CALVINO FELT THE weight of the Smith & Wesson hugging his body like a lover comforting him, snuggling real close as if nothing in the world was strong enough to come between them. But he knew this was a lie with a woman and a lie with a gun. In Vietnam, a handgun worked like an infant’s security blanket, something better left behind once one left childhood; a handgun was about as much use as a security blanket in a firefight where the other side was armed with combat zone fire-power. But a small argument against the forces of dark and evil was better than no argument at all.
He stood on the pavement, the fountain to his back, and glanced through the window of the Q-Bar. In the far corner of the bar, still seated at the table where he had left them, and in full public display were Webb and Darla. He saw Darla’s long, wet tongue move between her teeth and touch the tip of Webb’s nose, and then her tongue entered his mouth like in a porno film or a horror film, a devouring kiss which unleashed a monster. He turned and walked away. He had seen enough. Calvino’s law said that any woman who loved Barry Manilow’s music and dreamed of going down on him was still stranded circa 1969 in a Sport’s Illustrated Swimsuit issue. A time-warp baby. He had a fix on Darla, pegging her as that unusual brand of hooker—a Zone freak, a hardcore regular one ran across now and again—a genuine romantic in a mechanical, functional profession which was built on the illusion of romance and the reality of commerce.
Calvino moved quickly past the line of cyclos parked outside the Q-Bar; some of these drivers worked as undercover security agents, police, military and God knew what from other intelligence organizations. Chinese, Korean, American. Others worked for the privatized sector of the local mafia. He avoided them. A couple of ragged cyclo drivers pushed their cyclos away from the curb and rolled as if to chase him, running and panting, crying, “Mister, where you go?” Calvino waved each of them away, and their smiles vanished like a series of light bulbs as they explode one after another until there is nothing but complete darkness. But they finally got the message, peeled away, turned and walked back to their space in front of the Q-Bar.
He walked along the street, dodging cyclos, motorcycles and cars for some time, trying to figure what Webb’s angle was in setting up a meeting at night. Maybe he was hungry for that two hundred grand, thought Calvino. On the main road, he flagged down a cyclo and told the driver to take him to a street a short walk from Karen’s Bar. The driver looked at him, sizing him for the fare.
“Two dollars,” said the cyclo driver, climbing off the bicycle seat.
It was one of the few places on earth outside of America that drivers quoted fares in dollars. “Five thousand dong,” said Calvino. He climbed into the seat.
The driver, who was no more than a boy, stared at him before climbing back on the bicycle seat behind Calvino.
“One dollar,” said the driver, immediately dropping his price by half.
“You don’t like dong?” asked Calvino. “Dong no good. Dollar much better.”
“Okay, one dollar.”
The cyclo driver smiled, then not long afterwards, the cyclo turned left onto Hai Ba Trung Street, then made a right, not stopping for the light to turn green, at Le Thanh Ton Street. No one stopped for traffic lights or stop signs unless there was a policeman standing on the corner. The cyclo passed Don Dat Street. Calvino motioned for the driver to pull over to the curb. He climbed off the cyclo and paid him. He stood in the street until the cyclo disappeared from sight, then walked into Don Dat Street, and, a few minutes later, he cut down a small lane. It was as dark as inside the elevator during the power failure. There were no street lights. Calvino kept on walking, feeling his heart beat increase, the weight of his shoulder rig and the Smith & Wesson, whispering a lullaby, in a sweet voice.
“You’re gonna be just fine, baby.” He stopped and stared down the street and made out a dimly lit rim of light framing a few windows here and there. As he approached the lights inside the buildings showed the shadowy outline of windows, doors, roofs; the street was lined on both sides with old, cramped, dark shophouses, smelling of dry rot, backed-up sewage, and street garbage. Behind the padlocked gates some dogs barked. Nothing moved along on the small lane. He stood on the broken pavement, thinking how this was like Bangkok. In the distance, he could make out the sound of one of the Chinese soup boys beating bamboo sticks. Some traffic passed on the street, a cycle, then a motorbike, then an old man pushing a cart. He kept on moving ahead, almost stumbling over a woman who looked about eight months pregnant sleeping on the sidewalk beside her man. Their bed was a piece of cardboard. Bamboo stick music filtered through her dreams, he thought. The general wretchedness of the neighborhood would have made the lower East side of Manhattan look like Singapore. A hell’va place for an expat bar, he thought, as he stood listening and watching on the street.
There was unusual silence for a huge, slummed-out Asian city that had people swarming and crawling over every square inch of the place, picking over the scraps like junkyard dogs. More pregnant women camping on bamboo mats shifted in the shadows. He walked on until he came to a row of shophouses. He looked up at a painted sign that read: Karen’s Bar. Behind him a cyclo driver called out, “You, you. I take you now. Go find girl. Make love, good. Not expensive. Drink beer. Take girl. Can.” Calvino shook his head and watched him pedal away, thinking he should call him back and make the call in the morning. He tossed a coin in his mind’s eye. Heads he stayed, tails he left. It came down heads. He thought about two out of three, then he walked three more steps and pounded on the gate of the vacant bar but no one answered from inside. He kicked the door out of frustration, wondering what Webb’s game was and why he was hanging around the Q-Bar every night and how such a lawyer had ever been hired by Winchell & Holly. He was about to leave when a Vietnamese leaned out of the window two floors over his head and shouted down.
“Take the staircase on the side. I’m up here.”
Calvino stepped back and saw an old skinny Vietnamese man in a dirty singlet leaning out the window. Behind him a naked light bulb hung from the ceiling. He had pillow hair matted on one side like he had been sleeping. The other side was bald. Some men had that kind of hair they had to parcel out over the skull in a thin layer for maximum coverage.
“You Mr. Tang?”
“That’s me. You Demato?” Calvino nodded.
“Webb said you had a bar for rent.” Calvino stood back in the street and tried to imagine a bar in the shophouse. Bright lights, prostitutes, loud voices, a jukebox, and the smell of cigarettes and beer.
“You’re looking at it.”
There wasn’t much to look at. No wonder the former owner had gone out of business. Prison must have been a holiday camp after this neighborhood. Just finding the place required persistence and courage. Tourists taking one look at the street would have headed for the high ground of the Rex and Continental Hotels. Keeping in the circle of light like moths happy with the heat of the flame.
“Why don’t you come down and open up?”
The old man shrugged.
“The rats...” Then he stopped himself.
“What about the rats?” Calvino sensed the landlord and forgot himself for a minute. Having stopped short of explaining the rat problem was a good sign, thought Calvino. If you are trying to rent a bar, then you leave the rat problem for the new tenant to discover for himself after he has signed the lease. That’s why he wanted him to come upstairs. He probably had someone to go down and clear the rats out before he allowed Calvino to go inside.
“I’m from Brooklyn. I grew up with rats. I had two hundred kills with an air-rifle the summer I turned eleven. I had two hundred notches on my rifle butt.”
There was a light to the old man’s back making him look about a hundred years old but, in reality, Calvino guessed he was about sixty, with a couple of missing teeth, flabby arm skin and weepy eyes that looked like yellow piss holes in the snow. By the time he got down to street level, he was coughing, one of those deep smoker’s hacks. Calvino watched him bring up a lunger, and spit the contents of his lungs into the street. Stepping on a landmine or one of Mr. Tang’s lungers would be registered about equal on the horror meter. At ground level, Mr. Tang looked like he had shrunk to half size. His skinny legs stuck out of baggy shorts. He carried an oil lamp with a broken glass pane on one side and a large metal ring with keys. He didn’t look like a landlord, a man of means.
“You own this building?”
Mr. Tang looked up from the keys. “I am the manager,” he said.
“Who is the owner?”
His face turned to a Halloween black tooth smile. “Someone from Hanoi. I rent it for him.”
“Beautiful place like this. You shouldn’t have any trouble.” “In Vietnam there is always trouble,” he said.
Mr. Tang turned back to the key chain and the padlock which was in the middle of a fistful of chains pulled around the metal grates in the shophouse gate. After he unlocked the padlock, he unwrapped the chain and pulled up the metal gate. Then he reached down and picked up the oil lamp.
“Remember, watch out for the rats. The Australian was no good with rats. Mr. Evans complain very much. Say too many rats. Too much rent. Say Mr. Tang no good. He fight with everybody. He fight with police. No good. Police beat him up, break his balls, and take away his wife. She’s in prison. Next month she have baby,” said Mr. Tang, making a gesture over his stomach to show how fat she had been at the time of her arrest. “But he was the bad one. Not her. The police let him go. Said she was selling girls. Communist don’t like prostitution. Say old regime have Saigon girls fucking foreigners. No good. Fucking no good, they say.”
“I don’t plan to run girls from the bar,” said Calvino.
Mr. Tang looked him up and down. “Yeah, if you say so.”
He didn’t sound so sure and snorted back a laugh and brought up another lunger which he coughed up in stages, dragging it like a snake from his lungs, before spitting it on the sidewalk. Then he stepped inside the main room. Calvino followed a step behind. The oil lamp cast light about the height of a man against the floor, falling just short of the bar.
“How much is the rent?” asked Calvino.
“Very cheap price. Three thousand dollars a month. Two years paid in advance.” He rolled off the finance part of the deal straight away without blinking an eye. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had pulled out a lease and pen and asked him to sign it on the spot.
“You want it?”
“And you will throw in rat traps as fixtures?” asked Calvino. The old man pretended not to hear him. He looked at Calvino
as if he had already decided it was a mistake to come down and open up for him. But he had gone this far and decided to go ahead and show Calvino the premises.
“You fight with police, they break your balls,” he said as a kind of half warning. “The police come here and break Evans’ balls.”
Drew Markle had more than his balls busted, thought Calvino.
What had been on the diskettes? And why had he asked Mai to keep copies at home? Why didn’t he ask Jackie Ky to help him out? She was American... The thoughts crashed through the gates of his mind, and ran, and ran. He was distracted, lost in thought as Mr. Tang crossed the floor and put the oil lamp on the bar. Out of the corner of his eye, Calvino caught a movement as the light danced in the mirror behind the bar. A quick blur of motion which pulled him out of his thoughts and back into the moment. In the stinking, dark bar. The flash of motion could have been anything. A head, shoulder, arm or an extremely large rat standing on its hindlegs checking out a potential new owner. In less than a second Calvino dived out of the light, rolling over the floor and aiming for cover behind an over-turned table outside the arc of the lamp light. He crawled on his belly as the first shots ripped through the darkness. Tang groaned, said something in Vietnamese, then thumped like a fish that had taken a hook deep in its gut, and disappeared under the surface for one last, final dive. Calvino wasn’t sure how many of the shots had been fired, and whether all of the shots were intended for Tang. The firing stopped, and silence engulfed the bar. A long, tense quiet waiting for someone to make the next move. In the darkness he pulled out the Smith & Wesson from the shoulder rig. The feel of a gun was as good as the feel of a woman, and gripping the gun in the expectation of killing, choosing the moment, waiting with a finger pressed against the trigger, was unlike any other wait on the planet. A death watch. He won the advantage, and whoever had shot at him was exposed with the light to their backs. But, as in his worst nightmare, they had enough fire-power to blow him across the street.
He didn’t have to wait long before he saw a head pop up from the side of the bar. “Rats,” he thought. “Big, motherfuckering rats.” Calvino watched as the barrel of an AK47 came around the corner. The gunman exposed his head slowly, then he rose shoulder high, directly putting himself in the line of fire. Calvino squeezed three quick rounds, hitting the man in his left eye, jaw and the last round passed straight through the neck and shattered the mirror behind the bar. Seven years bad luck, he thought. There was silence for a moment which was broken by two male voices exchanging orders in Vietnamese, as he moved back from his firing position. Halfway down the bar, another figure rose up as if he were immortal, an automatic rifle tucked in close to the body and began firing, sweeping the darkness. AK47 rounds ripped into the wall several inches above Calvino’s head. The table top was metal but that didn’t stop a slug from passing clean through. A second burst split the oil lamp in half, and the oil splashed across the bar carrying a wave of flames. Calvino counted one, two, then flipped around the table, his hands around the gun, took aim and dropped the second gunman with two rounds. The man’s head jerked and he fell onto the burning counter top, making a gurgling noise as blood filled his mouth and lungs. The last gunman had meanwhile circled away from the bar, and the fire. Coughing from the smoke, he rolled right in front of the doorway. Smoke had got into the gunman’s eyes, half-blinding him, instinctively, his hands had come up to rub his eyes. Three blind mice. See how they run. Calvino didn’t wait for him to take his hands away from his eyes and back to his gun. Calvino shot him four times and the third gunman fell against the side of the metal gate and was dead before he hit the cement.
Calvino found a handkerchief stuffed in his jacket pocket, pulled it out, and covered his nose and mouth as he slowly rose to his feet. He edged forward, stopping to check the two bodies of the gunmen who had died at the bar counter. The interior temperature of Karen’s Bar was rising. He turned over the first gunman, who was obviously dead. Then he pushed over the second man whose head was split open, leaking blood like engine oil, bone and brains mixed with the blood. Blown apart by a high- tech piece of plastic in the shape of a gun. Both of the gunmen were young Vietnamese, early 20s, plastic sandals, not badly dressed. In terms of tailoring, the dead men were several cuts above the average cyclo driver parked in front of the Q-Bar. The hitman who was dead at the entrance was older. Calvino made him somewhere in his mid-30s when time had stopped forever. It didn’t matter, none of them were ever going to see forty.
In front of the bar, Calvino stopped and knelt beside the body of Mr. Tang who had been hit by a couple of AK47 rounds and most of his head was gone and his brains were splattered across the floor. A couple of slugs from the AK47 had torn away his face; no one, not even his mother, would have recognized whether this was an old or young man, or if it were a man at all. Tang’s clothes were on fire. There was the sickening smell of burning flesh. Calvino was shaking and angry, thinking how Webb had sent him and this old man to get themselves killed in Saigon. A moment later, he was out the back door, keeping to the shadows, climbing over a wall to the adjacent shophouse. He looked back at the flames leaping into the night. Below the wall, in the light of the flames, he saw dozens of rats were running out of the door. Jesus, he thought. How could one place have so many rats? He knew that the street was no longer silent and empty, but teeming with people running in every direction. These people had heard gunfire, seen bodies with bullet holes, and watched the flames of destruction before. The nightmare had returned to their lives and they rushed to see the carnage and to celebrate that once again they had survived. What they didn’t know was that Calvino was already over one wall, and scaling a second wall, taking evasive action under cover of darkness.
Calvino, smelling of smoke and fire, stayed on the back streets as he walked back to the Q-Bar. He hoped that in the tropical heat of the night he would lose the smell of death. At the Fourth of July picnic, he had worn the cheap cologne. He admitted to Pratt that he had no sense of smell. But he had been wrong, he couldn’t get rid of the scent of death, burning flesh, which clung to his nostrils. After scaling several more walls, he came to an alley and kept on moving low to the ground until about a kilometer later he finally came to a main street. He ignored a succession of cyclo drivers who came alongside, looking at this man in the wrinkled, soiled suit, smoky hair, and unknotted tie. They just kept on pedaling. He didn’t look like a passenger they wanted to deal with. His return journey to the Q-Bar, with all of his diversions, took about forty minutes and by the time he arrived, he had worked up a sweat, his shirt was soaked, sweat dripping off the end of his nose and chin. Webb had gone and so had Darla. But the Q-Bar was packed with people three deep around the bar, drinking and talking business. Funny thing was the music. The Miles Davis tape Jackie Ky had been playing earlier that day rose above the background chatter around the bar. One of the bartenders had cranked up the sound.
“What sauna did you find?” asked the schoolteacher.
Calvino sat down at the bar. “It never gets this hot in Brooklyn.”
The schoolteacher laughed.
“You looking for your friends?” he asked.
“Well, you won’t find them. Webb’s probably fucking her. I wish I was fucking her. Everyone at the bar wishes they were fucking her. But we ain’t. Not tonight. So we are getting drunk. You want a drink?”
“Yeah, I want a drink,” said Calvino.
“So how did Karen’s Bar look to you?”
“A little on the rundown side. Bad neighborhood, too,” said Calvino.
“You smell like you’ve been eating at a beggar ’s barbecue.”
Calvino took a long drink out of the beer the bartender handed him.
“You like Webb?” Calvino asked.
The schoolteacher ’s forehead wrinkled.
“Let’s put it this way. If he were on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him.”
“Did you see Webb leave?”
He smiled, taking a long drink on his beer.
“Not long after you took off.”
“Do me a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” There was an edge of suspicion in his voice.
“In case anyone asks, I was at the bar all night. I left for five, ten minutes, then came back, bitching I couldn’t find Karen’s Bar. Can you do that for me?”
“A real mystery man we got here. What happened? You get in a fight or something?”
“Something like that,” said Calvino.
“Hey, you’ve got yourself in some shit. That goes with the territory of Saigon. And you need someone to cover for you, right?”
Calvino smiled.
“How about another beer?” he said.
He gave the schoolteacher a couple of twenties.
“Take care of my bill.”
“Where are you going?”
“To see if Webb is on fire. Unlike you, I would piss on him.” Calvino had pulled real hard on the reins of his rage but the four horses kept galloping full speed ahead, cliff or no cliff, those ponies weren’t stopping for any one. The man had sent him out intending him to get killed. Setting him up for a hit. Pratt had said it was going to happen, he had set himself up by handing over that much money as if he had a death wish. His cover was that of a farang who didn’t know the story of how things worked in Southeast Asia, but Calvino had been in Asia for years and years. What he hadn’t known for all his years in Asia was the kind of love for a woman that made a man think stupid things such as love was powerful enough to have won a foothold in the world. Of course it hadn’t even come close. It was novice thinking; the kind of thinking that got you killed. By the time he had walked out the door of the Q-Bar, he had convinced himself not to go straight to Webb’s apartment and kill him. That had been the temptation. He wouldn’t really kill him, but he would make Webb wish he were dead. The sonofabitch, he thought, had finally figured out that Demato was Calvino, a lawyer, who once, in New York City, had represented an English grifter named Gentlemen James, the bed wetter, who had got a huge settlement from Webb’s client.
******
AT the reception desk of his hotel, the room key was gone and the young clerk with thick, black hair had a large grin on his face. Behind him on a Sony TV, a Chinese kung-fu film was playing from a VCR hooked to the TV, and three hotel staff sat on the floor watching an action scene. Two more had sheets pulled over their bodies, curled up, sleeping against the wall. They looked like corpses and the lobby looked like a public hospital morgue. Motorcycles were parked all down the first floor corridor.
“I give your friend the key,” said the clerk. “What friend is that?”
The clerk winked. “You know. Your American friend. She’s very beautiful. Very big.” With his hands he gave the universal sign language for very large breasts.
All the way up in the elevator he was trying to figure out how Webb’s mind worked. Expat lawyers in Southeast Asia, the local hires, were a breed apart from their brethren in America. Those lawyers, who survived on the edges of a world closed to foreign lawyers, made themselves useful because they had learned to understand the importance of the unwritten code of fear and face. How a deal would blow; how someone could get a bullet in the back of the head. Guys like Webb had usually developed a specialized taste, and their experience turned them away from a part of themselves, alienated some inner core, made them hard like steel, not just ruthless, but the moral compass which pointed to right or wrong got smashed along the way. They were usually smart, street smart, that is, they knew where young girls or boys could be found at bargain price. Or who had to be paid to fix a problem. They knew how to work the Zone to their commercial advantage. They were loners who stayed out of the limelight because that kind of attention made them nervous. However, that didn’t make them killers. Killing a man was easy enough to talk about but, even for the hardcore guesthouse lawyer, working the fringes of small-time deals, it was a rare thing for a man to find enough courage to pull the trigger. They worked a bloodless line of words and phrases, making paper trails. This wasn’t just crossing some line drawn in the sand, this was crossing a void with no name, a void which entered the man, and became him in a way he never anticipated. Taking another man’s life marked a separation from everyone else who lived on the other side of the divide; and once that happened, there was no turning back, no return to the paper trails. Gentleman James had pissed in the richest beds for a living. It was the one link to the past that Webb shared with him, thought Calvino. But Calvino had crossed that line. What would it take for Webb to kill a man? That was the question.
The elevator door closed behind him as he knocked on the door to his room.
When the door opened, Darla stood in black high-heels, six- inch heels, and she was wearing one of his shirts unbuttoned to the navel, the sleeves rolled up. She put her arms around him and kissed him hard on the mouth. He held her arms under his own, keeping her hands away from the gun he was carrying.
He kept his eyes open, looking behind her. The bathroom door was half-open. She opened her eyes and moaned.
“You taste good,” she said, pulling back.
Calvino pushed open the bathroom door with his foot, looked inside.
“Where’s Doug?”
“Not in your bathroom,” she said, laughing. “Then where?”
“He went to the office. Where else? All he does is work, work, work. He lives for his work. And it can make him so boring.” She walked back to the double bed, took a cigarette out of her handbag, lit it, raised her head, and let the smoke coil out of her thin nose. “I always charge lawyers in six minute intervals. It makes them feel, well, homey. Hey, you look kinda beat up. Are you okay?”
“I am having a great night. Does Doug know that you came here?”
She shook her head.
“It’s none of his business.”
“Why are you here?”
“Why, your charm, of course.” She inhaled on the cigarette until the ash grew long and gray before it fell onto the carpet. “And Doug said you are opening a club in Saigon. I started thinking. Yeah, a bar in Saigon run by an American. It’s romantic. Plus I am getting bored in Bangkok. So I am thinking to myself, Darla, here is a chance for a new start. Everyone knows that Vietnam is about to take off. The Vietnamese love Americans. Don’t ask me why. After all we bombed them for years. But they love us. I want to live in a place where people love us, Mr. Demato.” “You want a job,” Calvino said, sitting on a chair opposite the bed.
“Exactly.”
“And this is your idea of an interview.”
“If you are shy, then no one is going to notice you.”
“That rule wouldn’t apply to you.”
She let the shirt open and expose one large, firm breast with a pink nipple.
“They aren’t silicon. They are real. Natural. No sag. You can touch it. Go on, it won’t bite you.”
Calvino sighed and leaned back.
“What are your other qualifications?” he asked.
This made her laugh, her red painted lips pulled back, showing some very expensive dental work. This woman took care of herself.
“Any other man would have been all over me. Are you gay, Mr. Demato?”
“Cautiously heterosexual.” And incredibly in love, he thought. Why is it after you fall desperately head-over-heels in love, you find a Darla standing in your hotel room door, wearing your shirt, showing her breasts, promising every last single Zone fantasy in the privacy of your own hotel room? Why was the universe o rganized to create such misery and confusion? Was it that the world hated love, and whenever it struck, a Darla strike was launched to rub it out?
“Let’s see, I was born in Seattle. I am twenty-four years old. I am 37-23-34, and five foot seven and one half inches. I am university educated. I worked as an RN in Seattle. One night, on the graveyard shift, I read a magazine article about Russian hookers who were getting four hundred dollars a night to fuck Chinese- Thais in Bangkok nightclubs. I was taking home fifteen hundred a month after taxes. I’ve always had a head for numbers. So I worked out the figures. It was startling. If I worked double shifts in Bangkok like I was working in Seattle, then it would take about two years to make the same money as thirty-three years in Seattle. When it comes right down to it, is there that much more dignity in a bedpan than letting a stranger make love to you?”
That was one of those Zone questions that no one ever had an answer for.
“How long have you worked in Bangkok?”
“Eighteen months.”
“How long have you known Webb?”
“About a year. He pays like everyone else. I want you to understand that.”
“Why give up a good thing in Bangkok for a bar which isn’t even opened in Saigon?”
She leaned forward off the bed, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Because I’ve had it up to here with Bangkok. The traffic on Sukhumvit and Silom. The air pollution is so bad I can’t breathe. Bangkok is turning every call girl I know into a raving environmentalist. What I am saying, Mr. Demato, is that it’s time for me to make a change.”
“Bangkok’s definitely not Seattle, and neither is Saigon,” said Calvino. He got off the chair, walked over to the small fridge, knelt down and took out a beer.
“Want one?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Honey, I would love one.”
He took out two cans of 333 beer and snapped the tabs, handing one to Darla on the bed. She had the figure of a catwalk supermodel. The woman didn’t have a bad angle, he circled her looking for that one ugly profile to make him feel that he wasn’t giving up that much but, all he ended up doing was pacing, and working himself up into one of those blacked-out moods that he poured booze into. She leaned forward on one arm, her legs crossed, a relaxed smile on her face, as if she were right at home, no hang-ups, no stress. Good ole West Coast Pacific Northwest ease and grace. She took the beer and drank straight from the can.
“I’m trying to imagine you as a nurse in Seattle,” he said. “You know, as part of the American health care problem.”
She held up the beer can.
“I’m trying to imagine you as my boss,” she said. “And I don’t see any problems.”
He liked that about her: she was quick off the mark.
“The other night in the Q-Bar Jackie Ky was giving Doug a hard time,” he said, watching her on the bed.
“That bitch,” she said, the fire flashing into her eyes. “Whoa, why do you call Jackie a bitch?”
“Doug probably didn’t tell you. But Jackie Ky is a prime suspect in the murder of that lawyer who was killed here. I liked Drew. He was a nice kid. You know the type. Decent. All-American values. Knew how to treat a woman right. He was much too nice for her, that much is for sure.”
“Why would she kill someone?”
Darla rolled her eyes like she had to explain two plus two.
“Because she found out that Drew was having an affair with some Vietnamese girl named Mai. She’s a secretary or something at Winchell & Holly. Drew had something going with her, I guess. Well, I don’t know how much clothing they had on, but one night, Doug caught them late at the office. Let’s say in a compromising position.”
He swallowed hard, his face and throat were burning. I don’t believe it, he said to himself. Was this one of Webb’s crazy lies? Or a weird kind of sexual foreplay he used to stoke the fires with Darla?
“And he told Jackie Ky about it?” asked Calvino.
“I don’t know who told her. Does it really matter? She found out. Women don’t like cheating men. Men can’t seem to get that message in their head or in their balls. So, if she killed him, then, even as much as I liked Drew, well, he got what he deserved.”
“You’ve been working in the Comfort Zone too long.”
She laughed, and gave him a flash of recognition. “Yeah, you got that right. I was a Zone chick. But Jackie’s not. If she were a Thai Zone head, then Drew would still be alive but minus his dick. What do you think is better. Dead? Or dickless?”
“Wanna another beer?”
Calvino pulled two more beers out of the fridge. He flipped the same mental coin in his head. The same one he flipped before he went into Karen’s Bar. This time it came down tails. Tails Darla goes... Two out of three, he said to himself. I should have done two out of three at Karen’s Bar, he thought. After two more imaginary flips, he went into the bathroom and hid the Smith & Wesson under a pile of dirty clothes. Thank you for saving my ass tonight, he thought, giving a kiss to the plastic barrel. He showered, combed his hair, looked in the mirror, thinking about Mai with Drew. It made him crazy to think of that possibility. He turned out the bathroom light and walked out wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist. The main overhead lights were off. Only a side light near the bed illuminated her standing naked looking out from the balcony at the night. The sound coming back was from the bamboo sticks of a Chinese soup boy.
“Soup’s ready,” whispered Calvino, as he came up behind her. “Good, because I’m real hungry,” she said, turning around and flipping the towel away from his waist.
He took a deep, deep breath, moved slowly away from her, put the towel back around his waist. She didn’t fuck Markle, he said to himself. Faith, he said. It was an old-fashioned word that hadn’t crossed his mind for years. Faith was for fools, for people who lived outside the Zone. It was also for lovers, which was just another word for a fool. If he did not link faith in Mai with his love for her, then it would be lost; it wouldn’t matter. None of this would matter, and he would go back to Bangkok, his slum, his office, his Zone haunts, his missing person cases, and pass time until time finally passed him. He said the word, faith, over and over again, as he walked to the French doors to the balcony. Below, the boy with the bamboo sticks walked across the parking lot, making music. Behind him, Darla dressed and a couple of minutes later she let herself out without saying another word. Four dead men were in a burning building. The woman he loved was at home in bed. He was still alive. Looking into the night, he told himself that in life you needed some act of faith. Something beyond yourself to believe in. There was so much static misinformation in the world, crossing through computers, conversations, entering minds slightly altered, perverted, shuffled along the network, splitting into fragments along the web. This is what Drew Markle and Mark Wang and the men he killed tonight no longer have.