“Of course, I remember that Noi. What a sweet creature she was. Very affectionate and adored the goats. Two of the most important criteria in a woman, don’t you think?”
“How did you meet her?”
“A friend of a friend told her that I was on the outlook for a new addition to my harem and she was frankly more than a little interested. She literally jumped in my arms.”
“You offered her a place?”
“That was the idea. I made her a quite generous offer. But she stayed only a week.” Valentine threw up his hands. “Then vanished without a word. Don’t you think that was odd? Though, the longer I live here the less anything concerning women seems remotely odd.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Calvino figured either Valentine was lying to save face, or he really didn’t know about Noi’s boyfriend.
“She’s not in trouble, is she?”
Calvino paused.
“She might be. It would help if you would answer my question. When did she leave?”
“Let me see. . .” Valentine’s attention drifted off as if he were listening to faraway music that only he could hear. He sighed, turned his head away, his eyes half closed.
He drifted back into his state of rapture. Some bubble of memory from a concert, a reception or feeding one of his goats. Glenn Gould and Bobby Fisher came to mind as Calvino watched Valentine off in an alternative universe, alone with his music, alone in time occupying a zone empty of everything but the sound of Bach.
“Was Prasit still alive?” asked Calvino. “When Noi was living here?”
The question snapped Valentine back from his fugue. “Indeed he was. Noi arrived before he hanged himself.
Unfortunately her period in my employ was brief. And bittersweet.”
Valentine looked wistful and sighed. “I haven’t thought about Noi for a long time. Not until now. I must confess that I had completely forgotten about her. She was such a pleasant creature, and the time when she was in residence, the estate was a very different place. We knew harmony and peace. Each chord and note played the most wonderful music.”
Calvino smiled at the mention of the word “harmony” as in Harmony massage parlor. “That place. It merely shows that harmony isn’t always what it appears to be,” he said.
“Well, maybe for you, my dear fellow. All I can tell you is that none of the current turmoil was present. That came after she left. If you find her, would you ask her to phone me?”
Valentine had little sense of irony. He spoke out of the utter, complete conviction that Calvino not only would find Noi, but that she might actually change her mind and phone him. Her return might restore the equilibrium Prasit’s death had robbed from his life. He was already plotting how he would persuade Noi to rejoin the band of sanom.
“Did you ever see Noi together with Prasit?”
“Vincent, you barge into my most private of places during a three-hour session and then ask me if I can possibly know whether one member of my staff might possibly wish to converse with another member of my staff. Doesn’t that seem to you a slightly preposterous question? Unless you have some strange theory that Noi had something to do with Prasit’s death. Which is highly doubtful. Or that she had some kind of relationship with Prasit, which is impossible. She told me that she detested Thai men.”
She had left out the love in the love-hate relationship, thought Calvino.
“Do you remember how much time there was between when she disappeared and when Prasit was found dead?”
Valentine wrinkled his nose, scratched his chin, and drummed his fingers on the closed lid over the keyboard. “Let me see. It would have been. Been a few. . . You should ask my secretary, but I recall that about a week or so after her departure poor Prasit hanged himself.”
“Did Noi ever have any visitors?”
He frowned. “Of course not. My creatures aren’t allowed visitors. They can become a security problem. But I can tell you that Noi was unusually fearful. Som said that Noi always slept with the lights on. I say slept, but she hardly closed her eyes. Som said it was the isolation of the estate and the usual childish fear of ghosts. She had black bags under her eyes.” Noi had been haunted not by ghosts but by the fact people knew she had talked to David Jardine and the were closing in on her.
“Did you ask her if she had a problem?”
Valentine laughed, his longer, slender fingers slapping against his legs. “Thais don’t have problems. Mai mee pan ha. Of course, I said, ‘Why can’t you sleep?’ And do you know what she said? ‘I dream I am in the bottom of the sea and my tank runs out and I know that I can’t get to the top before I drown.’ The poor girl had a fear of drowning. Quite extraordinary. She was a qualified dive master.”
Calvino had reached the door when Valentine called to him. He was a master of timing. What he shouted was a foreign word.
“Xenophilia.”
Calvino turned and tilted his head. “I remember this is one of your sexual fetishes.”
“Not just mine. It appears to be one of yours as well. If what the staff tells me about Fon is true. It is a very small community inside the compound.”
“Perhaps too small.”
“Beware of wily widows. That’s my advice.”
“Thanks for your concern.”
“I wouldn’t want my private-eye distracted from his work.”
“You can fire me any time.”
“That won’t be necessary, Vincent. But try and wrap things up in the next couple of days.”
As Calvino turned again, Valentine threw out one more question. “You never asked about Noi’s fetish.”
“It had to do with water,” said Calvino.
Valentine’s eyes brightened. “You, my dear fellow, have a dirty mind.”
THIRTY-TWO
CALVINO PHONED HIS office and Ratana answered on the second ring.
“Vincent Calvino’s office, how may I help you?”
She was back; perfect, she had weathered the storm. “Any messages?” he asked.
“I’ve been trying to phone you. There is a new client. But you have to return to Bangkok today if you want the case.” Colonel Pratt’s investigation, which was intended to take him out of the danger zone and return him to Bangkok. “No can do. I am not finished in Pattaya.”
Ratana hadn’t been expecting him to reject the work. She had no idea that Colonel Pratt had been the one to find work for Vincent Calvino. It hadn’t been the first time nor would it be the last.
“You know that little guy with thick glasses from New York?”
“There are a million little guys with thick glasses in New York. Which one?”
“He has a Korean wife named Soon Yi. You know him. I know that you know him.”
“Soon what?”
“Soon Yi. Everyone knows her. She’s young and Korean. Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter.”
Suddenly the name came to him. “Woody Allen.”
“Yes, yes. My mother thinks that you are like Woody Allen but without the money or the fame.”
Ratana had a system of remembering actors by their spouse’s names. Jessica Lange translated as Sam Shepard. And Calista Flockhart as Harrison Ford. Once she had asked him, “What’s his name? I can see the face but I can’t remember the name. He’s Annette Bening’s husband. He’s a really old guy. He looks like what an American President should look like but doesn’t. He’s really famous. What’s his name? I know he’s more famous than Annette but I can’t think of his name.”
Try Warren Beatty.
As she spoke on the phone, he thought about the widow, Fon, who translated as Prasit’s wife, the obscure, nobody, ex-hitman, back-to-the-old-life-ways, hanged to death husband.
“Why does she say I’m like Woody Allen?” Calvino asked. “Woody Allen makes her laugh.”
He thought about telling her Fon had come to his bed. What would Woody or Harrison or Warren do to make a woman laugh?
THIRTY-THREE
THE CLASSIC DEFINITION
of terror is intense fear. You know the Latin word for this fear? Terror. Like a runaway freight train, it crashes straight into modern time with the same force, meaning, spelling and sound that is thousands of years old. The word should be feared. It has always been feared, and those with the power to cause fear have the ultimate power. Our enemies and our loved ones. We live in a state of perpetual terror.
David Jardine fell into silence. After a long pause, he looked up at the Buddha and a smile crossed his face. Calvino and Colonel Pratt waited for him to continue. “I wrote these words the second time I’d been shot in Vietnam,” Jardine said. Confined to his hospital bed in Da Nang, he’d overheard a doctor tell a nurse that Jardine had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of making it. It had inspired anxiety and caused fear to hear what amounted to a death sentence. In the field, when he’d been shot, he’d felt pain and fear. The second time it was the same; inside the hospital, he learned that terror had many different meanings.
Ten days later David Jardine had asked the nurse to bring him paper and pen, and he wrote the words down and asked the nurse to deliver it to the doctor. The doctor had scribbled a note back, attaching the letter.
“One more day of life is worth the whole world. If you could bargain an extra week of life and the price was having your body thrown in the street to be torn apart by wild dogs, it would be a good bargain.”
“Those were the words I received from my doctor. I never forgot them,” Jardine said.
Jardine’s job, he decided, lying in the hospital bed recovering from his wounds, was to do just what the doctor had prescribed: find one more day of life for himself and for those he loved and valued. And to do that, the mission was always the same: chase down and destroy those who live to take away that one more day.
Along the way he learned that terror had more than a feel: it had a color code. Not even the Romans with their invention of the word terror had thought of coloring the stages of terror alerts. Jardine had lived most of his life at the boundary of color code orange. Sometimes the threat of terror was downgraded from orange to yellow or upgraded from orange to red. Like waiting for traffic lights to change. Somewhere in the world an operations room was charged with choosing the color of the day for terror. Like a weather report. The chance of real, intense fear falling is ten percent. Or fifty percent. Or dig in, you have five minutes, and the color flashes across the sky and that is the last color you ever see. At that moment you are beyond terror. You are dead.
Jardine sat on the floor next to Colonel Pratt. In front of them was an enormous Buddha with thin wafers of gold fluttering as the two large floor fans in either side of the altar completed a 180˚ rotation. Even with the fans it was hot and sweat rolled down Jardine’s face and neck. His shirt was damp and stuck to his shoulders and back.
Colonel Pratt nodded at the end of Jardine’s terror story. Jardine had been saved by a wise man, he thought. Calvino found the two men sitting in silence inside the wat.
A novice monk guided him to the side of the large Buddha where Colonel Pratt and David Jardine waited. Calvino sat near Colonel Pratt and leaned forward on his knees, bowing three times, waiing the Buddha between each bow, then sat back erect. There was a hint of a smile on Jardine’s face as Calvino took his place.
“Respect is what hasn’t been forgotten,” said Jardine. “We are lost without it.”
“We suffer because of our wants and desires. And the desire for respect is another form of clinging,” said Colonel Pratt.
A silence again fell between the two men, both thinking about the nature of respect. Such a thing had once existed in America before the top one percent rented the country from the evangelicals. What was left of respect for everyone else in that kind of system? Waving of flags. It was why Calvino could never go home; the place called home had ceased to exist. Going home to a memory wasn’t going home.
Calvino watched them for a moment. The colonel looked calm, almost serene.
“Valentine remembered Noi,” said Calvino. “He said she had been living in the compound for a week before she disappeared. Why she left or where she’s gone, he doesn’t have any idea.”
“Do you believe him?” asked Jardine.
Calvino looked up at the large statue of Buddha. “Valentine is incapable of lying.”
“You just haven’t found the things he lies about,” said Jardine.
“I bow to your expertise in lying,” said Calvino.
“What did he say about Noi?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“He opened a two hundred dollar bottle of French wine on their first night together. And what does she do?”
Jardine’s focus was like that of a predator ready to make his move. He didn’t take his eyes off Calvino; he didn’t blink.
“What did she do?” asked Jardine.
“She poured Sprite into her glass of wine and then added two ice cubes.”
A smile lit Jardine’s face. “I like that.”
“She also had nightmares about drowning and slept with the lights on. In the morning she came to the table with bags under her eyes.”
“I talked with her trainer. The farang who taught her how to dive. You know what he said about her?” asked Jardine.
Calvino and Pratt shared a glance.
“I am certain you are going to tell us,” said Calvino.
“She had laughter in her soul. The body, heart and head were all in working order, but beyond that, something in her had been touched by an artist who knew how to turn the right corner. She had something rare. He said that Noi would always belong to him and he would be comforted by the memory of her laughter.”
There were women like that. But it didn’t sound like the same woman Valentine had described, thought Calvino. The farang trainer was a very good lead.
“She left Valentine’s compound a week or so before Prasit died,” said Calvino. He was careful not to judge whether the death had been murder or suicide. The presence of the large Buddha statue brought a solemn, sober state, one of caution about how people died, the nature of their nightmares and the reasons for their disappearance.
“She saw something she shouldn’t have seen,” said Jardine. “It was her karma to be there.”
“I came here to tell you what I found.”
“You didn’t find much, except the way that she drinks French wine,” said Jardine. “Like everything French, you need to cut it by half and add ice.”
“What did you expect? A map showing the location of the man we’re looking for?”
Colonel Pratt bowed to the Buddha statue and rose to his feet.
“Within the good is the bad, and the bad is within the good. It isn’t always a question of resources. The history of this wat is a good example.” He walked across the open area to a pillar where a large plaque had been placed. The writing was in Thai. Colonel Pratt translated: “The building of this sala was funded by Veera.”
He saw Jardine and Calvino looking at, what to the farang was, an unreadable scrawl on the plague. “Where did the money come from?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“We don’t really know. Does coming here knowing who built a wat make our respect to Buddha less? Do the resources matter? We find what we are meant to find.”
“The problem with selling yourself is you no longer care about the motives of those who buy you. All you are about is the money.”
Jardine looked away from the sign and up at the sky. What color was terror at that moment?
“And we help those we believe deserve our help,” said Calvino, looking straight at Jardine.
Jardine nodded and rose to his feet. “What we deserve is a world where people can go about their lives without worrying about the color of terror. A world where such fear goes back into the box and the lid is put on and if you don’t think that is worth committing to, then we find ourselves on different sides of the fence.”
“Which is another way of saying that you’re either with us or against us,” said Calvino.
“The Buddha teaches
the middle path,” said Colonel Pratt.
“And I respect his teachings. But we are at war. There is no middle path. The sooner people realize this, the sooner they can understand why everyone has to take a stand. You are on one side of the line or the other.”
Men like David Jardine were true believers; they couldn’t find meaning without finding their counterpart on the other side of a battle. The color codes were in their blood. “If I find out anything more, I’ll pass it along,” said Calvino.
In the parking lot, Calvino opened his car door while Jar- dine stood back a couple of feet with the colonel. “It wouldn’t be a good thing if you got yourself in over your head.”
“That sounds like a threat,” said Calvino. “Intended to cause anxiety.”
Jardine shook head. “Not a threat. Just on-the-ground realities. Civilians in war zones sometimes forget where they are. It’s not a holiday.”
“I’ll remember that,” said Calvino. “See you around.”
“I doubt it,” said Calvino.
Jardine showed no emotion, turned and walked away. His car and driver were waiting. His driver stood alongside the passenger side, holding the door open. Jardine climbed inside and the driver closed the door, walked around and climbed inside. The engine was running, the air conditioner pumping chilled air. Calvino and Colonel Pratt watched as the black BMW reversed out of the parking spot and disappeared out of the entrance.
“Why is it that I don’t like that guy?” asked Calvino.
“Like is less important than trust,” said Colonel Pratt.
“And you don’t trust him, do you?”
“He’s done nothing to suggest I should distrust him. On the middle path, one stays watchful. That’s not mistrust. It’s prudence.”
Friendships needed nourishment. Every so often Colonel Pratt would say something so simple and elegant that it provided fuel for months and months.
It was only later that Calvino found out that the abbot of the wat was a friend of Colonel Pratt’s commander and it was the abbot who had arranged his interview with Veera. It was a world of interconnecting relationships, favors, and duties like capillaries that allowed the blood to flow throughout the civil body. Pratt’s world of the middle path allowed everyone to walk that same path without knocking the other guy into the gutter.
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