Pattaya 24/7

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Depends if you like Singha.”

  Calvino liked that answer. He raised his Singha beer and toasted Colonel Pratt.

  “Here’s to New York City on the day you drank your first Coors.”

  Colonel Pratt raised his orange juice and touched the rim of the Singha bottle. He looked around the room at the young soldiers enjoying themselves, drinking, singing, and joking around. “It’s hard finding truth in a crowd.”

  That had been one of Calvino’s mother’s sayings. Long before Pratt became Colonel Pratt, he’d been a student in New York City. He’d spent many weekends at Calvino’s house. Calvino’s mother loved cooking for him. Over chicken soup she’d say things like, “You can no more find truth in a crowd than you can find compassion in a pack of jackals.”

  The colonel had loved Calvino’s mother like his own. He’d promised her when her son came to Thailand that he’d look after him. They had a strong bond, a connection going back twenty years, and each man had come to accept that there was a piece of destiny stringing together their personal and work lives in a circle. It had happened before in assignments in Cambodia and Vietnam, and it was happening again in the heart of mobster country. The history made Calvino a half-believer in karma. And what about the other half of his beliefs? Like just about everyone else, it was up for grabs.

  “And what will you do if some of your people are involved?” asked Calvino.

  He kept away from the word uniform. It wasn’t just author- ity, it was immunity and impunity. The uniform was a full house at the karma poker table.

  “My people? I can’t answer that until I know the situation.”

  “You’ll figure it out depending on the situation?”

  “On keeping a balance.”

  “The Tao,” said Calvino. “Neither day nor night.”

  The colonel nodded.

  Colonel Pratt had the Taoist belief that there was no black without the white, no good without evil, no beauty without ugliness. To eliminate one was to eliminate both, and since that couldn’t be accomplished, the best recourse was to establish a careful equilibrium. No matter how long his friend Vincent

  Calvino had lived in Thailand, Calvino still couldn’t accept a world which was both black and white; a world where the forces found a way to co-exist, and such an existence meant a mutual acknowledgment that one could never totally defeat the other. The metaphor of light and darkness failed to deliver the essence of what the colonel felt. But there was a breathing meditation that did. The physical act of being mindful as the lungs inhaled, held the breath, then exhaled. Mindfulness of that act, an act with two motions, one in and another out—that was being mindful that without each, the body would die.

  SIXTEEN

  AFTER FEEDING A bottle of milk to the kid named Delius, Sandra had walked from the goat pens to the guestroom and slipped an invitation under the door. Calvino saw a piece of paper sliding under the door. He picked it up. He opened the door and spotted Sandra walking quickly away from the guestroom. He stepped onto the verandah. Outside the guesthouse two of Valentine’s dogs chased each other around in the grass. The Great Dane pushed its nose inside, watching him and sniffing at his hands. He pushed the dog out, closed the door and read the paper. A handwritten invitation announced a recital by Searles Valentine would commence at 7.30 p.m. that evening. Mahler and Sibelius were to be performed and other surprises would be announced at the concert. And, as if the invitation wasn’t strange enough, Valentine had scribbled, “I will tell a touching and true story called “Lotus Shoes.” A new word for you to learn: podophilia.”

  It didn’t seem to matter that Calvino was in the middle of a murder investigation. Valentine had arranged for a recital and a story-telling session. And, no doubt, there would be more lectures on sexual fetishes. Was Valentine so cut off from the outside world that the death of a gardener was one more management problem to deal with? The presence of an investigator into that death certainly hadn’t caused Valentine’s routine to change. Except for the breakdown of his rotation system among his sanom, everything else in his life appeared much as it had always been. The issuance of the recital invitation was a confirmation that Valentine would not let anything or anyone interfere with the way he ran the life of the compound.

  Having instructed his secretary to hand-deliver an invitation at dawn appeared as natural as asking Calvino to stop for a fifty-kilo bag of goat feed. Valentine was a man who needed an audience. He needed a witness to his performance. He was at his best in front of an audience. A captive, private audience was the best. Some men liked showing off their women in a social setting. Valentine had loved showing off a harem as he sat behind a piano. This would be no ordinary recital. That was to be expected. There was nothing ordinary about Valentine. Why had he gone to the trouble of mentioning lotus shoes?

  As Valentine’s secretary was about to slip away, Calvino called after her. “Does he have regular concerts?”

  She turned back and stared hard at Calvino; the features of her Indian face twisted into a slow burn of rage.

  “The master plans a recital whenever he feels like having one. This is his place. His life. We exist in order to feed his damn goats, water his plants and listen to his music.”

  “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

  Her mouth moved and no sound came out.

  “He has been good to me and my family.” The words came out like a stock phrase; something that she repeated to herself every six hours as she sat on a stool and waited until the newborn kid sucked the contents of the bottle dry.

  Calvino walked down the path to meet Sandra. He held out the invitation. “Does he normally tell stories about shoes at his recitals?”

  “There is no normal in this compound. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Maew said you hand-feed Mahler,” said Calvino.

  “And Delius. Every six hours. They must be fed. Goats come before people. As do trees, shrubs, flowers and other things I’d rather not talk about.”

  “My job is to ask people to open up about the things they don’t talk about. It is one way to help me understand how Prasit died.”

  “You can stay here for years and you will never understand.”

  She turned and walked away. Her disposition had been cranky ever since the kids had been born. She had been assigned the duty of bottle-feeding Mahler and Delius every six hours, and feeling sleep deprived, she had fallen into a dark, foul mood and otherwise had made life miserable for everyone else in the compound. She had justified her moody behavior as the cost everyone had to pay for this unnatural separation of mother and child. After a week the mother would sniff the kid and walk away. The mother would make no claim on her child. There would be no bond. The kid’s diet had to be carefully monitored. Any deviation from the strict measure of the feed and the feeding time would subject the kid to all kinds of potential illnesses.

  Any deviation and Sandra would have a deduction from her salary.

  Being in a bad mood was a one hundred-baht fine. Missing a feeding was a one hundred-baht fine.

  Calvino wondered if the system of deduction might have had something to do with the death of the gardener.

  SEVENTEEN

  IN THE LAST afternoon, Valentine drove his beat-up old pickup into Pattaya to drop Calvino off away from the main drag. He stopped and put the pickup in reverse, and without looking, backed up. He hit the brakes hard. He had nearly collided with a new Toyota. The driver of the Toyota jumped out of her car and squatted down in the road looking for damage. Valentine squatted beside her.

  “You should look where you are going,” said Valentine. “You back into my car,” she said.

  “Where’s the damage?”

  Her eyes examined every inch of the car.

  “You lucky,” she said. “Next time maybe not so lucky.”

  Valentine climbed back into the pickup. “They should make cars from wood. At the end of the day, you park your car and sand down the bumps and scratches, slap on a li
ttle paint, and you’re ready for another day of driving in Thailand.”

  “Thanks for the lift, Valentine.”

  The blood had drained out of Valentine’s face. His hands trembled as he held the steering wheel. Calvino hadn’t wanted Valentine dropping him at his exact destination. After the near accident, Valentine was so preoccupied he wouldn’t have remembered in any event. Nor did Calvino want locals tracing the registration of his own car. Valentine dropped him about a five-minute walk from the pet clinic where Fon had once worked. There he could blend in as a tourist. Valentine looked around the area and was about to ask why Calvino had wished to be dropped in this dead zone of local shops, which had nothing to offer a farang. He thought better of it.

  “You can make your own way back to the compound,” said Valentine, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He pursed his lips together as Calvino opened the door.

  “Don’t forget, there is a concert this evening. I wouldn’t want my guest to be late. It would set a bad precedent for the employees.”

  I am an employee. Calvino said to himself. “I’ll be there at 7.30.”

  “Good, then be off and do what snooping you must do. Whatever you can find in this wretched neighborhood, I say, good luck to you. I have a bit of snooping of my own to do. Seven thirty and please be on time.”

  “On your way back, you wouldn’t mind picking up some goat feed, would you?” asked Calvino as he leaned down, one arm resting on the car door.

  “I hope you won’t be the one to write my obit. Because I fear you will never let me live that down.”

  Calvino shut the door and waved. He watched from the pavement as the concert pianist, gentleman farmer and harem keeper drove away in his ancient pickup, a plume of bluish black smoke gushing from the tailpipe. The pickup was a perfect disguise. No one would have looked twice at him, or thought that he had once been famous, that he was a man with a fortune, a payroll, and a dead gardener. Only someone who had no concern with face could possibility have driven such a vehicle. In a land of face, the best disguise for wealth was displaying poverty. He walked along the soi until he came to a market selling fresh fruit and vegetables. The hawkers called out to him, offering him fruit to taste. He cut in between a couple of stalls and saw a small shorthaired dog lying on its side under the shade of an overturned crate. He knelt down and looked at the dog. A woman selling mangoes hovered above him with a piece of fresh mango offered out in her hand. He took the slice and slipped it into his mouth. It was sweet. Calvino stood up from the dog.

  “How much to rent your dog?”

  The smile vanished from her face and she wiped her hands on an apron.

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  In Pattaya this wasn’t an inappropriate question to ask a farang.

  “Take her to the vet.”

  “Lucky isn’t sick. She’s a very clean dog. “She looks tired. Lucky needs a check-up.” The woman looked down at the dog.

  “One hundred baht. One hour. But you can’t hurt her.”

  “I’ll be gentle. Promise. And I’ll need a leash.”

  The vendor pulled out a frayed leash and handed it to Calvino.

  “Twenty baht for the leash.”

  “That makes a total of one hundred and twenty baht,” said Calvino.

  “And you buy from me one kilo of mango. I give you a good price.”

  “Good idea. I’ll take two kilos. When I bring Lucky and the leash back, I’ll pick up the mangoes.”

  The clinic was in a row of shophouses. It was sandwiched between a beauty parlor and a mom-and-pop shop—one of those last holdouts against the horde of 7/11 and other chain convenience stores that, like a contagious virus, had taken over much of Pattaya. Valentine had been right: the neigh- borhood was wretched. When the Australians or Americans issued their travel advisory about possible terrorist attacks against foreign interests, this was not the kind of place they had in mind. This was the kind of non-descript neighborhood that terrorists blended into. Inside the clinic, middle-aged housewives and teenaged maids sat in plastic chairs. Dogs on leashes lay at their feet or slept in their laps. A couple of dogs yapped, pulling hard on their leashes. Excitable, sick animals with yellowish eyes and dry, rubbery black noses.

  Behind the reception desk, a middle-aged Thai woman, her glasses on the end of her surgically altered nose, flipped through a box of small index cards. She was looking for something. Calvino waited with Lucky at the end of the leash as she fingered through the cards twice. It could have been a nervous habit, a way of looking to be doing something, Calvino thought. He stood there and she never looked up. He decided to interrupt and ask a few questions about prices and treatment. She pretended not to hear him. He repeated the last question twice, “My dog has a cold. How much for the vet to see her?” Before she answered, a needle must have been inserted into the hindquarter of a dog and it howled and then cried in pain. The dogs in the reception room looked up, ears erect. The perfect-storm look of terror reflected in their eyes. The woman behind the desk had the sullen look of a casino dealer eyeing a table of New Jersey pensioners. She glanced up from the card shuffling. She looked over the counter at the fruit vendor’s dog.

  “Lucky,” she said.

  Of all the dogs he could have rented, this one had to be recognizable by the card-shuffling woman with a bad attitude and nose job at the local pet clinic.

  “I want her checked out before I buy her. See if she’s got any problems. Before, there was a vet working here named Fon. She looked after my dogs for years. Then I went back to America. I am back and I’d like Fon to run some tests on Lucky.”

  The receptionist had a blank look on her face. She either had never heard of Fon or she was a first-class actress.

  One of the customers waiting with her dog cleared her throat. “Excuse me, did you say Dr. Fon?” Lucky had brought him some luck. He sat down next to the woman and she opened right up. The woman knew the history of the clinic. She had been bringing her dog here for ten years. She remembered Dr. Fon. Most importantly, she was willing to volunteer information.

  “Dr. Fon leave a long time ago,” said the woman in the faded blue dress.

  “And her boss, the guy who owns the clinic, I guess that he probably left, too?” asked Calvino, turning towards the woman with the white poodle.

  She shook her head and turned the page in her magazine. “No, Sia Veera, he still lives in Chon Buri. He has a big name. I never see him anymore.”

  “Is he the big man in the province? That Veera?”

  “He is very important. His name is loud,” she said. “Big politician.” In Thai the name that made a big noise was a famous name.

  “Thanks,” said Calvino. “What’s wrong with your dog?”

  “He’s too old. Sick. Can’t walk good. I come to have him put to sleep.”

  She flipped another page, smiled, and patted the dog on the head.

  “I don’t walk so well myself,” said Calvino.

  He had the name he’d wanted to find. There was always the chance such a common name could have belonged to someone else. Calvino was familiar with Thai names like Lek, Narong, and Toi. Veera could be added to such a list. But there was only one Veera who was known as an influential person in Chon Buri, or what the Thais called a jao poh. The woman had been clear this was the Veera with the big, loud name. Veera’s picture was often in the newspaper alongside local officials and politicians at some birthday, wedding, funeral, or opening celebration. The fact that Veera might also own a pet clinic was not a surprise. That was assuming that what a busybody in the waiting room believed was the name of the owner was the truth. In Thailand it was often impossible to determine the identity of the true owner of a business or a property. Title was channeled through a system of wives, minor wives, sisters, cousins, gardeners, maids, and luuk nongs. The truly rich and powerful had a lifestyle not all that different from the Pope, living in grand palaces decorated with art, collections of jewels, swords, scrolls and paintings,
and traveling in specially armored vehicles. But on paper they were paupers. When it came to directly owning property, the gangsters understood that like the Pope, it was better to keep ownership and title separate from the authority they wielded.

  “The vet will see Lucky,” said the receptionist.

  Calvino was at the door. “She’s feeling a lot better. That won’t be necessary.”

  “I thought you wanted an examination.”

  He leaned against the door. “I am thinking to myself. She will just get old. Sick. Won’t be able to walk. Then I’ll have to get her put down. I’ve decided not to get a dog. But thanks for all of your help.”

  He walked the dog back to the market stall and paid for the two kilos of mangoes. Lucky crept back to her spot in the shade of the crate, though the sun had moved and the shade was only a tiny shadow. The vendor gave Calvino back his change.

  “You can tell your friends about Lucky. They want to rent for one hour. No problem. She’s a very friendly dog. I think she like you very much.”

  “I’ll be sure to keep in touch,” said Calvino. Like drop her a postcard with just a few choice words: Hello my big, big bow wow.

  EIGHTEEN

  VALENTINE, GIGGLING AND smiling, jumped out of the pickup and ran around to the passenger side, opening the door for a slender young Thai woman. She stepped out smiling as she caught her first glimpse of the gardens. She had the pale-skinned Chinese complexion, narrow face, not young—mid- twenties—and an easy, confident smile. Dimples small black holes on both sides of her mouth like they had the gravitational force to suck Valentine’s eyes out of their sockets.

  Two hours later Valentine appeared dressed in black tails, white shirt, and white tie. He walked into the piano room as if he were walking onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. Following two steps back was the ying from the pickup. She wore a silver sequined dress and carried a matching bag. Everyone else had been waiting for twenty minutes before they arrived.