The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  On the walk back to my hotel, a man with bug eyes and a major overbite pulled his motor scooter to a rolling stop and asked me if I was in the market for “number one boom-boom”— what I presumed to be female companionship. I declined and continued on.

  Two well-groomed, put-together Vietnamese men were standing outside the hotel, smoking and pretending to converse, each covering the other’s back. Midtwenties, pressed slacks, subtle bulges at the waist under their polo shirts, where their holstered pistols rode. One locked eyes with me. He said something, then the other turned and eyed me as well. The only other people who look at you that way on the streets of Hanoi are those trying to sell you something. I made them as either undercover cops or intelligence agents.

  “Afternoon, gents.”

  They quickly, uncomfortably looked away and said nothing as I strode past them into the hotel.

  V

  A soldier on the sixth floor held me at gunpoint near the elevators while another telephoned his superiors to make sure I was cleared to see the two prisoners. I bided my time by pretending to study the guy guarding me, in a clinical psychologist sort of way. He didn’t seem to appreciate that. A couple of minutes passed before my clearance was confirmed and I was allowed in to see Stoneburner. His first words were, “How much longer am I going to be stuck in this shithole?”

  I cranked up the sound on the television—it was turned to BBC news—before telling him I didn’t know. I wasn’t about to divulge that Vietnamese authorities were planning to transfer him and Cohen to a prison in three days. The news would’ve only agitated him more than he already was.

  “There is some good news,” I said. “We got word to your wife and let her know you’re doing okay.”

  “I’m not doing okay,” he said, pacing the room in his underwear and wiping the sweat off of his face with a hand towel. “I’m going nuts in here. I should’ve listened to her and never come on this trip.”

  “You need to take a deep breath, sir, and relax.”

  “Don’t you tell me what I need to do, sonny. You have no idea what I’ve gone through, what these sons of bitches put me through the last time I was here. I didn’t murder that bastard. I did nothing wrong. I want out of here.”

  He stormed past me and tried to force open the door.

  “Open this goddamned thing right now!” he said, pounding on it.

  The door quickly opened inward, nearly knocking him off his feet. The two soldiers I’d dealt with earlier stood in the entryway with their assault rifles at their waists, fingers on triggers, yelling in Vietnamese. Stoneburner was yelling, too, vowing to kill them both if they didn’t let him out. I clamped my arm around his chest and pulled him back inside the room, assuring the guards that everything was under control. They didn’t comprehend a word I said, but they seemed to get that the old man, though upset, was no threat to them and that I was doing my best to ease the situation. One of the soldiers pulled the door shut. Stoneburner sat down on the edge of the bed and wept.

  “Them and their goddamned gibberish. I. I just want to go home, can you understand that? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “You are going home, Captain,” I said, gripping his shoulder, “just hang in there.”

  We talked for a while, everything from airplanes to the weather. By the time I’d left, he’d fallen asleep, curled on the bed like an infant.

  The soldiers let me out and escorted me down the hall to Cohen’s room. His demeanor was placid. He’d overheard the ruckus in the hallway involving Stoneburner and expressed concern.

  “The captain had a slight meltdown,” I said. “He’ll be fine.”

  My old professor gestured toward his balcony. I followed him out the sliding door. The cacophony of the city engulfed us.

  “I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first,” he said, talking low and close, “then I remembered. Cadet Logan. The smart mouth. Good to see you again.”

  “Always nice to make an impression. Good to see you again, too, Colonel.”

  “Now maybe you can tell me what you’re really doing here in Hanoi.”

  I told him, the truth this time. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He wanted to know what I’d learned in the course of my investigation that might help clear him and Stoneburner as well as Billy Hallady, who’d escaped Vietnam with his grandson and had made it home safely. I was reluctant to get into specifics involving Jimmy Luc, the jealous thug who may or may not have killed Mr. Wonderful for cheating with Jimmy’s wife. The less Cohen knew, I figured, the safer I was and the easier it would be for him to plead ignorance if and when the Vietnamese pressed criminal charges against him.

  “We’re gonna get you out of here, Colonel,” I said. “That’s all I’m prepared to say at the moment.”

  “Understood.”

  The room door opened. One soldier stood guard in the hallway while another brought in a cheeseburger and fried noodles. He set the tray on the desk and left.

  “One thing I can’t complain about is the chow,” Cohen said. “At the Hilton, you were always famished. We’d eat anything we could get our hands on. Maggots were considered protein.”

  He slid the balcony door shut behind me, turned up the television, sat at the desk and dug in, seeming to relish every bite. I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything since the few peanuts and bits of melon I’d had at former guard Duy Van’s house. Cohen noticed me staring at his plate and offered me some of his food.

  “I insist,” he said, slicing his burger in half. “Please.”

  He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I sat on the edge of his bed and dug in.

  “You mind me asking you a question, Colonel?”

  “Please. Questions are the cornerstone of philosophy.”

  “And philosophy,” I said, “is the cornerstone of man.”

  Cohen seemed pleased. “Well, I can see you weren’t the only one who made a lasting impression. What’s your question, Mr. Logan?”

  “What was the worst part of being a POW?”

  Cohen drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. What I remember most was not the story he proceeded to tell me. What I remember is the way he told it, the almost eerie dispassion of his words, as though he were recounting another man’s ordeal, not his own.

  He’d been in solitary confinement for several months, he said, his cell a sweatbox in which no light or air could penetrate, his ankles in leg irons bolted to the unpadded, concrete bunk on which he spent his days and nights, when the door suddenly opened and three guards entered, including Mr. Wonderful. He was big for a Vietnamese, pushing six feet and 200 pounds, with a nervous tick over one eye and a thin, hard mouth that could only be described as bestial. Other prisoners had come to know him as a master torturer, an innovator of few words who was always inventing new ways to inflict pain just short of death. Cohen had never met him before; he was about to discover just how good Mr. Wonderful was at his job.

  “His English was excellent. He demanded that I sign a confession admitting my ‘crimes’ against humanity and the people of Vietnam. I refused. He punched right in the face. Broke my nose. I told him to go to hell. He told me, ‘Cohen, you are a criminal. You will be punished.’ That was the end of the conversation.

  “They chained my wrists behind my back. Then Mr. Wonderful hauled me to my feet and beat me bloody for a solid ten minutes with a three-sided ruler—he loved the ruler. When he was done, the other guards dragged me to Room 18. We called it the Meat Hook Room. This time, he beat me with his fists. For how long, I don’t know, because I blacked out.”

  When he returned to consciousness, courtesy of several face slaps, Cohen found that the guards had shackled a cement-filled iron bar about nine feet long across his ankles. They rolled him over on his stomach. Mr. Wonderful took a length of rope and tied each of Cohen’s arms from shoulder to elbow. Two other guards then stood on either arm, tightening the rope until his elbows touched.

  “The pain, no one can imagine it,” Cohen said with a fara
way look. “I tried to think of anything to take my mind away from it. The teachings of Sartre. The slow, seductive way my wife would undress when she knew I was watching her. What it felt like, my stomach, the first time I soloed an aircraft. But you can’t escape pain like that. Nobody can. And they knew that, the Vietnamese. They were masters at it.”

  They left him lying there, bound that way, for what Cohen estimated was about an hour. The pain had subsided by then and his arms had gone numb. Mr. Wonderful returned and loosened the ropes. The blood flowed back into Cohen’s limbs along with a burning so excruciating that he vomited and soiled himself. Again, a signed confession was demanded. Again, he said he refused. Enraged, Mr. Wonderful released the iron bar that had been chained to Cohen’s ankles and laid it across his shins, then stood on the bar while the other guards jumped up and down on either end. When this failed to produce the desired results, Mr. Wonderful and his fellow guards raised Cohen’s torso off the floor with his arms manacled behind him and began dragging him around and around the room by his handcuffs. Several times, Cohen feigned unconsciousness, hoping they’d stop. Each time, Mr. Wonderful would merely pull Cohen’s eyelids up, smile, and the torture would continue.

  Until Cohen finally gave in.

  “I signed a confession that night. I couldn’t even really tell you what it said. My eyes were too swollen from the beatings. Will you excuse me a moment?”

  He got up from his chair and walked into the bathroom. I thought I might’ve heard whimpering, but it could’ve been the plumbing. The toilet flushed, the water in the basin ran, and my old professor reemerged. He was dry-eyed.

  “You’re a better man than I ever could be, Colonel,” I said. “I’m not sure I could’ve forgiven him had I been in your shoes.”

  Cohen patted me on the shoulder and slowly eased himself back down into his desk chair.

  “When I finally came home, my wife said I’d changed. She was right. There was no denying, I had changed. Started drinking too much and talking not enough. She hung on as long as she could. I couldn’t much blame her for leaving.” He gave me a sad smile. “You know, Kierkegaard was right when he said that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

  There was something palpably broken about him. One doesn’t endure what Steve Cohen and men like him did without the totality of the experience taking an irreparable toll on their souls and on those who try as best they can to love them.

  I said I’d stop in to see him again in the morning. The soldiers let me out. I took the stairs to my room. My hope was to catch a badly needed nap before going to dinner that night with Mai.

  The day didn’t quite turn out that way.

  ELEVEN

  Colonel Truong Tan Sang of the Ministry of Public Safety was waiting inside my room. He’d already helped himself to a bag of chips from the minibar, along with a mini bottle of Jack Daniels, and was stretched out on my bed, shoes off, arms behind his head.

  I shut the door and tossed my card key on the desk.

  “Make yourself at home, Colonel. Can I get you anything else? A robe? Slippers? A copy of basic privacy laws?”

  “Why is it you only have seventeen friends on Facebook, and that they all became your friend only last week?”

  “I don’t understand your question,” I said, stalling until I could figure out where he was coming from and how much he knew.

  He took a sip of whiskey. “It’s as if someone created a profile under your name online to make it appear as if you are a real person.”

  “As you can see, I’m clearly a real person, just not a very savvy one when it comes to social media.”

  “I see.” Tan Sang’s expression left little secret that he had his suspicions. “So tell me, Doctor, how in your professional estimation are your patients faring psychologically?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances, I suppose.” I watched him slip his shoes back on. “These are old men. They were traumatized the last time they were in your country. Being under house arrest conjures no shortage of bad memories from the past that are never far below the surface.”

  “We all have bad memories, Dr. Barker. The night my mother was killed by your B-52s as she stood in her kitchen is a memory that also is never far below the surface.”

  “I’m sorry your mother was killed, Colonel. Sincerely I am. But to hold these men responsible for that, or for a crime they might not have committed, it’s not fair.”

  He set what remained of his drink on the nightstand and swung his feet over the side of the bed. “What do you know of fair, of having bombs rain down on you? You, Doctor, don’t know the first thing about fair.”

  “What makes you so sure one of them killed the guard? What if it was someone else? A Vietnamese. A random street crime. A disgruntled business partner. A jealous husband, maybe.”

  I studied Tan Sang’s face, hoping for some reaction, a subconscious microexpression, that might tell me my own suspicions were not ill-conceived. His features, however, remained impenetrable. He got up and walked on my balcony. I joined him there. On the street below, two Vietnamese teenagers in high heels and tight jeans were walking arm in arm, laughing about something. Tan Sang watched them with what seemed like more than casual interest.

  “You have been asking many people many questions,” he said. “Questions that have no bearing on your job as a psychologist.”

  “Whatever questions I ask of anyone are all geared to ensure the emotional welfare of the men I’ve been sent here to take care of.”

  “You insult my intelligence, Doctor.” He fixed me with a hard look. “We both know why your government sent you. To deflect blame and accuse the peaceful Vietnamese people of fabricating a criminal case against your ‘innocent’ old men. But let me assure you, there is no need to fabricate anything. One of them is guilty. Or all of them.”

  “How can you be so certain, Colonel?”

  He dug out a folded sheet of paper from the left front pocket of his trousers, handed it to me, and watched with keen interest as another underage girl walked by on the street below.

  The paper was a printout, a copy of a feature article from the Riverside Press-Enterprise that had appeared online about a month earlier. The story detailed how retired air force officer Billy Hallady, a resident of nearby Redlands, would be attending a gala, State Department-sponsored dinner in Hanoi where he and two other former prisoners of war planned to bury the hatchet with an ex-guard nicknamed “Mr. Wonderful” from the Hanoi Hilton. The story quoted Hallady as saying, “We took a blood oath back then that if we ever got the chance, we’d make him pay for what he’d done to all of us, but that was forty years ago. None of us would ever do anything like that today. It’s long past time to forgive and forget.”

  “This is what you’re hanging your case on? A story in some newspaper that may or may not have quoted an old man accurately?”

  “The quote is accurate.”

  I followed him back inside. “Even if it is accurate, Colonel, it says right here, ‘None of us would ever do anything like that today. It’s long past time to forgive and forget.’ ”

  “We have other evidence, I can assure you.” Tan Sang plucked the article from my hand and strode toward the door. “I agreed that you could remain in Hanoi until the American criminals are relocated for their own safety. I will continue to abide by my word. But if I find out that you are continuing to go about, asking questions, I will have you arrested for espionage. If that happens, I can assure you, Dr. Barker, those old men will see their homeland long before you do.”

  V

  Mai said she’d never had Mexican food. Easily understood, I suppose, considering where she was from. Probably not a lot of Taco Bells in Singapore. She’d done research online and found that one of the few Mexican restaurants in all of Hanoi was located a mere four blocks away from where we were both staying. The place had garnered decent reviews and Mai seemed game. As we headed out of the hotel and into the crowded street
s, I spotted the surveillance almost immediately.

  He seemed too old and too well fed to be the roving postcards vendor he was pretending to be. The fact that he made no apparent attempt to sell anyone any postcards on the street was my first clue that he was likely an intelligence agent. The second was that every time I glanced back over my shoulder at him, he’d stop and turn away, pretending to look in shop windows. He could not have been a more obvious tail had he been wearing one.

  The place was called Bueno! Inside the door hung an oversized black velvet painting of a Mexican bandito smoking a cigar, ammo bandoliers slung across his chest. Sombreros hung from the ceiling. Colorful serapes decorated the walls. On the cashier’s stand sat a plaster cast of a human skull wearing a World War II German helmet.

  “This place is almost more Tijuana than Tijuana.”

  Mai smiled as if she got the reference, but I doubt she did.

  We took a table overlooking the street while the postcard vendor took up station at a souvenir shop across the way. A Vietnamese waitress in a Mexican peasant top and flowery, floor-length skirt, who didn’t seem especially happy about working at Bueno!, brought us menus. They were in Vietnamese, with corresponding photos depicting the usual Mexican fare.

  “What tastes best?” Mai asked me.

  “Tough to screw up chicken tacos.”

  “Chicken tacos it is.”

  I pointed out the picture of the chicken taco plate for the waitress, then pointed to what looked like a burrito smothered in chili verde sauce. She jotted down our order wearing a slightly pained expression and departed.

  “As we were walking over here,” Mai said, “you kept looking back.”

  “Did I?”

  She nodded.

  “Force of habit, I guess.” I said. “Bill collectors. You can never get away from those guys, even abroad.”