The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  “Gimme a minute.” He waited impatiently, biting his left thumbnail and glancing anxiously down the street—at who or what I couldn’t tell—while I spooned out the last bit of broth. “Okay, lead the way.”

  The sidewalk was crowded with Vietnamese. We towered above them.

  “What do you want?” Underwood said.

  “I want to know why you told the fisherman to keep his mouth shut.”

  Underwood looked over at me like he had no idea what I was talking about. “What are you talking about? What fisherman?”

  “You threatened him if he told anybody about what he saw that night.”

  “Okay, look,” Underwood said, “I seriously don’t know who you are or what you think you know, but whatever it is, you’re wrong.”

  “You were seen that night, Carl,” I said, bluffing, hoping to get a reaction.

  A look came over his face, something between dawning realization and horror. “If you think for one second I had anything to do with what happened to that guard,” Underwood said, “you’re out of your mind.”

  I asked him how long he’d worked for the CIA. He denied working for the agency. I smiled like I knew better.

  “Look,” he said, “even if I did, you know as well as me I couldn’t tell you.”

  At least I knew that much to be true.

  We passed by a gelato shop, the likes of which you can find at any shopping mall in America, where teenage employees in pink uniforms scoop Italian-style gelato into paper cups. Customers were lined up. Gelato. In Vietnam. The concept for some reason was hard to get my head around.

  Dodging motor scooters, I followed Underwood across the street and inside a small convenience store. The shelves were crammed to overflowing with myriad canned goods and packages of dried noodles, all labeled in Vietnamese or Russian. The only items I recognized readily were bottles of Coca-Cola and a broad selection of American-made hair products.

  “We can talk here,” Underwood said.

  He told me he’d intended to call me that day, to let me know that Vietnamese authorities had refused him access to their files on the death of Mr. Wonderful.

  “That’s the bad news,” he said.

  “What’s the good news?”

  Underwood glanced around to make sure we were alone. We were. “The good news,” he said, lowering his voice, “is that I was able to obtain information from other channels on the knife that was used to kill the guard.”

  Lacking sophisticated spectrometers, officials in Hanoi had had the murder weapon flown to Moscow for analysis at the Russian Interior Ministry’s famed Forensic Science Center. Russian experts had determined that it was a knockoff of the most popular hunting knife ever produced, an American-made Buck Model 110 with a wooden handle and a folding blade measuring almost four inches in length when unlocked. Based on the amalgam of the metal used to forge the blade, the Russians had concluded that the particular knife in question was either Chinese in origin or made in Taiwan.

  “Any prints?” I asked.

  “No prints.” Underwood shook his head. “There was one thing, though. They found a tiny speck of paint on the handle. Oil-based. Waterproof. It had a high lead content, apparently.”

  What that told me was that the paint hadn’t come from the United States, where lead in manufactured goods has been outlawed for decades as a health hazard. Most likely, Underwood said, the paint was Chinese-made, but that didn’t help narrow down where the knife was from, considering that paint manufactured in China is distributed worldwide.

  “What color was the paint?” I asked.

  “They described it as aquamarine.”

  Aquamarine? He might as well have been speaking Swahili for all I knew. Beyond the basic shades—red, blue, green, et al—I’m lost when it comes to envisioning colors. I’m not colorblind. You can’t legally fly an airplane if you are. But for whatever reason, I have trouble equating names to fancier colors. I couldn’t tell you the difference between periwinkle and puce to save my life.

  “What color is aquamarine?”

  Underwood looked at me funny. “It’s a cross between blue and green.”

  “Good to know.”

  “There’s one more thing I found out,” Underwood said. “You know Colonel Tan Sang, who’s heading the investigation? He’s an avid knife collector.”

  “The knife belonged to Tan Sang?”

  Underwood shrugged noncommittally. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  It defied logic that a man suspected of murder would willingly confide classified information about his crime to someone obviously investigating that crime—unless he was purposely trying to be deceptive. Carl Underwood Jr. didn’t seem bright enough to be deceptive. But, as the old saying goes, sometimes you never know about people; sometimes, the dumb ones turn out to be not so dumb—with the possible exception, perhaps, of former US presidents.

  “How long have you been in Hanoi, Carl?”

  “Too long. I’m tired of the food, tired of the smell. I’m tired of the way these people are always correcting the way I speak.”

  “You speak Vietnamese?”

  “Enough to be understood, I suppose.”

  The iPhone vibrated in my pants pocket. The name on the screen said Phu Dung. I told Underwood I’d be in touch, walked outside, and took the call.

  “I’ve left you messages,” I said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Phu Dung seemed surprised that I was agitated.

  “Working,” he said, “for you.” In the background, I could hear the whine of jet engines.

  As near as I could make out, Phu Dung had gone drinking the night before with a former MiG squadron mate-turned-insurance broker named Cuong. Phu Dung said he confided to his buddy, without revealing any sensitive information, that he’d been hired to help look into the widely reported murder of Mr. Wonderful. Cuong, he said, was very familiar with the case. He was now calling me from outside Cuong’s office near Hanoi’s Noi Bai Airport, from which both pilots had taken off hundreds of times to attack inbound American warplanes.

  “He told me, ‘Phu Dung, I know this man. I read about him in the newspaper.’ ”

  Phu Dung said his friend had told him that another agent from his office had sold Mr. Wonderful a life insurance policy about a month before his death. It paid 100 million dong— about $4,600. Two people were listed as beneficiaries. One of them was his wife. That didn’t surprise me, even if they were estranged.

  The other person named on the policy, who would share in the proceeds from Mr. Wonderful’s demise, was a stunner.

  SIXTEEN

  The death benefit paid 100 million dong—about $4,600. Phu Dung’s insurance broker friend had provided him a photocopy of the signed policy. Under a heading that Phu Dung said translated to “Beneficiaries,” I could make out the name of Mr. Wonderful’s widow, Giang. Directly under her name was that of Truong Tan Sang—the purported knife-collecting colonel from the Ministry of Public Security directing the Vietnamese government’s investigation of Mr. Wonderful’s murder. The policy stipulated that Tan Sang and the widow were to split the proceeds from the policy fifty-fifty.

  I slid the copy back across the table of the outdoor cafe where Phu Dung and I had arranged to rendezvous, a few blocks south of the embassy. There was more: records showed that Tan Sang had paid the policy’s premium himself with a check drawn on his personal account at Asia Commercial Bank.

  “Tan Sang pays for an insurance policy on the guy, then bumps him off. He’s a big knife collector, according to the guy I was talking to from the embassy.”

  Phu Dung wore a puzzled look. “. . . Bumps him off?”

  “Murders him. Or had him murdered.”

  “There is that possibility,” Phu Dung said.

  Call me naive, but I couldn’t rationalize why someone would risk his freedom by murdering someone else for half of a $4,600 insura
nce policy. Granted, $2,300 was probably a considerable sum for the average Vietnamese worker, but Tan Sang was a respected, senior public official. He was undoubtedly well paid, relatively speaking. If he was complicit, there had to be another, more logical explanation.

  “Mr. Wonderful sold car parts after the war and invested in apartment buildings. He and Tan Sang had to have known each other exceedingly well for Tan Sang to pay for an insurance policy. What if they were in business together? Tan Sang eventually decides to get rid of him and take over. Happens all the time, bad blood between partners.”

  “If that is true,” Phu Dung said, “why kill him now, after so many years?”

  “Who knows. Could be somebody tried to screw somebody out of some money and somebody got royally torqued.” My mind raced with theories. “What if Tan Sang found out that American prisoners of war are coming back to kiss and make up with the guy who guarded them way back when—it’s all over the news, right? Tan Sang decides it’s the perfect two-for-one: he can knock off his partner and pin it on Americans, whom he hates. And, hell, why stop there? Why not kill Jimmy Luc while he’s at it?”

  “Why would he kill Jimmy Luc?”

  “Look, he knows I’ve been going around town asking questions. He knows I’m looking for anything that would clear the Americans, or at least cast doubt on their having had anything to do with what happened to Mr. Wonderful. Could be he knows that a jealous husband like Jimmy would be a prime suspect in the death of Mr. Wonderful because Mr. Wonderful was sleeping with Jimmy’s wife. That’s a problem for Tan Sang. He wants to pin Mr. Wonderful’s murder on the Americans. So Tan Sang kills Jimmy, too, and calls it a suicide.”

  Phu Dung frowned, mulling my theory.

  “Look, I don’t know if they’re connected, either,” I said, “but it’s worth exploring.”

  “Let’s just eat,” my interpreter said. “We can think later.”

  My lunch was a flaky, deep-fried pastry shell called banh goi stuffed with minced pork and vermicelli. Phu Dung had insisted I try it. I regretted that I had. Delicious as it was, within a half hour, I felt like a fragmentation grenade had gone off in my stomach. After Phu Dung dropped me off near my hotel, it was all I could do to make it upstairs and into the bathroom. Whether I’d been followed was the last thing on my nauseaaddled brain.

  I was paying homage to the porcelain gods ten minutes later when the wall phone next to the toilet rang.

  “Yes, hello, Dr. Barker, this is Cara at the front desk. Your friend is—”

  “—Hang on a second, Cara.” I set down the phone, pried myself off the floor, rinsed my mouth in the sink, splashed water on my face, and grabbed a towel off the rack. I felt better, but not by much. “Sorry, Cara. You were saying . . .”

  “Your friend is here.”

  “My friend?”

  “Yes, sir. Your friend. She said she will meet you outside.”

  I thought she might’ve been talking about Mai. She wasn’t.

  Linh, the girl who worked at Jimmy Luc’s religious artifacts shop, was waiting for me across the street. I had the presence of mind this time to check for surveillance before approaching her. There was none so far as I could see.

  Behind her glasses, her eyes were rimmed red. She’d been crying.

  “Jimmy, he—”

  “Not here,” I said, taking a page from Carl Underwood’s playbook. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Off Gia Ngu Street and right on Cho Cau Go, I found a narrow alley, more of a passageway, really. It dead-ended at an iron gate and what looked to be a retirement home. An old man missing his lower left leg camped in a wheelchair inside the doorway, his bony hands folded across the tartan blanket that covered his lap, watching us with a blank expression. He was too far away to hear us.

  “I thought I told you to go away for a few days.”

  She nodded, wiping away tears, barely holding it together.

  “What’s wrong, Linh? Is it about Jimmy? I still want to talk to him. Is he alive?

  She shook her head no.

  “How do you know that?”

  A pink plastic purse was slung across her chest. She reached into it and handed me an envelope. Inside the envelope was a severed human ear.

  The short black hairs protruding from the flap of cartilage protecting the canal indicated that the ear was most probably male. The way the ear had been cleaved from the scalp, without jaggedness in the surrounding flesh, told me a straight blade, rather than a serrated one, had been used to do the cutting. The swollen cartilage, spongy to the touch and virtually drained of pigment, suggested that the ear had been submerged in water for several hours at a minimum. The thing you learn tracking bad guys for a living.

  “Jimmy’s?”

  Linh nodded, refusing to look at it. The envelope and its grisly contents, she explained as best she could, had turned up overnight outside the apartment where she lived with her parents.

  “Do you know who sent this to you?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Do you know why they sent it?”

  “To say . . .” She couldn’t find the word in English and finally gestured instead—slashing a finger across her throat.

  “To say nothing?”

  A downcast nod was her response.

  “Talk to me, Linh. What didn’t they want you to say?”

  “Jimmy very, very bad man.”

  That would’ve been putting it mildly given what she described were Jimmy’s other business activities beyond selling statues of the Buddha and incense burners to mostly tourists. I got out my phone. We conversed by typing via the translator, passing the phone back and forth. Jimmy, she said, was also into money laundering, fencing stolen motorbikes, and may have had a minor hand in the heroin trade. But her late boss’s bread and butter, the girl said, had been in human trafficking.

  “How do you know Jimmy was doing these things, Linh?”

  She pointed to her eyes.

  “You saw with your own eyes?”

  She nodded.

  “What did you see, Linh?”

  “Jimmy. He show me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She took the phone and typed. Jimmy, she said, had blindfolded her one night and driven to a house where several Vietnamese women were being held. He told her that she would be going with them unless she did what he wanted her to do.

  “Which was what, Linh?”

  She hung her head in shame. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Jimmy forced you to have sex with him, didn’t he?”

  She nodded, trying to hide her face with her hand and the shame that consumed her. I asked her if she recognized the name, Pham Huu Chi, better known as Mr. Wonderful. She didn’t. I asked if she knew whether Colonel Tan Sang was Jimmy’s silent partner in running young women like her to Cambodia and Thailand. She didn’t know that, either. Then she wept. I held her and comforted her as best I could, while the old man in the wheelchair watched us, his lips curled in a slow, lurid grin. I stared him down and he looked away.

  “Linh, I want you to listen to me. I want you to leave Hanoi for a few days, until the heat dies down. Do you understand? Leave. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  She said she had an aunt who lived in Hue. She would go there.

  “Outstanding. There’s one more thing I want you to do for me, Linh. I want you to call me if there’s anything you need, anything I can do for you. If you run into any trouble, I want you to call me. Okay?”

  She nodded, then asked for the envelope back, and hurried on like some small, frightened animal. What she planned to do with that ear was anyone’s guess.

  A shortcut led back to the Yellow Flower, a narrow alley crowded with open-air stalls offering mostly baby clothes for sale. Through the crowds, ahead of me, I could see two men watching me. One was the postcard seller who’d followed me before. The other guy I didn’t recognize. He had a horse face and was wearing a Bruce Lee T-shirt. The two men stood intentional
ly in my path. I thought one of them was going to say something along the lines of, “Colonel Tan Sang wants to speak with you. Come with us or we’re going to beat you to a pulp,” but no words were exchanged.

  As I closed the gap, Horse Face flexed his neck side-to-side like he was preparing for war and assumed an almost comically dramatic martial arts pose, apparently having watched too many Bruce Lee movies, then swung his left foot at my head in a high, roundhouse kick. I went low, came up underneath him, and landed a solid uppercut to his jaw while shoppers screamed and scurried, grabbing their children. The guy dropped to the pavement like he’d been deboned. I followed through, using the momentum of my punch to pivot within range of the postcard seller, but he’d already bugged out.

  Horse Face wasn’t moving. I stooped and checked his pulse to make sure he was still alive—he was.

  “Why’d you come after me?” I got no response. I grabbed him by his hair. “Answer me.”

  He couldn’t. He was out cold.

  V

  On the sixth floor of the Yellow Flower, where Steve Cohen and Virgil Stoneburner were under arrest, the mood was mixed. Both men had been apprised that they were being transferred to jail: one more night enjoying the relative comforts of hotel living before being shipped off to hell.

  Sitting calmly at his desk, Cohen was predictably professorial, befitting an old fighter pilot who’d set aside his warrior ways to teach philosophy.

  “Everything is determined,” he said, “the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

  “Albert Einstein’s theory of determinism. Every event, every decision, every action in one’s life is predetermined by an unbroken chain of prior events, decisions, and actions.”

  Cohen beamed. “Perhaps I haven’t been merely talking to myself all these years, standing up there in front of that blue sea of cadets. You actually absorbed something.”

  “I absorbed many things in your class, Colonel.”

  He sipped his tea. “I’m afraid there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do at this point that hasn’t already been done. What will be has already been.”