“Piss off, you little bastard,” said McPhail, as the boy brushed against him.
A central atrium rose five stories. Calvino leaned forward over the railing and stared up at the ceiling. Webbing had been draped over the arched windows and outside it was overcast, threatening to rain again, and the interior lights were turned down, casting a soft, mellow burnished light as if in this designer-made world it never rained. But even the management couldn’t erase all storm clouds. There had been jumpers. Despondent Thais climbing over the railing and falling headfirst in someone’s Caesar salad or hitting the polished white and black marble floor. News of the jumpers had been kept quiet to stop copycat suicides.
Classical music filtered up from the floor below. Presumably this was to soothe people, make them feel good, want to live, want to shop, not think about their problems or want to die.
McPhail had followed Calvino’s eyeline. “No jumpers so far today,” he said.
“I saw one last week,” said Calvino.
“God, they make a mess. It is incredible how fast Security cleans up the bones. I mean you’ve got teeth and blood splattered twenty feet. You don’t bounce when you hit this marble from the fifth floor.”
McPhail would have those details, thought Calvino. There was a Calvino’s law that a hardcore was someone who had witnessed so much death, violent death, that all the normal emotions had been peeled away to be replaced by statistics like the ones recited by baseball freaks who remembered every player and every game.
Most of the shoppers could have been exchanged for shoppers from anywhere else in the world. Caught in the soft lights and music, they walked the corridors looking for things to spend money on. The mall had succeeded in stripping Thailand clean of the peasants, construction workers, tuk-tuk drivers, the louts; none of them had sun-wrinkled, raisin faces with blood-red betel nut mouths. And it was quiet like the inside of a church in the suburbs. No constant buzz of fluorescent lights with swarms of insects bouncing off the bulbs. No traffic noises, no vendor carts, no blind lotto sellers, no limbless beggars with runny-nosed kids, no hilltribe mothers smelling of wood fires, holding a jaundiced baby in one hand and the other held out for donations.
McPhail followed Calvino up the escalator and they got off where a fashion walkway was being set up. A sign called this the Fashion Floor. This was the spot Noi had pre-arranged for the meeting. “If she’s a fashion model, I think I am going to like this assignment,” said McPhail.
“She’s a singer and has worked in LA.”
“Singer. Fuck that. Worked in LA, maybe. I can buy into that.”
“You don’t have to buy into anything, McPhail. My client wants her to call him. Nothing complicated,” said Calvino as he turned to look at the workers putting up the ramp. At the far end another crew was working on the entrance to the ramp.
“And what? Sing him a song?”
“Does it really matter?” asked Calvino.
“Well this ain’t LA. And in Bangkok everything is complicated. Just look in the mirror at your face and you will get a reminder.”
He ignored McPhail’s remark, walking around the perimeter, wondering whether McPhail might be right and this was something weird after all and that he, Vincent Calvino, was asking someone else to step into a trap that was being set for him. This made him edgy.
“This is where she will be waiting.” Calvino pointed at the door off the main stage.
“How am I supposed to recognize her?”
“I already showed you her photo.”
“She was sleeping. I presume she’ll be awake here.”
“Look for a UCLA button pinned to her handbag.”
“You got to be joking?”
“No joke.”
“What if there are two broads with UCLA buttons?”
“Ask which one is Diane. And sings. If there is more than one singer named Diane wearing a UCLA button, I’ll buy you lunch at the Lonesome Hawk.”
“You never know, big spender,” said McPhail.
McPhail was right. One never knew. Calvino’s mobile phone rang, and he pulled it out of his jacket pocket and pressed against his ear.
“Look up. At the top of the up escalator,” said the voice.
Calvino turned, looked up, lowered his sunglasses and saw Jess leaning over the railing one floor up, waving down at him.
“What a coincidence,” said Calvino, sliding the sunglasses back snug against his nose.
“Let me buy you a coffee. Say, the fifth floor in five minutes?” It was a question but before Calvino could answer the call had ended.
Calvino put down the phone. “Got to go McPhail. You’re sure you can handle this on Sunday?” He handed him a piece of paper. “This is the guy’s number. Take her to a pay phone and put through a collect call. Then put her on the line. Once she says hello, you’re done. They’ve connected. I’ve done my job, and I owe you a big one.” Calvino folded a thousand baht note into McPhail’s hand.
“Piece of cake. I get her to phone this guy in LA. End of story. How can anyone fuck that up?”
JESS sat alone at a Burger King table demonstrating another one of Calvino’s laws: that it is better to be alone and lonely than lost in a crowd one can’t escape. It was hard to know whether he was lonely and lost in some escape no one could understand but himself. One table away two old Chinese ladies chomped down on Whoppers. Grease and ketchup bleeding between their fingers, they stopped only to put a straw between their lips and suck from huge cola cups. The burgers were larger than their heads. Jess had chosen fast food alley for a coffee—one of those LAPD habits. Bunched together side by side was the unholy trinity of junk food—Dairy Queen, Burger King, and KFC. Bloated teenagers sat around tables in their school uniforms looking like they had stepped out of an American TV series set in an Americanized ethnic community.
“We could be in LA,” said Calvino as he pulled up a chair.
“What are you drinking?” asked Jess.
“Coffee. I’ll get it myself,” Calvino said pushing the chair back. “Nice ambience.”
No reply from the LAPD cop.
Calvino glanced at the escalator carrying people up to the cinemas on the sixth floor. Kids with greasy food patches on their faces, pumped up with coke, shot like fleshy flames up the escalator to the cinemas. Calvino edged his way back through the burger eaters and escalator runners. As he approached the counter, he looked back and saw Jess waiting in silence, his hands wrapped around his paper cup of coffee. Turning back around, Calvino watched the fry cook lowering a wire basket of French fries into a boiling vat of oil. A moment later he was back at the table. Funny that Jess would be here, funnier still that he would be asking Calvino for coffee in the Emporium, but the funniest line was this LA cop’s silence. Calvino decided to let it go, wait until Jess had something to say. Whatever was on his chest was taking a while to work its way up to his throat and to form into words.
Calvino sat sipping his coffee. The two old Chinese women had finished their Whoppers, looking glassy eyed from a major grease injection as they stared silently into their cokes.
“Colonel Prachai says you know your way around. I was glad to hear that,” said Jess, stopping to sip from his coffee for the first time. He looked over at Calvino, betraying no clear expression.
“Call him Pratt. It’s okay. I’ve called him Pratt for more than twenty years. You know that even his wife calls him Pratt?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“But you’ve got some doubts about hiring me for this job.”
Jess pressed his lips tight and nodded. “You could say that. I couldn’t quite understand why the principal had insisted that I team with you.”
Calvino drank some coffee. He was a little surprised. “I thought Pratt had got me the job.”
Jess grinned. “He is a major fan of yours. But the job came from someone in LA. My principal mentioned a friend named Gabe who had recommended you. When I learned you had never heard of my principal, I became . .
.” His voice trailed off.
“Suspicious. Doubtful. Uncertain. You’re thinking, what is going down here. I am being ordered to work in Bangkok, my hometown, with a farang. Why a farang? Why this farang? What gives? And why doesn’t this farang know him?”
“Something like that.”
“Gabe I know, though I can’t imagine why he would recommend me to your principal. I haven’t exactly come through for him,” Calvino said. He paused, watching the steam rise from his coffee, collecting his thoughts. “And I am thinking, why does a Thai who works for LAPD come knocking on my door, looking to put a grand a day into my pocket. No one hands over that kind of money without a reason. The guy we are guarding, Wes Naylor, is just another low-life LA lawyer who has probably never earned a grand a day in his life. It seems out of proportion to the circumstances. Unless someone is trying to make a statement. Someone trying to give us some advice through the kind of money they are throwing around, and if you’re smart, if I am smart, then we should listen to what they are saying.”
“Naylor only has a limited law practice. He’s mainly a businessman.”
“Yeah, what kind of business?”
“He’s got something to do with e-commerce—you know selling stuff on the Internet.”
“Stuff covers a big category of things.”
“He has one of those single male traveler websites.”
The light went on for Calvino. He knew about these sites. “He sells information on where to find yings,” said Calvino.
“That’s one way of looking at it. The hotel deal is an extension of his business. That’s what Kowit has told me. I think he has been pretty honest about this. He didn’t need to tell me this background about Naylor. But he is coming here as a lawyer,” said Jess. “Kowit confirmed that.”
“Who’s Kowit?”
“He’s a personal friend of Dr. Nat.”
“And Dr. Nat figures in how?”
“There is a hotel in Bangkok he’s buying.”
Jess took another sip of his coffee and smiled; not a broad grin, but one of those smiles that indicate that some kind of reality had registered, logged into the ledger as valid.
“None of this is adding up, Jess. Think about it.”
“I am listening,” said Jess.
LAPD Jess wasn’t stupid enough to fully accept the situation as presented to him, or was he? His willingness to listen was an encouraging sign, thought Calvino, who liked the idea that just maybe the set-up disturbed him. It damn well should have given him some restless nights. What needed to be understood was that neither of them was going to be blinded by the money. But money had that blinding light function for a lot of people.
“Okay, you’re an LA guy. Let’s put it in film terms. Do you remember the film where the Internal Affairs cops frame the black cop by planting offshore bank account files in his house?”
“The Negotiator. Yeah, I liked that movie,” said Jess.
“Like it or not, you gotta believe that those files prove the black cop has been ripping off the police pension fund for years, otherwise the Internal Affairs Department case falls apart. Am I right?”
“You’re right,” said Jess.
“There is no way that offshore rip-off could work the way Internal Affairs said it worked. You just don’t open an offshore account over the telephone. This is not like ordering take-out pizza. There are forms to fill out. Copies of passports to be sent in. Bank officers who know your name and send you letters. So they got a file with papers in it. If the cop is innocent, then how is his name on any of those papers? Evidence is a chain. One bad link and it breaks. If the bad guys forged the papers, then his lawyer phones the bank and gets copies of the originals. His client’s name isn’t on any of the originals. So how is he dirty? He ain’t. That’s the point. The cop should have walked. Internal Affairs had nothing. Jess, banks don’t go around transferring millions of dollars without a paper chain a mile long to document what they are doing. You don’t change a couple of years of fraud overnight by doctoring a file. Real life doesn’t work that way.”
“You’re saying Naylor or my principal is lying?”
“I don’t know if they are lying. But they might be acting on some misinformation,” said Calvino. “Remember that Grisham novel The Firm where the plot turns on a limited partnership formed in Hong Kong for tax purposes? Hong Kong is a tax haven. Why would you form a limited partnership there? The answer is, you wouldn’t. What I am trying to say is that most of the time Americans get international connections and deals dead wrong. They don’t understand the process: how things work, the system, the tracks left by messages, letters, statements, records. Take bodyguarding. This is a big deal in America. Thai gangsters have bodyguards, too. But the guy actually funding this deal is Thai. Does he come to Thailand? No. He sends a part-time lawyer who is in the sleaze business to negotiate his deal. He stays home and pays eight grand and expenses for bodyguards. One he doesn’t know. Jess, it doesn’t add up except in an American movie or novel where no one seems to care that things don’t add up. They just follow the action and don’t think too much. I live here; you were born here, Jess. And we have some heavy thinking to do. What we are being asked to do is something no one who has ever lived here would ever believe. Not for a moment. So we have to ask ourselves who these people are who hired us and what they really want? And why are they throwing around all of this money? No client has ever peeled off four grand in advance and not wanted something more than he says he wants.”
“What’s your theory, Vincent?”
“These people are selling a set-up that is tailored for American consumption.”
“Wes Naylor doesn’t need to arrive tomorrow. If we think we can’t handle it, then all I have to do is make a phone call. Cancel out the arrangement and we walk away from the job.”
Calvino watched a couple strolling past sharing a Diary Queen peanut and chocolate sundae. Each digging into the side with their tiny red plastic spoons. “You wouldn’t have come all the way here if you were going to walk away.”
“And I don’t see you reaching in your pocket and handing back the four grand,” said Jess.
“How do you want to play it?” asked Calvino, watching the female member of the couple stick the red spoon in her mouth, her eyelids half-closed in ice cream pleasure. He wondered if she had that same look in bed.
“As it comes.”
“That is very Thai.
“I am Thai and I know what I am doing.”
Here comes the right-wing nationalist bullshit, thought Calvino. Part protest, part threat, part a show stopper. Meaning, not only am I Thai but you are a farang and no farang can ever make the right call in Thailand; farangs don’t know enough. They don’t have Thai blood.
“So where do you want to take it, Jess?” asked Calvino.
Some serious tension was heating up. Calvino was halfway to throwing the four grand on the table and walking away from the junk food, this junk case. He could smooth it over with Pratt; tell him the truth, that he had a conflict—this meeting with a singer named Noi, the sleeping broad who called herself Diane. The appointment came out of the blue, and he owed it to Gabe to follow through, otherwise where would his reputation be? Gabe would never recommend him again. The way Jess was fingering the paper coffee cup, it wouldn’t be long until leaks started to appear. He didn’t look happy; Calvino didn’t look all that happy either. The assignment was shaping up to be something like the Emporium itself—a fake world with controlled temperature and light. Inside Jess’s own self-contained world of LA, it made sense, but once outside into the real stink of Bangkok, it began to fall apart, like a movie or novel that asked someone to believe in a premise which they knew rang false because they lived in the real world. So where were they? Inside another cartoon scripted by those looking to make fast money.
“If you pull out, I can phone LA and tell them the situation.”
“In other words, you want me to make the decision for you.”
&nb
sp; “Then you are in?”
There were defining moments in everyone’s life and Calvino felt this was one of them. Fish or cut bait time. He stared at Jess, wondering if this cop had leveled or was still holding back. Pratt’s recommendation had to count for something.
“I don’t have anything else on this weekend.”
Calvino rose from the table.
“See you tomorrow at the airport,” said Jess. “We will meet Mr. Naylor’s flight at noon.”
“Exactly what kind of cop are you?”
Jess pushed back the coffee cup. “Narcotics. Undercover narcotics.”
“Putting drug dealers in jail?”
“Sometimes,” said Jess.
“Then bodyguard duty should be a piece of cake.”
Jess laid a small plastic bag on the table.”That’s your first mistake.” He opened the parcel as he talked, never losing eye contact with Calvino. “If someone really intends to take someone out, it’s difficult to stop the shooter.” Jess removed a radio transceiver from the bag, connected a mini-mic and then a control switch. “But if he’s simply intimidating for business reasons, then that’s a different story. But either way, I promise you one thing, it won’t be a piece of cake.”
The last item he took out was the flesh-colored wireless earphone that was shaped like the nose cone of a rocket. He allowed the earphone to roll back and forth in the palm of his hand before handing it to Calvino.
“You ever use one of these before?” Jess asked. “It’s called an earphone inductor.”
Calvino picked the earphone out of Jess’s hand. “No wires. The signal transmits from the induction coil.”
“The main rule in surveillance is to stay in communication with your partner. You see or hear anything I should know about, you push the talk toggle on the control switch. And I will do the same thing. We work together by being in different locations around the asset. I go ahead and you follow. The radio transceiver goes on your belt, the induction coil and mini-mic concealed in your jacket.”
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