The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  “Relax, boys. I’m just getting some papers.”

  Ever so slowly, I unpocketed the letters and handed them to the lieutenant. He skimmed the copy written in his native language and glanced briefly at the English version, then ordered me to wait downstairs in the lobby for further instructions.

  V

  They were waiting in the hotel’s reception area for the housekeepers to finish cleaning their room so they could check in. He was ruddy with coal black hair shot through with gray, and high cheekbones, like he might’ve had some Native American blood. His wife approximated what Janis Joplin might’ve looked like had she lived past sixty. She engaged me in conversation the moment I sat down, one of those always chipper, outgoing types eager to share the intimacies of their personal lives with complete strangers.

  “You look like you might be from America,” she said. “We’re Americans, too.”

  “Really? I would’ve never guessed.”

  “Born and bred. I’m Lydia Rostenkowski. And this hunka hunka burnin’ love is my hubby, Leonard.”

  Leonard nodded an annoyed hello, not looking at me, like he was used to his wife doing all the talking.

  “How’re you liking Vietnam so far?” Lydia asked me.

  “No complaints.”

  “Leonard wanted to drive to Albuquerque to visit his sister, like we do every year, but I said, ‘Leonard, I love you from here to the moon, but we are not going to visit your sister this year, and we are not going to Alamogordo just because they have a KOA campground down there. For once, we’re going on a real, honest-to-god vacation.’ And he said, bless his heart, ‘What about my cousin? He lives in Vietnam. We could go visit him.’ So, here we are. Pretty wild, considering neither of us has ever had a passport before and never even been out of the country, unless you count Nogales, which really doesn’t count because everybody from Mexico is now living in America.” She leaned forward, a twinkle in her eye. “You know what notebooks have that Mexicans don’t, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “Papers and borders,” Lydia said, cracking herself up. “Isn’t that right, Leonard? Isn’t that what you say all the time? ‘Papers and borders.’ Get it?”

  Her laugh reminded me of a machine gun. Leonard closed his eyes and gripped both arms of his chair like he was wishing it were an ejection seat.

  “We’re from Phoenix,” she said. “Well, actually, Leonard’s from Phoenix. I’m from Chicago, but I couldn’t stand those darned winters after a while. That lake wind. Goes right through you, especially when you get old. The blood thins. Where are you from?”

  “Rancho Bonita.”

  “Rancho Bonita, California?”

  I nodded, wishing the housekeeper would hurry the hell up so Lydia and Leonard could check in.

  “Oh. My. Gracious. Rancho Bonita,” she said. “That is such a fabulous place. I was there for a weekend once with my old boyfriend, right after high school. Drove his old VW out. He came down with this condition. The doctors said it was from surfing—not much surfing in Chicago, you know. All that water pollution out there, whatever. Talk about swelling. He couldn’t get his pants off without screaming. It was absolutely horrible. I mean, can you even begin to imagine?”

  “I’m trying hard not to.”

  She droned on about everything and nothing. The Buddha says that tolerance is letting others be different in their views and actions. I sipped my second cup of sweet tea of the morning, nodding politely in all the right places, and tuned her out.

  Through the windows, amid an endless procession of motorbikes and foot traffic outside the hotel, I watched a haggard-looking street peddler trying with little success to interest tourists in Zippo cigarette lighters—designed to look like those used by American servicemen during the war—that he was selling from a tray strapped around his neck. Another young entrepreneur outfitted with a pair of scissors and a tiny plastic stool was having better luck, barbering hair on the street.

  Approximately ten minutes passed before a top-of-the-line Lexus SUV, a black, RX 450, pulled up in front of the hotel. I automatically made a mental note of the license plate number—you never know when information like that can come in handy. Hey, it’s what I used to do. The doorman with the Elvis hair approached the Lexus from the passenger side. The rear window came down. Casually, the doorman looked both ways as if to make sure no one was watching him, then reached into the vehicle with his right hand and quickly pocketed something small that someone inside gave him. As he strode back to his workstation a little too casually, the army lieutenant I’d encountered upstairs emerged from the hotel. He approached the same Lexus where he offered a subtly reverent bow, then handed my letters to whomever it was sitting in the SUV’s right rear passenger seat. After about a minute, the passenger door opened and a hard-looking Vietnamese man stepped out.

  He was short and trim, with silver hair, dressed in a dark green uniform identical to the lieutenant’s—short-sleeved and open at the collar. Only this guy sported way more stars on his shoulder boards. I guessed him to be in his early fifties. The doorman held the door open for him and he strode into the lobby with the lieutenant following him at a respectful distance.

  Lydia was yammering on about how much her last root canal hurt. Listening to her was like undergoing a root canal. I excused myself from her monologue and stood as the man with the stars approached me.

  “Dr. Barker?”

  “That would be me.”

  “I am Colonel Truong Tan Sang.”

  The name came as no bulletin. He was the same man in the briefing photos I’d seen on my phone. We shook hands. He smiled, but there was no warmth behind it. His teeth were narrow and crooked, like misaligned pickets on a fence.

  “You are a psychologist?”

  “I am.”

  “Where, may I ask, did you receive your doctorate?”

  Intelligence operatives are taught to prepare their lies in advance, to have their cover stories down pat, in detail, thus reducing the chances of being caught off guard if their identities or motives are questioned. I knew I should’ve prepared more thoroughly, nailed down psychologist Barker’s backstory before landing in Hanoi, but there had been little time and I’d more or less blown it off. Now, nervous and jet-lagged, I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I’d earned my pretend PhD. I also knew that if I hesitated even a millisecond answering Tan Sang’s question, he might well smell a fraud and my mission would be over before it even began.

  “Penn State,” I said, hoping my guess matched the trail of fake credentials that Buzz and his team had established for me online. Wasn’t Penn State where his kid had gone to school? It was as good a gamble as any.

  “Ah, yes, Penn State.” Tan Sang raised his eyebrows a little too dramatically. “I myself studied a bit of psychology, Doctor. Are you familiar with the work in object relations theory by Professor Frost? He has been at Penn State for decades.”

  I was being tested. If I said I was familiar with Professor Frost and his work, and neither existed, my cover would be blown. If I said I’d never heard of Frost, and the professor really had taught at Penn State for decades, I’d similarly be toast. So I said neither. My old football coaches always said that the best defense is a good offense. At that moment, I was inclined to believe them.

  “We can stand here all day talking shop, Colonel. I demand to see the two United States citizens you’re holding. Immediately.”

  “This is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Doctor, not America. You are in no position to demand anything.”

  “Those letters I gave your lieutenant, duly signed by your own government, would suggest otherwise. If you attempt to deny me access to those men, Colonel, or to obstruct in any way my efforts to assess their psychological well-being, I’ll be forced to take the matter up with higher authorities. I hope you’re prepared to personally deal with the consequences.”

  Colonel Tan Sang wasn’t used to being challenged by anyone, let alone a forei
gner. He took a step back, but his hard gaze never left me as he conversed in Vietnamese with his lieutenant. The younger officer bowed his head repeatedly and kept saying, “Vâng, thưa ngài,” which I took to mean, “Yes, sir.”

  When he was done addressing his lieutenant, the colonel said, “Very well, Doctor. I have directed my comrade to allow you access to conduct your assessments, but for no more than thirty minutes a day. The criminals are to be transferred to a more secure facility for their own safety.”

  “You mean to a prison?”

  Tan Sang ignored my question. We both knew what he meant. “We are preparing the facility to make the criminals as comfortable as possible in consideration of their advanced age. We have our own mental health experts who will ensure their continued well-being. You will not be allowed to see them there.”

  “Read the letter, Colonel. My authorization grants me full access. It says nothing about thirty minutes a day. It says nothing about where I’m allowed to do my job.”

  “I am aware what the letter says, Doctor,” he said, his voice rising. “I am in command of this investigation and I am responsible for the two criminals.”

  “You realize, Colonel, that these men underwent almost unimaginable hardships the last time they were guests of your country. Putting them back in a prison cell could be catastrophic to their psyches.”

  “The death and hardships they subjected my people to before they became our ‘guests,’ Doctor, more than justified whatever treatment they received then. They will be treated fairly, as they were then. This is my decision.”

  “When do you propose to transfer them?”

  “Four days hence, at which time, with no other purpose to serve, you will be escorted to the airport and leave Vietnam.”

  “You’re kicking me out of the country? I just got here.”

  “Four days, Doctor.”

  I’d pushed him about as far as I could, but I wasn’t about to stand idly by while he railroaded two old men who’d yet to be convicted of anything.

  “I’d like to see my patients now,” I said.

  SIX

  The Vietnamese lieutenant and I rode up to the Yellow Flower’s sixth floor. Neither of us spoke. The elevator doors opened. He turned right. I followed him around the corner, down the hotel’s north side. There, facing each other across the hallway, were two pairs of soldiers holding their assault rifles at port arms, across their chests, standing guard on either side of two doors. At the end of the hallway, a fifth soldier stood guard at the entrance to the stairway. Though I couldn’t see him, given the way the hotel was configured, I assumed that the soldier who’d initially confronted me on the southern end of the floor was guarding the stairs there.

  The lieutenant searched me to make sure I wasn’t carrying any weapons or contraband. Then he said, “Fifteen minutes, each criminal.”

  “I can’t do my work in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  He swiped a card key, opened a room door, and stood aside. After I entered, he pulled the door closed behind me.

  Virgil Stoneburner was lounging on the bed in his boxer shorts. He lowered the Tom Clancy paperback he was reading and squinted at me with suspicion. Room service trays with half-eaten plates of food cluttered the floor.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Washington sent me. I’m a psychologist.”

  “You don’t much look like a psychologist.”

  “I get that a lot. How’re you holding up with all this, Captain?”

  “How am I holding up? I’ll tell you how I’m holding up. Shitty, that’s how.” Stoneburner sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed to pull his pants on. “These little cocksuckers have me locked up in here. They won’t let me talk to anybody. They’ve disconnected the phone so I can’t call my wife. They say I’m under investigation for some kind of murder, but they won’t say who I supposedly killed. Some limp dick from the embassy showed up yesterday. He won’t tell me, either, but says they’re doing all they can to get us out, and that’s the last time I saw him. Now the government sends in some psychologist? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  He was pallid and bespectacled. What little hair left on his scalp was gray and uncombed, and when he stood, buckling his belt, he wobbled. One leg was noticeably shorter than the other.

  “Look, I just wanna get out of here,” he said. “I already served my time in hell.”

  “That you have, Captain. No one could ever argue with that. You seem stressed. Have you tried listening to music?”

  “Music?” He was looking at me like I was a guy pretending to be a psychologist. “You think that’s what I need? Music?”

  “Music alleviates stress. It soothes the soul. What do you say we practice some meditative breathing techniques while we listen?”

  Stoneburner was incredulous. “What in the name of the Almighty are you even talking about?”

  The remote control to the room’s Russian-made, thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV was sitting on a lamp table beside the bed. I turned on the set, found what had to be the Vietnamese version of VH-1—an Asian Justin Timberlake dancing and singing his way through an up-tempo, hip-hop video—then cranked up the volume to drown out any listening devices that might’ve been installed in the room.

  “Okay, pal,” Stoneburner said, “now, you listen to me. Whoever or whatever you are, what I don’t need right now is listening to crap like this and putting up with your bull—”

  I held up a finger to quiet him, leaned over and whispered in his ear.

  “They’re saying you murdered Mr. Wonderful.”

  “The guard?”

  I nodded.

  He sat down slowly on the bed, stunned, his expression was one of disbelief. He started to say something. I sat beside him and pointed to my ear. He got the crux of what I was trying to do and leaned in close.

  “He’s dead? You know that for a fact?”

  “They found his body in a lake after your big dinner.”

  “And they think I did it?”

  “Or one of the others.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Stoneburner said. “And it sure as hell wasn’t Cohen or Hallady. I can promise you that.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Stoneburner looked up at me. “You don’t spend years in a prison camp with a man and not learn everything about him. I know Steve Cohen. I know Billy Hallady. Maybe they had thoughts like that back then, you know, to kill the sonofabitch— especially Billy. Billy got beat worse than any of us, believe me. Wouldn’t tell ’em a damn thing and spit in their faces. They’d knocked hell out of him two, three times a week. Nearly killed him I don’t know how many times. You couldn’t blame him for wanting revenge. Hell, we all did. But not now, not today. We’re all old men now. You don’t live as long as any of us has still filled with that kind of hate.”

  With the music blaring, Stoneburner recounted how he, Cohen and Hallady had gotten dressed up to attend the dinner that evening with Mr. Wonderful in the grand ballroom of the Metropole, Hanoi’s most elegant hotel, a holdover from French colonial days. He estimated that more than 200 others were also on hand—North Vietnamese veterans, Communist government dignitaries, and a handful of representatives from the US Embassy. The former POWs had been coached by embassy officials to be on their best behavior, and that much was at stake economically. Then Mr. Wonderful showed up. He was drunk, Stoneburner said.

  “He stood up after everybody got done eating and read some bullshit statement, which they translated for us, about how America was imperialist and how we’d been taught a valuable lesson by them kicking the crap out of us, but that we were all now good friends. No apologies, no nothing. We shook his hand because those were our orders. They snapped some pictures of us standing around together, like we were all good friends, and that was it. I saw him leave the hotel alone, about ten o’clock or so.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Mr. Wonderful. The three of us waited around for maybe
fifteen minutes, talking to the State Department people, then came back here. I’ve been stuck in this goddamned room ever since.” He wadded up a paper napkin and flung it across the room.

  “I don’t blame you for being upset, Captain. We just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Lemme tell you something, sonny. I spent the better part of seven years sleeping in leg irons. I can do this standing on my head. It’s my wife I’m worried about. I have no idea if she even knows what the hell’s going on over here. She has a heart condition. I was supposed to be home three days ago.”

  I told him I’d try to make sure his wife was kept informed of his situation.

  “We’re gonna do everything we can to get you out of here, Captain.”

  “Who are you, really?” he demanded.

  “Is there anything I can get you? Anything you need?”

  “Yeah,” Stoneburner said. “You can get me a time machine so I can go back and bomb this shit hole back to the Stone Age, like we should’ve done forty years ago.”

  “I’ll be back when I can. You take care of yourself until then. Try to keep calm.”

  “Calm, my ass. You tell whoever you’re working for that unless Cohen and I are out of here pronto, we will sue the living shit out of Washington for putting us through this nightmare again.”

  “I’ll let ’em know.”

  I rapped on the door. The Vietnamese soldiers standing guard outside in the hall let me out.

  V

  The television in Lieutenant Colonel Steven Cohen’s room was tuned to a taped broadcast from the nearby Hanoi Opera House. My buddy Buzz, the opera fan, would’ve loved it: A bejeweled soprano with big hair and even bigger pipes was performing an aria, hitting the kind of notes that can shatter crystal glasses. Cohen could’ve easily blown my cover, but he appeared not to recognize me as I walked in. I wasn’t surprised. More than two decades had passed since I’d graduated from the academy. How many hundreds of other cadets had attended his philosophy lectures in the interim, absorbing his learned insights on Plato and Confucius, John Locke and Descartes?