Sandra struck him as someone on the outside of the sanom system. But she had one leg inside the business part. Anyone close to the money and with a better life than the others had to be an object of envy, thought Calvino. The reference to sex and Sandra had thrown Valentine off balance. He had recovered his composure in a heartbeat. More than money connected the two.
Once they returned to the sanctuary of the main gardens—the goats hidden away—Valentine sang and danced. In his mind, he had left this world for the world of his hallucinated orchestra. His imagination possessed him. Why is it that illusions make some men carefree, and some women murderers? It is a question to which there is no answer. The man who had sat across from him at the breakfast table had gone through personality alterations as he waltzed through his day. The confrontation with Kem was instantly forgotten as if it had never happened. Valentine lacked the capacity to retain anger or harbor a grudge. Such feelings discharged from his mind within minutes of their appearance. It became clear why the problem with Fon was such a serious one; it was constantly challenging him to remember something that he wished to forget.
Calvino had planned to use the time with Valentine to gather pieces of something which one couldn’t quite call evidence; it was thinner, more fragile than hard facts. Desires, secrets and disappointments were more like psychological tea leaves, and a private investigator learned from experience how to read the language of betrayal, cruelty and murder from a glance, a tear, the posture of the body, and the tone spinning around the edges of a word like a fully loaded weapon. The relationship to sex. The relationship to power and money. Valentine had been right about one thing: there was a system of living and working and relationship, and there were those who work inside and outside it, and the way they worked side by side was through deception and threat of harm to anyone destroying the illusion of harmony. Because the entire setup, to use the Thai expression was dtok khob, thought Calvino, didn’t mean that in an off-margin world there wasn’t the same desire for peace and tranquility. It was for this world that Calvino had been hired as the chief restorer of what had been lost.
FIFTEEN
THE MAIN BAR inside the Tequila Reef was packed with American soldiers. Young men and women—short hair, no overhanging bellies or flappy arms, the toned bodies of efficient killing machines—who drank Singha beer straight from the bottle. They were seriously fit and seriously into the mode of having fun. A couple of Hispanics danced in front of the jukebox. They had soldier and American written all over them. They had arrived in Pattaya as part of an advance team for the Cobra Gold exercise—the annual military exercise conducted by Americans and Thais in the fine art of coordinating killing machines. A surfboard from Hawaii hung over the door. The waitresses wore Hawaiian skirts and leis and behind the long counter was a row of frozen margarita machines. In the corner a couple of black women engaged in a speed-drinking contest with strawberry margaritas. A roar of laughter erupted as the winner slammed down her glass and grinned. Thirty or so soldiers shouted, cursed, talked, belched, filling the main floor with loud vibrations and gas.
In the back, sitting alone at a booth, Colonel Pratt sat with a glass of orange juice reading about the latest bombings in the south on the front page of a Thai newspaper. Calvino walked his way through the crowd and slid into the booth. Colonel Pratt lowered his newspaper, folded it neatly and put it on the table. Calvino, looking upset, sat across the table.
“The noise is terrible. This isn’t music. It’s jackhammers against the skull,” said Calvino. “Let’s go someplace else.”
“Noise is good.” “Since when?”
“Who can hear us talk above that sound?”
A waitress came to the booth and Calvino ordered a Singha beer.
“You never order beer,” said Colonel Pratt.
“Who would recognize me if I am drinking a beer? They might think I am another soldier in the advance Cobra Gold team.”
Colonel Pratt nodded and smiled. He didn’t think anyone would mistake his friend for a soldier. They didn’t come that old except in the movies. “Like the noise, beer has its bad and good points, depending on the context.”
“As I said earlier, I am investigating a death. Suicide? The police report concludes Prasit killed himself. Murder? The widow is convinced he was killed.”
Colonel Pratt sipped his orange juice, looked over at the soldiers. “It could be both.”
“Either the guy killed himself or someone killed him.” He wasn’t certain whether Colonel Pratt was trying to provoke or teach him. Knowing Pratt, he would say one is required to produce the other.
“Okay,” continued Calvino. “How do you murder yourself and then say that isn’t suicide?”
“Sometimes a man wishes to die. He can’t or won’t do it himself. So he incites someone to do the dirty work. So what do you call that? Suicide? Murder? Suicide by murder?”
“Assisted suicide like when someone has a fatal illness?” asked Calvino.
“Or someone is tired of life.”
Calvino was suddenly sorry that he had opened up a possible third explanation for Prasit’s death.
“Why are you in Pattaya?” Calvino asked. “It’s not exactly your beat.”
“A murder investigation. A reporter—or what remained of him—was found in a well. He had been shot and his body dumped. The local police have found no clues. The family asked why the police haven’t found the killer. They’ve had a couple of months and come up with nothing.”
There were layers of truth—some even claimed that there were degrees of truth. The colonel chose for reasons of his own to state the upper surface. He knew Calvino well enough to know that he’d pick up the highly unusual nature of a Bangkok-based colonel assigned to investigate a killing in Chon Buri. Many possibilities could be read into such an assignment: the importance of the victim, some cross-jurisdictional power conflict, or a possible connection to an unrelated case in Bangkok or elsewhere. In the case of Thailand, it could be all three possibilities along with a dozen more. Years ago Calvino had learned never to press Colonel Pratt for more information than he was willing to offer. It was an attitude that was rare; it was an attitude that allowed the colonel to be at ease in the presence of a farang.
Colonel Pratt continued. “My superiors have an idea that I might find what has been overlooked.”
“Finding the overlooked.” Calvino paused. “That’s the sort of thing that can get a reporter killed. Find that and you find his killer.”
Calvino’s Law: The dark forces and influences who contracted for hit often had enough juice to guarantee that a curious policeman would finish his career walking point duty along the Burmese border.
“How long are you in Pattaya?” Colonel Pratt asked. Calvino thought about the newspapers spread on the floor
of Prasit’s prayer room. One of the photo spreads had been of a reporter’s remains being hoisted out of a well, the bones displayed on a sheet in a field. There were only a few Thai words Calvino could read on sight: farang, reporter, murder, and sex. Not always in that order, and not always in the same story. But the words often appeared in bold-printed headlines.
“A few more days,” said Calvino. “Maybe longer.”
“You heard about the travel advisory from Australia?” Colonel Pratt glanced at the soldiers dancing in front of the jukebox.
Calvino shrugged. “Every month there’s a new terrorist warning.” He drank from the Singha beer and made a face.
“Sooner or later everyone gets to be right,” said Colonel Pratt.
“And you think someone is going to be right this time?”
“I don’t know. But no one knows when it’s their turn.”
“Meaning?”
“I am having a look around.”
“What’s the primary mission? The murder investigation or checking out if the jihad in the south has moved north?” asked Calvino. Silence followed. “Or maybe it is a two for one.”
This brought a gentle smile from
the colonel. Strike at the golden calf and Cobra Gold. He had read the phrase in an intelligence report.
Colonel Pratt’s choice of bars hadn’t been a random act. Calvino knew the colonel had a good reason for choosing a particular place and time. Even with limited intelligence sources, it wouldn’t be difficult to learn that the Cobra Gold advance team had chosen this bar as their place to hang out and unwind. The bar, with its American theme, music, food and management, made them feel comfortable. A joint in a strange and foreign place that acted as a home away from home. The kind of designated playing field that a terrorist dreamt of targeting. Pattaya bore the stain of jahiliyya—barbarism.
“My client wants a quick resolution.”
Silence fell between them, the void filled with the hollering from the bar.
“You’re under pressure,” said Colonel Pratt. “And so am I.”
Ever since Calvino could remember, his friend had played a dual role inside the department. He was admired and held in awe because he understood the mystery of how farangs thought. Not only the process, but also the rationale underlying the process. At the same time, such knowledge caused a sense of unease, distrust, and created distance as his superiors and others in the department were fearful that his knowledge might suddenly turn and shift and double back in unforeseen ways, in directions that they could not control.
Overhead the air-conditioner groaned, straining at full blast to cool down the hot, throbbing bodies; men and women letting off steam, knowing what lay before them was an exercise and not the real killing experience. Calvino looked over the tables and the bar. If he were a terrorist, he thought, where would he hide a bomb? Or would he park a motorcycle out front, walk away, and push a detonator as he walked along Beach Road? Or would he walk in with the explosives concealed inside his clothing, walk up to the jukebox, drop in a coin, push the number for Eminem and listen to the lyrics: Look, if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted... one moment. Listen real hard because those might be the last words anyone inside would hear, as the bomb went off and he cleansed the planet of infidel soldiers.
Calvino watched the soldiers dancing to Eminem’s rap. He tried to erase the apocalyptic image from his mind. On one level, he wanted Pratt to know that he could handle his own investigation. But the images of a bomb exploding stayed inside his mind. He told himself that he didn’t need anything from Pratt. But he wasn’t so sure. Everyone had been living under the terror of code-orange alerts for months. It didn’t stop anyone from going to a bar. Most of the time no one gave the possibility of an attack a second thought.
“Khun Ratana’s under pressure from her mother,” said Colonel Pratt.
“She’s learning Chinese. Did you know that?”
“She told me.”
“Her mother wants to buy a gun. That’s not dealing well under pressure.”
“Most people don’t hold up well under stress,” said Colonel Pratt.
“Staying in quarantine hasn’t helped.”
Colonel Pratt sipped his orange juice. “Tomorrow Ratana plans to go to the office.”
“She told you that?” It was news to Calvino.
Colonel Pratt nodded. He liked dispensing good news for a change.
“I hadn’t heard.”
“You know secretaries, they like to surprise their boss.” Calvino felt awkward talking about Ratana as if she were someone who would surprise him. He told himself that she was his secretary. An employee. But even Pratt knew there was something more unstated between the two of them. A personal bond that neither of them had yet found the words to express.
“Any idea who wanted to surprise the reporter with a bullet?”
“A couple of ideas,” said Colonel Pratt. “He was working on a story about the disappearance of a crew who worked on a fishing trawler. One of our sources said the bodies of the two Khmer were burned and the remains dumped in the sea.”
“And Pramote thought there was a story to investigate,” said Calvino.
“How did you know his name?”
“I read it in the papers.”
“I didn’t think Pramote’s murder ran in the English newspaper. And even if it did run, they would have buried it in the back pages. Besides, the report was in the papers months ago.”
“Last summer, wasn’t it?” said Calvino. “I have a good memory when it comes to murder.”
“A long memory and a good memory aren’t necessarily the same thing,” said Colonel Pratt.
Calvino let the remark pass, raising his Singha beer.
“Is there a connection with the men who got burnt and the reporter? Maybe he got whacked because he found something he shouldn’t have found,” said Calvino.
“And what might that have been?” asked Colonel Pratt. “That’s what you’re figuring out. Does anyone kill a reporter without someone important giving the okay?”
The case had the fingerprints of the local mafia on it. There was no need to say the word: jao poh or gangster or warlord. Chon Buri had its fair share of gangsters running women, drugs, and guns. They ran their local turf with brutality, and violence, and kindness and handouts. Protection and safety were guaranteed for those who bowed to the godfather’s authority, and a spot at the bottom of a well was reserved for those who challenged him, failed to heed a warning to back off. Those had always been the sub-rules of the game—the official rule was to deny the existence of jao poh. It was crazy. A world of denials and a world of containing the power and influence of what was denied. Pramote wouldn’t have been the first reporter to suffer from the illusion that his press credentials would shield him. He got it wrong. The influence didn’t get any darker than the one in the provinces. Gangsters lacked a reputation as original thinkers. As men of action, original thinking was of secondary importance. Finding how to get things done without getting caught, that required a lot of thinking.
Colonel Pratt said that the Cambodians came into port on fishing boats at the end of every month to unload their catch and to get paid. These were poor, uneducated peasants. They worked for two weeks, a month, six weeks fishing offshore. It was hard, backbreaking, dangerous work. They worked long hours, surviving on rice and fish. Surviving wasn’t the best description. They were likely fed well enough to be kept strong enough to work the bone-crushing hours. The colonel admired the Khmer’s determination to make money for their families in Cambodia. The big boss paid in cash. They walked away with four, five, even ten thousand baht, depending on the weight of the catch. This was a lot of money.
Colonel Pratt fell silent. Calvino knew how to fill in the blanks.
It was too much money for people in the village not to notice. Local officials and gangsters setup roadblocks, stopped them and demanded their money. After the extortion team struck, the worker might be left with five hundred baht. They should have been grateful to walk away with one baht; that was the attitude of the locals. The men at the roadblock could have taken everything. But this was the middle-path, leaving something for the unfortunate victim of fate. Let him go back and fish again and try his luck. Maybe his karma might improve. There was always the chance he could escape the roadblock next time. That was enough of a chance for them to return to the trawlers to try one more time to avoid highway robbery. What was clear, though, was that no Cambodian fisherman should complain to the police or to NGOs, or especially take his cause to a reporter or a foreigner.
“Karma is a hard thing to understand,” said Colonel Pratt. “I understand enough. A man gets himself killed. He dies on the job. Because he found out who did the fishermen. Someone talked to him. He got the story.”
If this breach of the rules happened, or was rumored to have happened, the fishermen’s bodies would be found—sometimes, or sometimes it would disappear at sea. The fishermen were shot, stabbed, drowned—the method was less important than the certainty that death served as a warning for each man to honor his fate and that of others destined to a better place on the wheel spinning the cycle of chance.
In this life, it became the nature of their relationship with those waiting onshore. Next life, who knew? The situation could be reversed. And indeed it may have been reversed, so why should I have my chance? It was given to me, thought Calvino.
Colonel Pratt had pieced together most of the story from several sources. It was always surprising how much people talked about things they shouldn’t talk about to each other and even to strangers. Each person had a tiny piece of the story. To them that was the whole tale. It was likely that the dead reporter had somehow stumbled over enough gossip to start making a few too many inquiries.
The puzzle Colonel Pratt cobbled together was of the day the men died in the village. Several fishermen had been seen in a fight outside a bar, and not long after that, plumes of smoke rose in the distance from a forested area. Later the charred remains had been scooped up from the gooey mess of smoldering tires and dumped into a bag, carried onto a boat, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. They had returned to the sea where they had worked and they vanished without a trace. No one had been arrested for the murder of the Cambodians. No one had been arrested for the murder of the reporter. It was the way things worked. Or the way people with authority and influence worked the system: without fear that came with the knowledge they were untouchable.
Someone reached over the bar and rang the bell. Peels of laughter and shouting followed as the soldier kept ringing the bell. A couple of moments later, a waitress brought another orange juice and Singha beer and set them down on the table.
“Looks like good luck,” said Calvino. The colonel was right: there was no such thing as luck in the abstract. In the abstract luck was just another chance that could go either way. Not unlike love, stud poker or the lottery.
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