“Maybe we can help each other,” said Calvino.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear for the past thirty minutes.”
“What can I do for you?” Calvino asked.
Jardine looked at the stage and pointed at one of yings on stage. She had a plastic oval with the raised number 18 pinned to her bikini bottom. She wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd; no one in the bar would be able to identify her from the other four dancers in the line-up. She had no special features. Nothing about her body was memorable. She was another ordinary ying; like elevator music or wallpaper, she was there and not there at the same time.
Except for one non-physical item: her friendship with an ex-dancer named Noi. Calvino misunderstood at first.
“Her friend unhooked herself from the chrome-pole-and-bikini gig and became a dive master.”
“That ying?” asked Calvino. “A diver?”
“Not the dancer on the stage. The one dancing, her name’s Dew,” said Jardine. “Her friend Noi went into diving.” Calvino watched Jardine carefully to see if his face betrayed some kind of a joke. But he wasn’t joking. “Dive master?”
Jardine turned, looked at Calvino and nodded. This was the kind of turn in the road of life for a bar ying that sounded like pure fantasy, but stranger things had happened. Not often, but there were a few expert divers in Pattaya who had started their careers working in bars before deciding their future lay working underwater. According to Jardine, Noi had witnessed a small boat coming ashore last New Year’s Eve. A pickup truck was waiting with several men. One of the men from the boat stayed on shore with a large locker. Two men helped load the locker onto the pickup. She recognized one of the men in the boat from the village where she grew up. There wasn’t a lot of light, but she thought he was the captain of the trawler. She couldn’t make a positive identification of the other man from a photograph. He had a beard. It was dark. He wore a mask. Months had passed. All she remembered was a small half-moon scar above his right eye.
Jardine said, “That fit one man, an Indonesian high up in our private deck of cards for JI operatives. His name is Hasam. You know what his name means?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sword. Vincent, it means sword. A sword used to cut down the infidels. Wipe out the barbarians. We have reason to believe Hasam was smuggled into Thailand carryinh a device that, if detonated, will kill many thousands of people. You know about a reporter named Pramote. He got himself killed investigating a story in the same village. Veera’s village. Funny about all these connections in one small fishing village in the boondocks. Pramote interviewed Noi. We believe he was following up a lead and stumbled upon something about the trawler and the men and the device. Naturally, we are interested in Veera and his connection. You talked to him. He’s not an easy man to get access to, even with our resources.” Calvino had been listening and watching the stage. He was prepared to agree that a lot of murders were dumped on Veera’s doorstep. But that didn’t mean Veera didn’t kill people
when a problem couldn’t otherwise be managed. “I’d like to talk to Noi,” said Calvino.
“Join the list. She disappeared one night.” Calvino cocked his head. “Can’t find her?”
People in Pattaya went missing in action all the time. “That is a problem. The last person she was seen with was Valentine.”
Gone missing in sex. Calvino wondered if there was a word to describe such a fetish.
THIRTY
FON SAT IN bed, her knees raised touching, reading a book. She had slipped into Calvino’s bed. Waiting for him to return, she became bored and pulled a book off the small library shelf in the guestroom. The title had caught her eye—Unsubmissive Women. She read the part about how Chinese women had been bought and sold as prostitutes in America 130 years ago. An unmarried Chinese woman with a son had been sold for $105. It was a low price because of her age. The prostitute was in her thirties. Past her prime and her market value had dropped. Fon had cocked her arm to throw the book against the wall when Calvino opened the door.
“Are you going to throw the book at me?” he asked.
She lowered her arm. “Do you think I am past my prime?”
Calvino closed the door. There was only one answer when a woman in her thirties asked that question.
“You are in your prime.”
The smile returned and she uncurled her legs, swung them over the side of the bed, swinging her feet, waiting and grinning. He recognized his white shirt; she had rolled up the sleeves to the elbow. Under the shirt she wore panties. He sat on the bed next to her, holding the book in his hands.
“Sometimes when you read the truth, it makes you more mad than when you read lies.”
Fon’s smile faded. “Nai knows I am here.”
Her face looked like she was about to cry, but her eyes were flirtatious.
“He knows you were here the other night.”
She floated on a cloud of sadness. “Why is it when a man sleeps with a woman, that is a natural desire and he gets a medal. But when a woman wants to sleep with a man, she’s a slut.”
She waited for a reply but Calvino didn’t have an answer. For someone who was a self-described “failure” of the system, she had more awkward questions than any Thai woman he’d met.
“Did he fire you?” she asked.
“He thought your sleeping with me was a good interrogation technique.”
“Was it?”
The jury was still out, he thought. She might have been using him as an avenue to recover the money owed to her husband. There was no way of knowing. When it came to large sums of money only a few people could be trusted not to lie, cheat or steal to keep it. Those who had more than they could spend or who valued honesty above opportunity had the best chance to rise above temptation. He wasn’t certain which category Fon fit into.
“I know how to find Ton,” she said. “I thought you’d be happy.”
He got up and poured himself a whisky. “Thanks.”
He drank the whisky straight from the glass and poured another before walking back to the foot of the bed.
“You don’t look happy.”
She was right. He didn’t feel happy, either.
“Do you remember one of Valentine’s yings named Noi? She worked in TQ2, then qualified as dive master.”
He said nothing about Jardine, or that Jardine had gathered information from a bar ying turned dive master who had witnessed a terrorist drop along the coast.
“She worked here a long time ago,” said Fon. “Do you know why she left?”
Fon lay down the book.
“She went back to her Thai boyfriend.”
A lapidary phrase suitable for a farang tombstone.
Then there was Ratana. She never had a Thai boyfriend. There was always the exception that proved the rule. One exception was enough to make fools out of most men, think- ing they had won. Jardine had it right. There were two out of a million you could trust. And everyone assumed the one they had chosen was one of two. Look for their tombstones.
Calvino threw back the second whisky and shivered. “I guess that kind of thing is bound to happen. She saw a life flash before her eyes. Feeding goats named Bach, Mozart and Elgar and listening to Valentine play the piano. And everything suddenly became clear. An unemployed boyfriend wasn’t such a bad thing after all.”
“Why do you ask about Noi?”
“Her name came up tonight.”
“You go to her bar?”
“Yes, I went to her old bar. But she wasn’t there.”
“It’s because I am not in my prime,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Noi is a young girl. Men like the young girl.”
“I am trying to find who killed Prasit.” After sleeping with Fon, Calvino found himself unable to use the phrase, “your husband.” Half-dressed in his shirt, he didn’t want to think of her as someone’s wife. Or as someone’s widow. He fell silent. It was his call. The first time a
woman slept with a man, she couldn’t be sure he had any desire other than sexual. If he slept with her a second time, the illusion existed that his desire for her was something more than sex. In her mind she had acquired a right of possession.
“Thanks for finding Ton’s address. I appreciate it.”
“You want me to go?”
He didn’t know the answer himself. The meeting with Jardine had rattled him, made him confused and uncertain about what he wanted. He had a gut feeling Pratt had arranged for Calvino to meet Veera so Jardine could record the conversation using sophisticated listening devices. In other words, he had been setup. He should have seen it coming. Getting a meeting with Veera should have been impossible. He’d like to learn how Jardine had managed to get to Colonel Pratt.
Or had he? He thought about Colonel Pratt and suddenly became depressed.
He had tried to phone Pratt all evening, but the colonel’s cellphone was turned off. By turning it off, Pratt was sending a message.
“Did you hear what I asked you? Do you want to me to leave?”
He stared at the bottom of his glass. “Up to you,” he said.
On the beach, Pratt had pleaded with him to go back to Bangkok. He started to understand why Pratt had pressed him to return. Calvino couldn’t shake off the horrible feeling that his friend had known that night on the beach what was going down. Pratt had told him about David Jardine. But Calvino hadn’t been careful; he wasn’t listening. Colonel Pratt never tossed out a name without having a reason. He should have told me, thought Calvino. He should’ve fucking told me.
Fon stepped down from the bed, walked around and threaded her arm through Calvino’s and led him to the bed. “Noi’s boyfriend came to pick her up the day she left. Valentine refused to see her. He stayed behind his walls playing the piano. That’s how he fights pain. Better than this,” she said, removing the glass from his hand.
Deep in his gut, he knew that Pratt, in his own way, had told him. A couple of Americans—including David Jardine—had likely visited the village, asking questions. Veera’s kid had said something he hadn’t thought too much about at the time: “We get lots of farangs wanting to talk to my dad. But they don’t get in.” He could see in his mind’s eye the farangs in suits, with short cropped hair, one of them speaking fluent Thai, asking for an appointment with Veera. The Americans followed the trail and sometimes told the Thais what they were doing. Other times they kept to themselves, searching and asking questions. They had gone to Colonel Pratt after they decided they couldn’t go any further on their own. They had gone to the village to fish, throwing a line out for information. Had anyone seen a foreigner? Flashing photographs of possible JI agents who were known to be somewhere in the region. Had anyone seen this girl? Flashing another photograph, this time of Noi. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. Veera was unavailable. No one knew when he would have time.
Calvino sat back in bed and Fon started to kiss him lightly on the forehead, working her way down to his nose and lips. Closing his eyes, he thought about Ratana. With Ratana, he felt desire, but the unspoken pact had excluded sex. It wasn’t one of those permanent decisions. One day it might happen.
Fon’s kiss lingered, trying to void the distraction that made him distant. It wasn’t working. He told himself that a man might want a woman without wanting to sleep with her just like he might want a woman only to sleep with her. Most of the time, given the opportunity, a man would sleep with just about any woman. If men were as discriminating as women in their choice of sex partners, the world’s population would have leveled off at around a million. As her lips reached his chest, he made a decision. Gently he pulled her to eye level.
“Yes, of course. It makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“How they knew.”
Colonel Pratt had left Bangkok a couple of days after the Americans and Thais caught a JI terrorist named Hambali. That gap in time had been long enough for them to get information. It was coming together inside Calvino’s mind.
“I don’t understand,” Fon said. “Who knew what?”
He was already off the bed, buttoning his shirt. It was better that she didn’t understand. What good could come from Fon knowing that a big-time terrorist had been on the run? Or that his name was Hambali who’d been caught, waiting for his passport and visa stamp? She waited for Calvino to say something. Instead, he turned around, thinking about how the cops had broken into Hambali’s apartment in Ayudhaya and arrested him. How he’d gone for his handgun but had no time to use it.
She pulled one of the pillows onto her lap, nestling her arms around it.
“I’ve got to go.”
She looked hurt. “You’re not going to tell me,” she said.
“You found something to do with my husband’s death. But it’s a secret.”
“How much money was Prasit owed?”
She lowered her head, pushing her face into the pillow. He waited a moment. She came up for air. Still clinging to the pillow, she said. “One hundred thousand baht.”
“And you want it.”
Anger flashed across her face, evaporated, and the tears fell.
“Blood money? Never. Is that what you think of me?”
He left the room without replying. His mind was elsewhere. The papers had been filled with wire-service stories and photos of a terrorist from Indonesia who had been arrested in Thailand, flown to Afghanistan and from there to Cuba. His wife had flown in from Malaysia to stay with him. The Indonesian had been tracked down on a visa run. Even terrorists made visa runs in Thailand. Suddenly Thailand had become a terrorist hot zone. The interrogators had turned up the heat on their boy. Someone finally broke him. Calvino guessed that had to be David Jardine. Jardine had said someone had been smuggled into Thailand with a dirty bomb. He also had said Pratt was one out of two men in Thailand he would trust.
Hasam, the sword, had arrived in Thailand on New Year’s Day. What if he’d been ordered to keep a low profile and wait? What if he were a sleeper? A man with a destiny ordered to wait for a signal to set off a bomb. Not a Bali bomb killing a couple of hundred, but a bomb, as Colonel Pratt had hinted, that would kill hundreds of thousands. No one was certain if Hasam was his real name. They had a photograph but no positive identification.
It was time to have a heart-to-heart talk with two men. Valentine.
And. Pratt.
Sometimes fear hypnotized people. Sometimes fear caused hysteria. If a bomb were to be detonated in Pattaya, nothing would survive in the city, and in the world all reason and reflection would dissolve into violent impulse.
THIRTY-ONE
CALVINO SIDE-STEPPED the Great Dane with a gravity-defying waterfall of slobber suspended in one corner of its mouth, and set out searching for Valentine. He checked the goat pens. No Valentine. He headed to the main house. Som, who was pot- tering around the kitchen area, the shelves of bottled snakes behind her, was startled as he slipped in without a sound. Her hands at her throat, she pointed towards the piano room on the far side of the swimming pool.
“No one can disturb him,” she said. Idiosyncrasy had its limits.
“Watch me,” said Calvino.
The dining table was being set for the evening meal. A plate for Prasit’s ghost was at the same place as before. Beyond the kitchen area, Gop, Valentine’s number three ying, sat in shorts and tank top beneath an umbrella beside the pool reading a comic book. Her lips moved as she read. On the side table was a plate with the remains of an apple turning brown; lines of ants ferried the bounty down the leg of the table. She looked up and smiled at Calvino.
“Sabaidee, mai?” Are you fine?
“Rohn,” said Calvino, looking at the slices of apple. The ants were relentless, tireless in their work. Nothing stopped the marching columns.
Gop fanned herself. “It’s too hot.” But there wasn’t a drop of sweat on her body.
As he approached the piano room, he heard Bach in a way he’d never heard it before. M
aybe no one, not even Bach, thought it was possible. For an instant the music froze him at the door. Each note was precise, clear, hit square, with passion and speed. No one had ever played Bach like Valentine. He played for himself. He knew no bounds or limits when he was alone at the piano.
Calvino opened the set of chambered airlock doors and entered Valentine’s room in the middle of his sacred practice period. The music stopped. Valentine remained hunched over the keyboard, his hands suspended above the keys. For a few seconds, he refused to acknowledge Calvino’s existence. It was his way of denying that anyone could possibly have violated the cardinal rule of leaving him unmolested as he played. Calvino pulled a chair next to the grand piano and ran a hand across one end of the keyboard, the knuckles still rough and raw from the Harmony massage parlor attack.
“My God, you must never do that. Do you know how much this piano cost?”
“Tell me about Noi.”
“You’ve destroyed my concentration.”
“The Bach. I heard you playing.”
“You have no idea.”
“About Noi,” said Calvino. “And I want to hear the story. Now.”
Valentine stared at the keyboard, watching Calvino’s hands, fearing a repeat of some movement that would annoy him. When it seemed the immediate danger had passed, he slowly lowered the lid over the keyboard and turned in his seat.
“Noi? My dear fellow, that is a little bit like asking an American to tell him all about someone named Jones. You must be more specific.”
“This Noi worked at TQ2. She quit the bar and trained as a dive instructor. You hired her as a sanom. That Noi. Does her name ring a diver’s bell?”
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