“Farang don’t understand.”
If he had five baht for every time he’d heard that expression, he could have retired a wealthy man. It was the automatic conclusion of last resort. Bred in part from desperation and frustration or fear, and in part from the reality that farang more than likely couldn’t understand why things happened the way they did and the reasons for accepting what was often unacceptable.
Fon was holding back. He felt it. “How many stitches?”
“Six,” she said.
“A good lottery number,” said Calvino. She smiled.
“You look good when you smile. You should try it more often.”
She repacked her medical kit. “I am sorry she lost her husband.”
“The problem is everyone is sorry. But no one’s talking to me. How can I fit the pieces together without someone helping me understand what exactly happened?” asked Calvino.
“Part of the puzzle is your husband’s guru. He seemed to have a lot of influence. Your husband looked up to him, admired him, and consulted him in times of trouble. At the time of his death, your husband was in trouble, and I think he must have talked to the guru about this. So you’ll understand it’s not unnatural that I would want to talk to the guru directly.”
She busied herself repacking the medical kit.
Calvino poured another drink from the bottle of Mekhong.
“Not so good for you. He’s very close to Sia Veera.”
She looked up. Touched his bandages one more time. “Are you afraid of him?”
She nodded. “But maybe you should be, too.”
He drank the shot from the glass and put it back on the table. His body ached from the kicks and punches. The pain returned, fresh and immediate like a cool breeze coming off the sea. An omen or warning that by changing a couple of variables, a cool breeze became a gale-force wind. A force of nature that sank ships. One that blew down houses and buildings. One that swept away men.
“Did your husband fear him?”
Fon turned and stored the medical case away. He watched her take an amulet on a gold chain from the cupboard. She laid it on the table in front of him. “He believed this would protect him.”
“Except from Sia Veera.”
“You are starting to understand.”
He picked it up and put the amulet in his hand. “Please wear it.”
Calvino put the amulet back in her hands. She reached forward and put it over his head.
“You will need all the protection that you can get.”
TWENTY-FIVE
COLONEL PRATT SAT on a blanket spread on the sand, playing the tenor sax. The sea lapped at the shore a few feet away. A white spume bubbled in the wake. The water was close enough to smell the brine. The colonel lowered his tenor sax, drew the sea into his lungs and expelled the air all at once as he brought the sax back to his lips; he poured the sea mist into his music. He remembered this deserted beach from the old days when Pattaya was a fishing village. Pattaya was fifty kilometers away. In the sixties Pattaya didn’t qualify as a city. It was another village with a thin string of fluorescent lights. By the time of the R&R decade starting in the mid-sixties, Pattaya Beach Road and Pattaya 2 Road had transformed the fishing village with strips of neon. And the fishermen were replaced by men with a past that mostly didn’t include a boat. Not everything from the old days had changed. What remained constant was the presence of powerful men whose orders summoned up a mixture of envy and fear. The colonel never underestimated such dark influences standing like a cobra in the tall grass ready to strike a lethal blow.
He played the sax as if to cast away the shadow that fell across his soul. Veera’s shadow which, like that of all strong-men, ensured those within his power lived in fear. There were no oaths sworn or loyalty pledged except to him. Justice and right were his to decide. Forces in Bangkok had decided Veera’s time had to end. They suspected but lacked sufficient evidence to establish a clear connection with terrorists in the south. There was a wisp of smoke. That was enough to signal that the time had arrived to remove Veera. But arresting Veera would not be an easy battle. The strongman continued to have a strong political base. He was fortunate to live in a world squarely divided between those who lived by instinct and those who appealed to the instincts in others. To react was to survive; to reflect was to survive with wisdom.
Colonel Pratt sensed, though, that much of the world had entered an age of reaction and survival. When he stepped back, what Colonel Pratt had were two fragments of a large puzzle. Veera, the long-time provincial godfather, and intelligence reports suggesting that a terrorist named Hasam had slipped into the province months ago. Could this have happened without Veera’s knowledge and consent? Terrorists like Hasam wanted a return to the world of the clan and tribe, and the strongman. If he succeeded, on the surface their victory was one for all the Veeras. The colonel wondered if Veera was wise enough to understand what lay beneath the surface. Men like Hasam possessed a ruthless, single-minded vision. They had shown they possessed a certainty of mission: finding and destroying soft targets. Would Veera have been so blinded by money that he’d fail to grasp that Hasam represented a direct threat to his survival? That Veera himself was living near the bull’s-eye of the soft target? Or had he taken money believing he could control whatever would happen next? Veera didn’t understand their world. Hasam’s fundamentalist paradise of true believers didn’t include a guestroom for local godfathers.
The Buddha taught that all life was a cycle of suffering. To crave, to want, was to ensure never-ending suffering. The colonel believed the day would come when men of wisdom would rise up and destroy men like Veera and Hasam. Until then, the terrorists and men like Veera would fuel the ambitions of reactionary forces. Men like David Jardine had been sent to his land to engage and eliminate these forces. Jardine (who worked under the cover of the Embassy) was part of a special unit with a mission, and Pratt had been enlisted in the same cause. Pratt had come to this beach to reflect, to remember and to forget.
Colonel Pratt hit a high note at the end of a riff, lowered his sax and watched the moonlight dance on the sea. A half-dozen fishing boats were anchored in the distance. The wake from a lone patrol boat cut through the moonlight. A searchlight circled the boats like a lighthouse moving across the sea. A naval patrol boat slowly crossed towards the horizon, looking for smugglers, bandits, or terrorists. The light was a snare set for a rabbit hunkered down out of sight, trying to survive. Rarely would the men in uniform patrolling the waters offshore have a second chance to catch a couple of men on a launch, speeding to shore. That would have taken incredible luck. The word was already out that new orders and rules were in place. Pressure had been placed on everyone by the Americans. The time-honored way was to announce a crackdown. Fishing boats had to fish. No supplemental income was permitted during the crackdown. No pay-offs, no exceptions. Everyone understood the main unspoken rule: crackdowns applied on sea and land. But they were never forever. They were for a time, a cooling-off period, and then business would resume. A number of the boats hadn’t bothered to go out. Fishing nets hung on the decks of those boats nearest to shore. The men stayed back drinking and playing cards, borrowing money against the time when business would return to normal.
Before he turned and looked away from the sea, Colonel Pratt said, “I wasn’t certain if you could find this place Vincent.”
The man had been right, thought Calvino. The spot along the beach would have taken the latest technical equipment to locate. Calvino had circled the area for nearly an hour before pulling into the right small dirt path and finding Colonel Pratt’s BMW parked at the end. Calvino had driven with the windows rolled down, listening as he drove. He had walked along the beach listening. If he hadn’t heard the sound of the sax in the distance, he might not ever have found Pratt sitting in the dark along the beach. Standing ten feet behind the colonel, Calvino was thinking he didn’t know how Pratt did this trick of knowing someone had come up behind him. The eyes in t
he back of the head had served him well in the past. Calvino had been careful to make no noise. This wasn’t about noise; Pratt had sensed his presence. Calvino sat on the edge of the blanket.
“I heard the sax. I was thinking, you play John Coltrane real good.”
“He was a genius. I am a cop who plays at the sax. I don’t pretend to be real good. I like looking at things the way they are.”
“And how are they?”
“You don’t look so good. And you’ve been at the Mekhong.”
“Bingo. You win any teddy bear on the top shelf.”
Colonel Pratt cradled the tenor sax and looked at the sea. “There’s some intelligence about an attack. Who, where, how. . . the details, no one is sure. Stuff is picked up on intercepts. Some of it useful, most of it not. This time the people who work this side of things say something bad may happen. And it may happen soon.”
“I tracked down the owner of the Greek restaurant. Pramote had his card. All the owner was interested in was staying in business. A reporter died. He didn’t care. The dead had his name card. So what?”
“Terror destroys the mood to eat out. People stay home. They don’t want to die. The owner was thinking about his future,” said Colonel Pratt.
“People forget soon enough. The bombs in Bali killed over two hundred, and everyone said no one would go to Bali for a decade. A year later, the tourists were back in Bali.”
“What if they had killed 200,000? What, then?”
“You think something like that is in motion here?”
“The people in the South can’t be bought. I admire that. But if they decide to expand their violence, that I can’t admire. I must do all I can to stop this bad thing from happening.”
Not being able to buy off the militants in the South was a challenge. They had to be dealt with on matters of principle and that was the biggest challenge of all. Religion was in the blood. So was murder. The average was thirty seconds for that blood to complete the cycle from the lungs to the heart through the body. A religious impulse or a murderous one followed the same pattern.
“You think something bad is about to happen?” asked Calvino.
“But it doesn’t matter what I think,” said Pratt. “You know what I want?”
Pratt turned his head and looked at Calvino for the first time. “What?”
“To find out if Valentine’s gardener killed himself or was murdered, and then I can go home. I want to go back to my office and my life.”
“I remember when you were a man of ideals and principles.”
“You get older and wiser, Pratt. What can you change? Look at the police force, the people on the take, hands in other people’s pockets, accumulating wealth. And where does that leave you? On a beach, playing John Coltrane on your sax, on a mission to do someone else’s dirty work. Collar a local gangster who is out of political favor. One gangster muscled another mobster for power and money. If it just stopped at gangsters then it could be contained, but it’s more than that. The system gorges on the weak and helpless and if you get in the way, you end up stuffed down the bottom of a well. There are a few men like you who know this is a rotten deal. Some of them write letters or make speeches about brother- hood and compassion for one’s fellow man. They are the freaks, Pratt. They actually believe that the engine that moves this well-oiled machine from day to day won’t roll right over them, flattening them.”
“What you are saying is, give up. That there’s no point in trying to do right?”
Calvino kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks, rolled his trousers up and walked into the sea. “Only with your family and friends. The rest of the world, they are on their own. There is no real hope for them. If they really looked down, you know what they would see?”
Colonel Pratt watched as his friend walked up to his knees into the sea.
“What would they see, Vincent?”
“That there is no net. They can’t trust what they are told. They don’t know who to believe or what to believe.”
“You want to pack it in?”
Calvino turned with his back to the sea. He raised his arms.
“A long time ago, in New York, the Chinese Triad had a contract to kill you. You could have run back to Thailand. But you stayed and faced what you had to do.”
“What I am trying to say, Vincent, is that I am not certain I can give you the same protection here. I made a promise to your mother when you came to my country. I told her I would look after you.”
“Pratt, you didn’t run away.”
“I’ll have one of my men drive you back tonight.”
“You’re not listening to me. You didn’t run.”
Colonel Pratt looked out at the sea.
“It’s not what I want. I look at your face. You’ve been beaten up. Next time could be much worse, Vincent. The people we are looking for have no problem with killing.”
“The statute of limitation ran out on that promise to my mother some years ago. Didn’t I tell you that?”
Calvino splashed with the palm of his hand. The water soaked his face and shirt. He splashed again. “I drank a little Mekhong,” he said. He shook his head until the stitched part of his eye throbbed. “Okay, I am feeling better. Feeling alive. And what exactly did these spooks tell you about an attack?”
“Some bad men have been reported coming in. From Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Burma. It takes a handful of such men to change everyone’s life.”
Calvino walked back and sat on the blanket. “I know the party line. What I asked is who came to blow up somebody or something in Pattaya?”
“You could be back in your bed in Bangkok in a couple of hours. I’ll see you have another case tomorrow.”
“Do I look like a charity case? Is that what you’re saying? Go home, you can’t cut it here. I’ll throw you a bone to gnaw on. You won’t go hungry, my old friend. You still have a few teeth left to chew. Is that what you’re saying to me?”
Colonel Pratt put the mouthpiece of the sax to his lips and played. When he stopped, Calvino had hunched over on the blanket, shivering in the night.
“What do you want, Vincent?”
“I want to talk to a man named Veera.”
“Do you have any idea who that is?”
“He’s the man.”
“And you think Veera had Valentine’s gardener killed?” Calvino shrugged, looked away. “I don’t know. But I’d like to ask him about a man named Sawai. He’s a guru, a seer, and he was a frequent visitor to Prasit’s house. I listened to one of Sawai’s tapes. Prasit kept the tapes in his prayer room. Sawai seems to be in the spiritual guidance business.”
“You are trying to square the circle.”
“Circle? Square, or maybe it’s a straight line with no con- nection. But I’d like to find out.”
“Why not talk with Sawai?”
Calvino was prepared for this question. “In Thailand you taught me that it is better to start at the top and work your way down. You can never work your way up.”
Pratt smiled, wishing he had left certain lessons untaught, as this ex-New Yorker sooner or later proved himself a more than capable student.
TWENTY-SIX
VEERA HAD BUILT his estate one kilometer north of the fishing village. He had a stone wall carved by hand into the face of a cliff. One stone at a time had been cemented into place; hundreds of hands and machines had worked to erect a defensive wall, and from the top, looking out, one saw nothing but blue sea. He built walls within walls. To keep out barbarians, to keep out intruding eyes. When he finished with his great wall, he had a fifteen-foot whitewashed concrete structure that wrapped around five acres of land. Calvino braked at the main gate and waited as security men ran mirrors on long poles underneath his car, checked the trunk, made him pop the hood and checked the engine. The lid of the trunk slammed, then the hood, and they waved him inside and shut the gate behind. Two security guards escorted him from his car across the circular drive to the main house.
As he
drove ahead, he saw Veera’s four-story house with its Doric columns and arched windows. The building had morphed, for a moment, into a knock-off of the White House, with added features lifted from a high-class private members club complete with fountains and statues of goddesses and roaring bronze lions and rearing horses on hind legs. Flapping on top of a twenty-foot high white pole was the Thai flag. Veera was definitely a high wall man. Outer walls enclosed the immediate beach. The compound had been built to use the sea as a buffer, a defense position on the flank of the compound. The sea was also an escape hatch. As Calvino got out of his car, he looked below at the wharf and at several luxury boats rocking in the gentle sea. An arsenal of weapons and ammo had been stored in the compound and on the yachts.
Inside the gates and into the central courtyard, Calvino was transported light years away from the fishing village. Inside the door to the main house, two more security men ran airport-like scanners up and down his clothing and then patted him down before nodding that he was free to go. Another guard led him down a long corridor and through a set of enormous doors, which opened into a room large enough to park a plane. A plump man with thick, black hair combed straight back, wearing a blue silk shirt and dark trousers, sat behind a large teak desk piled with stacks of papers. A half-dozen luuk-nong in dark designer glasses, wires snaking into an ear,
were positioned around the room like a human shield for their boss, keeping a respectful distance. The chatter he heard as he entered stopped the moment Calvino came into the room. The men in the room snapped into work mode. On any official event attended by major politicians or jao poh, these hard, no-nonsense men in their late twenties and early thirties with short-hair cuts and hidden eyes were everywhere from the parking lot to the lobby to the corridors with their cellphones and handguns. They wore traditional raw silk outfits: shirts with a high Chinese collar over matching trousers. The effect was to create the impression of a uniform worn by members of the same elite unit. The shirts, worn outside the trousers, were tailor-made to conceal a weapon.
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