The Black Echo

“It’s not an ashtray, Detective,” Ernst said in a somber tone. “That is a rice bowl, three centuries old. I brought it home with me after my stationing in Vietnam.”

“You were working on trade and development then, too?”

“Excuse me, Bob, did you find anything?” Eleanor interjected. “On the name?”

It took Ernst a long moment to break his stare away from Bosch.

“I found very little, but what I did find may be useful. This man, Binh, is a former Saigon police officer. A captain… Bosch, are you a veteran of the altercation?”

“You mean the war? Yes.”

“Of course you are,” Ernst said. “Then tell me, does this information mean anything to you?”

“Not a lot. I was in-country most of my time. Didn’t see much of Saigon except the Yankee bars and tattoo parlors. The guy was a police captain, should it mean something to me?”

“I suppose not. So let me tell you. As a captain, Binh ran the police department’s vice unit.”

Bosch thought about that and said, “Okay, he was probably as corrupt as everything else that went with that war.”

“I don’t suppose, coming from in-country, you know much about the system, the way things worked in Saigon?” Ernst asked.

“Why don’t you tell us about it? Sounds like that was your department. Mine was just trying to keep alive.”

Ernst ignored the shot. He chose to ignore Bosch as well. He looked only at Eleanor as he spoke.

“It operated quite simply, really,” he said. “If you dealt in substances, in flesh, gambling, anything on the black market, you were required to pay a local tariff, a tithe to the house, so to speak. That payment kept the local police away. It practically guaranteed your business would not be interrupted-within certain bounds. Your only worry then was the U.S. military police. Of course, they could be paid off as well, I suppose. There was always that rumor. Anyway, this system went on for years, from the very beginning until after the American withdrawal, until, I imagine, April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell.”

Eleanor nodded and waited for him to go on.

“The major American military involvement lasted longer than a decade, before that there was the French. We are talking many, many years of foreign intervention.”

“Millions,” Bosch said.

“What’s that?”

“You are talking about millions of dollars in payoffs.”

“Yes, absolutely. Tens of millions when added up over the years.”

“And where does Captain Binh fit in?” Eleanor asked.

“You see,” Ernst said, “our information at the time was that the corruption within the Saigon police department was orchestrated or controlled by a triad called the Devil’s Three. You paid them or you did not do business. It was that simple.

“Coincidentally, or rather not coincidentally, the Saigon police had three captains whose domain corresponded, so to speak, quite nicely with the domain of the triad. One captain in charge of vice. One narcotics. One for patrol. Our information is that these three captains were, in fact, the triad.”

“You keep saying ‘Our information.’ Is that trade and development’s information? Where are you getting this?”

Ernst made a movement to straighten things on the top of his desk again and then stared coldly at Bosch. “Detective, you come to me for information. If you want to know where the source is, then you have made a mistake. You’ve come to the wrong person. You can believe what I tell you or not. It is of no consequence to me.”

The two men locked eyes but said nothing else.

“What happened to them?” Eleanor asked. “The members of the triad.”

Ernst pulled his eyes away from Bosch and said, “What happened is that after the United States pulled military forces in 1973 the triad’s source of revenue was largely gone. But like any responsible business entity they saw it coming and looked to replace it. And our intelligence at the time was that they shifted their position considerably. In the early seventies they moved from the role of providing protection to narcotics operations in Saigon to actually becoming part of those operations. Through political and military contacts and, of course, police enforcement they solidified themselves as the brokers for all brown heroin that came out of the highlands and was moved to the United States.”

“But it didn’t last,” Bosch said.

“Oh, no. Of course not. When Saigon fell in April 1975, they had to get out. They had made millions, an estimated fifteen to eighteen million American dollars each. It would mean nothing in the new Ho Chi Minh City and they wouldn’t be alive to enjoy it anyway. The triad had to get out or they’d face the firing squads of the North Army. And they had to get out with their money…”

“So, how’d they do it?” Bosch said.

“It was dirty money. Money that no Vietnamese police captain could or should have. I suppose they could have wired it to Zurich, but you have to remember you are dealing with the Vietnamese culture. Born of turmoil and distrust. War. These people did not even trust banks in their homeland. And besides it wasn’t money anymore.”

“What?” Eleanor said, puzzled.