The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  He swallowed hard. “Where’d you get this?”

  “I took it. What were you doing there with Tan Sang?”

  For a second, I thought he was going to start crying. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, wadded it, and tossed it onto his plate. “I was, uh, conducting my own investigation,” he said, his eyes never meeting mine, like he really couldn’t believe so flagrant a lie, either.

  “You want to try it again, Carl?”

  I waited. Underwood swigged his beer and signaled for another before he finally looked at me.

  “I’m a GS-12. Do you know how much I make annually? Sixty-two grand. Do you know how far that goes when you have three kids back in Virginia and a wife who doesn’t understand what it is to live within your means? Her credit card got stolen the other day. I haven’t even canceled it. Whoever stole it is spending less money than she does.”

  He forced a smile, hoping I’d lighten up.

  “So you decide to pedal flesh on the side with your friend, Tan Sang, because you can’t make ends meet. Is that how it works, Carl?”

  “He’s not my friend. We’ve met a couple times socially, that’s all. Embassy receptions, political ceremonies, that sort of thing. I swear I didn’t know what he was into. That was the first time I was there. As soon as I realized what was going on, I made him take me back to the office.”

  The waitress brought over a fresh bottle of beer. Underwood chugged half of it with one long swallow.

  “What did Tan Sang hope to gain by you getting involved in his little enterprise? Protection? Access to intelligence files?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I never let it get that far.” Underwood was nervously peeling the label off his beer bottle. “The guy asked if I was interested in getting dinner, getting to know each other better. It’s not unusual in this business, those kinds of interactions. They’re trying to find out what you know and you’re trying to find out what they know. The goal is to flip him, get him to come work for you. You know how it works, I’m assuming.”

  I said nothing. If Underwood knew of Stoneburner’s death and Tan Sang’s decision to release Cohen, he didn’t mention it, and I didn’t say.

  “My family . . .” The words caught in Underwood’s throat. “I know you have a job to do, but if you destroy me, you destroy them.” He polished off what was left of his beer, gazing at the bottle.

  “Look at me, Carl.”

  He did, with obvious discomfort. I leaned closer to him, my hands folded on the table, a gesture meant to convey confidence and to let him know in a primal way that I knew everything, and that there was no point in lying.

  “Tell me you had nothing to do with the murder of that prison guard.”

  “Nothing. I swear.”

  He was fidgety and sweating—typical signs of someone who’s lying—but people also fidget and sweat when they’re anxious, and Underwood was definitely that. His unblinking eyes held steady on mine when he proclaimed his innocence, but that meant nothing, either. Someone trained in counterinterrogation techniques, as I am sure he had been, would know that looking away when confronted is often interpreted as an indication of lying.

  I waited purposely for him to fill in the gaps. He didn’t try—a good sign that he was being truthful. Honest people typically volunteer necessary details and little more, while liars tend to pile on the specifics, as if to convince you of their veracity. I watched his hands. More often than not, truthful individuals refrain from touching their faces. A liar will often scratch his nose, or run his hands across his mouth if he has something to hide. Underwood kept his hands on the table or in his lap. I checked his shoes. Liars often subconsciously position their feet in a direction facing away from the person questioning them, as if they’re preparing to run away. Underwood’s feet were facing mine.

  “Until I learn otherwise,” I said, “this’ll be our secret.”

  “Thanks.” He exhaled, visibly relieved.

  I was getting up to leave when he said, “I’m assuming you’re aware that Colonel Tan Sang’s car was spotted near the lake just before the guard was killed.”

  “Who spotted it?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. I can tell you, though, that the information comes from a credible source.”

  “You’re telling me Tan Sang killed the guard?”

  “I don’t know who killed him. All I know is what I just told you.”

  Was he telling the truth, or hoping to deflect me? I couldn’t be sure either way. Walking out, I crossed paths with Leonard returning from the restroom.

  “I’m starving,” he said. “It’s rice everything around here. I’d kill for some real American food.”

  “You mean like tacos or pizza?”

  “Exactly.”

  V

  The soldiers standing guard duty on the sixth floor of the Yellow Flower looked to have gotten the word that Cohen was being released because they’d all vanished by the time I returned to the hotel. Cohen said he’d received word, too—a terse phone call from a woman at the Ministry of Public Safety informing him he was booked on a flight that evening to San Francisco by way of Seoul and Hong Kong. It was suddenly as if Tan Sang couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.

  Cohen was subdued. One might’ve expected the opposite— his nightmare was almost over; he was going home—but given Virgil Stoneburner’s death, I more than understood his mood.

  “How do you know for certain it was an accident?”

  “I don’t,” I said, watching him fold a dress shirt and lay it carefully in his suitcase, “but right now, we have other imperatives, the first of which is getting you home.”

  He paused, staring down at the floor. “Virgil was a good man. So are you. I owe you a great debt of gratitude.”

  “I’m just happy you’re getting out of here, sir.”

  He rolled up a pair of trousers. “I have a little boat, out in Monterey Bay. I try to spend as much time on her as I can. I’d love for you to come up for a few days when we get back. I can pick you up at the airport. We can do some sailing, grill some steaks, decompress. You can stay as long as you’d like. What do you say?”

  “I didn’t know you sailed, Colonel.”

  “Oh, yes. Got into it a few years back. The real psychologist I was seeing at the time was an old navy man. He said it might be good therapy. Much less stressful than hauling around sixteen thousand pounds of bombs and jet fuel. He was right. Started out in a thirteen-foot Sunfish up at Lake Granby, in Colorado, then decided I needed a little bit more sail and a whole lot more water. Found a sweet little thirty-foot Catalina out in California and that, as they say, was that.”

  The notion of soaking up the sun for a few days with my old professor would’ve frankly been more intriguing had it not involved sailing. Not that I have anything against boats. It’s just that, when you want to go somewhere, compared to airplanes, they’re about as fast as a week in jail. I assured him regardless that I’d try to find time in my schedule. He seemed pleased.

  “Well, I suppose I should go do some packing myself,” I said and headed for the door.

  “I’m reminded of what Aristotle wrote,” Cohen said, watching me go. “He said courage is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. What Virgil Stoneburner did was very courageous.”

  “I just wish he was going home, too, Colonel.”

  “I’m not talking about his alleged escape attempt, Mr. Logan.” Cohen’s chin began to tremble. Tears flowed. He looked away, covering his eyes.

  “What is it, Colonel?”

  He gestured for me to follow him out onto the balcony. Such precautions were likely no longer necessary, but paranoia in a communist state is hardly an unhealthy practice.

  “Stoneburner didn’t go upstairs that night to bed,” Cohen said. “He was with the rest of us in the hotel bar for a while. Then he went out. Left the hotel. To where, I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I didn’t want to implicate him
in a murder.”

  As Cohen recounted events that night, Stoneburner had done some serious drinking before and throughout the big dinner with Mr. Wonderful. By the time the Americans retired to the Yellow Flower’s rooftop cocktail lounge, he was thoroughly hammered.

  “He started going on and on about this whole big plan of his,” Cohen said. “How he found out how Mr. Wonderful liked to take walks late at night around this one lake to clear his head, how it would be easy to find him and pay back the son of a bitch for all he’d done. Then he takes out a folding knife and starts playing with it. I thought he was joking around—we all did—but he wasn’t. I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. The conversation got a little heated. He essentially called me a coward, said I’d gone soft, and stormed out. Billy Hallady and his grandson left a few minutes later. I finished my drink and went to bed. What happened after that, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “When we first spoke, you made it sound like you had your doubts about the Halladys, that they might’ve had something to do with it. Now you’re saying you have your doubts about Stoneburner.”

  Cohen leaned against the railing, turning his face to the sun with his eyes closed. “When we first spoke, Mr. Logan, Virgil Stoneburner was alive and the Halladys were safe stateside, where the Vietnamese could never touch them. My goal as senior officer was to get us both home in one piece. Virg’s guilt or innocence was beside the point. Now Virg is dead. He’s no longer at risk.”

  Whether Stoneburner or Billy Hallady or both of them murdered Mr. Wonderful, Cohen was unwilling to speculate— in the same manner he would not condemn any of them for their possible involvement in the crime.

  “War can wreak havoc on a man’s mind long after the last bomb has been dropped,” Cohen said. “Being captured by the enemy and tortured only compounds that havoc. Virgil Stoneburner suffered, Mr. Logan. We all did. He deserves better than to have his honorable service to his country impugned in any way, but under the circumstances, I’m not sure what the better course of action would be.”

  “One thing I don’t understand: how did Stoneburner find out that the guard liked to take late-night walks around the lake?”

  Cohen pondered the question with a frown. “You know, come to think of it, he never said.”

  V

  The front desk clerks all stood and bowed as Cohen and I departed the Yellow Flower for the last time. “Y’all take care,” Dan, the manager, said in that slightly unsettling Texas twang of his, shaking our hands and walking us outside, where our taxi was waiting. He then asked that I post a positive review on Trip Advisor when I got home. I told him that I’d only recently figured out how to send and receive e-mails; the chances of me posting a review online, I said, were only slightly better than Kim Kardashian winning an Academy Award anytime soon.

  Dan laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  Three police cars escorted us to the airport, lights flashing and sirens yowling. I thought Colonel Tan Sang might meet us there, but he was a no-show. A phalanx of stern-faced Vietnamese government officials in green uniforms (I wasn’t certain whether they were immigration or military authorities) carried our luggage and whisked us through the terminal, past several security checkpoints to what passed for an executive lounge. The room was about as luxurious as a bus station waiting area, but it was quiet and that counted for something. We sat on molded orange plastic chairs, alone, and waited.

  Cohen gazed wistfully out at the runway. “The last time I flew out of this airport was in 1973,” he said. “They drove us out in buses. There was a C-141 waiting for us on the tarmac. That red, white and blue star on the aft fuselage . . . something I’ll never forget.”

  “Must’ve been quite a moment.”

  Cohen closed his eyes, remembering. “Even after we took off, we didn’t dare think we were free until the pilot came on the intercom and said we were outside Vietnamese airspace. The whole plane went nuts, everybody cheering and crying. That’s when I felt relief. Only then. They gave us cigarettes and coffee. After we landed in the Philippines, we had steak, corn on the cob, ice cream, strawberry shortcake. As much as we wanted. Best meal I ever had.”

  Our magic carpet ride came in the form of a Korean Air Boeing 777 and departed at 2250 hours. We flew business class. Don’t ask me who paid for the tickets. To this day, I don’t know. I slept most of the way, that first leg, anyway, awakening only to eat. The food was outstanding. Smoked New Zealand salmon, chicken Aventino, and cheesecake. Cohen drank one glass of champagne after another. The flight took six hours and change, followed by a fourteen-hour layover in Seoul, followed by a four-hour flight to Hong Kong, followed by another, nearly sixteen-hour layover.

  On the last leg of the journey, fifteen hours in an overbooked Cathay Pacific Airbus A350, our seat assignments were separate. Cohen sat somewhere forward of the wing while I was relegated to a middle seat in the very last row of the plane. The Airbus’s audiovisual system had malfunctioned, along with my overhead light, meaning that reading was out of the question and there were no movies to watch. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. Same with meditating. Mostly I tried not to think about Savannah and focused on connecting the dots that might lead me to who killed Mr. Wonderful. Or killers. By the time we landed in San Francisco, bleary-eyed and exhausted, I was no closer to figuring it all out than when I’d left Hanoi. My brain was fried. And I still had another one-hour flight to Rancho Bonita.

  Cohen was flying on to Monterey, anxious for the solitude of his boat. He’d spent the majority of his post-Hanoi Hilton years studying the great philosophers, seeking some silver bullet I suppose that he’d hoped would help him forget the war. The closest he’d come was chancing upon some obscure Irish author whose name he couldn’t remember, but whose words resonated. “To forgive is wisdom,” the author wrote, “to forget is genius.”

  “I had hoped this trip to Vietnam would bring me some peace,” he said as we stood in the US Customs enforcement line, waiting to be let back into the country. “I’m afraid it did the opposite.”

  “I’m just glad you’re back. I’m glad we both are.”

  A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer sitting in a little glass booth motioned him forward, ran his passport through a scanning computer, asked him a few perfunctory questions, and welcomed him home. I got the same treatment. Standing a few feet beyond the Customs checkpoint was a lanky blonde in flat heels with kind eyes and an off-the-rack navy skirt suit. A San Francisco Department of Airports ID badge hung from a yellow lanyard around her neck.

  “Colonel Cohen?” she said, smiling, her hand outstretched. “Hi, Barb Gollner, airport administration. Just to give you a heads up, there are a few news media folks waiting to chat with you out in the main terminal. We can certainly make arrangements to have you exit the airport without having to deal with them, if that’s your preference.”

  “I’d be happy to talk to the press.”

  “Very good, sir. Right this way, please.”

  “Looks like the cat’s out of the bag,” I said as we followed her.

  Cohen stopped and turned to face me. “There are elements to all this, what went on behind the scenes, that I’ll probably never know, but it’s important for me that you understand, I’m so grateful for all you did. Thank you.”

  “I was doing my job.”

  “The invitation stands,” Cohen said. “Come up and spend some time on the boat. It’ll do you good. It always does me.”

  My clothes were sticking to my skin. I could barely keep my eyes open. I needed a hot shower and a night in my own bed before I could begin to even think about more traveling.

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  When I went to shake his hand, he hugged me the way a father might’ve. He didn’t let go for a long time.

  The “few” news media types to which Ms. Gollner referred in fact constituted a sizable, unruly gaggle of reporters and camera operators who engulfed Cohen like a rock star the moment he emerged from t
he Customs area. He took the onslaught in stride, answering their questions with fighter-pilot cool, one at a time. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me as I rolled my suitcase down the concourse, toward my connecting gate. That was fine by me. My part of the saga was over. That’s what I assumed, anyway.

  Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong if I had wanted to be.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Kiddiot rubbed against my legs, purring and chirping, thrilled that I was home. When I picked him up to hug him, he licked my cheek with that cute little pink sandpaper tongue of his, as loving a pet partner as there’s ever been.

  And if you believe all that, there’s a bridge for sale in Brooklyn I’d like to show you.

  He treated me with his usual indifference, jumping off the bed and sauntering toward me, bushy orange tail flicking sideto-side, as I unlocked the door and entered our garage apartment. Then, picking up speed, ears back, he hustled past me and ran out into Mrs. Schmulowitz’s backyard.

  “I was thinking about taking you to one of those fancy kitty day spas on your birthday,” I hollered after him, “but you can forget about that now, you ungrateful pelt.”

  I booted the door shut.

  My shoes felt like cement blocks. I sat down on the bed and pulled them off. My socks and shirt, too. All I wanted was sleep, but that wasn’t in the cards.

  “If you’re a burglar,” Mrs. Schmulowitz shouted from outside, “I have a shotgun in the house and I know how to use it.”

  “It’s me, Mrs. Schmulowitz.” I got up and opened the door.

  She was standing there empty-handed, wearing her favorite New York Giants baseball cap, her frizzy hair (this week’s color: midnight black) sticking out underneath, black stretch pants and an oversized, white T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Magic Johnson driving the lane on Larry Bird.

  “You don’t really have a shotgun, do you, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”