Tunnel Vision

by Jimmy Thomson

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Chaos seems to follow Danny and Zan. After narrowly avoiding a sticky end in Los Angeles, they escape to Vietnam to help out an old army mate of Danny's and explore a new TV-writing project. But soon they become entangled in a web of mysteries: their friend is being poisoned, a government official's daughter has disappeared, a mysterious body has been found in a canal, and there's a bloodthirsty sun bear somewhere in the city. It all seems to revolve around one powerful man, and he has Danny and Zan in his sights. They've got to get on the front foot if they're going to walk out of this mess. Tunnel Vision sees fever-pitched adventure collide with sharply witty, pacey dialogue as Danny Clay and his (almost) faithful sidekick navigate the corrupt world lurking beneath Saigon's crowded streets.

Release date: July 31, 2018

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

1

The sun bear in the cage by the gate roared and slashed, then, jolted by another shock, backed into the corner and mewed plaintively at the man wielding the cattle prod. Colonel Nhu turned to the occupants of his limousine and laughed. ‘Look at me,’ his grin said, ‘I made the bear cry.’

Inside the car, Nguyen Thanh Tuan could not look. He was remembering the moment when he made the worst decision of his life, down to the exact time and date. It was Wednesday, 27 April – his daughter Serena’s sixteenth birthday. It was also ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day’, an American affectation that the Vietnamese Ministry of Sports, Culture and Tourism had embraced, reluctantly at first, but more enthusiastically in recent years as the tentative links with their former foes grew stronger.

It was also the day that his terrifying boss, Colonel Nhu, first saw Serena. From then on, Colonel Nhu had pursued an interest in her that Tuan thought strayed from mildly inappropriate to dangerously obsessive.

As the gates swung open and Nhu waved his driver through – the bear baiting over – Tuan felt the urge to tell the large, older European man behind the wheel to turn around and take him and Serena back to the city.

But his lack of courage, and his hope that he was mistaking Colonel Nhu’s intentions, restrained him. Everything about this dinner date spoke of power and privilege. How many Vietnamese government officials – regardless of their status – had a Westerner as a chauffeur? How many kept a live sun bear in a cage at their gate, to torment for their own and their guests’ amusement?

As the Mercedes Maybach crunched over the pink gravel driveway that curved towards the house, Tuan could see from the vehicle’s headlights that the building was in two parts. One leg of the L-shaped house was a modern concrete-and-glass mansion. Triggered by motion sensors, floodlights sprang to life and revealed the other wing, further back in the magnolia trees, to be a large but more traditional Vietnamese narrow house with multiple floors and balconies swathed in ornate ironwork and mouldings. It was as if the past and the future had collided on Nhu’s immaculate lawns and taken root. The car stopped in front of the entrance to the modern wing.

A young woman in an ornately embroidered ao dai – a calf-length, slender silk tunic with side splits revealing long flowing pants – opened Tuan’s door and offered her hand. At the same time, Nhu emerged from the shadows and helped Serena out of her side of the car. They walked together up the low white marble steps to an impressive set of brass and crystal doors.

Inside, the hallway was even more eye-catching, with more white marble and brass. An ostentatious curved staircase swept up to the first floor, with an ornate gold balustrade leading the way, but none of it seemed quite right. The architect had clearly gone for stark, stylish minimalism, but Nhu had been unable to resist the lure of showy opulence.

The woman in the ao dai led them to a glass cocktail cabinet, then teetered away on tiny shoes through another massive carved timber door. Pouring two generous measures of 2013 Mars Shinshu Japanese whisky that Tuan reckoned retailed for $500 a bottle, Nhu offered an apology: ‘I’m afraid my wife is unwell, and won’t be joining us,’ he said.

This came as no surprise to Tuan. Mrs Nhu was notoriously reclusive and rarely seen in public. She was said to be devoutly religious and only accompanied her husband to social occasions when protocol absolutely demanded her attendance.

‘However, my niece, Jasmine, will be your hostess tonight,’ he said, gesturing towards the stairs. There, floating rather than walking down, like a feather caught in a light breeze, came a stunningly beautiful late-teenage girl in an elegant white evening dress.

Tuan saw Serena glance down at her own clothes. He had told her to dress smartly but conservatively. He was about to regret it, as Nhu caught Serena’s look of disappointed self-appraisal.

‘Jasmine, my dear,’ Nhu said. ‘I’m sure you must have something a little more … um … elegant in your wardrobe that Serena could wear.’

‘Young girls do love to dress up,’ Nhu said to Tuan as Jasmine wordlessly took Serena’s hand and led her to the stairs. Serena turned to Tuan with a bemused smile and his stomach flipped. From somewhere deep in his churning gut, his instincts told him their lives would never be the same again.

—

As the plane touched down lightly at Ho Chi Minh City airport, Danny Clay pressed his nose against the window, like an eager schoolboy, as the old bombproof bunkers rolled past. The curved concrete shelters had once housed American fighter planes, but most were now empty, although a few protected modern rescue helicopters from the elements. To Danny, a former army engineer turned TV writer, this was the stuff of dreams – and nightmares – and scripts yet to be written. Fifty years after what locals called the American War, the scars were still here. The structures lined the runway like a row of stitches on an old wound. Designed to survive Chinese bombs, delivered by Russian planes flown by North Koreans, they had easily lasted half a century of relative peace.

The plane lurched to a halt near some buses – the number of visitors had clearly outgrown the airport, so the overspill had to be shuttled to the arrivals building. A thousand kilometres to the north, Hanoi International sat half-empty but spotlessly clean, a testimony to France’s guilt-edged generosity and the power of Communist symbols over common sense.

With the first clunk of the stairs against the hull, half the passengers ignored the pleas of the cabin crew to stay in their seats until the seatbelt sign had been switched off. Overnight cases, plastic carriers full of duty-free booze, and stripy bags made of material that would outlast humanity were pulled out of the overhead lockers, some only just missing the heads of passengers who had remained seated.

One young Asian man was literally climbing over a large American in an effort to join the anxious throng desperate to be among the first.

The first to do what? Danny thought. To stand and wait? Zan, unbuckling from the seat beside Danny, caught his half smile and rolled her eyes.

‘Don’t say a word,’ she said.

‘I didn’t …’

‘Well, don’t!’ she said as she climbed up onto the edge of her seat to retrieve her own bag, being too short to do it from the cabin floor. Danny was about to reach past her to help when he caught the ‘I can do this!’ look in her eye. Danny had seen that look many times before, so he nodded his surrender and set about searching for his own day pack, which had been pushed back a couple of rows in a jumble of jackets, backpacks and laptop bags.

The 19-hour flight from LA had been uneventful apart from Danny shouting ‘Sniper, Sniper!’ and ‘Incoming!’ in his sleep. He was in denial about his PTSD – ‘Army psychobabble’, he called it – but Zan knew better. Too much stress, or too little, and Danny would dream he was back in Afghanistan, sometimes reliving horrific events he had witnessed, sometimes ones he’d only heard about; it was the curse of a former soldier with an active imagination. Zan had pulled him back so many times she could almost predict when it would happen. Almost, but not always. Fortunately, for most of the flight anyone close enough to hear had been protected in their cocoons of sleep masks and earplugs.

The arrivals hall was a picture of brisk efficiency, with most passengers forming orderly lines at a respectable number of open booths. There’s something about visiting a totalitarian state, Danny thought, that makes even the most exhausted or over-refreshed tourist rediscover their good manners. Meanwhile the travellers who thought they were smart in getting a travel approval letter, rather than a visa, discovered they had to queue to pay in US dollars, wait for their passport to be stamped, then join the queues anyway. There were a lot of lingering looks at the ever-shortening lines of pre-arranged visa holders at the immigration desks.

Danny sailed through, although his genial smile was not reciprocated by the severely thin lips of the young woman with the tightly pulled-back hair who stamped his passport. The militaristic uniforms of the immigration officials seemed to require a steely look of mistrust. One booth away, Zan seemed to be having more trouble with a middle-aged man looking down on her from his elevated desk. The immigration officer was asking her questions and looking frustrated as Zan shrugged and shook her head, as if she was refusing to answer.

For a chilling moment, as he waited for her, Danny thought questions over the death of Alan Hahn – the old man who’d had a fatal heart attack in a lift in which Zan was the only other occupant – had found their way to Saigon. Zan had at first been praised for her heroic efforts to revive Hahn, then, when it was revealed that he had been trying to drive her mother out of her home, Zan was accused of having caused the heart attack in the first place. Even before Danny knew for sure what had happened in the lift, he was certain that Zan was capable, in every respect, of having done it. The incident was still fogging his thoughts when she suddenly appeared beside him, smiling.

‘Got your luggage receipt?’ she asked cheerfully.

‘They won’t let you take your bag out without it,’ Danny replied. ‘I thought you hadn’t been here before.’

‘Mostly Hanoi,’ she replied. ‘Different airport, same rules.’

They resisted the temptation to watch an American trying to bully his way through the immigration desks, having failed to convert his pre-arranged permit into a passport stamp, and refusing to join the other queue to do so.

‘Hey, who won the war, buddy?’ he spluttered at an unmoved immigration official.

Danny and Zan exchanged silent ‘ouch’ looks and headed for the luggage carousels. Soon they were stepping out from the sterile cool of Ho Chi Minh City airport into the fetid sauna of a late Saigon morning, and Danny spotted a familiar face in the crowd.

Danny and Zan were both tired and pale from the flight, but they looked hale and hearty compared to Bren Willis, whose thinning hair was lank and his skin like sun-bleached parchment. Bren, a former Army mate of Danny’s, had been tall once, very tall, but the weight of some invisible burden had bent him out of shape, reducing his height to something closer to Danny’s five-eleven while, it seemed, taking his confidence along for the ride.

Bren hugged Danny with an enthusiasm that suggested relief more than pleasure at seeing him. His greeting for Zan was more formal, a handshake, nod and half-smile bordering on hesitant. Danny wondered briefly if he didn’t like Asians, but that was unlikely, considering that he lived here and was married to a local girl.

‘Danny, you made it,’ Bren said. ‘Thank God.’

‘God and China Airlines,’ said Danny. ‘They helped.’

Bren’s response was more of a twitch than a smile. Grabbing Zan’s bag, he herded them into an air-conditioned minibus and handed them each a plastic bottle of water, the standard Asian tour guide’s way of saying, ‘Please don’t die of dehydration on my watch.’ Bren chatted amiably and aimlessly. Danny watched Zan’s eyes flicker and sweep as the airport flashed past, as if she couldn’t decide what to look at. These were her people, but they weren’t. What was that look? Confusion? Loss? She caught his eye and smiled reassuringly, back in the now.

The streets and the traffic grew tighter as they neared the city centre – if they were arteries, Saigon was on the verge of a massive heart attack. Occasional parks, trees and bushes bathed in scooter fumes, drifted past. There were more motorbikes than Danny remembered from before – some with mum, dad and three kids on board. But then there were more cars and vans too. That was going to make crossing the road a challenge, he thought. Motorbikes and scooters will weave their way around you. Four-wheeled transport often doesn’t have that option. The government had decreed that the city would be free of motorbikes and scooters by 2025. Good luck with that, Danny thought, looking around and wondering if the Honda Revolution had better staying power than either the French, Americans or Viet Cong.

‘The scooters are a river and you are a rock,’ an old man had said to Danny when he spotted the tall foreigner riveted to the pavement on his first visit to Vietnam. Danny couldn’t work out exactly how you crossed a road that was a never-ending flood of traffic. ‘The river makes way for the rock,’ the old man had explained as he led Danny into and through the stream of bikes. Crossing the road in Saigon was more of an adrenaline hit than rappelling out of a helicopter, Danny thought – and he’d done enough of both to know.

Their long grumbling snake of traffic slithered to a halt. Danny looked out at two men sitting on an old, lightweight motorbike. The passenger was holding two sheets of glass vertically across his thighs. One decent pothole and he’d be as legless as a Scotsman who’d won the lottery on New Year’s Eve. But then, if two wheels and an engine are all you’ve got to move stuff around, that’s what you use.

The minibus driver said something to Zan in Vietnamese. She shrugged and turned away.

‘What did he say?’ Danny asked.

‘How should I know?’ she replied. ‘I don’t speak Vietnamese.’

‘But …’ Danny began, but let the question die. It had never occurred to him that Zan didn’t speak the local lingo.

‘My parents insisted we only spoke English at home,’ she said, her lips thin with embarrassment. ‘I never learned because I never needed to.’

‘So why exactly are you here again?’ Danny asked, mischievously.

‘Fuck you, Danny,’ she said. ‘And that isn’t the reason.’

The reason Danny’s erstwhile neighbour, occasional script editor and frequent drinking buddy was with him was that they had both escaped potentially fatal events in both Sydney and Los Angeles. Right now they had nowhere else to go and no one else to go with. Bren said something sharply in Vietnamese and the driver tensed and tried to shrink into his shirt collar.

‘He asked what a nice girl like Zan was doing with two Ucs,’ Bren explained.

‘Ooks?’ asked Danny.

‘Ucs,’ Zan said. ‘Australians.’

Danny looked askance.

‘Okay, I have a little …’ she said. ‘Tourist Vietnamese.’

‘I told him he should mind his manners or I would be having a word with the hotel manager,’ Bren explained.

‘Oi troi oi!’ Zan said, and she and Bren laughed. His splutter and bark, like an old engine kick-started after a long lay-off, sounded like it could have been the first time he’d laughed in months.

2

It was late afternoon by the time Danny and Zan – showered and changed – reconvened in the cream lobby of the Liberty Central Hotel, in Saigon’s teeming District 1. Dominated by a giant mural of an elegant Asian woman descending from a cyclo – the bicycle rickshaws that propelled terrified tourists through the city’s traffic – the lobby was an air-conditioned haven from the excess of humidity and humanity on the street. Danny nodded to the picture, as if saying hello to the woman in it. The background was the Ben Thanh market, which was literally 50 metres from the tourist hotel.

‘I call her Phuong,’ he said, catching Zan’s eye. ‘Like the girlfriend in The Quiet American.’

‘That’s my mother’s name,’ Zan said, looking puzzled.

‘I know. I read the book and saw the picture before I met your mum,’ Danny said. ‘And I always stay here. Force of habit.’

Danny had noticed a shadow pass over Zan’s expression when she mentioned her mother.

‘Your mum, is she okay?’ he said.

‘Yeah, fine,’ Zan said, with a little too much conviction. ‘All good.’

Danny led Zan to the bar at the rear of the lifts. Bren was slumped asleep on one of the leather-covered sofas, a glass of beer barely touched in front of him.

‘I love these,’ Zan said, scooping a handful of tiny dark-red peanuts from a dish on the table next to Bren’s beer, leaning her head back and trickling them skilfully from her fist into her open mouth. A waitress approached with menus as they sat down.

‘Two Triple-Three,’ Danny said. ‘Hai, ba-ba-ba.’

‘Aren’t you the linguist,’ Zan said.

‘Two beers is all I got,’ Danny confessed. ‘You like Triple-Three?’

‘Who doesn’t?’ Zan said, clearly too tired from their flight to berate him for daring to order beer, or anything for that matter, on her behalf. Bren suddenly lurched awake, seeming to take several seconds to work out where he was.

‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not getting much sleep these days.’

‘It’s okay,’ Danny said. ‘We just got here. Now grab a coffee and tell us what the hell is going on.’

Bren ordered iced coffee, a strangely addictive mixture of strong Vietnamese coffee, ice, condensed milk and sugar.

‘Ca phe den da,’ Zan said under her breath, as if she was trying the words out like an old favourite jacket she’d found lying forgotten at the back of a closet. Danny looked at her but she dismissed his curiosity with a shrug and flick of her hair.

After a slug of his now lukewarm beer, Bren leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, holding his head in his hands and regarding Danny and Zan with a look that invited them to suspend disbelief.

‘Okay, as you know, Danny, I am married to a Vietnamese woman. Mai.’

‘I was best man at their wedding,’ Danny explained to Zan.

‘Shut up, Danny,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about you.’

‘A couple of years ago, Mai and I bought into a real estate scheme to build some new apartments a little way up the Saigon River, in District 22. They’re just this side of the Saigon Bridge, overlooking Central Park.’

Danny was about to explain the geography to Zan but she raised a finger and gave him one of her looks. Danny sat back and let Bren continue, watching Zan, who already seemed completely absorbed in the story. One of the things he liked – no, loved – about her was her laser focus on whatever grabbed her attention.

‘The deal was crazy good. The land had been zoned as parkland. No building allowed. But we were contacted by a guy in the government, a very powerful guy, who said he could fix it, only he needed civilians to front it. So we put all our savings into it and borrowed some more …’

‘And it all turned out to be bullshit,’ Danny said, earning a frown from Zan.

‘No, not at all,’ Bren continued. ‘We got the permissions, the building contracts went through, a bank came across with the guarantees and the apartments are almost finished. Sweet as. Meantime, the property prices in Saigon have gone nuts. The profits we were going to make on the development doubled, maybe even tripled. We would have been set up for life.’

‘Would have?’ Zan asked.

‘Our new mate decided we were making too much money, or, more to the point, he had new partners and they weren’t making enough. He wanted to cut our share from 50 per cent to 10. That would barely cover our investment and loans.’ Bren looked at his hands. ‘That’s when I did something stupid …’

Danny glanced at Zan and could guess from her raised eyebrow what she was thinking … something else stupid.

‘I went to his office and bailed him up,’ Bren continued eventually. ‘First of all he got heavy with me, threatened to have me deported or jailed, or both. When I said my wife was Vietnamese and I would make sure whatever deal he’d done to get permission for those apartment blocks would come out in court, suddenly he was nice as.’

‘Then what?’ Danny said.

‘I started getting sicker every day,’ Bren continued. ‘My skin was getting darker in patches and I was getting sores all over.’

He pulled his collar aside, and for the first time Danny noticed patches of darker skin discolouration on his neck and chest. Bren then pointed to the remnants of warts and boils on his forearms and legs.

‘I went to a local doctor. He did some blood tests and it turns out I have arsenic in my system.’

‘Jesus,’ said Danny.

‘So I stopped eating at home. Now I have to sneak away and grab a bowl of noodles when I can.’ Bren pulled at the loose skin on his face. ‘I’m not getting poisoned any more, but look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m wasting away.’

Danny said nothing, remembering how fit and strong his former Army mate had once been. Now he looked like a two-dimensional puppet in a shadow play.

‘And Mai?’ Danny asked.

‘Fit as a flea,’ Bren said, his face betraying his suspicions. ‘Even though we’d been eating exactly the same food.’

‘You suspect her?’ Zan asked, her voice laden with scepticism.

‘Murders are most often committed by the people closest to the victims,’ Danny said.

‘Crimes of passion, yes,’ Zan said. ‘But this is about money. And this is Vietnam. Family comes first, last and everything in between.’

Zan’s brusqueness surprised Danny. He glanced at her and saw something he’d never seen before – like she was feeling insulted on behalf of her race.

‘Okay, what exactly do you expect from us?’ she added.

‘Us?’ Bren asked. ‘As in Vietnamese women, or you and Danny?’ Clearly he’d read the signals the same way.

‘Let’s try option two, or we’ll be here all day,’ Danny said. ‘How can we help?’

‘I need you to put some listening devices in my house,’ Bren said. ‘I would do it myself but Mai is always around. I need to hear what she and her sister are saying about me when I’m not there.’

‘How does Mai feel about the real estate deal?’ Zan asked.

‘She says I should give up. Go back to Oz. Cut and run and she’ll follow,’ Bren explained. ‘I just have this feeling … soon as I am out of the country, they’ll shut the door behind me and I’ll lose everything, including the initial investment. The other guy is a total crook.’

‘Not a lot of trust in your marriage, then?’ Zan said, a cold edge to her voice. ‘Is it really worth hanging on to?’

‘You think I should lose my wife, my money and my home?’ Bren said. ‘All of it, without a fight?’

‘Maybe this is not your home,’ Zan said, earning a theatrical cough from Danny.

‘I gotta go,’ Bren said, checking his watch. ‘Gotta catch the ferry to Vung Tau. Take this.’ He handed Danny a mobile phone and charger and pulled himself painfully out of his seat. ‘The phone’s number’s taped to the back. My number’s already in the contacts. I’ll call you when I can get Mai away from the house.’ He passed Danny a piece of paper. ‘And call this guy. He’ll get you all the kit you need. On me.’

Bren and Danny shook hands and Bren looked down sadly at Zan.

‘Nice to meet you, Zan,’ he said. ‘Wish it was under better circumstances.’

‘Me too,’ she replied with the minimally politest of smiles. ‘But, you know, we just got out of a very nasty situation in Los Angeles and Sydney. People died. We could do to chill a little. I mean, isn’t there anyone else who could do this for you?’

‘Anyone else I trust?’ Bren said, and shook his head ruefully.

‘Oh, hey,’ Danny said as Bren turned away. ‘Who is the fixer guy … the one who’s trying to screw you on the deal?’

Bren leaned back into Danny and Zan so that he didn’t have to raise his voice over a Carpenters cover duo, who had set up surreptitiously before launching into a toned-down version of the already soft pop take on ‘Jambalaya’.

‘They call him Colonel Nhu,’ he whispered.

—

‘Maybe it’s not your home?’ Danny said, shaking his head. ‘Really?’

‘I was just saying …’ Zan replied.

‘Never took you for a racist,’ Danny continued.

‘Not racist … truthist,’ Zan said, and giggled as she plunged her chopsticks into a steaming mound of morning glory and garlic. They’d had another couple of beers after Bren had left – consumed mostly in silence (not counting the spectacularly ordinary trawl through the Carpenters’ catalogue in the background). After an hour they realised they should eat before they slept, only because delaying their rest might offset their jet lag.

They strolled around the corner into the sweaty night, jinking past street vendors, badly parked motorbikes and people sitting on tiny stools eating bowls of chao – rice porridge containing something that might, at some point in history, have been chicken or duck.

‘Safest street food you will ever get, anywhere,’ Zan said, nodding towards a giant pot perched on a gas ring. Occasional steam bubbles erupted from grey lava as the vendor stirred. ‘If these are anything like the ones in Hanoi, some of those pots have been going for twenty-five years. Maybe longer.’

‘How do they clean them?’ Danny asked.

‘They don’t,’ Zan said. ‘Just add more rice, water and meat, and boil. Kills 99 per cent of all known germs.’

‘Knowing my luck, I’d get the other one per cent,’ Danny said. ‘So you know this place?’

Zan shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’ve only been here in Sa. . .