The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  “Where you go, sir?”

  “The Metropole.”

  “I take you.” His smile was a testament to lifelong dental neglect.

  “How much?”

  He held up four fingers. Forty thousand dong.

  I held up two fingers. He countered with three. The ride would cost me about a buck and a half.

  “You England?” he asked as he pedaled.

  “American.”

  “Ah, yes.” He flashed bad teeth. “America number one.”

  “You give a lot of Americans rides?”

  “America number one,” he repeated.

  I got out my phone and showed him the driver’s license photo of Sean Hallady.

  “Ever seen this man before?”

  More smiling and nodding.

  “You saw him, this man?”

  Another pleasant nod. “America number one.”

  Logan, you must be living right. Hundreds of cyclo drivers in Hanoi, and I happen to run into the one who remembers Sean Hallady. I commended myself on my good fortune.

  “Where did you see him?”

  “America number one.”

  “Right. I got that part. I need to know where you saw him and when.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “America number one.”

  That’s when I realized my driver had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Do you know what you get when you cross a marine with a gorilla?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about a cow and a trampoline?”

  “America number one.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

  Phu Dung, my interpreter, was waiting in the lobby of the Metropole when I walked in. He was stationed in a high-back armchair where he could keep an eye on all the approaches, sipping tea like he was a member of the landed gentry.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you,” he said, eyeing everyone who came and went. “It was not difficult.”

  “My countersurveillance skills must be a little rusty.”

  “So it would seem.”

  He wanted to know what I was doing at the Metropole. I said I intended to hopefully find an employee or two who was there that night, who could help shed light on the timing of events that led to the murder of Mr. Wonderful.

  “No one will talk to you,” Phu Dung said.

  “Sure they will. International hotel like this, everybody speaks English.”

  “Even so, you are an outsider. Outsiders cannot be trusted.”

  “I’ll pretend I’m Vietnamese.”

  Phu Dung smiled and stood. “Let’s go.”

  “Lemme guess: you know somebody.”

  We were going to see an acquaintance of his former brotherin-law. The man had served with Mr. Wonderful at the Hanoi Hilton.

  V

  Duy Van was the former guard’s name. He lived on the other side of the Red River, in the northern Hanoi suburb of Long Bien. The rusting, cantilevered bridge spanning the river, linking the Vietnamese capital to the port city of Haiphong, had been bombed repeatedly during the war. Back then, it was among the most heavily defended targets in the world. I remember when I was at the academy seeing archival film footage of those attacks. It was one of the first times the air force had used so-called “smart” bombs—guided munitions. Riding across the bridge on the back of Phu Dung’s Harley, I could see sections that still remained damaged forty years later. Had it been worth the cost in human lives: trying to save, and the other hoping to destroy, so unattractive a hunk of iron? In truth, I suppose I could’ve asked the same question about all the many fixed targets I’d blown up on bombing missions in later wars.

  Duy Van and his wife resided in an apartment above a liquor store, along a narrow street flanked by tall, leafy trees. He met us enthusiastically at the door, a wizened, white-haired old man who grinned and pumped my hand like I was a visiting diplomat. He seemed pleasant enough. History compelled me to dislike him, regardless. Who knows what horrors he’d inflicted on Cohen, Stoneburner, Hallady and other captured American airmen?

  He gestured hospitably toward a couch and two matching chairs covered in a floral fabric that had seen better days. Phu Dung and I sat on the couch. Cheaply framed photos covered the walls. The canals of Venice. Michael Jackson. A portrait of the Communist revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh. Van lowered himself gingerly into one of the chairs, wearing what looked to be a genuine gold Rolex on his left wrist.

  I looked over at Phu Dung. “Does he speak any English?”

  “No.”

  “Where’d he get the watch?”

  Phu Dung inquired politely. Van responded in Vietnamese, pouring three shots of scotch from a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. It was not yet 0800.

  “He says he bought the watch.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d taken it from an American prisoner of war.

  Van handed me a shot. I knew enough not to insult him by turning it down. When a man invites you into his home, friend or foe, and offers you a drink, you drink, even if you don’t drink, and even if you don’t like him—especially if you’re there to get information.

  He raised his glass and proposed a toast in Vietnamese. He and Phu Dung gulped down the scotch. I held the glass to my lips and pretended to sip. The aroma, the taste, it all came back to me. I wanted more than just about anything to throw that shot back, to pour myself another, and another. Somehow, I didn’t.

  A frail old woman—Van’s wife, I assumed—shuffled in from the kitchen clutching a platter of food with both hands. Slices of cantaloupe, honeydew melon, and a gold-lacquered bowl heaped with salty spanish-style peanuts. She set the platter down on the coffee table in front of me and returned to the kitchen without so much as looking up. Van gestured: help yourself.

  “Why’s he being so chummy?”

  “I told him that you are an important writer. That you have come to tell the truth.”

  “. . . The truth?”

  “How your captured pilots were treated with compassion and punished only when they did not obey the rules.”

  With compassion? Something sour-tasting rose up in the back of my throat and stayed there. The urge to grab the old man by his throat was almost irresistible. Somehow, I resisted that urge, too.

  “What can he tell us,” I said, “about Mr. Wonderful?”

  Phu Dung asked. Van talked nonstop in Vietnamese for more than five minutes, hands gesticulating, voice rising and falling. I could’ve just as easily been a potted plant for all the attention he paid me.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Phu Dung acted like I wasn’t there and continued conversing with the former guard while he poured him another scotch. Van said something and they both laughed. I’d never heard my interpreter laugh before. It sounded vaguely like Kiddiot throwing up a hairball.

  “What’s funny?”

  Phu Dung wiped tears from the corners of his eyes. “How many men does it take to open a bottle of beer?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “None. A man’s woman should already have the bottle open for him.”

  Phu Dung laughed again. I didn’t.

  “Ask him if he tortured any American servicemen during the war.”

  Phu Dung’s smile faded. “We are guests. To ask this kind of question would be disrespectful.”

  “Ask him or you don’t get paid.”

  Phu Dung gave me a hard look, then turned and asked.

  The former guard gulped down his drink and poured himself another. “Không bao giờ,” he said.

  “He says no torture, never.”

  “What about Mr. Wonderful? Did he ever torture Americans?”

  “He says nobody ever tortured anybody.”

  I glowered at Van. The old man couldn’t meet my eyes. We both knew what had happened in that prison so many years ago.

  He began speaking rapidly in Vietnamese, gesturing animatedly, while Phu Dung
interpreted on the fly. The crux of it was that Van and Mr. Wonderful would get together every couple of weeks to kick back and reminisce about old times. After a few pints of bia hoi, the thin but deceptively potent drought beer popular in Hanoi, Mr. Wonderful would invariably begin boasting of his latest sexual conquest for Van’s vicarious pleasure. He claimed to have bedded more than one hundred women, married ones among them. It was because of his indiscriminate catting around, Van speculated, that Mr. Wonderful may have met his end. The husband of one of those women, he said, was a thug with ties to both the Hanoi police and the city’s vast criminal underworld. He went by the name, Jimmy Luc.

  Van further suspected that Jimmy Luc must’ve known about his wife’s infidelity because, in the weeks prior to his death, Mr. Wonderful had begun receiving hang-up calls at all hours of the night. One morning Mr. Wonderful found a freshly slaughtered chicken draped over the handlebars of his motorbike. He regarded it as both a threat and a warning.

  “How concerned was Mr. Wonderful that this Jimmy Luc might actually come after him for sleeping with Jimmy’s wife?” Phu Dung translated my question. The two Vietnamese men conversed for nearly a minute. When Van was finished talking, he poured himself another shot.

  “Not worried,” Phu Dung said. “He says Mr. Wonderful had many friends to protect him.”

  “Mr. Wonderful was paying off the police?”

  “Everyone in Hanoi pays off the police.”

  Van said Jimmy Luc owned a religious curio store in the Old Quarter and readily provided the address. It struck me as suspicious that the old prison guard would have that kind of detail at his fingertips, but I let it go. He asked Phu Dung to ask me when the article I supposedly was writing would appear and where he could get a translated version of it. Whatever Phu Dung said in response seemed to satisfy him. I thanked him curtly for his time, got up, and left.

  As I climbed onto the back of Phu Dung’s motorcycle, Van emerged from his apartment and insisted on giving me a coin. It was a gift, he explained in Vietnamese, a token of lasting peace between our two nations. The coin was a US nickel, minted in 1971. I wondered if he’d stolen that off of an American prisoner, too.

  He waved, friendly as can be, and watched us drive away.

  Merging into traffic, I tucked the nickel in my pants pocket, hoping the coin might bring me more than five cents worth of luck. Something told me I was going to need all I could get.

  TEN

  If you’re a small merchant in Hanoi selling, let’s say, miniature pagodas and tacky plastic statues of the Buddha, how do you eke out a living flanked by literally dozens of other small merchants, all selling basically the same junk? From an economic standpoint, it made no sense, but that’s how it works in the Old Quarter.

  Jimmy Luc, whose wife had allegedly been cheating on him with the late Mr. Wonderful, owned a shop at 81 Hang Quat Street. “Dất Thánh” was the name painted in yellow on the grimy canvas awning above the entrance. Phu Dung said it meant “Holy Land.”

  “I’d prefer to ask the questions this time, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Whatever you say,” Phu Dung said in a way that made it clear he minded plenty.

  A girl with plain features and dark straight hair was dusting a shelf of copper incense burners. She wore glasses and glanced at us shyly as she went about her work. Phu Dung said something to her in Vietnamese. She responded softly.

  “She says she would like for you to buy many expensive things so her family will not starve.”

  I picked out some incense, a plastic elephant, and a wooden Buddha that was about six inches tall. The girl tried to interest me in a larger, more expensive jade Buddha, but that Buddha sported a fiendish smile, the kind you’d see in a slasher movie.

  “Tell her when it comes to religious icons, less is more,” I said, smiling, as she rang up my purchase.

  Phu Dung told her. There was no response. The total came to less than five dollars.

  “Ask her how old she is.”

  “I am . . . nineteen,” she said with an embarrassed smile, braces on her teeth, as she carefully rolled my new Buddha in bubble wrap. “My English, not good.”

  “Better than my Vietnamese. What’s your name?”

  “My name Linh.”

  “Linh. Lovely name.”

  She said she was a college student studying tourism and marketing. She asked if I was enjoying my visit to Hanoi. I said I was. She asked me if I needed someone to show me the sites and volunteered for the position.

  “I already have a tour guide,” I said, pointing to Phu Dung, who’d gone outside to make a phone call. “Otherwise I would. You’re much prettier than he is.”

  She smiled demurely, pushing an errant strand of hair behind her right ear, and handed me a plastic bag containing my purchases.

  “Actually there is something you can help me with, Linh. I’m looking for the owner of this shop.”

  “The . . . oh-ner?” Her expression said she didn’t understand the question.

  “Jimmy Luc. The owner. We’re old friends. Is he around?”

  She licked her lips. “Jimmy not here.”

  “Where can I find him? It’s very important, Linh.”

  “I . . .” She shrugged nervously.

  “Will he be in later today?”

  Another shrug. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “When was the last time you saw him, Linh?”

  “I work now. Please.”

  Eyes darting. Dusting shelves a little too vigorously. She was frightened. Of what, I didn’t know.

  “I heard he was having problems with his marriage, with his wife. Is that true?”

  A shrug. She wanted nothing more than for me to leave.

  I rubbed the back of my neck and turned my head slightly, wondering what good I was doing there. That’s when I noticed them: the photos of various attractive men and women tacked to the wall behind the cash register. The majority were flashing smiles that were just a little too perfect, with teeth that were way too white, like the kind you see on lounge singers and soap opera stars. I guessed most of them to be Vietnamese celebrities. In each picture, the subject posed beside a short, fashionably attired Asian man with a winning smile, gold neck chains, and cold, hard eyes that looked like he’d slit your throat for pocket change. Thuggish Jimmy Luc, the alleged jealous husband. Had to be.

  “Good old Jimmy,” I said, peering closely. “The man never ages, does he?”

  She shook her head almost imperceptibly, dusting a shelf without making eye contact. Definitely Jimmy.

  I took a closer look at each photo if only to stall for time, hoping Jimmy might come waltzing in, unaware. One of the pictures showed him arm in arm with a redhead in a turquoise tank top. Loaded down with shopping bags, flashing a gap-toothed smile and wearing two-tone shades, the woman could’ve easily passed for the singer, Madonna. For all I knew, she was Madonna.

  The picture hanging on the wall below hers, however, was the one that grabbed my attention:

  Standing close beside Jimmy Luc was Colonel Truong Tan Sang of the Ministry of Public Safety—the very officer heading the investigation of Mr. Wonderful’s murder. Jimmy and the colonel were holding hands.

  V

  “Men hold hands in Vietnam,” Phu Dung said. “It does not mean what it means in your country.”

  “I’m not suggesting they’re taking cruises and warm showers together,” I said. “What I’m suggesting is, at a minimum, that they all apparently knew each other—Jimmy Luc, Mr. Wonderful, and Colonel Tan Sang.”

  “Many people in this world know each other.”

  “You don’t find the connection curious?”

  “Many things I find curious,” Phu Dung said, “including why your country felt the need to declare war on mine. But I no longer dwell on these things.”

  I didn’t feel like debating him. There would’ve been no point.

  We were sitting on stools in a haze-filled, second-floor coffee house across the boulevar
d from Hoàn Kiếm Lake, surrounded by male college students pecking away on laptops and iPads. The joint was up a narrow flight of stairs behind a luggage store—out of the way and hard to find, which was how Phu Dung liked it.

  “Look,” I said, “you can’t tell me it’s all coincidence. People don’t post a picture of themselves in their shop holding hands with the lead investigator in a murder they may well have committed.”

  He sipped his coffee and said nothing.

  Tacked to the walls were posters of British soccer clubs. The air inside the café was blue with cigarette smoke. We sipped steamed coffee with vanilla, sugar, and a raw egg stirred in. I watched a bead of sweat roll off Phu Dung’s hairless, bullet-shaped skull, down his nose, and into his cup. He seemed not to notice.

  “You have a woman?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “But you did.”

  I nodded, looking away.

  “She was beautiful?”

  “She was.”

  Phu Dung sipped his coffee, eyeing me. “You seem sad to me, Logan.”

  “You’re not exactly a barrelful of monkeys yourself, Phu Dung.”

  “. . . A barrelful of monkeys. You Americans and your expressions.”

  “Forget it.”

  He cracked his knuckles. “Whenever I am sad, I remember that I am not a woman, then I am happy. The only good thing about being a woman is that a woman gets the last word in any argument. Anything a man says at the end of an argument is the beginning of a new argument.”

  “Works that way in Vietnam, too, huh?”

  Phu Dung smiled. At least I think it was a smile.

  There are, of course, other advantages to being born male. Generally speaking, you can open your own jars. You need only shave your face and neck. You also tend to know stuff about carburetors. We could’ve chatted indefinitely on the transcultural differences between men and women, but I needed to get back to the hotel, to check on Cohen and Stoneburner. Truth was, I was also tired, still jet-lagged. I finished my coffee and got up to go. Phu Dung said he’d work up some fresh leads in hopes of finding Jimmy Luc. We arranged to reconvene at 0730 the next day near the lake, by the bridge.