Calvino waved at her as he closed the gate and walked into the enclosure. Her hair was braided and the braids were pulled back with clips, showing face and throat. The hairstyle made her look younger.
“Som said I’d find you here,” said Calvino.
She looked at the stitches she had sewn around his ear. There was still a red puffy, ragged line. “Your cut looks better.”
“Someone asked if I’d had a face lift.” She smiled. “What did you tell them?”
“Only on one side,” he said. “But I didn’t come around to talk about my scars.”
“Then why did you come?”
He leaned over the wooden railing and watched her slowly pull the brush along the side of Wagner’s neck. “Why is it that I keep getting surprised? Every time I come to Pattaya I am surprised.”
“Avoiding surprise is an art. Maybe they don’t teach that art in Bangkok.”
Calvino rubbed his eyes, grinned and took a deep breath. There was still blood in one eye from the assault. Out of the blue Fon’s priceless observation confirmed what he had suspected—she’d spent her life as a gardener’s wife concealing her intelligence. That was an impossible task. Intelligence insisted on asserting itself.
“We are lacking in our basic education,” said Calvino. “Not everyone can be taught.”
He turned towards her, standing a couple of inches away.
“I can be a good student. Lesson one. Paint me a portrait of Ton.”
It was her turn to look surprised.
“He’s the guy who worked with your husband on special jobs. I have a good idea that you already know about that and didn’t want to tell me. I understand. No one wants to talk ill of the dead.”
She stopped brushing for a moment.
“My husband worked with a lot of people.”
“It’s my turn to paint a portrait. Killing people is work. Let me make it clear. Ton, his brother, Sombat and your husband worked as a murder-for-hire team. They were in the killing business. Do you understand the picture I’ve painted?”
She dropped the feed bucket into a trough. A couple of the goats jumped and scattered. Wagner ran off. She watched as Elgar and Bach munched the spilled feed from the ground. Calvino reached down and picked up the bucket and held it out.
Her face flushed. “I know what he did in the past. But that was many years ago.”
“How would you know?”
“I would have known.”
“There’s something I don’t understand. With your university degree, your qualification to work as a vet, you must have had a lot of men wanting to marry you. You married an uneducated gardener. It doesn’t fit.”
“The first time he showed up in my clinic with a sick animal I saw something in him. He had a deep compassion for every living thing. Money can’t buy that. Education can’t teach that. His love of nature was beyond anything I had ever known in another human being.”
She started sweeping up the feed and shooing away the goats. She was thinking about the tightrope she’d been walking. She had a burning desire to establish that her husband hadn’t committed suicide. To clear her husband’s memory risked opening his past connections. She tossed and turned at night, seeking a way to walk that tightrope. Calvino had caused her to lose her balance. She tried to read from his expression, his voice, his words, how much he knew and how much he was guessing at, using her to fill in blanks. It had been only a matter of time before he walked to the pasture and confronted her about the bad days when her husband and Ton and Sombat had killed people. She had dreaded that moment. Now it had arrived.
“My husband’s dead. What do you want me to say? That he was perfect? That he never did anything bad? You have no idea how he regretted what he’d done.”
Calvino watched the goat munching. “What I want is for you to say, ‘I will help you.’”
“I’ve already tried to do that.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I can’t say. But if you really want to help me, then tell me how I can find Ton. Tell me where I can find him.”
“I don’t know where he lives.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I take that to be a yes.”
“Really, I don’t see the point of all this.” Anger flashed across her face.
“Your husband, his brother and Ton took assignments from Veera.”
“I told you already he worked for Sia.”
“I have a theory. Good hired guns are never allowed to retire. They may stop for a short time or a long time, but they are always pulled back for another job. Your husband had a new job offer. He brought in Sombat and Ton to work with him. The same team, just like old times. Now two of the men in the team are dead, and that leaves only Ton. He probably knows who killed your husband and his brother.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Ton would be dead, too.”
“Did you ever hear about the walking dead man? That could be Ton. Before he finally stops walking and becomes just dead, I’d like to ask him about their last job.” He walked around to where she stood. “You told Valentine that your husband hadn’t killed himself. You organized the other women to back you. You knew that Valentine would be forced to do something. If it hadn’t been for you, he never would have hired me. Your husband’s death would have stayed a suicide. You want to know the truth. Or you wouldn’t have done any of this. Now I’m asking you for some help, and by helping me, you get what you’ve been after. Does that make sense? You still want the world to know your husband didn’t take his own life? Or have you changed your mind?”
She sighed, playing with the brush, pulling out strands of hair.
“It’s true, my husband did do the bad thing. But he stopped and he was sorry for that life. He promised never to do that again. Every day he prayed to Buddha for forgiveness.”
“He took one more job. I figure someone important asked him for a favor. Your husband couldn’t say no.”
Fon pressed the brush against Bach, who was penned between her and the railing. “He never saw that man again.”
“He didn’t have to. Sawai was your husband’s guru. He is also close to Veera. What I am saying is, Veera had a messenger.”
She threw down the brush and started to walk away. Calvino grabbed her wrist. “That’s how it worked, isn’t it? Sawai brought a job for your husband. Veera asked for him to do something. Just one last time.”
“My husband wanted his own farm and herd. Is that so bad? Valentine has all of this. And we are Thai, and what do we have to show for our lives? He wanted more than being Valentine’s pet. He wanted more for me.”
“He figured Veera was good for one last big pay day. Whack someone Veera wanted out of the way. Then he’d have enough cash for the land and herd.”
“You’re hurting my arm,” said Fon.
He released her wrist. She made no attempt to move away or break eye contact. There was something different in the way she stared at him. Not hurt or contempt or hatred. More like a woman who had decided to stop running.
“You can’t run away from this. Even if you want to,” he said. He regretted grabbing her wrist. He mostly regretted judging her husband. In the real world of looters, thieves, and the rare golden opportunity, there was never sufficient moral cargo to stop the rush to claim a windfall. Prasit had simply done what most people around him were programmed to do: seize the advantage; never let the opportunity slip away. He never looked back. He only saw from the enclosure of his own hunger a shortcut to another life.
“We never talked about it,” she said. “Thai men aren’t like farangs. They keep their plans secret. They don’t talk about it to their wives. You live here a long time. You have a wife?”
“No wife.”
“Girlfriend?”
The conversation was getting personal.
“Believe me, a man needs to make his woman proud of him.”
“He had a wife with a
university education.”
“You think that was easy for him?”
“I think you tried to make it easy for him. You settled for a life as a gardener’s wife working for Valentine. You were so far off the frame it’s hard to believe you were ever in the picture. I don’t care how much his compassion touched you. It had to be hard for you and for him. Valentine was after all, as you say, an outsider. A farang.”
“My husband understood very well that I loved him. . . that I never questioned him,” she broke off and turned back to pouring feed into a trough for one of the goats.
“Question him about going back to work for Veera? You didn’t need to. You were smart enough to figure it out. He suddenly had a pile of cash. He told you he was now going to buy land. Somehow it went sideways. Those who did the killing got killed. Except for Ton. And he might be able to tell me what happened to the money.”
“Do you know who killed my husband?”
He had her full attention. Somewhere in her mind, she had to know he would ask about the money. No one clatters down the rungs of ladders examining potential motives for murder without asking what happened to the money.
“The question depends on who hired him to make the hit on the reporter. You saw the newspapers on the prayer room floor. He made a point of keeping newspapers with photographs of the reporter. Or what was left of him after they pulled the body out of the well. And the other old news- papers. All from hits going back for years. The prayer room was covered with the reports of the people he’d killed.”
“That was Sawai’s idea.”
“Being a smart woman, you understood what was going on.”
Her eyes gave her away.
“What I don’t understand is why someone would want to kill your husband and his brother and leave Ton still alive. Just call me curious.”
“I can’t have my life back until I know who killed him.”
“One more thing I’ve been meaning to ask. Call it another lesson in art. Did your husband show you the money?”
She shook her head. Something was spinning around in her mind. “He hadn’t been paid. That is why he was killed.”
“He asked for the money?”
“It was owed to him.”
“He knew getting what was owed might be a problem. Kai hen tin ngu, ngu hen nom kai.” The chicken sees the snake’s feet and the snake sees the chicken’s breast. This translated as a stand-off.
A bubble of laughter rose from her throat. The farang had summarized her husband’s situation with accuracy.
“At first, I think Valentine hire someone who knows nothing. I am glad to be wrong about you.”
He walked back to the guestroom, turned on the air-conditioner and poured himself a whisky neat in a glass. He sat on the edge of the bed and took a drink. She was holding back. As he was getting closer to the answer, she retreated further into silence. What was her angle? Was she after money? Claiming her husband had been killed might bring her some cash from someone like Veera. Or a bullet. Yet there was no sign that Veera was taking any interest in her or her demand to find the person who had killed her husband—she wasn’t on his radar screen, another one of those little people who lined up by the hundreds every day with a problem, complaint or desire. This explained why the widow, the wave maker, was still alive. The waves still had not hit Veera’s beach. Calvino started to feel that with Valentine as her cover, here was a woman who could avoid the best surveillance systems. She was very good.
At the same time, all roads and all fingers pointed to Veera, and that made it a little too easy. Veera had talked up a great story about his humble beginnings and his dedication to the village and how he was responsible for all of these people who depended on him. Calvino had heard this kind of rags-to-riches story before. In New York, he was Italian on his father’s side, and he had listened as a boy when an old man who was said to be a Mafia godfather had told similar story to his uncle and father. The don said that his job was to look after his own. Blood was thicker than water. Once that premise was agreed on, then suddenly a lot of things were much easier to understand. Take an outsider: such a person could be tolerated, accommodated, but if he decided to make trouble, the outsider had better watch his back. And if any outsider came into the territory looking to make trouble for someone important and powerful on the inside, then whatever was needed to be done to remove that problem was done.
The problem had started with a couple of Khmer fisherman and escalated into a different, more complex problem. The first theory was that the two Khmer had been talking too much about sideline assignments on a trawler. The villagers said they saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing to the police. The Khmer had vanished to the moon as far as they were concerned. Whatever the villagers had witnessed, no one could get them to talk. Not that anyone was trying very hard. The second theory was pure hatred for the Khmer. In the village, no one liked the Khmer, who were outsiders, dirty, dark-skinned people who stole their jobs; ignorant, and foreign, inferior people. Taking the next step was easier once the Khmer were no longer considered in the same category as other human beings. It made the killing easier to understand but it could have been for a hundred different reasons. A slight, a robbery, or some local drunks who got carried away when their extortion racket turned ugly.
Whatever the reason, the Khmer got themselves killed in or near the village. But the story hadn’t stopped with their two murders, a second outsider, and this time a Thai reporter asking a lot of questions about the Khmer prostitutes. He got wind of the murders. He had been a journalist, and murder was always a good story. He didn’t take the hint that his presence wasn’t wanted. He didn’t take the warning that followed the hint. What happened? He’s been warned, he wouldn’t listen, then he was warned again. This was the tradition. Thais normally gave a warning. When he didn’t listen, he was no longer entitled to a further warning. The reporter went ahead sticking his nose into the business of the village even though his activities might lead to damaging evidence and to some important person. They got rid of him. Had him killed and dumped his body in a well. Finished. Problem solved. Peace and tranquility returned to the village. It’s the way things work in New York and in Chon Buri and a thousand other places. It came from a universal instinct to protect your own kind even if that means killing strangers who stick their noses in your private affairs. That’s the way it is. It is a law of nature. It is hardwired.
Whatever could be said for human nature, it couldn’t stop Calvino from blaming Veera for cold-blooded murder. It was something no one could ever forgive in another. The moral cargo may have left this world, but it didn’t stop Calvino from clutching onto a view about the difference between right and wrong. Killing was always the wrong thing. Whether out of revenge or personal or business conflict. It had no justification. Killing the Khmer was possible because men like Veera knew how to channel the most primitive instincts towards their own personal interest. Such ability was the true face of evil.
When he called in Prasit, the jao poh would have known what buttons to push. Prasit would have thought of himself as a soldier in Veera’s command. If the old commander called him up, Prasit was unlikely to have said, “I can’t. I am retired.”
An hour later, Fon came into the guestroom without knocking. She closed the door and leaned against it as she unbuttoned her shirt. She slipped out of her jeans, and wear- ing only her bra and underwear, moved to the bed. Calvino finished the whisky in the glass and set it on the table. “It’s been a long time since I have a man,” she said.
She held his face in her hands and kissed his mouth, then his cheeks, and worked her way to the stitched wound along his ear. “It does look like a face lift scar,” she said.
He pulled her on top of him, unhooking her bra. The schoolgirls at Sawai’s compound flashed through his mind. Had he walked into another honey-trap? It was highly possible that she was using him to follow her husband’s money. He dropped her bra onto the floor.
It had been a long
time since he’d had a woman come to his room and strip down and climb into his bed. She was freshly showered and had put on make-up and perfume. She had taken the braids out of her hair and combed it out until it fell in long black waves down to the center of her back. Her tongue darted in his mouth and she let out a long sigh as he entered her. Her arms around his neck, she shuddered, eyes wide open, watching his face, watching his eyes half close, riding him slowly until the motion turned automatic.
Her nails ran down his shoulders as she arched her back and finally her eyes closed, and when she slumped back onto his body, her breath was hot on his chest. He stroked her face, pulling back the tangle of hair. Neither of them said anything for a long while afterwards.
When she finally rolled to the side, he cradled her head in his arm. He hadn’t expected it to happen. He had had no warning that it would happen. And moments before he had convinced himself that Thais always signaled in advance of an attack. She had simply launched the attack.
“I want to have you the first you came to my house,” she said. “Thai girls aren’t supposed to think that. They aren’t supposed to say this to a man.”
“You’re not what I’d call a typical Thai woman,” he said. She looked up and smiled at him, kissing his chest. She shook her head.
“I am a failure of the Thai educational system. Do you know why?”
“I thought you were a success,” said Calvino.
“No, a failure. I learned to think. And learned to question and not accept what someone said just because he was a poo yai. Like many farangs, you meet the successes of the educational system and you think we are all like that. It’s because you don’t think. I am glad to be a failure. In my country, it is the failures who will one day make things change.”
“Sawai tried to set me up with a tag-team today,” said Calvino.
“I don’t understand.”
“Two teenaged girls in a honey-trap. My guess is, Veera tipped him I was coming and they were trying to compromise me. Farang caught with two fifteen-year-olds would have got me out of their lives for about ten years.”
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