The Black Echo

through normal channels. To wait for things from Washington.”
    “Foreign national?”
    “Vietnamese,” Bosch said.
    “Came here when?”
    “May 4, 1975.”
    “Ah, right after the fall. I see. Tell me, what kind of homicide would the FBI and the LAPD be working on together that involves such ancient history, and history in another country as well?”
    “Bob,” Eleanor began, “I think-”
    “No, don’t answer that,” Ernst yelped. “I think you are right. It would be best if we compartmentalized the information.”
    Ernst went through the motions of straightening his blotter and the knickknacks on his desk. Nothing was really out of order to begin with.
    “How soon you need the information?” he finally said.
    “Now,” Eleanor said.
    “We’ll wait,” Harry said.
    “You realize, of course, I may not come up with anything, especially on short notice?”
    “Of course,” Eleanor said.
    “Give me the name.”
    Ernst slid a piece of paper across his blotter. Eleanor wrote Binh’s name on it and slid it back. Ernst looked at it a moment and got up without ever touching the paper.
    “I’ll see what I can do,” he said and left the room.
    Bosch looked at Eleanor.
    “‘Ellie’?”
    “Please, I don’t allow anybody to call me that. That’s why I don’t take his calls and don’t return them.”
    “You mean until now. You’ll owe him now.”
    “If he finds something. And so will you.”
    “I guess I’ll have to let him call me Ellie.”
    She didn’t smile.
    “How’d you meet this guy, anyway?”
    She didn’t answer.
    Bosch said, “He’s probably listening to us right now.”
    He looked around the room, though obviously any listening devices would be hidden. He took out his cigarettes when he saw a black ashtray on the desk.
    “Please, don’t smoke,” Eleanor said.
    “Just a half.”
    “I met him once when we were both in Washington. I don’t even remember what for now. He was assistant something-or-other with State back then, too. We had a couple of drinks. That’s all. Sometime after that, he transferred out here. When he saw me in the elevator here and found out I was transferred, he started calling.”
    “CIA all the way, right? Or something close.”
    “More or less. I think. It doesn’t matter if he gets what we need.”
    “More or less. I knew shitheads like him in the war. No matter how much he tells us today, there will be something more. Guys like that, information is their currency. They never give up everything. Like he said, they compartmentalize everything. They’ll get you killed before they tell it all.”
    “Can we stop talking now?”
    “Sure… Ellie.”
    Bosch passed the time smoking and looking at the empty walls. The guy didn’t make much of an effort to make it look like a real office. No flag in the corner. Not even a picture of the president. Ernst was back in twenty minutes, and by then Bosch was on his second half-cigarette. As the assistant deputy for trade and development strode to his desk empty-handed, he said, “Detective, would you mind not smoking? I find it very bothersome in a closed room like this.”
    Bosch stubbed the butt out in the small black bowl on the corner of his desk.
    “Sorry,” he said. “I saw the ashtray. I thought-”
    “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