THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER Jardine left, Colonel Pratt said, “I have something I want to show you.”
“Why do you want to stick around? I’ve got a lead to follow up.”
“This won’t be a waste of time,” said the colonel.
Calvino followed Colonel Pratt across the parking lot and down a passage between two salas. A few country people sat on folding chairs inside the first sala. A young ying arrived a few seconds ahead of the colonel. She wore a white robe, her head was shaved, and she stepped out of her sandals before entering the sala barefoot. She knelt in front of a coffin and lit a stick of incense, holding the smoking stick in her cupped palms. Thumbs touching her forehead, she leaned forward. She executed the ritual like a pro, thought Calvino. In the Land of Smiles, it was always one incense stick for the dead. The ritual was a sign of respect, a prayer that the dead person would be reborn to a better life. Even for a nun, the rule was one stick of incense.
For the living wanting a better life, the idea was to make a merit ritual, or tam boon. The sticks increased to three: one lit for the dharma, another for the sangha and, lastly, a third set afire for the Buddha. Merit-making was a three-stick deal; for death, one stick was enough.
“Does she live in the wat?” asked Calvino. Not all wats had facilities for nuns. He was thinking that Veera had paid for much of the wat and wondering if it been Veera’s idea to have Buddhist nuns.
Colonel Pratt nodded. “Over there.” He pointed across the parking lot at a row of buildings.
“They are in separate quarters.”
“Also paid for by Sia Veera.”
Colonel Pratt nodded. “He’s making merit for the next life.”
Jardine had one thing right—the threat of death was the ultimate form of terror. As everyone sooner or later croaked, the nervous types started preparing early for the eventuality that their deeds in this life were being written down in a book and the book decided what would come in the next life. Veera must have had some anxiety about the bookkeeping on the other side, because he had spent a lot of money in the wat. One day he’d be laid out in one of the salas, and the villagers and luuk nongs would line up, one incense stick each, kneeling in front of his coffin and praying the books were balanced and that he’d be reborn a more powerful man. Some powerful people in Bangkok were seeking to accelerate Veera’s celestial bookkeeping.
In front of where the nun knelt, a wooden stand held the framed photograph of a youthful, grinning Thai who looked in his early twenties. The photo looked like it had been enlarged from a small snapshot; the deceased’s grainy smile and smudged eyes peered out from a pixilated, grainy haze.
Colonel Pratt said, “He was shot a couple of nights ago. The police said he was a drug dealer. He shot at them first.”
“They found drugs on him,” said Calvino. There was no point in making it a question. The whole time he watched the Thai nun in front of the coffin.
“A dozen pills,” said Colonel Pratt. His voice was clear and confident. Not that he believed the dead man was a drug dealer, but that he believed the evidence of drug dealing had been found.
Such a death was a set piece. If the man had been shot dead and the cops said he was a drug dealer, then it followed that drugs would be found on the body. That was a one-way package deal to the nearest sala. The same thing had happened to Prasit’s brother. Shot to death. Fon said the brother had no previous record of drugs; pills had been sprinkled around his body. Who was to know? Pills were all the evidence required. Sombat’s death was another open-and-shut case of a drug dealer killed by unknown forces.
“The rule of law is always the first casualty of any war,” said Colonel Pratt, who had read Calvino’s mind. The colonel was mostly right about how Calvino’s mind functioned on matters in Thailand. This time it wasn’t hard to hit the target. A lot of people had the same thoughts. Once the troops were sent in, that was the end of due process, prosecutors, judges, evidence, and the burden of proof. The war on drugs had been fought no differently from any other war.
“In Vietnam the Americans ran a program code-named Phoenix,” said Colonel Pratt. “Members of the program slipped into a village under the cover of night and slit the throat of suspected Vietcong. How could they ever be certain the throats belonged to Vietcong? They killed based on intelligence gathered by men who collected information from the field. That is always a weakness.”
“You can never know.”
“No one can ever fully know. Mistakes were made in the Phoenix operation.”
“It’s the price that gets paid,” said Calvino. “Paid by those at the sharp end of the sword.”
Colonel Pratt understood how a seasoned cop saw the world: people in the field sometimes had their own agenda and settling scores was a temptation. You don’t like someone: he’s a threat or he’s shown you some disrespect or he’s running some competition with your business or your wife or girlfriend. Put him on the list. Light that single stick of incense. But the flaws and shortcomings in intelligence never stopped people in the field from acting on the intelligence or investing resources in the Phoenix program. Or shooting men said to be drug dealers. The lesson was never learnt: it was impossible to rely on the honor of others to pass up the truth because either malice or ignorance always stained truth and honor. The only way to know the truth was to do your own fieldwork. So someone like David Jardine appears without any real connections. What does he do? What kind of assumptions would he make? Had there been another Phoenix-like program for international terrorists? It was the default plan of occupiers. It was the natural choice one expected them to make, and one was almost never disappointed.
The nun finished her prayer and planted the solitary incense stick in the bronze pot near the coffin. She rose and walked outside the sala, stepping into her sandals. She came straight over to Colonel Pratt. She wore no make-up. With her bald head and large white robes, it was difficult to tell her age. Other than to say, despite the self-inflicted demolition to her beauty, she still remained too young and beautiful to be a nun.
“Mae chee Noi, this is Khun Vincent,” said Colonel Pratt. Jardine had left empty-handed. Somewhere along the line, Colonel Pratt had made a judgment call. A command decision in the field, under fire, knowing what he decided would shape the fate of things that followed. He had chosen friendship.
Calvino waied her. She returned his wai with a slight nod. Nuns and monks don’t return a wai. It’s a rule.
He tried to imagine Noi living inside Valentine’s estate with the other women, the goats, the swimming pool, the lounge chairs, the TV room with everyone huddled around watching the Savage Channel. She had been part of Valentine’s self-invented world and now she was part of one a couple of universes away.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about Prasit.”
“If you wish,” she said.
“You knew him?”
She nodded.
“Yes, I knew Pee Prasit.”
The three of them walked across the grounds and found a bench.
“Would he have killed himself?” asked Calvino.
Asking a nun who had sworn a vow of truth a question was about as close as any private eye could hope to come to finding an answer connected with the truth.
“He loved life. But he was scared. Very afraid because of the bad things he had done, and the people he had worked for.”
He had been living in a code red state of terror. Why had it gone to flashing red?
Calvino smiled; he had a short list of who made the color red of terror. “Let’s talk about the people he worked for. Before Valentine, he did some work for Veera? Am I right about that?”
Some say fear is your friend and there is no denying that was true. But in Thailand, ambiguity is your best friend. He waited as she looked away, picking at the hem of her robe. “Maybe. Maybe not. If you do the bad thing, you see the bad thing returning to you from every corner.”
“Meaning you aren’t going to tell me,” said C
alvino.
She neither answered nor ignored him; her stare was blank.
“Do you know who Veera is?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“Yes.”
“Did Prasit know who he was?” She nodded.
“He knew.”
The colonel knew the Thai way to get an answer. Calvino shrugged his shoulders like a boxer coming out of his corner for round five. A little beaten but still steady on his feet.
“Did you ever meet Ajarn Sawai at Valentine’s compound?” asked Calvino.
“I saw him twice at Valentine’s.” Her voice broke as she spoke.
“Other than Jardine, who else knew that you were a witness?”
The word got her by surprise as if she had lowered her gloves and taken a slamming right hand to the jaw. Her head dropped. She stared at the ground. When she looked up, that controlled, placid face had a slight twitch above the right eye. The word witness had pushed the color red button. Terror alert, alarm bells ringing in her head.
“I don’t know. He didn’t understand me. Or why I went to Valentine’s. He believed I’d gone to warn Pee Prasit.”
“Warn him of what?”
“That he was in danger.”
“What kind of danger?”
She shrugged and clammed up, folding her arms tightly around her body. She rocked back and forth, quietly, the way a grieving child moves, to shake out the feeling of doom and sadness.
Calvino leaned forward, his arms resting on his legs, running his fingers through his hair, exchanging a glance with Colonel Pratt. “Valentine said you were afraid of ghosts and couldn’t sleep.”
She nodded, tears springing into her eyes. With the edge of her robe she wiped them. “I was afraid.”
“Did you warn Prasit that Veera had paid someone to kill him?”
The tears flowed. “I came to this wat because I no longer want to know of this world. It has only suffering for me. I did some terrible thing last life and now I am paying my debt.”
“Listen to me, Noi. Did Prasit know someone was coming after him?”
“He knew. And he was so, so afraid. He knew he was going to die.”
“If you have other duties, it’s okay for you to go,” said Colonel Pratt.
They watch her rise and slowly cross the grounds.
She had taken sanctuary in a wat. It was her way of saying that she had left the world, and as long as she stayed in the wat, she’d be safe. What was her salvation was also her prison. As long as Veera was alive, she could never leave. One could struggle a lifetime and never quite understand the struggle going on inside her head. Colonel Pratt could have easily given her up to Jardine, but he didn’t do so. Jardine would have taken her out of the wat and put her in one of the interrogation houses, and she risked disappearing into a shadowy world, one from which many had never re-emerged. The colonel had withheld intelligence. Calvino didn’t care about that. He didn’t like what he saw when he looked in Jardine’s mirror. Life was about deciding what you could live with looking back in the mirror.
Only death was absolute—except to a Buddhist for whom death was a transformation. And death had been all around Noi, circling above her head, plucking out of the earth and sky the people she knew, the people she loved, the people she hardly knew existed. She was someone you wanted to light a candle for, a single candle of hope that the light might shelter her from the void of darkness.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE ADDRESS FON had for Ton was two months old and as useful as a bar ying’s promise. No one at the fleabag room had known Ton. No one in the neighborhood had any idea what had happened to him. He probably had gone home. One thing for certain: guys like Ton never went back home except to hide, and if he’d gone into hiding, he’d have left months ago.
Calvino had pretty good idea that Sawai would know how to find Ton. Calvino had phoned the guru and asked for a recent address. Instead, Sawai made an appointment to meet. For a man who never seemed to leave his compound except to visit the jao poh or the house of someone like Prasit, the immediate consent to a meeting came as a surprise. What wasn’t a surprise was that the guru was late for the appoint- ment. He might have had a plug-in to cosmic laws but his co-ordination with local time was flawed. Calvino paced back and forth waiting in front of the Royal Garden Plaza shopping mall, glancing now and then at his watch. He had started to sweat in the heat, so he stepped inside the Plaza.
It was no surprise when Sawai phoned and said that he had been delayed but the meeting was still on.
“Don’t worry. Ton wants to meet you,” said Sawai. “That seems unlikely.”
“Sure. See you below the red plane.”
Calvino was worried; would the guru show? That was the question. He reminded himself that it had been the guru’s idea to meet at the Plaza. The irony wasn’t lost on Calvino that this was the same mall which housed the Believe It or Not museum. Sawai’s instructions had been to meet below the red plane. Everyone in Pattaya knew the red plane was the fuselage of a fake plane that was suspended over one entrance to the plaza. The front half of the plane didn’t exist. It hadn’t been built. The size of the fuselage indicated a single-engine plane. The illusion was that the plane had plowed into the plaza and was stuck half in and half out. As landmark, it couldn’t be missed. As an advertisement for the Believe It or Not museum, it already was out of date, one of those clever advertising ideas floating up from the pre-9/11 world. It screamed out World Trade Towers in New York City. Believe It or Not.
Sawai arrived twenty minutes late on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. He wheeled to a stop in front of the Plaza. He leaned back on the saddle, slipped the large shiny black helmet from his head and looked around. He’d parked directly below the simulated plane crash. He looked around for Calvino.
The automatic sliding doors opened and a blast of hot air from the outside shot into Calvino’s face. He stepped back. One last dance with the air-con before meeting the overheated guru. Inside the mall, it had been cold enough to wear a jacket and sweater. Calvino stayed with the jacket, a .38 police special riding in the leather shoulder holster under his left arm. He waited and watched as the guru, holding his crash helmet as he spun around on the saddle of his Harley, scanned for some sign of the farang private eye. Sawai, with his shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a dozen amulets hanging from gold chains around his thick neck, fingered his cellphone. The guru had come alone. Calvino didn’t like the look of the setup and left the guru to roast under the sun. Toast him a medium brown, wear him down a little, make him tired and disoriented. Sweat glistening on his bald head, pellets of sweat splashed onto his crash helmet, straddling a Harley, the guru was the one who suddenly looked worried. He rang Calvino’s cellphone. Calvino let it ring. Let him cook a little longer. No one paid Sawai any notice. If he had the two teenagers riding on the back, he still would have blended into the general freak show. Calvino wondered if the guru had ditched the jailbait tag-team or if they were back at his house, peeling oranges and waiting for his return.
Pattaya was a tourist attraction, part of a 24/7 non-stop freak show. Sawai was a candidate for ringmaster of the moment. The exhibits inside the museum had a hard time competing with the action on the street, which offered an unlimited possibility of staring and pointing at the dwarfs, the giants, and the bald-headed guru in designer shades.
On the phone Sawai had promised that he would arrive with Ton. That had been the purpose of the meeting: to meet Ton and talk to him about Prasit and Sombat.
But the guru had arrived alone. Beads of sweat ran down his shaved head. As the sliding door opened again, Calvino stepped out into the oven-like sun. He answered the phone. Sawai spotted him immediately, greeting him with a smile.
“Where’s Ton?”
“Waiting.” The guru looked him up and down.
“You are going to be hot wearing jacket,” he said.
“I can take a lot of heat before I melt,” said Calvino. The guru eyed him. “Up to you.”
“Yeah, up to
me,” said Calvino. “So where is Ton?”
“At work.”
Calvino smiled. “Shooting anyone I might know?”
“He works in a gym. He’s a trainer. The other trainer didn’t come back from lunch so he couldn’t leave. He said we should go and meet him at the gym.” Sawai put his helmet on, pulled up the tinted perplex faceguard and patted the seat behind him. “Let’s go.”
It was one of those Daniel Pearl moments. What goes through the head and what goes through the heart are distinctly conflicting messages. Ninety percent of human history screams out with one overriding lesson—don’t trust a stranger. In the past, there were only two choices with a stranger, kill or be killed. The choices were written deep within the genetic code. The invention of the gun had come as a convenient way of dealing with strangers. Sawai was a stranger, and Ton he’d never met. Calvino had only a moment to consider the alternatives. He could terminate the meeting with Ton, break off with Sawai, and return to Valentine’s. Or he could climb onto the back of the Harley and take a chance. The guru had, as far as he could tell, tried to set him up for a fall, using a couple of underaged girls to bait the trap. Calvino locked eyes with the guru. Sawai made a living looking into the eyes of others and convincing them he had the truth. He’d made Prasit a true believer, lending him spiritual bodyguards to protect him in the time of need. Prasit had ended up dead. Calvino felt the weight of his .38 riding against his chest. A choice equalizer in case things started to go sideways.
Calvino climbed onto the back of the Harley. “Let’s go find your boy,” he said.
Sawai gunned the Harley out of the mall and onto Beach Road. He drove towards Walking Street. Most things in Pattaya were 24/7 but Walking Street was also a driving street until early evening. The Harley roared down the road lined on both sides with shops, restaurants, tattoo parlors, tailor shops and jewelry shops. After dark, once all the neon lights came on, Beach Road and Walking Street and the side sois looked like a version of Las Vegas after it had been thrown into a garbage compacter and compressed down to four or five stories high. Merchants sweeping the pavement in front of their shops didn’t bother to stop and watch the guru and farang on the Harley speeding past. The mannequins in the Believe It or Not Museum could have come to life and run down the road and they wouldn’t have looked up.
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