PRATT HAD CIRCLED around the old Opera House a number of times and each time there was something disturbing him about the structure. The one hundred years of French rule in Vietnam left its mark in the buildings and boulevards of Saigon. Dropping an opera hall onto an island like setting a perfect pearl into a gold necklace was something only the French would have thought to do in the tropics. While the French had come and gone, the buildings and streets remained. The farang had not marked Bangkok in this way. He wondered, how does a country take pride in the sense of beauty that other people impose on them? What is to be done with the legacy after the farang have left? Tear it down? That would violate the unspoken rule that one destroyed only that which was no longer practical. The old Opera House could be made practical, so it survived; the classical scalloped front entrance looked faded, worn, like a once beautiful woman after years of an abusive relationship.
On the corner of Dong Khoi Street and Le Loi Boulevard stood another French building directly opposite the old Opera House. On the ground floor was the Givral Patisserie & Cafe. The entire building was the mixed symbol of old Saigon and modern Ho Chi Minh City—a three-story J&B bottle designed as a bright green neon sign stuck onto the side of classical French architecture. The J&B bottle cap half obscured the window to the room where Marcus Nguyen kept a mistress, a vantage point that provided him with a Lee Harvey Oswald view of the old Opera House. He stood in the window with a pair of binoculars, watching Pratt stopping before the steps of the Opera House. What thoughts would be inside the mind of this Thai policeman? Marcus thought. What eyes was he using to look at the street? To turn the old Opera House into a shopping mall, or club? Thai police had a knack for business. Harry had told him that this Pratt had an appreciation for the arts, in particular, for Shakespeare. Perhaps the Thai policeman viewed the old building as a piece of history which had survived all kinds of dramas—tragedy and comedy.
Before the fall of Saigon, the government had used the Opera House as the National Assembly. Then the government not only fell, many of the politicians had fled before April 30th, 1975, leaving the communists to turn the main hall, where the National Assembly had met, into a people’s theater. In the rear of the building, there was a small hotel. Next door was the Q-Bar. On the Continental Hotel side was another bar. People’s Theater, People’s Hotel, and a New York City bar with Caravaggio murals on the wall. Change was in the Saigon air the twentieth year of the liberation of the city.
Pratt, as he walked alone, had wondered if some communist committee, filled with people who had spent half their life fighting in the jungles, had been given the job of making practical use of the old Opera House without compromising the principles of the new regime. Who had served on the committee? A collection of fighting men, ex-soldiers and cadres whose reward for winning was a chance to take revenge on the building where the old regime had resided. This might have explained why a number of rooms had no windows. The architecture of war predominated and the Saigon Concert Hotel—its name evidence of the schizophrenic character of the city—was like a blueprint of underground tunnels and chambers. Calvino had come up with the idea that Pratt should move into a room within the vast complex of the old Opera House. He would have music, he would have privacy, and more importantly, there was a place they could meet in secrecy. Calvino had discovered that the cheapest room in the hotel was also the largest. There were special rooms located at opposite ends of the fifth floor, each with a private staircase and landing; the giant space which was left over had been converted into three rooms.
“Why so cheap?” Calvino had asked the assistant manager behind the front counter. After he asked the question, he knew that he had automatically lapsed into expat-speak. He had made a literal translation into English from the Thai tum my took?
The assistant manager flashed an official smile, as if she had been asked that question many times by farang new to Saigon. The smile a mother bestows on a child who asks why there is a sky, why are there clouds, what happens when I die?
“Some people think too much noise. But if you like music, then you should take. I think room very cheap for Saigon,” she said thoughtfully.
The rough corridor between cheap and expensive had squeezed out just about anything in the middle. Calvino nodded that the room would do fine for the right person after an inspection. It was perfect, in fact, for the purpose he had in mind. On the left of the small entrance leading to the fifth floor room was a door, one of those Alice in Wonderland, tiny doors. All that was missing was the rabbit. Calvino played the role of Alice as well as was to be expected, he hunched down beside the door and discovered that a piece of copper wire had been used to fasten the door. One end of the wire disappeared inside the room. He needed less than a minute to pick the lock and open the door. Inside was a narrow walkway about forty meters above the main stage and large backstage area. On the scaffolding it was dark and below some musicians were practicing. From the look of the wooden walkway no one had been up there in years. No guest was going to complain and the performers and musicians below could not have cared less. It may have been one of the few unbugged areas in the entire building.
Pratt checked into the room sight unseen; he had based his move solely on Calvino’s recommendation. He stood in the doorway and looked around a reception room. On one wall was an eight foot by fifteen foot painting of Mount Fuji capped with snow. He looked over his shoulder at the bellboy.
“Beautiful,” said the bellboy in a soiled shirt with a Mao collar, grinning at the painting.
“Splendid,” said Pratt, thinking the decor was the ultimate revenge on the French sensibility, on the old regime, on everything an educated, cultured farang would have held in high esteem.
The final destruction of the Western sense of artistic beauty, the desecration of the high temple left by French culture. In the bellboy’s eyes, he was gazing upon a masterpiece. This bellboy spoke the language of the modern Saigon, a place which had sealed its fate twenty years earlier when the tanks rolled into Saigon and the National Assembly was no more. Only the building was left behind once again, like it had been left by the French, as it had been left after the Americans had gone.
******
AROUND two in the morning, Pratt slipped out of his room, quickly entered the small side door, edged his way along the scaffolding toward a figure in the shadows. Calvino squatted in the dark like an Isan laborer, staring into the dark and drinking a 333 beer. Pratt pointed his flashlight and Calvino lifted his beer as a kind of salute.
“It’s not exactly front row at the Met,” said Calvino.
“But then Saigon isn’t exactly New York City,” said Pratt. “New York is five floors down in the Q-Bar,” he said.
Pratt looked around the vast space below, the empty stage, curtains and rows of seats.
“It would be difficult to bug this area. Not impossible. But what would be the point?”
“Exactly. No point. So how’s your new room?”
He had worked out the math in his head. The cost of two glasses of the 1987 La Tour Sauterne at the Rex was roughly two nights in the Mount Fuji room on the fifth floor. When it came to the division between investors, there were those who drank the cost of a hotel room before dinner, and there were those who drank 333 beer and dreamed of one day affording the corkage charge on an expensive bottle of wine.
“From the art on the wall, I have the strong feeling that management made a decision to appeal to the Japanese investor,” said Pratt.
“I doubt there are any Japanese in this hotel. Too down-scale for them.”
“That also crossed my mind,” said Pratt. “But there’s always hope.”
“How did your meeting go with Khanh?”
“Another boc phet session that ran an hour. He spent half an hour complaining about wasting days and days with State Department officials and American Consulate officials from Hanoi. They came alone or in twos. They asked the same questions about Drew Markle. They asked him if he had ever had an argument with Markle. This upset him. Who did these Americans think they were? Did they know where they were? State Department people in Saigon treating him like a criminal suspect.”
“Sounds like he let his hair down.”
“He said that the farang didn’t understand the Asian mind. It wasn’t useful to kill an American lawyer. It wasn’t useful to kill any American. They were trying to open up their economy, their country. They wanted American technology. Killing an American was the last thing any Vietnamese would do. Why were the American State Department people so stupid? he asked me.”
“Khanh has a point, Pratt.”
“In police work you find most criminals have a point.”
“You think he’s covering up something?”
“What do you think?” asked Pratt.
“The word on the street is that Markle was capped by a Vietnamese. Someone brought down from Hanoi for the job. But I don’t know what to make of the theory. The Vietnamese way of thinking, loyalties, fears, are divided between North and South. It’s hard to know the direction on the compass to find the truth. Of course, whoever did the job must have followed Markle. Tracked him. That takes some skill. Of course, the fact that Markle was never late made the killer ’s job easier. But someone had to give the hitman the information. That Markle was going to the restaurant that night and give him the time.”
“Any idea who that might have been?”
“He was meeting someone special for dinner that night.”
“A woman,” said Pratt.
Calvino nodded, finished his beer and put the can down on the scaffolding.
“A Viet Khieu named Jackie Ky.”
“Kee?” asked Pratt.
The English word translated into Thai, depending on the tone, as either “shit” or “ride”. Pratt waited until Calvino repeated Jackie’s last name in a neutral tone, playing the name over in his mind. How would his superiors in the Department in Bangkok react if the killer they had to turn over to Mark Wang’s family had such a name? The Hong Kong Chinese would think that the Thais were playing a joke on them. So much rested on family names in Asia, so much more than any farang ever knew.
“Yeah, Ky,” he said again. “She’s as American as they come, and a babe, Pratt.”
“What was her relationship with Markle?”
“Close enough. She made a point of letting me see her go through the usual rituals. The lit incense sticks she put in front of his picture at a wat. She shed the right amount of tears. All the time I am looking at this framed photo of Markle in the second row of a hundred photos of other dead people.”
“Sounds impressive.”
“It was intended to be.”
“So she was putting on a good act?” asked Pratt.
Calvino wavered, balancing all he knew about Jackie Ky, which wasn’t a great deal, and each time he came down on a different side.
“She’s pretty broken up over Markle’s murder,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an act.”
He had been on this side of the Jackie Ky equation before. Pratt waited a beat, taking in Calvino’s observation. “Did you ask her about Mark Wang?”
Calvino nodded, pulled another beer from a brown bag, popped the tab, and drank from the beer can.
“She said that she met him once. But she didn’t remember Wang’s name until I reminded her.”
“Maybe he was using another name,” said Pratt.
“I thought of that. So I asked her if Markle had mentioned anything about Chinese yuppies from Hong Kong. And she said, yes. There had been a Chinese guy who hated banks and wanted Douglas Webb to hold a lot of cash for him. She said Drew was against taking cash into the office. She said Markle told her that lawyers didn’t do that sort of thing. He thought it was unethical for a law firm to keep cash like a Chinese laundry.”
“She said Chinese laundry?”
Calvino smiled. “I added that.”
“Cute.”
“Markle also worried about violating Vietnamese currency regulations.”
“How much cash are we talking about?”
“Don’t know. But I think we can assume it was enough to get two men killed,” replied Calvino.
“Someone in the law firm overruled Markle and told Wang they would keep his money.”
“Khanh seems hungry,” said Calvino.
Pratt knew that in Vietnam, like in Thailand, there was a vast difference between those with hunger in their belly and the few with the opportunity to fill their rice bowl.
They had worked together for so many years, Calvino could see what was bothering Pratt about this suspect, and he said, “Khanh wouldn’t have the connection to get someone like Wang killed in Bangkok. If Wang had been killed in Saigon, I could go with it.”
“Then that leaves Webb,” said Pratt.
“Webb told me he had been in Bangkok for five years,” said Calvino.“ He speaks Vietnamese. And Thai. And Japanese. That’s a good enough reason to hate the bastard. Americans aren’t supposed to speak anything but English.”
“Five years,” said Pratt. “That’s more than enough to make the kind of local connection to get someone killed.”
“Jackie said they had gone to a Thai-Vietnamese friendship concert a week before Markle was killed. She said that Markle and her went along with Webb and some bimbo who was from Bangkok.”
Pratt rolled his eyes, expecting the worst. Calvino let it hang for a moment.
“The bimbo was a mem-farang,” said Calvino. “Who lives in Bangkok.”
Calvino nodded, “So Jackie Ky says.”
“I’m thinking out loud now...”
“You’re on stage. That’s permitted.”
“Thanks. But what I was going to say is, sometimes Channel 9 or 7 sends a crew to record a concert. Then they show it on TV. My kids watch them. And sometimes the camera scans the crowd.”
“Maybe you should check it out.”
“You have a safe phone yet?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Nothing is one hundred percent.”
“It’s a figure of speech.” Pratt hunched forward and looked down at the stage below. “If I were at home, I could deal with Webb.”
“The distance been Bangkok and Saigon is a short flight given they seem to be a million light years apart,” said Calvino.
“I know. We have no back-up in Saigon. It’s just you and me. And I have been thinking it’s not such a good idea for you to pal around with Webb. Forget about giving him the cash you brought in.”
“That’s why I brought the cash, remember. You were the guy who said, ‘We might need some spending money to get someone out of trouble,’ ” said Calvino.
“The idea was to bait a trap not feed a rat. That’s different. You don’t corner a dog and expect him not to come at your throat.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors. Rats and dogs.”
But Pratt was right, thought Calvino. If Webb were a cornered dog he would come out all claws and fangs. What had Webb been doing in Bangkok? He claimed he spent five years working in-house for a large Japanese bank. Maybe. Before that, he had been an associate at Winchell & Holly in New York City. He had gone to the minor leagues, showed that he could hit the ball, and they called him back to the majors. Not an ordinary career path but then Winchell & Holly wasn’t exactly an ordinary law firm. The lawyers shared a common specialized tax background. This was a perfect fit for a tax law firm boutique, handling offshore business for extremely wealthy people. Maybe after he signed on in Saigon, Webb was treated like a minor leaguer. By then, Webb would have gotten his nose into some of that wealthy lifestyle and decided he was tired of waiting for real respect out of New York.
Calvino turned around in the half-darkness of the scaffolding and nodded his head. The conversation went into one of those dead-stick dives, neither pilot wanting to try and pull up before the other one. Calvino crumpled up the empty 333 beer can, and looked at it in the palm of his hand. He thought about the little helicopters street vendors had made from the empty beer cans and smiled. And he thought about Marcus’s sidewalk buddy, Tan, who had a body like the crumpled beer can flattened out on his skateboard, sailing at rat-shit level through the streets of Saigon, his life bounded by no more than half a kilometer of mean, dirty sidewalks and gutters. Most of all, he thought about the anguish Harry Markle had felt that night when he was told that his kid brother had been killed in Vietnam.
“I am going to make Webb work for it a little bit more. It’s no good making it look like I am in a hurry to give him the cash. He would get suspicious. All the government types hanging out in the office. If the guy’s dirty, he has to be at max level paranoia right now.”
“I asked Khanh about the expat lawyer.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t feel dong chi with Webb.”
“Meaning Webb wasn’t exactly like a brother or comrade.”
“It’s hard to think of Webb as a fellow comrade.”
“Khanh didn’t like the way the farang looked at the Hanoi girl who works in the office. Like he was undressing her in his mind.”
Calvino accidentally knocked one of the empty 333 cans off the scaffolding and it bounced off the stage. He tried to grab for it and almost fell himself.
“Be careful, Vincent.”
He had asked Mai about Drew Markle. It wasn’t as if he had overlooked the possibility and she said, well, she implied, in so many words, that there had been nothing outside the working relationship. Why would Khanh have made the crack about Markle undressing her with his eyes?
“What’s wrong?” asked Pratt.
Calvino turned in the darkness. “Nothing.”
“Every time you say nothing, it’s something. What is it?” asked Pratt.
There was pause.
“What did you feel the first time you saw Manee?”
The question caught Pratt by surprise.
“For me, it was love at first sight. But she didn’t like me.”
“At Winchell & Holly there is a Vietnamese woman. Webb calls her the Hanoi girl. Her name’s Mai.” Then he stopped.
“What’s this got to do with Manee and me?” Pratt held his breath. He didn’t want to hear. “I am in love with this woman.”
“You know how crazy that is?”
“Yeah, I know,” said Calvino. “She reads Chekhov. Do you know Chekhov?”
“I only remember one piece from The Cherry Orchard.” Calvino raised an eyebrow and he grinned.
“Aren’t you gonna tell me?”
“This is no good, Vincent.”
“Pratt, I want to know the line.”
Pratt saw there was no way, now that he had brought up this piece of knowledge, that Calvino was going to let him off the hook.
“Okay. In The Cherry Orchard there is a failed writer named Yepihodov, who said, ‘Personally, I’m a cultured sort of fellow, I read all sorts of extraordinary books, you know, but somehow I can’t seem to make out where I’m going, what it is I really want, I mean to say — to live or to shoot myself, so to speak. All the same, I always carry a revolver on me. Here it is.’ ”
While he had been inside the Q-Bar with Webb, he had had to hide his knowledge of Caravaggio, and that made him feel humble playing the idiot. Only it was worse with Pratt, he hadn’t remembered a single line from Chekhov, and here was a Thai, delivering a line that hit belly high, one of those emotionally guided missiles with a tiny camera in the nose straight on target. Life should have been structured fair enough so that the Chekhov offset the Caravaggio, but somehow there was a gaping void, he thought. His feet hanging over the edge of the scaffolding. He had felt superior knowing more than Webb. How was it that both Mai, a Vietnamese, and Pratt, a Thai, with their knowledge about a Russian writer, had made him feel like a high school dropout? He did what he could do to salvage some pride.
“That sounds like something I might have said,” said Calvino. “You’re right, Vincent. It does. That’s why I have never forgotten
it. And whoever killed Wang and Markle may try and kill you, Vincent. Don’t forget, at the end, Yepihodov shoots himself.”
“Russians have no sense of humor, Pratt. You know that. And there is one other difference. I know who I am and what I am capable of doing.”
“I don’t think you understand what I said before. In Saigon...” Calvino waved his hand. “We are alone. You and me, Douglas Webb and sixty million plus communists.”
“Something like that.”
“You know that in New York they pulled my ticket to practice law for fraud and violation of ethics,” said Calvino.
“That was a set-up.”
“There is something in the way this Webb looks at me that reminds me of that time. I was thinking it through earlier. Webb would have been working at Winchell & Holly when I was still practicing in New York. There’s something about the guy that’s familiar.”
Pratt turned the flashlight on his watch. It was time for some sleep.
“Same time, same place, tomorrow,” said Pratt.
“I wouldn’t miss the second act for the world,” said Calvino, looking at Pratt and then down at the stage.
As Pratt got up and started to walk away, Calvino called after him, “I forgot to mention Marcus Nguyen, ex-Marine Colonel. Tough guy. Mobile phone. Chauffeured car and claims to know everyone in the Party. He’s a friend of Harry’s who told me to look him up.”
“Has he given you any help?”
“Too early to tell. But he might before it’s over.”
“About the Hanoi girl,” said Pratt.
“Her name’s Mai.”
“What if she’s...”
“She’s not. I know it,” Calvino said, feeling a cold chill go up his spine and shatter into icicles behind the sockets of his eyes. God, he hoped that he was right. After Pratt left him alone in the darkness, he remembered the dream in Bangkok, the one with Drew Markle holding Marcus Nguyen’s severed head. The eyes half-closed in death. Was this a sign of what happened when you got too close to someone you should doubt? He hoped not.
******
UNTIL you have tried it yourself, it is difficult to believe that two hundred thousand dollars, broken down into one-hundred bills, fits perfectly into two Johnny Walker Black Label boxes. The Johnny Walker box appears to have been unintentionally tailored to house exactly one thousand bills. The genius of the design, the genius of the practicality of making a box for either a thirty dollar bottle of whisky or a hundred grand in cash. One thousand individual bills a box. Calvino had bought two Johnny Walker bottles in their boxes at Don Muang Airport and carried the boxes into Vietnam inside a plastic duty-free bag. He had stuffed the bills into the boxes in a toilet cubicle and left the bottles behind. Someone who had gone to take a shit got a two bottle bonus. Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport rarely gave such a deal. But someone was a lucky customer, thought Calvino, as he walked down the long corridor to his plane, carrying the plastic bags with Tourist Authority of Thailand printed in big letters on the side.
Calvino got out of the metered taxi in front of Winchell & Holly’s villa off Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in District One. He paid the driver in dollars. As he approached the front gate, two soldiers dressed in olive green uniforms, carrying AK47s, stopped him.
“What’s the problem? Post-Liberation paranoia?” asked Calvino.
The soldiers said nothing, tightening their grip on the AK47s. He had violated one of Calvino’s cardinal rules for long-term survival—never, ever challenge an armed soldier who gives an order unless you are carrying two hundred grand and are at the door of the branch of a powerful American law firm.
The taller one with a square jaw waved Calvino over to a table and gestured with the barrel of the rifle at the plastic bag. Calvino opened the bag, the guard looked in, and without any change of expression, waved Calvino through. He was about to open one of the Johnny Walker Black Label boxes when Mai came out the door.
She spoke to the soldiers in rapid-fire Vietnamese. The soldier inspecting his bag handed it back to Calvino. Still he had no smile, no offer of apology, just tiger eyes, watching him as he followed Mai inside the main entrance of the villa. Calvino’s law: men with war weapons never apologized for stopping and searching a foreigner.
“What did you tell them?”
“That I knew who you were. That you were an important foreigner.”
“And they believed you.”
“Of course.” She turned and smiled, brushing her hand against his.
His Hanoi girl had vouched for him, turning a red light into a green light. Winchell & Holly was wired to provide an express lane with only green lights for their clients; that was their reputation, how they made their money. Smooth passage in troubled waters. Even power brokers needed military protection. Sometimes.
“How long were you waiting at the door?” “I saw you come in the gate.”
She had wanted him to taste the power and fear, he thought. “Who are the boy scouts? Khanh’s private army?”
She laughed. “No, it’s not like that. We have always had a guard. It’s normal. And since Mr. Markle died, we thought more protection would be good. Since we don’t know why it happened, Mr. Khanh wanted to protect the office and, of course, our clients. Like you.”
The set-up looked like an idea Khanh would come up with. He wondered if Webb had to restrain Khanh not to park a couple of APCs, flying the red flag, outside the front gate. He followed Mai into the elevator. One of those old-fashioned caged lifts from black and white French movies, the kind with an accordion metal gate pulled closed with a handle. The lift had a fine mesh on the sides and ceiling, exposing the thick wires and cables moving slowly as the lift started to move. Mai stood next to the control lever, pressing it forward. She glanced back at Calvino, giving him a crooked grin.
“Did you say something?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow as the lift shuddered. Yeah, he was about to say something and she had sensed it before he had opened his mouth and this made him nervous. He had never given a speech in an elevator before. Nor did it help that Mai’s ao dai tightly clung to her body, showing each contour, and smelling of perfume.
He had found the speech in his second-hand copy of the Chekhov, the one that Pratt had committed to heart. After an hour, he had memorized it. As the elevator started up, he started, “‘Personally, I’m a cultured sort of fellow, I read all sorts of extraordinary books, you know, but somehow I can’t seem to make out where I’m going, what it is I really want, I mean to say—to live or to shoot myself, so to speak. All the same, I always carry a revolver on me.’ ”
Mai’s eyes beamed, she folded her hand around his. “Chekhov. I so love Chekhov.”
“I know.” His throat constricted, his knees weak. He felt like he was under an attack of teenage hormones, an overwhelming assault on the mind and body. The way she squeezed his hand, and then what seemed like a miracle happened—though he later found out this was almost a daily occurrence in District One— there was a power failure and the elevator came to a halt between floors. They were close enough to each other that their bodies touched in the total darkness. Calvino took a lighter from his pocket and flicked it, the flame illuminating her face, as he leaned down and kissed her on the lips for the first time.
“We are between floors,” she said.
“How long until the power comes back?” he whispered. “One minute, one hour. It’s never the same.”
“Toi muon co,” he said in broken Vietnamese. “I want you.”
She laughed and corrected his pronunciation. He repeated after her.
“You say that well,” she said.
“It took longer to learn than the Chekhov.”
“When did you learn that?”
“Last night.”
“And the Chekhov?”
“Last night was a busy night.”
“What time did you go to sleep?”
“Four or so.”
“I remember looking at the clock at four am. And thinking of you. I’m glad you learned the Chekhov. And the Vietnamese.”
“And I’m glad the power cuts off in Saigon.”
He extinguished the lighter flame. There was a long pause. Neither could see the other. Out of the darkness, or maybe because of the darkness, he felt her hand touch his face, her fingers trace the groove of a scar which ran three inches from his eyebrow to his forehead. It was an unexpected exploration, an assertiveness that caught him off balance. He was in the Winchell & Holly building on business. All this talk about being a Hanoi girl as if to telegraph that she was beyond any sexual expression.
“How did you get this?” she whispered.
“Someone tried to kill me a long time ago,” he said. “It reminds me of someone.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No, not a boyfriend. What happened to the person who hurt you?”
“Things came to an inky end.”
He heard her laughing gently in the dark.
He left out the detail that he had been working a case in Bangkok when he was jumped by a katoey, a lady-boy, who had been positioned upstairs in a Patpong bar, waiting to stick a knife in him. The katoey ended up with a Reynold’s fine ballpoint pen plunged so deep into his eye only an inch of the tip was exposed.
They kissed first with just a brush of the lips. Then with lips parted, and, after that, their mouths opened as if to swallow the other. As they kissed she quietly stepped out of her ao dai pants. Her arms around his neck, he leaned her back against the railing. Her breathing became more irregular, her face against his; as her tongue touched his, she sighed. She pulled her face back for a moment. It was too dark for her to see him. There was some why question in her mind, a fight to ask overcome as her mouth found his again. Her breathing was the only sound as he entered her. Her long fingernails were under his shirt, running up his back. Her legs wrapped around his waist, her back against the side of the elevator, with two hundred grand in fake hundred-dollar bills on the floor, Calvino made love to the Hanoi girl. He was still inside her when the lights came back on, and the power. He reached over and hit the control lever. She quickly slipped into the bottom half of her ao dai, looked at her face in the shiny chrome control panel. Turning around, she rubbed the smudge of lipstick off the side of his face.
“This was an omen,” she said. “The power going out.”
She shook her head. “No, your coming to Vi etnam. I knew you were the one the first time I saw you.”
He looked at the eyes for some trace of irony, of a lie. There was none.
“I came to Saigon because I wanted to open a bar.”
“You came to Ho Chi Minh City because you were meant to.” He had obtained what he had desired, thought about alone in his hotel room, and nanoseconds after he had fulfilled his desire came the terrifying moment of realization he would leave the Zone forever because of one woman. When faced with the solid reality of such a prospect, he found himself asking whether he could ever leave the Zone, or whether the Zone would be carried like a seed inside him, ready to sprout anew sometime down the road and destroy their relationship. He had possessed her, this was what he told himself that he really wanted. Did he believe himself? He touched her hair. He wanted the power to go back off, for time to stop, and for the darkness to surround them again. Then he wanted her to go with him, he saw himself with her in the elevator, as he pushed the control lever and a moment later they reached the ground floor. Then they were in a taxi on the way to the nearest place which performed civil marriages and he said, “I do.” For life and all of the other lives to follow, “I do take this woman.” And then there was the personal vow, “I am declaring myself free of the Zone.”
The elevator stopped and she opened the door. “We are here,” she said.
He reached down and picked up the plastic bag with the two hundred grand. He hesitated for a second inside the elevator. From the way she looked at him with full concentration as if she could read his mind.
“You will be late for your appointment with Mr. Webb,” she said.
He had a case to finish. After that, he said to himself, he would be a free agent, then he would ask her.
“After all this business is settled, things will be different,” he said.
“After the war things were supposed to be different,” she said. “But mostly they have been the same.”
“We’ll talk about it over dinner,” he said.
She thought about this. “Good idea,” she replied.
“And about Chekhov.”
“Him, too.”
Her English was nearly perfect, and the way she moved walking away from him made his breath snag in the back of his throat. He had just made love to his woman. The Hanoi girl, he thought, the untouchable girl who Webb would have bet the bank would not go to lunch with him. After she led him to the reception area, Mai had turned coldly formal in the presence of the other staff. She disappeared without saying goodbye. Then, they had made love without really saying hello.
Two gray sofas were on either side of a glass table. A man in his late 40s dressed in a gray suit and green tie sat reading the International Herald Tribune. Calvino sat on the opposite sofa. Fourth of July picnic, Bangkok, Thailand, raced through Calvino’s head. He felt a moment of sheer panic. He knew this guy, and more important, this guy knew him and could blow his cover with one word, “Calvino.” He waited like someone looking an executioner in the eye. Do it. Let’s get the fucking thing over. He was almost happy. I go back for Mai and get out of here, he thought. But then nothing happened.
Calvino then recognized the man as Fred Harris, a Bangkok based US Embassy guy. Harris returned to reading his newspaper as if he had never laid eyes on Calvino before. Harris had worked for a couple of years at the US Embassy in Bangkok. Harris had taken Pratt away at the Fourth of July picnic. He had a problem: Something about providing security to investors who were meeting in Phuket. Harris could not have looked more American in Saigon if he had had the Stars and Stripes tattooed on his forehead. As soon as he started to worry about Harris blowing his cover, he thought, Harris isn’t going to blow my cover. And there was one very good reason: Harris was working on special assignment himself. He had caught the sonofabitch red-handed in the middle of some black bag operation, thought Calvino. He watched as Fred lowered the newspaper and stared at Calvino, then looked away.
“Dan Bryant,” Fred Harris finally said. “From Akron, Ohio.”
Calvino didn’t blink. There were clerks and secretaries running back and forth. One brought Harris a mug of cold water.
“Vincent Demato, Brooklyn. I’m opening a bar in Saigon. How about you?”
“I am in the investment business.”
“Yeah? The business of America is business. Isn’t that what they say? Besides, I’m an investor myself. You got a brochure or card?”
“Sorry, but I’m fresh out,” said Fred Harris.
One of the secretaries, who had overhead Calvino’s request, left and reappeared a moment later with an impressive brochure. “Mr. Bryant not have. But we have. You take this,” said the
secretary, handing it to Calvino.
“Thank you, you are very helpful,” he said, as she turned and went back to her desk. “The Vietnam Emerging Market Fund,” said Calvino, reading the front of the brochure. He opened the brochure. Inside were a list of names, and he found the name of Daniel Bryant, financial consultant.
“Financial consultant for a Vietnamese mutual fund?” asked Calvino.
“Yes,” said Fred Harris, lying through his teeth.
Harris was a Vietnam war veteran having served two tours in the army. Harry Markle knew him vaguely and said that Harris had been in that oxymoron called Military Intelligence, if Calvino remembered correctly.
“So you spend a lot of time in Vietnam,” said Calvino, enjoying the sight of Harris squirming on the expensively upholstered Winchell & Holly sofa.
“Enough to do my job,” he said, curtly.
“We all have a job to do, and what is sufficient time to do a job? I ask myself. And I say to myself, ‘That is always a difficult question.’ It must be the same in your line of work. A new mutual fund must be complicated to pull off. You spend a lot of time with lawyers, bankers, underwriters, accountants. God, just about everyone who is important in the commercial sector. Being a financial consultant must be just about a full-time job. Or do you have other clients?”
Harris pulled the newspaper up, covering his face, as if he were reading rather than figuring out some way to get Calvino off his case.
At the Fourth of July picnic, Harris had been cheering on the Marines in the tug-of-war contest with AT&T. That was insight into how the government worked, a CIA guy would never doubt that his allegiance was to the Marines first. Companies could be taken over, liquidated, or go broke, but the Marines would always be ready to pick up their end of the rope and pull on command.
Calvino nodded to himself, looking at the brochure and thinking how guys like Fred Harris looked like they were born to work for the government. Anyone in the private sector had an edgy, nervous, pushing aggression, that showed their ass was on the line, they had to perform or else they were in the street. Fred Harris who was balding and sprouting jowls had a civil servant’s attitude, I’m in control, I can fuck with you, but you can’t fuck with me. I have the power on my side, so I can relax, cross my legs, and calmly read a newspaper in the Saigon law offices of an American law firm which had just lost a lawyer to a grenade attack.
Douglas Webb suddenly appeared.
“Mr. Demato, how are you doing?”
Calvino didn’t reply, he reached down for his duty-free bag, got up and followed Webb into the conference room. He pulled back a chair and sat down before Webb had said anything. Mai came in with two cups of coffee. She didn’t look at Calvino, and he tried not to look at her. Webb noticed all the non-looking that was going on between the two of them, and made a mental note to ask Mai about why she had become so cool, detached with the new client she had flirted with the day before. He had probably made a pass and she knew that she had made a mistake, thought Webb.
“I’m sorry I am late with the coffee, Mr. Demato. But the maid forgot to boil the water until just a few minutes ago.” She left as quickly as she had arrived, softly closing the door behind her. Calvino exploded, hitting the conference table with his fist.
“What the fuck are you pulling?” he shouted at Webb.
The outburst caught Webb off guard. At first he wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or if Calvino was seriously upset. As he lowered himself down into the seat at the head of the table, Douglas Webb saw a flash of anger cross Calvino’s face.
“What’s the problem, Vincent?”
“That guy sitting out in reception. He smells of government. I come to your office with two hundred grand, and what do I find sitting opposite me? Some guy who looks like he works for the Internal Revenue Service. I don’t need this shit. I want to know what that guy is doing here.”
Douglas We bb sat back in his chair, his fingertips pressed against the surface of the table. He looked satisfied and a smile broke over his face.
“How do you know he works for the Internal Revenue Service?” “I’m from Brooklyn, and anyone with that kind of haircut
and cheap suit works for the fucking government. And I wanna know if you’ve done some deal behind my back with that asshole brother of mine in New York. Because if you have, then...”
Webb raised one of his manicured hands from the table.
“No threats, Mr. Demato. I am not working for your brother. I have no relationship with the Internal Revenue Service other than filing an annual return.”
“So who is that guy in reception?”
Douglas Webb took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled.
“Mr. Bryant works for an important client. We have had a number of visitors from the US government since Mr. Markle’s death. Some have said up front they were from the government. Others have, well, shall we say, some creative stories. But we have known Mr. Bryant for sometime. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Of course I’m worried. You phone back to Brooklyn, checking up on me. You’ve got an army of Vietnamese thugs in uniform carrying AK47s and CIA types in the reception. All I want is something real simple. A lawyer to do my legal work for a bar. And not only am I worried, I have to pay three hundred bucks an hour to tell you that I’m worried.”
“Relax. It’s my job to tell you when to be worried. And as your lawyer, I’m telling you to relax,” he said, and paused.
“If you aren’t happy, then I will see that a secretary brings in the five thousand dollars you left with us yesterday.”
“Five grand? All of it?”
“All of it,” said Webb, smiling.
“Okay, tell me one thing. What is the law?”
Calvino sometimes had clients who asked stupid questions like that. It was a lawyer’s test of patience, and his ability not to start laughing was immediately subjected to the most severe test of all.
“Good question,” said Webb.
He was a real pro, thought Calvino.
“Forget about law as you know it in New Yo rk. Here it is Confucian morality. Think of a government made up of wise elders who decide who can do what to whom and when. Who gets to run a bar, a shop, a hotel. Rules would be an insult. Because wise elders should be able to do what they want, what is right. Instead of rules, you have the wise elder’s personal virtue to protect you. In the West, we have lost our belief in personal virtue—maybe any kind of virtue—and in its place we plug the gap with thousands of laws. In the East, there is no belief much beyond virtue and when the virtue falls, then there is only a void. Not laws. Just a void which can suck you in, clean you out, and spit you back all the way to New York.”
Calvino nodded. “And you get three hundred bucks an hour watching people go into the void?”
“What I’m saying is there is a problem with the law.”
“What you’re saying is there is a problem because there is no law.”
“That’s going too far. Think of Vietnam more like Sicily a hundred years ago. Elders, godfathers, whatever you want to call them, call the shots.”
“I like you, Douglas. I never heard a lawyer talk straight before.” He took the duty-free bag off a chair and put it on the table.
He pulled out the two boxes of Johnny Walker Black Label. “Premium whisky is the only way to go,” said Calvino. He opened the box and pulled out a bundle of one hundred dollar bills.
Webb took out a fountain pen, unscrewed the cap, and began to write out a receipt for the cash. “I am writing a receipt, Mr. Wang,” he said.
“You mean, Demato.”
Webb stopped writing and looked up with a mixture of fear and dread.
“What did I say?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But it wasn’t Demato. It sounded like a Chinese name, one of those names they put on computers,” said Calvino. “Like Wang.”
“Yes, it was Wang. I had him on my mind. He was one of our Chinese clients. I am sorry. That’s the problem when you try to do two things at the same time.” He finished writing the receipt, held it up, blew on the ink, then passed it across the table to Calvino. It read: “I, Douglas Webb, have this day received from Mr. Vincent Demato, American citizen, resident of New York, New York, the sum of US$200,000. I shall hold this sum according to the instructions of Mr. Demato and dispose of such sum as he so instructs.” It was signed by Douglas Webb.
“It doesn’t say anything about Winchell & Holly,” said Calvino, looking up from the receipt.
“Nor can it. I am doing this as a personal favor, Vincent. There is no way that Winchell & Holly could officially do this. It would violate a half dozen laws. But, for a client doing business in a place like Saigon, I can understand this makes business sense. Sometimes laws aren’t written by people with business sense or experience.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Calvino slid the duty-free bag with the two Johnny Walker Black Label boxes to Webb’s end of the table. “Aren’t you gonna count it?”
“I think we can trust each other.”
“I was thinking about checking out the Q-Bar tonight. Come around and I’ll buy you a drink. What do you say?” asked Calvino. “Let’s say the usual time. About ten. Now I had better attend to Mr. Bryant. He does look government, doesn’t he?”
As they stood in the door of the conference room, Webb shook hands with Calvino. The plastic bag was in Webb’s other hand.
“There is something familiar about you, Mr. Demato. I am sure I’ve met you before. Maybe in New York.”
“Maybe in Little Italy. I had an uncle who ran a restaurant there. I used to wait tables going through college,” said Calvino. “My ex-wife said that I look like a lot of people in New York. That was another way she had of saying that I was no one special. Once I get this bar, I mean, club, off the ground in Saigon, they won’t be saying that Vincent Demato isn’t special, will they?”
He stood in front of the elevator, waiting for it to come up from the ground floor. Mai walked toward him, then she caught sight of Webb watching Calvino through the glass window, and kept on walking without saying a word. She had wanted to say that she loved him. But there was no time. Inside the lift alone, he felt a thaw setting in; the ice was melting and he was finding for the first time what was inside a man who loved and lived free of the Zone.