“Recognize him?” Jardine asked.
Calvino shook his head. Jardine waited until Sawai finished looking at the picture. The guru handed the picture back.
“I never see this man.”
The farang suits had finished with the body. Colonel Pratt ordered the body snatcher to lift the body onto the gurney. It took two of them grunting and sweating to lift the barbells off the body and set them on the floor.
“What do you know about snakes? Let’s start with cobras,” said Calvino.
Sawai pulled a face, half-disgust, half-contempt. “Ask your good friend, Valentine. He keeps snakes.”
Colonel Pratt told Sawai that before he left, the colonel wanted to talk with him in the lobby. He ordered one of his men to tail the guru. Sawai stopped at the top of the stairs and punched a number into his cellphone. That was good. That was what they wanted him to do. Was he calling to let his next appointment know that he would be late? Or was he checking in with Veera? His cellphone was on their radar. After Sawai disappeared down the stairs, Jardine waited until Colonel Pratt had returned.
“Hambali also told us something else,” said Jardine.
Calvino felt whatever Jardine was telling him, he wasn’t giving away very much. A crumb, hoping the bird would follow the trail. “He told us that Hasam was carrying big money when he was smuggled into Thailand nine months ago. Say, fifty grand.”
Colonel Pratt followed the gurney down the stairs. Sawai was one step behind him.
“I’ll see you downstairs,” said Colonel Pratt.
That left Calvino, the farang suits and Jardine alone in the gym. “Hasam was carrying something else. An evil and nasty weapon intended to cause maximum harm. The man named Sword came here with a dirty bomb. He was told to wait until he received a signal. Even Hambali wasn’t sure what the signal was. It had been coded, and once he was captured all of the codes were changed. Your man Prasit was somehow tied into all of this. When I said you were in over your head, it wasn’t to bust your balls, it was to state a fact. There’s a terrorist cell in Pattaya and it’s working 24/7 to find a way to accomplish its mission. This isn’t me talking. It’s Hambali. He’s blown up enough people to know how things work, and he’s told us about all he can.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Calvino.
David Jardine smiled.
“Stay out of the way. But in case you don’t stay out of the way, and you happen to come across our man, let us know. It’s important, Vincent. For a lot of people you used to know in New York City.”
Downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, Colonel Pratt sat across from Sawai who said he had a theory about Prasit’s death that he wanted to tell it to the colonel in private. The thing about gurus and fortune-tellers is they are supposed to see the future and when they don’t, they inevitably come up with an explanation. “Men with bad karma can go at any time,” said Sawai. “No one knows. I had a feeling this morning that Ton’s time was near, and that’s why I arranged for Vincent to meet him.”
You can buy that and the Brooklyn Bridge for ten dollars, thought Calvino as he sat next to Colonel Pratt. Ton was about to confirm the guru’s theory of the murder of the gardener. With all the deadly snakes showing up, one didn’t have to look very far to find a snake-oil salesman.
“What’s your theory?” asked Colonel Pratt.
Sawai explained how Prasit’s jealous wife had arranged the murder of her husband and left evidence to suggest that it had been the work of her husband’s lover. About the time Sawai had finished, Jardine showed up and handed Calvino a set of photographs of Indonesian terrorist suspects, including Hasam.
“Hold on to these,” said Jardine. “If you run up against any of these men, give me a call.”
Along with the pictures was Jardine’s name card with his cellphone number handwritten along the bottom. Calvino had given Sawai a perfect alibi. Jardine ignored the guru, leaving the interrogation to Colonel Pratt. The American security officer stared at Sawai and shook his head, then turned and walked out with the farang suits. Whatever Ton’s bad karma had been, Calvino had a hunch it was interlinked with Sawai’s connection to Veera.
Most decisions in life depend on whether you’re looking for speed or distance. Choosing a woman, for instance. Doing a job. There had been a look in Ton’s eyes in the gym; Calvino had seen something. Living long enough in Thailand, he could see those who had been defeated; it was in the eyes of certain men. Ton was one of those men. Life had worn him down. Such men are in their dreams rowing in a small boat towards a mist rolling in from the far horizon. The current is carrying their boat to the edge of a drop-off. There are those who pull against the current in fear; there are those who welcome and embrace the mist as nothing in their life will ever compare to their disappearing in it.
THIRTY-SEVEN
CALVINO NURSED A Singha beer while reading through his notebook. He could see a pattern developing in his shuttle back and forth between Fon and Noi; he covered a lot of territory but never got close enough to form a picture of what had happened during Noi’s brief tenure as a member of Valentine’s harem. With Ton dead, the hit team that had likely whacked the local reporter had been eliminated. The links to Veera were all in the grave. Who had ordered the hit on the reporter was an academic question rather than a legal one. Sawai was in the clear and for the same reason. Had Veera and Sawai acted together? Calvino would have put money on it. Whoever made the contract had managed to deal effectively with the loose ends. With no gunmen alive, the general rule in Thailand is that the evidence of murder is insufficient to convict. That was the reason the masterminds eliminated the chain of evidence.
After he finished the beer, Calvino walked across the street and into the dive shop. He asked for the boss. He handed his name card to the Thai behind the counter, who looked at it without any reaction.
“Tell the boss it’s important.”
A couple of minutes later, a young stocky, tanned farang in shorts, tank top and sandals strolled into the shop, clutching Calvino’s card, sweat pouring down the side of his face.
“Are you the boss?” asked Calvino.
The young man extended his hand, “Paul Yasbeck’s the name. You want to rent equipment?” He had a middle-American accent. And the look of a wholesome, all-American college fullback ten years after scoring his last touchdown, packing a bag and flying to Thailand.
Calvino shook his head. Going for a dive wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.
“I want to ask you a few questions about one of your former employees. Noi.”
“Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“Is there some place where we can talk?
Yasbeck led Calvino to his a backroom office. Scuba tanks stood against the wall. A shelf held a row of diving masks. On his desk was a photograph of a Thai woman and three children.
“That’s my wife. She’s from Pattaya and that’s our three kids,” said Yasbeck.
“Nice family,” said Calvino. He sat in a chair in front of Yasbeck’s desk and took out his notebook, flipped it open, studying it for a moment.
“Noi worked in a bar. After that she worked for you.”
“I trained her to dive. She passed the examination for her master’s certificate. You know how difficult that is?”
“That’s something,” said Calvino.
Yasbeck nodded his head. “Better believe it.”
Believe It or Not. Divephilia: the sexual excitement of having sex underwater. Noi had been collected as another specimen for Valentine’s living garden of sexual fetishes.
“Before that she worked in a South Pattaya bar as a dancer. Now she’s a nun in a local wat. I’d say that is some career for someone who’s only twenty-two years old.”
“I was sorry to lose her. The customers loved learning to dive from Noi. They’d sign up for a two-day course, then sign up for two more courses. Not that she ever did anything with them. I mean, outside her job as a diving instructor. Once she left the bar, she clean
ed up her act. I told her that my wife wouldn’t allow any diver turning underwater tricks. Or dry-land ones either. The wife’s strict about that. She kept her side of the deal, as far as I know. I was real sorry when she left.”
“Was her leaving sudden?”
“Out of the blue.”
“Did she say why she was leaving?”
“Her boyfriend was in some kind of trouble.” Yasbeck rolled his eyes.
“You take a beautiful girl like Noi. She could have any guy and what kind of guy does she pick? A loser. He’d borrow money from her and of course never pay her back. That’s par for the course. Right?”
“Did you ever meet the boyfriend?”
Yasbeck fiddled with a dive meter. He looked up.
“He’d pick her up after work sometimes. He never missed picking her up on payday. He never came into the shop. He sat in his pickup and waited for her to come out.”
“You know his name?”
“Rangsan. I used to tease Noi about her boyfriend. I’d call him Ring-Rang-Rung.”
“What kind of pickup did he drive?”
“A two-year-old red Toyota. She said he was still making payments on it and he was always short of cash.”
“Do you know what kind of work he did?”
“Noi said that he worked on the coast. He’d get hired to take fish to the market. Sometimes he’d haul goats or sheep. Only most of the people around here have their own pickup trucks. His work wasn’t steady. He’d go a week without a job.”
Calvino made notes. “Do you know where Rangsan was from?”
“He was a local boy.”
“A boy?”
“He was about the same age as Noi. Twenty-two, twenty- three. Skinny and moody and she’d paid for him to have a nose job. He said his flat nose was hurting his business. If he had a farang nose, then the work would flow in. She paid the six thousand baht and he got a farang nose but he had no more business after the nose job than before. My feeling was, the guy was a loser. She stuck up for him. But she had to know the guy was a lost cause. That’s a woman for you. They don’t know how to cut their losses.”
“A nose job to haul goats and fish?”
Yasbeck shrugged.
“She said he lacked confidence.”
Calvino shook his head.
“I want to go back to one thing you said earlier. You said Noi left because her boyfriend was in some kind of trouble. Do you know what the trouble was?”
“A business conflict I guess. The second she said Ring-Rang-Rung had troubles, that was enough for me. I didn’t wanna know. I still don’t wanna know what kind of troubles he had. I’ve lived in Thailand since I was twenty-one years old, and that’s been for thirteen years, and I can tell you, Mr. Calvino, whenever one of the girls tells you that her Thai boyfriend has trouble, you don’t ever want to go there. She wants to leave because of the boyfriend, then no matter how great she’s been for the business, you have to let her go. Because she’s gonna go anyway. She going into some firestorm and you can’t stop that from happening.” He paused, got up, and pulled a brochure from a stack on his filing cabinet.
“You said Noi’s in a wat.”
“She’s a nun.”
“That must have been some trouble,” said Yasbeck. He handed Calvino the brochure.
“If you ever want to take up diving, you let me know, okay?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Calvino looked at the brochure. On the front was a picture of Noi with scuba tanks on her back and diver’s mask pushed back over her head. She wore a bikini and looked like the kind of fantasy woman that would have any man digging into his wallet for a few days of diving lessons. He could see the attraction for Valentine.
“You can never figure out these women,” said Yasbeck.
“One thing I can say about Noi, the woman had laughter in her soul.”
Calvino had heard the line before. Talking with the Thai boyfriend would be top of the agenda for Colonel Pratt—if they could find the boyfriend.
“Sometimes a woman doesn’t understand that what she wants isn’t what she really wants,” said Calvino.
THIRTY-EIGHT
LATER IN THE afternoon Calvino returned to the wat. A funeral party squatting under the shade of a large tree watched him stroll along the grounds. Men and women playing cards and gambling, gossiping, others nearby milling around and watching the farang dressed in the jacket walking among them as they ate chicken and rice with their fingers. As Calvino stopped, an old woman dipped a cup into a plastic bucket, navigating large pieces of ice, and scooped up a glass of water. She held it out for Calvino, her toothless grin spreading across her lips.
“Hot, isn’t it?” she said.
He drank the water and handed back the glass.
From the kitchen behind one of the buildings came the clattering of pots and pans from women cooking. Calvino walked away from the funeral party and found a space to sit on a concrete bench underneath a giant bodhi tree. Red and green and yellow strips of cloth had been tied around its enormous trunk. Dozens of Buddha statues and a spirit house lined with tiny doll-like figures had been stacked beneath the tree. The dolls would have been at home on the table inside Prasit’s prayer room. Some ancient urge drove adults to bring dolls and place them around a tree or inside a room and to light candles and incense and pray. Fear of the unknown, the uncertainty of life. The same fear a child feels but can’t express; a fear which is deep and unknowable. Sending in the dolls as proxy eased the anxiety.
Calvino saw Noi slowly cross the large dirt parking lot. He rose from the bench and waved to catch her attention. He was half way across the parking lot when she finally reached him.
“Thank you for making time,” he said.
“I have a lot of that,” she said.
“There’s a bench where we can sit and talk.”
She followed him to the bodhi tree. From this vantage point it was possible to observe anyone arriving or leaving the wat and the sala. The tree and bench occupied the high ground inside the wat grounds and, like the crow’s nest of a ship, gave a commanding view of the sea from one side. Calvino could imagine the abbot would have positioned his spies there to watch suspect monks or nuns. A circular concrete bench had been built around the perimeter of the bodhi tree. In places the bench surface was broken and had fallen into decay and ruin, marble as impermanent as a human life. Calvino dusted off a spot and motioned for Noi to sit down. He sat next to her, facing towards the sea beyond. She stared at the sea.
“I’d like to ask you a few more questions,” said Calvino. Whatever the reason, it was clear something had made her change her mind. She hardly acknowledged him, folding back into herself in a remote silence.
“It is late. You must come back tomorrow if you have more questions. I will be in trouble.”
“You’re already in trouble.”
She had begun to rise. Calvino rose and moved in front of her, blocking her path. She tried to go around to the left; he moved left. She tried the right side and he moved at the same pace.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” she asked.
“You saw something on the beach.”
She turned to walk back and then stopped, half turned. “I told you what I saw.”
“You told me what you wanted me to believe. But you saw a lot more. You saw something that made you afraid. It made your boyfriend Rangsan run. That’s why you came to this place. And staying inside here is why you are alive.”
Calvino pulled out the brochure from the dive shop with her picture on the front and showed it to her. “Rangsan drove to the diving shop in his red Toyota pickup. He borrowed money from you. When you quit your diving instructor job, you told your boss that your boyfriend was in some kind of trouble. We need to talk about your boyfriend’s problem.”
Noi, the master diver, still bore memories of her time working in a bar; she couldn’t escape the provocative force caused when a farang cast doubt on her word. Pride or face, it was d
ifficult to describe the feelings that Calvino had tapped into, but he knew bar yings’ vulnerable spots; hitting it was the key to successfully getting her to open up. He had attacked and she had reacted. Noi sat down hard on the bench, arms folded.
“I don’t lie,” she said. Inside she steamed.
“Why are you angry?”
The Buddha self she sought to find had gone. As much as she tried, nothing was turning out as she wished. But she was a poor, uneducated peasant girl, she told herself, and her skin was too dark and her nose too flat and her hips were too narrow to be considered beautiful.
“Because I am a stupid girl. And ugly.”
Except to farangs, she conceded to herself. Valentine had thought so, too. She had had a real chance of a new life, which had vaporized in a week. Her face pointed ahead, her eyes turned to the corner, watching as Calvino sat a couple of feet away.
“You were with Rangsan that day. You know what happened. Why not tell me what you saw on the beach last New Year’s Eve?”
She shuddered and leaned back on the bench.
“I already tell you and Colonel Pratt. I not tell anyone anything. I go now, okay?”
There is never a right time to pull the pin from a grenade, but once it’s done, there are only seconds to make the decision that affects everything else.
“The Americans, men like Jardine, are looking for you. If he knew that you were here, what do you think he’d do? Play nice? If he asked you about Rangsan, would he let you walk away before he got an answer? If you won’t talk to me, then I can see he gets this brochure. David Jardine and his friends don’t strike me as men who waste time getting answers.”
He rose from the bench, sighed and looked at the sea. He thought how David Jardine would use Thai proxies at the interrogation. Keeping to the guidelines of plausible deniability, watchful as the interrogators asked the questions he had requested. Threats and beatings and torture couldn’t be traced to him. His hands would remain clean. It was the perfect world of no accountability and no limits.
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