“It must have been a lousy card?” asked Pratt. “No money inside, right?”
“How did you know?” He paused and looked at Pratt, his one good eye blinked. “You said something about work?”
Pratt nodded towards the tall, well built Thai in his late thirties wearing a sports jacket, blue shirt, and jeans. He stood just inside the doorway, looking around the messy apartment. It looked like a crime scene with only the yellow police tape missing.
“This is Jess Santisak,” said Pratt.
“Jess as in Jessie James?” asked Calvino extending his hand.
“Jess as in Jessada,” he said firmly, shaking Calvino’s hand.
“Jess is Thai,” said Pratt, beaming like he was introducing a member of the family.
“That’s good, since this is Thailand.” Calvino retained a small hope that they would turn around and leave. He let them stand in the doorway for a moment, assessing the situation.
“I never much liked birthdays. On my last birthday, I was stabbed, sir,” said Jess, lifting his shirt and showing a long scar on his stomach.
“Stabbed? I am feeling better already.” Did this guy just call him sir? This threw Calvino off a little, and he was about to say something but let it go.
Mrs. Jamthong had not cleaned Calvino’s apartment for a couple of days as she bailed water out of her own room below the staircase, her dogs standing on shipping crates. In those few days of neglect, Calvino’s newspapers, half-eaten fruit, socks, underwear, empty Mekhong bottles, dirty dishes and glasses, Domino pizza boxes, built up a certain level of mass as they were scattered across the room. Jess could see through the open bedroom door the far wall where a black lace bra hung over a poster of the 1968 New York Yankees team. A line of red ants streamed out of the empty Domino’s pizza box, crossing the floor like an army on the march. Baby powder had been sprinkled across the floor of the bedroom and sitting room. A trail of small footprints ended in front of the black bra, then veered off towards the closet and bathroom. Calvino’s Law: Never bar fine a ying who won’t look you in the eye. If she will look you in the eye, pay the bar fine, but follow her footprints across the room to find out what she is really after.
Calvino made his way through the debris to the fridge. A rat ran across the carpet and disappeared into the bedroom. He threw a book at the rat. He missed.
“Make yourself at home,” Calvino said, gesturing towards the sitting area. There was a sofa, a coffee table, and two old armchairs. “With the flooding, the housekeeping is a little behind.”
He pulled a plastic bottle out of the fridge, nudged the door shut with his hip, and then poured two glasses of water. On top of the fridge were his painkillers. He opened the bottle, dumped two tablets into his hand, popped them into his mouth, and swallowed, drinking straight from the plastic bottle.
“Sorry, I don’t normally drink from the bottle. These are my last two clean glasses. The doctor said to take the medicine, and in three days no more cold,” Calvino said walking over to the sofa. He tried to put the glasses down on the coffee table but there was too much junk in the way, so he handed them each a glass and then sat down in his armchair. “Just push all that junk on the floor,” said Calvino. “You won’t hurt anything. I promise.”
Jess carefully stacked up a pile of magazines on the floor and put a pile of unopened junk mail and books on top of the stack. He was the meticulous type, thought Calvino, as Jess sat down. Someone who never had anything in his office, his house, his life, out of place.
“Jess’s been with LAPD nearly ten years,” said Pratt. “He was LA County kick-boxing champion when he was fourteen years old.” There was a note of considerable pride in Pratt’s voice as he summed up this aspect of Jess’s career.
Calvino cocked his head, thinking kick-boxing, LAPD. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, so what is he doing in my apartment—looking for a sparring partner? “You mean Los Angeles has Thai cops working for LAPD?”
“They have a few, sir.”
There was that “sir” thing again.
“How many farang cops you got working in Bangkok?” Calvino looked at Pratt who raised his right hand and made a zero. Pratt, was a Colonel in the Royal Thai Police force and knew the impossibility of a farang ever becoming a police officer. Affirmative action would come about the same time that corruption would be wiped out of the system. “That many? So what’s a Thai LA cop doing in Bangkok? Maybe transferring here and you’re gonna sign on as Pratt’s new partner,” continued Calvino.
Jess shook his head. “Not exactly. I took leave for a private assignment, sir.”
“Please don’t call me, sir. It makes me nervous. And whatever you do, don’t reply that you are sorry, sir. So you are here freelancing. Didn’t know you guys could do that.”
“It’s a bodyguard assignment.”
Pratt sat opposite Calvino. “And he asked who I would recommend for the assignment.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Vincent Calvino grew up on the streets of New York City and put all that knowledge to work on the streets of Bangkok. And so far was still alive. Well, basically alive.”
Calvino nodded, stared straight at Jess. “Do I look like someone who has mastered the streets? Last night that guy hit me so hard I thought I had landed in Wyoming.”
“Pratt recommended you, Vincent Calvino. That’s good enough for me,” said Jess.
“Right now I am on the injured players list. Besides I don’t do bodyguard work. I have to point that out to you. It doesn’t pay and the people you end up guarding you mostly wish someone would whack them out.”
“My principal is paying one thousand dollars a day.”
“On the other hand, I didn’t say that I never took bodyguard jobs,” said Calvino. “So exactly who is your principal and why does he need a cop from LAPD and a farang to guard him in Bangkok? Who has threatened him? What are we bringing to this situation? What kind of deal are we making here?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” said Jess. Something was bothering him. It was all that powder on the floor. He looked at the ceiling as if this were the source. “What happened to your floor?”
Calvino wrinkled his nose. “Baby powder. When I bring a girl back, I head for the shower and afterwards I come back and do the due diligence. I follow her tracks to see where she’s gone, and by knowing where she’s gone I have a good idea what she is after. Money, a photo of another woman, passport, rings, gold, cameras, the usual stuff. For the past couple of nights I haven’t felt like cleaning up. Then I wasn’t expecting guests either.” He shook his head, feeling the pain, winced, looked over at Pratt who had gone disturbingly quiet, then back at Jess. He tried to wipe the snot discharging from his nose, and groaned from the pain of touching it. He drew in a long breath, then slowly released it.
“When you roll over a couple of times, forgetting you have a broken nose and a stitched-up eye, you start getting inquisitive about the world again,” Calvino continued. “How did I walk into this? Why didn’t I see the tracks this guy was leaving before he punched me in the face? Simple, basic questions like that make you question yourself.”
Betrayal laced with pain was humbling, as humbling as searching for answers, wishing for the right answers to emerge from a man’s basic condition of confusion, indecision, and terror.
“It’s good you have questions. But I am not certain I have all the answers, sir.”
“Sir, sir. Cut the sir crap. Who does have all the answers?” Calvino slowly rose from the sofa and walked across the room back to the fridge, where he took out a fresh ice pack and put it against his face.
All the answers were stored in that place somewhere in the universe where all the numbers added up. One big vault and everyone living inside had a key. Only in Bangkok no one had a key, and no one knew what would or could happen next.
“If you can’t do the job, then you can’t do the job,” said Jess.
Calvino closed his good eye as he pressed the ice pack a
gainst his nose.
“Who is the guy? Your principal as you call him.”
“The principal is Dr. Nat. The asset’s name is Wes Naylor. He’s an LA lawyer. Naylor is assisting Dr. Nat on doing a deal here and there are some shareholders who don’t want to see the deal done. He’s had a couple of threats. His client is paying the costs. Paying in advance. We pick him up from the airport on Saturday and on Wednesday we take him back to the airport and put him on a plane to LA.”
Jess pulled out an envelope and counted off forty Ben Franklin’s, fanning them out near the pizza box like a fancy drawbridge for the ants. Calvino walked back and sat down, leaned forward and looked at the money.
“You walk into my place, see my condition, the condition of my house and you still want to put down four grand?”
Jess nodded.
“Life doesn’t work like this. Ask Pratt. Tell him, Pratt; life doesn’t come roaring up to your door with four grand and lay them on your table because someone thinks you know the streets of Bangkok.”
Pratt listened to their exchange, wondering who had more of an edge in keeping someone alive in Bangkok: the Americanized Thai or the Thaified farang. They had been touched with a knowledge; they were the negative image of each other. Another self, a late in life learned different half, with all those new memories of events trying to make sense and come to terms with what they had been raised to believe and understand was real and true. Worlds independently occupied were about to join and they would be forced to work together, finding a common ground for four nights and days. Much could happen, or nothing, thought Pratt. And who was to say that mere necessity cannot create a bond of understanding. Pratt remembered the lines from Macbeth: “The attempt, and not the deed, confounds us. I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?”
He repeated the speech for Calvino.
“You see, you ask Pratt a question he doesn’t want to answer and he goes all Thai, and what does he do when he goes all Thai? He quotes Shakespeare.”
THREE
AS CALVINO OPENED the door to his office, Ratana was standing a foot away, waiting. She saw the damage that had been inflicted on Calvino’s face—the broken nose, stitches, puffy, bruised skin around the eyes—and without any change of expression glanced down at papers on her desk. Inside, she wept. To make his appearance even worse, Vinee had worn his dead man’s blue blazer, the one he had bought off a vendor’s rack in Amarin Plaza for 199 baht. At least that was his story, but she was never sure when he was joking and when he was serious. And the blurry line between fact and fiction, Vinee had confided in her, was always moving; he didn’t know himself most of the time what was true and what was false. Neither did any other farangs living inside the Comfort Zones of Thailand.
This much was fact: the blazer was second-hand. She could tell from the jacket’s condition. For one thing, it was missing buttons—all the buttons were gone—one sleeve was frayed as if the previous owner had rubbed against sandpaper. Calvino had bought the jacket without noticing (or if he noticed, then he really didn’t care) that all the buttons had been stripped off. Had they been put over the dead man’s eyes? Sold separately in the Weekend market? Lost in an accident, a fight, or through a dry-cleaner’s negligence? These thoughts sometimes entered her mind as she sat at her desk watching him on the days he wore the buttonless coat. Ratana’s mind never stopped thinking of the possibilities of why things were the way they were. That was the way she was wired.
She wondered if he had noticed that she had sewn a set of buttons on his second-hand jacket a week ago. He had stepped out for a long lunch at Washington Square, leaving the jacket draped over the second-hand filing cabinet in his office.
“You had a call,” she said. “The message is on your desk. Good news.”
Calvino liked that she had not said anything about his damaged face. She had taken in the full extent of the wreckage but her self-restraint, her natural way of forcing herself to withhold what she was thinking meant there would be no drama. Her lack of reaction made Calvino respect her above everyone else in his life, other than a few people like Pratt and Father Andrew. No recrimination, no judgment, no asking about whether the injuries had hurt or were causing him pain now. That was not Ratana’s style; she had been right about taking the birthday card delivery assignment. Nothing betrayed her feelings. He also liked that she didn’t say who had left the message, which was waiting on his desk. She left these tiny discoveries for him to make, knowing men hated yings telling them what to do or spoiling some small, insignificant surprise. Her silence ensured that Calvino would read the message straight away. He was a curious man and she admired that about him. After all these years they had a way of working together; they knew each other’s habits, what worked and what was best left unsaid. After she finished her law degree, she kept referring to herself as Khun Vinee’s secretary. Whenever her parents—especially her mother—had demanded that she use her law degree and work for a law firm or at the very least start her own law firm, she told them she would think about it. She had been thinking about it for many years now and was no closer to leaving Vincent Calvino’s life than the day on which she received her law degree.
“My luck has just turned around, Ratana. Forget about my face. I have some good news.” He walked around his office, peeling off his jacket and throwing it over a filing cabinet. The metal buttons on the sleeve of his jacket struck the side of the filing cabinet with a thud. “First, you were right about that birthday card.” She didn’t say anything. He held up the sleeve of his jacket, then looked over at Ratana. “Seems like a fairy sewed buttons on my jacket. I guess you wouldn’t know who that was?”
A few minutes later, she came into his office carrying a small black lacquer tray and set it down on the desk. There were several china bowls and a box of cotton balls. And some medicine in a strange jar.
“We have a new case. No birthday card this time. You might like to know, I got a four-day job. Big money. Legit, easy work.” He laid out the forty Ben Franklins on the desk. “Paid in advance.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his one good eye. Ratana opened the black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl flowers inlaid in the top, took out a cotton ball, touched the edge of the ball in the bowl of water, then sprinkled a fine brown powder from the jar onto the ball.
“The money’s for a bodyguard job. That makes the second case we’ve had out of LA this month.” He half opened his one good eye, watching her prepare the cotton ball. He quickly closed it again. “The good news is that it pays a grand a day. Those are US dollars. Four days. Four grand. Forty times a hundred. And the bad news is the assignment is twenty-four hours a day. Still, I might clear enough to open a branch office in LA.”
This was a bad time to try out some cheap humor.
He winced a little as the cold, wet cotton touched the eyelid of his damaged eye.
“Joking,” he said, feeling the sting.
A branch office in LA, she thought. He was either joking or dreaming again; his face was broken and stitched and he kept on dreaming and cracking jokes like nothing had happened. The LA cases and the birthday card were the only two new cases he had this month. Ratana never lost track of the nature of the private investigation business—long stretches, weeks at a time with nothing but habit and hope to keep one going from one day to the next, then a flurry of cases would burst forth like spiders crawling out of rubbery wet eggs from a nest.
“What fairy sewed up your face, Khun Vinee?” she asked.
“Hey, that stuff stings,” Calvino said, squirming in his chair. “Not much. Stinging means it probably is doing something good. And it wasn’t a fairy, it was a doctor at Bumrungrad Hospital. At least I don’t think he was a fairy. But then who really knows?”
The homemade medicine was made from ground-up mangosteen, ginseng, peach pit, and some other ingredients which Ratana’s grandmother had kept as a family secret passed from mother-to-daughter—everyt
hing had been pounded into a fine powder.
“It is anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory. And it kills bacteria,” said Ratana.
“Very New Age. Maybe very old age.”
“This is your first bodyguard job,” she said, throwing the first piece of cotton into the center of his wastepaper basket. Dead center hit. She picked out another ball, put it in water, squeezed it, and then touched the end in the powder.
“It kind of eats into the skin, doesn’t it” he said. “So it’s my first job. What’s that supposed to mean? I am not worth four grand? Or that I won’t know how to handle a situation if one comes up?”
“Sensitive,” she said. “I mean the skin.”
“I know what you mean.”
She ignored him as she wetted the second cotton ball in the water, squeezed out the excess liquid, then touched the ball to the powder. She slowly rubbed the cotton over the bridge of his nose, tracing a line up to his stitches. She pressed the cotton against the wound, held it for a couple of minutes, letting the medicine soak into the skin. Her grandmother believed there was a special technique to using Chinese herbs; her mother also believed that this powder prevented infections and healed wounds. The water was not ordinary water but nam mon, sacred temple water. The abbot had given this water to Ratana’s mother, and because she had a good heart and loved her daughter, she gave it to Ratana with a pledge that she would use the water wisely. She thought about telling Calvino where the water came from but she figured he would not understand and wished to avoid hearing what she knew would be his point of view—no water was any more sacred than any other water. There were certain things they could never agree on. Next she would question herself, then her mother, and there would be no end to this inquiry; no good end could come from a debate with her boss. Matters of faith were better left with the core material unexamined by analysis.
“You can open your eyes,” she said. “If you can, that is.”
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