If you decide not to come, I understand, and I know you’ve made your decision. Please don’t reply to this, just come or don’t come.
Love, Paul
Well, that wasn’t too embarrassingly sloppy and sentimental, and I didn’t regret sending it. Everything was spelled right, rare for an e-mail.
As of this morning, as I said, there was no reply, which could mean she hadn’t opened her e-mail, or she took me at my word when I said, Please don’t reply to this, as Peggy Walsh had taken me at my word when I told her not to come to the airport.
The door opened, and a well-dressed man about my age entered, carrying two cups of coffee and a plastic gift store bag. He put the bag and the coffees on the table, then put out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Doug Conway. Sorry I’m late.”
“I’m sorry you’re here at all.”
Doug Conway smiled and sat opposite me. “Here, this coffee’s for you. Black, correct?”
“Thanks. You want peanuts?”
“I’ve had breakfast. First, I’ve been instructed to thank you for taking this assignment.”
“Who’s thanking me?”
“Everybody. Don’t worry about that.”
I sipped the coffee and studied Mr. Conway. He looked pretty bright and sounded pretty sharp so far. He was wearing a dark blue suit, subdued blue tie, and looked sort of honest, so he wasn’t CIA. Also, I can spot CID a mile away, and he wasn’t that either, so I asked, “FBI?”
“Yes. This case, if it has any resolution, will be a domestic matter. No CIA involved, no military intelligence, no State Department intelligence. Just FBI and army CID. It sounds like a murder, so we’ll handle it like a murder.”
Well, he did look honest, but he wasn’t. I asked him, “Will anyone in the Hanoi embassy know of my presence there?”
“We’ve decided to limit this information.”
“To whom?”
“To those who need to know, which is practically nobody. The embassy and consulate people are about as useful as tits on a bull. I didn’t say that. But fortunately, we’ve got an FBI guy in the Hanoi embassy, who’s on assignment to give classes to the Vietnamese police on the drug trade. His name is John Eagan, and he’s been briefed on your trip. He’s your guy if you’re in trouble and need to contact the U.S. embassy.”
“Why doesn’t John Eagan go find this guy I’m supposed to find?”
“He’s busy giving classes. Also, he has less ability to travel around than does a tourist.”
“Also, you don’t want any direct U.S. government involvement in this case. Correct?”
Mr. Conway, of course, did not reply. He said instead, “Do you have any threshold questions to ask before I begin my briefing?”
“I thought I just asked one.”
“All right, then I’ll begin. First, your mission is clear, but not simple. You have to locate a Vietnamese national named Tran Van Vinh — you know that. He is an eyewitness in a possible murder case.”
Mr. Conway went on a while, doing the FBI thing, as though this was just another murder that needed to be worked and packaged up for a U.S. attorney general. I sipped my coffee and opened my last bag of peanuts.
I interrupted his legal spiel and said, “All right. So if I find Tran Van Vinh, I tell him he’s won an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C. Right?”
“Well… I don’t know.”
“Well, neither do I. What do you want me to do with this guy if I find him alive?”
“We’re not sure yet. In the meantime, we’re trying to come up with some possible suspects, and/or the possible murder victim. If we do, we’ll get photos to you of these guys from when they were in the army. If that happens, and if you find Tran, you’ll show him a series of photos — just like in any criminal case, and see if he can ID the suspected murderer and/or the victim.”
“Yeah. I think I’ve done that a few thousand times. But my Vietnamese is a little rusty.”
“You can hire an interpreter anywhere.”
“Okay. Why don’t I take a video camera or tape recorder with me?”
“We thought about that. But that sometimes causes problems at Customs. We might have your contact in Saigon give you a video camera or tape recorder. Did you bring a regular camera?”
“Yes, as instructed. I’m a tourist. How about an international cell phone?”
“Same problem. They’re very paranoid at the airport, and if they search your luggage and find things like that, they get nosy. Visa or no visa, they can turn you around and boot you out for almost no reason. We need you in the country.”
“Okay.”
“But we may get you a cell phone in Saigon. Be advised, however, that their cell phone system is very primitive, and they have more dead zones than a cemetery.”
“Okay, so if you decide you want this guy in Washington, then what?”
“Then we might go to the Vietnamese government and explain the situation. They’ll cooperate.”
“If you don’t want their cooperation now in finding this guy, why do you think they’re going to cooperate after you tell them you’ve been snooping around their little police state and found one of their citizens who you need for a murder trial?”
Doug Conway looked at me a moment and said, “Karl was right about you.”
“Karl is right about everything. Please, answer my question.”
Conway stirred his coffee a few seconds and said, “Okay, Mr. Brenner, here’s the answer to your questions, past, present, and future. The answer is, We are bullshitting you. You know that, we know that. Every time we bullshit you, you find little inconsistencies, so you ask another question. Then we give you more bullshit, and you have more questions on the new bullshit. This is really annoying and time consuming. So, I’ll tell you a few things right now that aren’t bullshit. Ready?”
I nodded.
“One, there is more to this than a thirty-year-old murder, but you know that. Two, it’s in your best interest that you don’t know what this is about. Three, it’s really very important to our country. Four, we need you because you’re good, but also because if you get in trouble, you’re not working for the government. And if you get busted over there, you don’t know anything, and that’s what you tell them because it’s true. Just stick to your story — you’re on a nostalgia trip to ’Nam. Okay? You still want to go?”
“I never wanted to go.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you. But you know you’re going, and I know you’re going. By now, you’re bored with retirement, you’ve got a deep-rooted sense of duty, and you like living on the edge. You were an infantryman once, you were decorated for bravery, then you became a military policeman, then a criminal investigator. You were never an accountant or a ladies’ hairdresser. And you’re here talking to me. Therefore, we both know that you’re not going home this morning.”
“Are we done with the psychobabble?”
“Sure. Okay, I have your tickets, Asiana Airlines to Seoul, Korea, then Vietnam Airlines to Ho Chi Minh City, known to us old guys as Saigon. You are booked at the Rex Hotel — upscale, but Saigon is cheap, so it’s affordable for Mr. Paul Brenner, retired chief warrant officer.”
Conway took a piece of paper out of the plastic bag and said to me, “This is your visa, which we secured from the Vietnamese embassy with an authorized copy of your passport that the State Department was kind enough to provide.” He handed me a sheet of cheap paper printed with red ink, and I glanced at it.