Exhausted by reliving the events, Fon collapsed forward on the chair, hands covering her face. Calvino waited until she composed herself and then left the house. As he was on his way back to the guestroom, Maew stepped out of shadows. She followed a couple of steps behind him. He stopped, looking over his shoulder a few feet beyond where she should have turned to her own door.
“You’ve passed your room,” he said. “In fact you should have been in your room a long time ago.”
“I am not sleepy,” she said.
Calvino leaned against the wall of the building.
“You have been waiting for someone,” said Calvino.
“I wait you.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
Maew smiled and stepped two paces closer.
Pee Fon’s very clever. She’s not a stupid girl like the rest of us. I go to mor sam. Junior high, then I leave school. Fon go to university. And she graduated from university. She worked as doctor.”
“A doctor?”
“For animals,” said Maew. “But she married a stupid gardener. He was from upcountry. Like me, pee Prasit go only to mor sam. Then finish. Why she do like that? Marry a stupid man like him? She’s dtok khob. I go to university, I get the paper, I not work for Mr. Valentine. I marry a very rich man and he buy me a house and a car, and I work in a office and have my own desk.”
“Maybe she loved Prasit,” said Calvino.
“If she could love Pee Prasit, then she could love someone else, too.”
Dreams and fears were manufactured for most people. What they wanted and what they were afraid of were identical to links of sausages on a conveyor belt. The same product filled with the same material. Calvino walked ahead, stopping to open the door to the guestroom; he thought about what eyes were watching from the darkness. It didn’t matter, he thought. If Maew had something to say, she could come into the room and say what she had on her mind and leave. Instead, she walked straight into the room, walked over and sat on the edge of the bed.
The gardener and his wife had rarely been apart. In the last couple of months, Fon hadn’t been herself. She was less friendly. Prasit seemed nervous, jumping at the slightest noise, distant and remote. They both did their work but kept to themselves. Fon had stopped smiling long before her husband was found dead.
Something had bound them together. “A secret,” said Valentine’s number one girl. “What secret?”
“If I tell you, then it won’t be a secret.”
Calvino rubbed his eyes, walked to the door and opened it.
“Wait, don’t go so fast. I can tell you something.”
Maew, easy and relaxed, was happy to play the game, and Calvino stopped, rested against the wall and glanced outside. The giant Great Dane came sniffing and slobbering around the verandah. He closed the door and turned back towards her.
“Fon go upcountry.”
“Thai people go upcountry all the time,” said Calvino. “Not Fon.”
Maew had been surprised that Fon had left the compound and traveled alone to visit her family upcountry. Such a solitary journey was unusual. Fon had told her that her mother’s sister had fallen ill and had asked for her. What could she do but comply? The aunt had a long history of illness and there was nothing to suggest that she was any more ill than usual. So after a day, Maew saw that Fon had returned with a handgun and had hidden it in the prayer room. The next day she had gone into Pattaya on an errand. When she returned, Prasit was dead. The gun remained where she had hidden it. She had found him sitting in his chair, slumped forward from the door. If he were going to kill himself, she had told Maew, he would have used a gun.
According Maew’s account, Fon was thirty-seven years old and came from a long line of freethinkers. Fon’s parents had been communist in the 1970s and she grew up in the jungle with her parents on the run from the army. It was only later that her father, a university-educated engineer, found work in Singapore and saved money for Fon’s education. She hated the government for what they had done to her parents. Alienated from students who spent more time on their make-up and clothes than their studies, she decided on a non-traditional lifestyle. She always wore baggy jeans and old shirts. She studied science and earned a degree. After university, she qualified as a vet. The middle-class Thai seeing her at a distance assumed from her dress that she was a peasant. She liked that assumption and did nothing to dissuade others from looking down on her. She said this gave her more freedom than those who drove imported cars on credit. And freedom was the most important thing in the world. She learnt the secret when she was young: giving up face in return for freedom was a small price to pay.
Most Thais lived their lives mainly to acquire a “big” face. Face was their reward. Without a big face—and that took money, power and influence—all else in life was thought to have been lost. And to lose face was the next thing to losing one’s life. Such a loss led to rages, threats, irrational outbursts; it also led to murder. Then Prasit ran into someone like Fon who failed to play the face game to type, who had turned the absence of face into an art form.
She had met Prasit five years earlier. At the time, according to Maew, Prasit had worked as a gardener for a resort in Pattaya. Fon was an assistant vet at a south Pattaya pet clinic. He had been a diligent worker. Starting as a member on the ground crew, he ended up as foreman. He had taken a great deal of interest in learning about plants and wildlife. One day he brought a poodle to the pet clinic where Fon worked. A guest at the hotel had asked him to take the dog for a wash and cut. The day they met, Fon had said that it was Prasit’s love of animals, his kindness towards people, his knowledge of plants and flowers that had touched her. They saw each other two days later. Again they met the next day and then daily meetings occurred outside the workplace. She had known her fair share of men before. Prasit was the only man whoever allowed her to trust herself to be faithful. Even well into her thirties, Fon possessed a beauty and elegance the farm clothes could not disguise.
In the prayer room, Fon had played with her husband’s amulet as she spoke. Play didn’t quite capture the caressing game, one finger at a time, massaging, touching, stroking as she spoke. The skin on her hands and face were roughened by the sun. She had milked the goats the same day she found her husband dead. She was at the work the next day. During the entire ordeal she never missed a day’s work. She did her husband’s chores as well as her own. She worked from early morning until late at night. No one could believe her energy or her determination to lose herself in her work.
Maew said she didn’t think that Valentine would keep Fon on at the compound for much longer. She was the gardener’s wife; what she did was work as part of a pair, and the pair had been broken. The fact that she continued to occupy the gardener’s house was a circumstance forced upon Valentine by the other women living in the compound. Until she left, he couldn’t hire another couple. The gardening work of the huge estate was disrupted despite the double-duty shifts that Fon pulled. And Valentine had pointed out that it wasn’t that Fon had no other place to go—she had family upcountry, she had marketable skills. She refused to budge until the manner of her husband’s death was resolved. Valentine had suggested that she was stalling, being quite comfortable in the gardener’s house from which she showed no signs of voluntarily leaving.
“The gun was the secret?”
Maew smiled. “Yes, but there was another secret.”
“Better than a gun?”
Maew leaned forward and whispered, “When she found Pee Prasit, there were yaa bah pills sprinkled over his clothes. The same as had happened to his brother. Pee Fon threw them away and made me promise not to say anything about them.”
“Did she tell you why she did that?”
“She said a bad man had put the pills on her husband.”
“Do you have any idea who the bad man is?”
Maew stretched, arching her back. “I go now,” she said.
“Stay a minute. I want to ask you something,
” said Calvino.
“No good for me. People see me leave your room they say the bad thing to my boss. Then I have a problem. You understand me?”
Calvino understood her all right.
She smiled, and bounced off the bed and out the door.
TWELVE
IT WAS NEARLY eleven. Calvino opened his cellphone. He wondered if it was too late to phone Ratana. Her mother’s enforced quarantine hadn’t excluded phone calls. There was an unwritten rule that she wasn’t allowed calls after 9.00 p.m. Fon’s rebellious state was contagious. Ratana had the same impulses as the daughter of the jungle fighters. Parents made a difference. Ratana’s mother taught her the Chinese symbol for a woman and Fon’s mother had taught her how to field strip an AK-47. The phone was Ratana’s only outside link with the world. He auto-dialed her number. It didn’t connect. He lay back and thought about Fon’s devotion to her husband, and how she continued to demonstrate this loyalty even after his death when everyone else said she should accept the police report. In his secretary, Calvino had witnessed similar acts of caring and support. He redialed her cellphone number. This time the call went through. She answered on the third ring. She sounded sleepy.
“The gardener’s wife has a gun,” said Calvino. “My mother wants to buy a gun.”
The first step was buying a gun; the next step using one. Fear had a way of making people feel a weapon was a source of comfort. Like the dead dragonfly and monk’s markings on the door had given Prasit comfort. Shooting at shadows out of fear was a good way to kill someone you loved.
“It is a bad idea.”
“The neighbors make her paranoid about Muslims who want to kill Buddhists. She has nightmares of terrorists breaking into the house and hacking her to death.”
Many people were already armed. The last holdouts were the little old Chinese ladies like Ratana’s mother. People felt a sense of helplessness. Security and protection businesses boomed.
“Talk her out of it,” said Calvino.
“I’m trying my best. You know how mothers are.”
His own mother had been headstrong, self-willed. She had owned a handgun.
“The gardener’s wife also has a university degree. She’s a trained vet.”
“She married a gardener?”
The reaction was forceful and immediate. The social distance between them had to have been large. They would have had little hope of acceptance of their marriage by those around them. Someone like Valentine wouldn’t have cared. He’d have shrugged and dismissed Fon’s degree and training.
“They seemed to be happy.”
Ratana was silent with a gray horror that happiness could ever be found in such a union. She struggled to find words to express her troubled thoughts.
“Could she have murdered her husband?”
“Because he was a gardener?”
Calvino smiled, rubbed his eyes, opened them and looked up. He saw a large house lizard on the ceiling.
“She’s the one who wants an investigation. Everyone else is content to say it was suicide. Valentine lives in a fantasy world occupied by his big-hearted creatures. He doesn’t want that world disturbed. He doesn’t want reality to intrude on his fantasy life. He doesn’t much like Fon.”
“Who?”
“That’s the gardener’s wife. I was saying Valentine wants Fon off the premises.”
“Is that why he hired you?”
Calvino thought for a moment. Ratana had a way of seeing through to the truth of a situation. “Yeah, that’s a large part of his motivation. Fon’s a modern woman. Valentine wants his women from the Middle Ages.”
She paused. “Do you know what it means in Chinese when you put the symbol for woman and modern together?”
“I give up.”
“Prostitute.”
“There were no rural prostitutes in China?”
“That’s what I asked my mother.”
“What did she say?”
“Modern city life has destroyed our values.”
“I thought Buddhism taught that all life is about accepting impermanence.”
“I thought of that, too. My mother said a good Chinese girl listens to what her mother teaches. Everything else can be impermanent.”
“What does dtok khob mean?” he asked. Maew had used it in reference to Fon marrying a simple, uneducated gardener.
“It means someone who is off the margins. Someone with an alternative lifestyle. Like a hippie. Or a rebel. For example, an educated Thai-Chinese girl who works for a farang private investigator. Her mother might say she’s dtok khob. Off the page and into the unknown. Or you can say nok krob. Off or out of the frame.”
“Or a university graduate who marries a gardener,” said Calvino.
“I almost forgot—Colonel Pratt phoned. He’s going to Pattaya.”
Before he could reply, the line went dead. He tried phoning again but there was no signal. He sat back and thought about what she had replied to her mother. “I am a modern girl but not a prostitute.” Or, “My duty is to myself.” Or, “I don’t want to live on the page composed by you.” It seemed close, but none of it quite fit what Ratana would actually have said. Most people accepted the page or frame manufactured by parents, teachers, and movie stars. There were so many subtle ways that mothers used to keep their daughters on frame, on the page. Ratana was in the process of undergoing an intensive indoctrination. He watched the gecko on the ceiling hunting mosquitoes.
All that he had intended was a good-night call, but the call had ended before he had accomplished his task. It was unsettling. The way cut-off phone calls always were. In the grayness of existence, the figures that broke the surface of consciousness lurked in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to play their tricks and hook their victims, pulling them down below the surface line until they no longer breathed. It was this world that Ratana’s mother instinctively feared. The one she wished to keep outside the door of her daughter’s life. It was that world of darkness that Calvino had represented: hidden, dangerous, and mysterious. His was an alien world to a traditional Chinese-Thai mother. He repeated the phrase dtok khob. To fall. To fall off the margin and into the void. Was that what he was doing with Ratana’s life? The most that could be promised was that he would not expose her to the frontline of his work. She worked behind the lines, knowing that she would be safe and that he would keep himself one jump ahead as the long shadow fell.
Calvino found himself listening to the buzz of the air-con. What stuck in his mind was the way his secretary had dropped the information about Pratt. The colonel would have wondered why his friend had gone to Pattaya without calling him. He didn’t have a direct answer other than the frustration of Bangkok, the tangles of traffic and heat and thunder storms, along with a sense of doom prevailing among most people as stories of disease and terrorism continued daily in the press. Colonel Pratt was on his way to Pattaya. There hadn’t been time to find out why his friend, the colonel, was going to Pattaya. He conjured up the image of his friend. He lived and worked under the protection of Colonel Pratt. “Protection” wasn’t quite the right word. He sheltered under the colonel’s wing. The colonel had been the slender thread on which to build a life in Thailand; no foreigner could exist for long in the private investigation business without a patron. Friendship with the colonel was better than owning a gun.
In the darkness, he saw in his mind’s eye the prayer room in the gardener’s house and the ritual markings and dragonfly taped to the door; heard the taped voice chanting and talking about spirits, bodyguards, and princesses. Faith that below the surface lay a world of forces—good and bad—that could be appealed to for protection. For Prasit, it had been more than mere faith; this place represented the forcefulness of Fon’s belief in her husband and his inability to take his own life. She had made a case for murder, thought Calvino. But it wasn’t conclusive. Life proved always to be filled with surprises about the capacity and motivations of others; hidden, dark sides of personalities that sudden
ly exploded without warning in an act of violence or self-destruction.
It was hard for others—wives, brothers, mothers, fathers, neighbors—to reconcile that the membrane of life rested on a sea of deep forces lying beneath, the seen co-existing with the unseen. Until there was a break and all hell was blown through that cracked membrane of what had been solid and good. He imagined how Fon would have returned from her trip upcountry and carefully wrapped the gun in a sacred cloth, placing the weapon in the prayer room for the eventuality that her husband’s prayers went unanswered, for the day when the unseen crept into their lives and other means had to be used. The gun must have been in reach that day; if it was, then why hadn’t Prasit gone for it? It was possible that Prasit and his brother had both been on drugs. Yaa bah, pure speed, made people crazy. It made them do things they would not otherwise dream of doing. Either Prasit didn’t know that he was in mortal danger or, as the police report concluded, his mortal danger came from unknown forces deep in himself.
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