“Find anything?” asked Calvino.
“That’s a question I should be asking you.”
“I can’t read much Thai. So how would I know from the Thai stuff? If I were in Bangkok, Ratana would have it all translated by now.”
Pratt looked up from an English language name card, turned it around and placed it square on the table, facing Calvino. “What about this one? And this card. The two addresses are close together.”
Calvino read the two name cards.
Underneath the words Athens, authentic Greek food, was the Greek flag. The other read: Harmony Massage. If there had been a flag, it would have been a flag of convenience.
“I’ll handle the restaurant and the massage parlor,” said Calvino.
Colonel Pratt put the contents back into the shoebox and put on the lid. “Better yet, why not handle the whole lot? Ratana’s back in your office tomorrow. As you said, she can translate the stuff for you.”
“You’re not interested?” asked Calvino.
“I didn’t say I was uninterested, Vincent.”
“But you just had a quick look. There could be a clue to Pramote’s killer.”
“We have a good idea who killed him.”
“But you haven’t arrested him?”
“What happened to the reporter is one factor.”
Calvino took a long drink from his Mekhong and Coke. “And the other factors?”
Colonel Pratt shrugged and drank his orange juice. “You’re not telling me something,” said Calvino, smiling. “Things done well, and with a care, exempt themselves
from fear. Things done without example in their issue are to be feared.”
“Shakespeare,” said Calvino. It wasn’t a question. “Henry the Eighth.”
Calvino always expected the colonel to dig into his knowledge of Shakespeare and produce the precise quote to fit the situation. A Thai cop who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare marked him. Colonel Pratt wasn’t the defensive type. He endured the isolation that came from thinking in a different way from his colleagues. Something had been on his mind, a question that others had asked.
“Shakespeare was wise,” said Colonel Pratt. Calvino remained silent.
“Shakespeare understood that life was theater, and what is theater other than an illusion? He was a Buddhist in his heart. Life is a drama with three intervals. You and I, Vincent, have started the third act. It’s our last chance to understand the nature of life before the curtain comes down.”
The colonel was an enigma. If he hadn’t been his best friend for many years, Calvino might have dismissed Pratt as another one of those guys who lives in a world of epigrams—a quick-reply artist skilled at producing obscure but meaningful-sounding quotes on demand.
“Fear’s always been the growth industry,” said Calvino. Make that a double espresso shot for capitalism and a triple espresso shot for Christianity.
“And it always will be, because the world is divided between those who fear not getting what they want and those who fear losing what they have.”
Colonel Pratt understood that if you lifted up the prose in Shakespeare and looked inside at the mechanics, what you found was simple—the necessity for an outside enemy to act as a diversion; allowing those on both sides of the fear divide to unite against a common external threat. Sometimes it was called the third hand. Sometimes it was called terrorism. The force had many faces and names throughout history. An equilibrium existed when there was just enough external terror to keep the internal fear in check, but too much might cause fatal, everlasting damage. Thailand was on the edge of losing its equilibrium, and this made the colonel fearful.
TWENTY-ONE
THE SHOEBOX CONTAINED a lot of junk, the detritus of an investigative reporter trying to put together a story while at the same time trying to keep track of his expenses. That evening, inside his guestroom, Calvino sifted through the invoices, clippings, notes, match covers, and name cards. He could have meditated over every piece of paper forever. It was mischievous to leave such a legacy. Sowing seeds of doubt, missed chances, evidence that could be misconstrued a hundred ways. Misfits, con artists, evildoers all had business cards. It was enough to make any man a bona fide misanthrope.
Name cards from a Greek restaurant, a massage parlor, a dry cleaner’s, a couple of go-go bars along Walking Street, places where farangs hung out, nursing happy hour drinks and playing grab-ass with the dancers; a hotel along the beach, a Russian bakery, a car rental place, an export company, and a distribution business—they specialized in beer, whisky, and cigars. Pramote was about ten cards short of a full deck of playing cards and about eight months short of being a live player.
Calvino sat back and studied the hand that he’d been dealt by a dead man. Did he hold? Or did he call? What was the bluff? How much should he bet? There was no way of asking for another card. His decision to cut Colonel Pratt in on the hand had been rebuffed. The colonel had his own hand and was keeping it close to his chest.
There were too many places for one man to cover and most of the addresses were likely dead ends. Ever since he’d seen the newspapers in Prasit’s prayer room, he’d had a gut feeling that the newspapers had a purpose. Prasit hadn’t randomly laid out the newspapers in that room. The king of spades. The papers were telling a story that meant something personal. The ace of spades. There was only one problem: Calvino couldn’t prove anything. But he could read a good card hand. He couldn’t get the image of the newspaper photo out of his mind. The picture of a dead reporter’s remains positioned in the place of honor before the prayer altar. He toyed with the Greek restaurant card. Then an idea came to him. A Greek salad was made with goat cheese. The gardener helped raise goats. He dropped the card on the bed. So the owner had killed the gardener and the reporter because some bad goat cheese was delivered? Maybe there wasn’t a connection at all. It was tedious, frustrating work, like filling in a crossword puzzle in another language. When anyone wired events and people together over a given time period, they found what they believed were real connections. As everything on some level was connected with everything else, this wasn’t a difficult task to do or a difficult premise to sell. From an investigator’s point of view, it meant running leads down blind alleys, then backing out with one’s tail between one’s legs. Unless one was careful, a lifetime could be spent running up and down such alleyways. Calvino picked two alleys: the Greek restaurant and the massage parlor. He was following an old and tested Calvino Law: If you are going down a blind alley, pick one with leads a couple of doors apart.
Colonel Pratt had had no more of an idea of what to do with the contents than anyone else. The shoebox had driven him to quote Shakespeare. He might have assigned a couple of men to interview the people who gave their card to Pramote. But what would they find out? Pramote had been dead eight months. How many cards had they been given since that time? What would they remember? What would these people tell the police?
Yeah, this reporter came around and ordered a Greek salad, he liked it, he asked for a receipt and my card. It happens all the time. What did I make of it? To be frank, I didn’t make anything of it. I asked him if he might mention the salad in his newspaper. He said he wasn’t a food critic or anything. Then I said, couldn’t he ask the food critic to give a plug?
With deadly viruses inside planes, trains, buildings and hospitals, martial law like closing hours, and killings increasingly more brutal in the south, ordinary life had been put on hold. People had stopped going to Pattaya, and what businessman didn’t need a friendly reporter’s help to stay in business? He’d gone as far as he could in thinking about the name cards in the box. But there were two ways to study the shoebox. Analyze what was inside and analyze what was not inside.
One of the cards absent from the box was the name card of Pramote’s editor. Nor for that matter, was there a name card for anyone connected to Pramote’s newspaper.
As Colonel Pratt had said, why would Pramote need the name card of his boss? He
knew where to find him.
Calvino decided to start with one of the people whose card wasn’t in the box and to meet for lunch at the Greek restaurant on the name card. A two-for-one blind alley.
TWENTY-TWO
PRAMOTE’S EDITOR AGREED on the phone to meet Calvino for lunch at Athens.
“I love Greek food,” the editor said in perfect American English.
Calvino’s Law: If you want to meet a reporter, offer to buy him a drink; if you want to meet an editor, offer to feed him.
He spotted the editor the moment he walked through the door. The man had confidence. His clothes were ultra-fashionable. Manicured fingernails. Expensive shoes. Not quite a swagger, but clearly a high opinion of himself, earned, in part, through hours of department-store mirror time. In one hand he carried a newspaper. Not any newspaper, but his own rag, suggesting he had an identity problem separating who he was from what he did for a living. He wore a freshly pressed shirt and trousers with knife-sharp creases. His face was open, boyish. Almost feminine. Calvino guessed him to be early thirties. He wouldn’t have lasted a round with the muscled Special Forces guy at the restaurant the night before.
“You must be Vincent,” he said, offering to shake hands. “You can call me Mike. All of my American friends call me Mike.”
He shook Mike’s hand. He had a firm clasp. As Calvino had just met the man, he wasn’t certain how deep Mike’s friendship ran with farangs. The restaurant had ten tables covered with identical checkered blue-and-white tablecloths.
Pictures of small Greek islands with white sandy beaches on clear, blue seas hung on the walls. There was a Greek calendar on another wall. And a Greek flag. But there wasn’t a sign of any Greeks. Two Thai waitresses hovered in the corner breathing yaa dom from inhalers. They showed surprise when Mike walked in. He waved at them and called for them to bring the menu.
They both arrived with menus and bottled water. Neither of them showed the slightest interest in Calvino. He’d been sitting for five minutes without either waitress coming around. Now Mike was at the table, they poured his water and gave him a menu. They walked around without offering a menu to Calvino.
They couldn’t take their eyes off Mike. He had the handsome smile of a luuk-krueng—half-Thai and half-farang—which made him an object of both envy and distrust. Idealization for good looks worked to give luuk-krueng a razor’s edge advantage, but the under the surface, suspicion of the person’s foreignness blunted that edge. Bringing up the subject of the dead reporter hadn’t erased the smile. Calvino had a feeling Mike smiled when he slept.
“They make a great Greek salad,” said Mike. “That’s my recommendation.”
Calvino folded the menu.
“I’ll have the Greek salad.”
The waitress looked puzzled.
“He’ll have the Greek salad,” Mike said to her in Thai. “Oh, the Greek salad.”
“That one,” said Calvino. “Not the Italian or Spanish or Irish salad. The Greek salad.”
Mike broke a roll in half and buttered one half. “Khun Pramote was a good man.”
“Was he a good reporter?”
Mike leaned back, chewing a piece of roll. He nodded to himself and stared into space as if to contemplate what this farang wanted to hear. What degrees of truth does he expect? What degrees of truth could he get away with? “He liked the way American reporters investigated and probed. He would have liked you. An American private eye looking into the heart of matters, getting to the bottom of things. That was Khun Pramote.”
“What was he working on at the time of his death?”
“He was working on a story about the trafficking of Cambodian women into prostitution.”
Mike saw from the private eye’s reaction that his carefully selected piece of information had been absorbed without a blink. Mike disliked a farang who possessed an immunity to surprise; it robbed him of a sense of pride—more than pride, power, to witness the farang investigator’s grateful request for more details. Calvino gave away nothing.
“You knew about the story, Vincent?”
Let the guy speculate, thought Calvino. Keep him on edge. “You assigned him the story,” said Calvino. He had turned the tables on the editor.
“Pramote had a bee in his bonnet. Personally, I thought it was a waste of time. Everyone knows the reality of how things actually work on the ground. Women want jobs. There are no jobs for them in Burma and Cambodia. How are they going to feed themselves and their families? If you’re an attractive young woman with no education, what would you do?”
“I am more interested in why Pramote wanted to do that story.”
Mike shrugged as if what Pramote wanted was of no particular interest. Of much greater interest to Mike was having a captive audience to express his own view on the prospects of peasant girls from neighboring countries.
“What other opportunity do these girls have? None but to sell their bodies. But in their village there are no buyers. Or Greek restaurants or massage parlors. Certainly there are lots of young unemployed men, but there are no buyers who have cash. So girls find a middleman who puts them in contact with a network of smugglers. And once they enter that system, they find their buyers, or should I say their buyers find them?”
“What was Khun Pramote’s angle on the story?”
“He knew the girls couldn’t come freely into the country without someone with influence willing to pull strings. He started asking questions. This is a very small community. If I ask one of the waitresses for a Greek salad, you know what happens? People assume that I love Greek salads. They start sending Greek salads to my office and my house with ribbons tied on the baskets, and soon I start getting requests for a Greek salad plug in the newspaper. And then other requests, until I would have nothing in my newspaper but stories about the origin and health value of Greek salads.”
“You said that Pramote was a good man,”
The editor studied him for a moment. “How good is your Thai?”
“I speak Thai.”
“A lot of foreigners speak what they call Thai to their maids and bargirls. But they don’t really speak Thai. They wouldn’t understand if I said Khun Pramote was sue goen pai.”
“Meaning, he was naïve,” said Calvino.
“Very good, Vincent. Too straightforward. We sometimes use this for people from upcountry. It is one thing to be childlike when you are a child, but to be childlike as an adult. . .”
“A way of thinking that can get you killed,” said Calvino. Mike smiled. “You know, I think I like you.”
“Saying someone is sue goen pai also means that they are too honest,” said Calvino.”
“Yes, yes, exactly. That captures Khun Pramote’s personality. When you’re a reporter in a backwater, you have some choices to make. You can report on local festivals, the charity fairs, run pictures of green rice fields, elephants, waterfalls, pictures of happy people splashing and having fun at the beach. Or you can run pictures of back-alley brothels, drug addicts, slums, pimps, and prostitutes, and crusade about the injustice of it all. Who is to say which vision is more honest?
I told Khun Pramote to be careful. He was a reporter and not an NGO. Let the NGOs run seminars about trafficking and we cover the seminars and can report their findings. Let them take the heat.”
“He didn’t listen.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Calvino thought about Bob Dilley, the American journalist killed in the blast in Pattani. He was another reporter who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Editors sat safe and secure in their offices like generals, while the frontline troops marched into battle. Pramote wasn’t coming back and neither was Dilley.
Calvino noticed that Mike wore a wedding ring. “You’ll understand how Pramote’s widow feels.”
“Because I wear a wedding ring?” He laughed. “That doesn’t mean that I am married.”
“What does it mean?”
“A wedding ring keeps away the amateurs. They see a ring an
d understand that whatever happens next, commitment isn’t part of the deal.”
He saw where Mike was headed. If truth were a mining operation, you wouldn’t want to buy the ore from Mike. “You warn yings with the ring, and you warned Pramote off the story. He didn’t listen,” said Calvino.
“That’s right. He didn’t listen. Anyone with a wife, a couple of kids, and a career leading to nowhere takes a long look in the mirror one day and says, ‘How am I ever going to dig myself out of this hole?’ Most of the time they know the answer. They can’t dig out. That hole only gets deeper every year. So what are a man’s options? Accept the fate that has been handed him in this life or check out. And next life, remember to stay single.”
The man had taken an oath of bachelorhood. The brotherhood of bachelors looked with profound pity on a man who had voluntarily locked himself up and thrown the key to a woman.
“You think he killed himself?” asked Calvino. “He kept looking into the smuggling of women business because he knew in the end a gunman would come after him? You really believe that?”
Mike paused and toyed with a chunk of feta cheese with his fork. “Like I said, I am not certain what to believe about Pramote. Other than, as I said before, he struck me as sue goen pai.”
The restaurant owner came out from the kitchen. Fifty- something with a large gut hanging over his belt, he wore all black. An obese Zorro years after he had hung up his cape and sword and planted himself at the dinner table. One of the waitresses had told him the editor of the newspaper was having lunch with a farang. “Welcome to Athens,” he said. “I hope that you like the food. And if you could say something in your paper, we would be grateful.”
Calvino pulled out a photograph of Pramote and showed it to the owner. “Do you remember him? It would have been about nine, ten months ago.”
The owner studied the photograph, turned it over as if there would be hint of the identity of the person on the opposite side. He scratched his head. In the photograph Pramote wore a business suit and tie; his hair was combed and his eyes were wide open. “I see so many people I can’t remember them all.”
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