking a gun under his jacket. The two uniformed cops greeted him and he climbed happily in the back seat, then the car drove away, honking into traffic.
I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and howled. Inside my head, of course. Not literally. My credit card thief was a policeman.
Chapter Thirty-One
That bar, full of men with guns. Close-knit. Protective. Wary of strangers. Saigon đêm was a cop hangout. Blow off some stress after work with booze and birds. Why not, it was a free country. Well, as free as any dictatorship, I suppose.
I checked the iPhone to see if I could ask Google about nearby police stations, but alas I’d been using it for more than a couple of hours, so it was dead.
I kissed goodbye to my two thousand dollar deposit, cycled back to The Rex, and slunk up to my room, dust and sweat forming a kind of soup on my skin. It wasn’t even nine a.m. yet. I showered while the phone charged, then used the hotel’s Wi-Fi to research police stations in Saigon. District One’s main station was on Duong Pasteur, and for once my luck was in. It was close to the Fideco building and the main Bank of Vietnam headquarters, both of which I could actually see from the rooftop bar. About five minutes’ walk. I dressed in khaki shorts and a microfiber shirt and, rather than carting around more photos, I snapped a couple of shots onto the iPhone, now at a quarter battery, and set off.
The police station dated back to before the war, and could easily have been mistaken for a bank were it not for the police cars and bikes parked out front and the various officers and patrolmen coming and going in their green uniforms with red epaulets. A couple of them nodded my way as I entered through the arched doorway and approached the front desk, a plain table with two older men behind it. An army of fans redistributed the hot air, but there was no air-conditioning that I could detect. I stood before the reception desk and one of the men—White Beard—looked up at me once, then back to his paperwork. His colleague, a clean-shaven wrinkly chap, didn’t even look up.
“Hello,” I said. No reaction. I used the iPhone to look up a translation. Lots of replies so I tried the easiest-looking one: “Alô!”
White Beard looked up again. “Alô,” he said. Then some more things I didn’t understand.
“Speak English?”
“No.” He went back to his paperwork.
I brought up one of the photos of the man I was looking for, one I snapped outside the Saigon đêm, and placed the phone in the path of White Beard’s pen. He stopped and laid his pen flat. He spread his fingers on the desk and gave me his attention with a smile that didn’t seem altogether genuine. “Làm những gì bạn?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t speak Vietnamese.”
He waved his hand behind his partition, indicating a vast open-plan area where people who I assumed were suspects or witnesses talked to men in suits, at desks dotting the cauldron of a work-floor. I assumed he was highlighting how busy the place was.
I pointed at the phone. “I’m looking for this man.”
I mimed binoculars and pointed again at the phone. I felt like such a dick, but it was less than forty-eight hours since I learned I was coming here. Charades were all I could rely on.
White Beard picked up my phone but gave no indication he recognized the man. He pressed the home button and showed his colleague, who shrugged. Another policeman came over, and then another. White Beard pressed buttons and went online. There were no apps or anything other than what came pre-installed, but he was finding plenty to amuse himself. The younger of the two new guys told him to do something, and he did. A roar of laughter from the trio. I tried to snatch the phone, but they pulled it out of reach. They were playing some pre-installed game.
“Come on,” I said. “I just need to—”
“You are looking for me, I assume?”
I turned to the voice. The rangy frame, the yellow teeth, the wet sore on his lip that he wore as casually as a tie-pin. Yes, the man I was looking for stood right there, not a drop of sweat to be seen. His badge said Thiếu tá Công an in small letters.
I said, “I can’t do anything to you here. You see that, don’t you? I’m not looking for a fight. I need information.”
He tentatively shook the hand I offered and I noticed his neat fingernails, his dry palm. “I am Major Giang. Lanh Giang.”
“Giang?” I said a little too eagerly. “Did you say your name is Giang?”
“Major Giang,” he said. “I am a senior officer here.”
… a bar or a restaurant or the name of a song… No, none of those things.
It was a man.
Just like that, the “Giang connection” was right in front of me.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Major Giang growled a couple of orders and White Beard handed back my phone. I thanked him and asked if we could talk somewhere.
Giang said, “Is this about the same thing as last night?”
“Yes, but I do not want to do anything that will damage you. I need answers.”
“I do not think that is something I must provide.” He signalled to the men who commandeered my phone and they came towards me.
I said, “I have proof,” and displayed my email on the iPhone, a list of bars and transactions on Gareth’s fake card. “It wouldn’t take long to get this to your commanding officer.”
No reaction.
“All it takes is a rumor,” I said. “The odd bribe here and there might be tolerated, but hundreds of dollars on a credit card stolen from a British national? They’ll screw you up, and your career will be ended. You know they don’t need undeniable proof, just enough for a strong suspicion.”
The cops escorted me to the door.
Giang said, “Khoan đã!” which dismissed the men. Quietly, he said to me, “There are not many policemen who speak English, but my desk has no privacy. I will meet you somewhere I think there will be no ears.”
“My hotel isn’t far—”
“Neither is the war museum. Meet me there in one hour. Inside the gate. A little cooler for you, and not too far to walk.”
I agreed and made as if to leave, but Giang did that tough-guy thing and stopped me.
“And Mr. Park…” He dabbed at his sore and flicked a dot of something off his breast pocket. “Do not record me, do not bring any friends, and do not try to mess with me. Right now
you are an inconvenience. Be more than that, I will make sure you regret it.”
I found the War Remnants Museum by flagging down a rickshaw and taking a ten-minute ride along the streets in the shade of the skinny young man’s red-fabric seat. He jogged at a good pace, his back wet, his bare feet hard and scaly. I gave him a ten-dollar tip, which he accepted with a great big smile.
Until the mid-90s, the War Remnants Museum was known as the American War Crimes Museum, and a Huey greets visitors as they enter the reception garden, lending a taste of what is to come. The Vietnamese call the Americans “invaders” while the Americans think of themselves as “liberators.” Every story in the museum was told, naturally, from a North Vietnamese perspective.
Further into the gardens, an F-5A fighter canted at an angle, a Japanese couple posing beside it, their phone on the end of a selfie-stick. A dozen-or-so tourists perused anti-aircraft guns, a second jet, a decimated US Jeep. Under the first awning that skirts the outer path, framed pictures of what they called “American Atrocities” dominated the walls and glass displays; burning children, the charred corpses of babies, beaming GIs posing with dead freedom fighters (not the “Viet Cong” or “Charlie,” strangely enough). As I digested the mechanics of one of the most horrific weapons ever deployed in modern warfare—napalm—Giang managed to approach and stand beside me. We were alone under the awning.
“I fought for the South,” he said. “A foolish boy who believed US propaganda.”
“You think communists invading from the North was propaganda?”
“No, I think teaching that communism is evil was propaganda. That was the great lie. Paranoia repeated today with Iraq and others—anything not democracy must be defeated. Unless the oil price is threatened.” He ran his fingers over the glass protecting a photo of helicopters fleeing Saigon. “When the imperialist invaders fled, I was enrolled in a school where I learned the truth about our war.”