“You should wait and bring it around to my office and I will issue a receipt.”
“I don’t think you are going to flee the scene for four grand, Dwight. Try to help us make a flight tomorrow.”
Calvino folded up the notes, reached over and stuffed them in Dwight’s jacket pocket.
“I can’t promise that, Vincent. Don’t pin me down. You know how time works here as well as anyone. Nothing ever gets done in a hurry. Transporting a body is hardly a priority. This man was found at the scene of a bombing. All we need is for somebody to link him with the bomb and then you have a major problem of getting the body released. We need the report the police sergeant at the scene of the death filed. In normal cases, this isn’t a problem. But to ask a police sergeant to accept responsibility for the paperwork in this case, I just don’t know. And then you need a death certificate signed and issued by the district office. There’s the embalming, and you know, all the other details. All you need is one person who doesn’t have time or who is afraid or whose relative just died to throw everything into the future.”
Morgan was backtracking, laying out all the bureaucratic excuses to pin delays on someone else. It was time to lay down a little guilt.
“If I hadn’t got Naylor to identify this man, then where would you be?” asked Calvino. He knew the answer already but wanted to make sure that Morgan knew Naylor’s identification meant that Morgan owed Calvino. Not a big debt but enough to have Morgan do what was necessary to get the paperwork done.
Calvino knew perfectly well what the Embassy had to do if no one stepped forward to claimed a dead American, and none of them at the Embassy liked that possibility. But he wanted to hear Morgan explain the problem unidentified dead Americans caused everyone in his section. “We would take up a collection in American Citizen Services and arrange to have the body cremated. We would store the ashes just in case. Every year we must do this four, five times. It makes us all feel terrible.”
“What you’re saying is that Naylor just saved you six hundred bucks out of your own pocket.” Calvino had no reason to rub Morgan the wrong way. But he needed the man to go out of his way to clear the paperwork.
“The main thing is the death certificate,” said Morgan. “The doctor has to sign it. Getting a doctor to sign the certificate isn’t all that easy.”
“Hold on for a minute,” said Calvino. He went back into the morgue with the Foodland plastic bag. Less than five minutes later he came out without his bag and the bottle of Johnny Walker Black and handed Dwight Morgan the signed death certificate with Daniel’s name on it.
Morgan read the certificate and smiled. “Cause of death: heart and breathing stopped.”
“That seems to cover it,” said Calvino.
“Mr. Naylor, you do have a power of attorney. Vincent mentioned this on the phone.”
Naylor nodded. Calvino reached in his jacket and took out the power of attorney Naylor had signed in the bar and handed it to Morgan. The duty officer read through it quickly and then looked up.
“Mind if I hold on to this?” Morgan asked.
“No problem,” said Calvino.
“No problem,” said Naylor.
He suddenly realized that he had tried to drink the bribe. Calvino knew how the system worked; so did Morgan. But Naylor was green. He played the role of the fish out of water so well he could have made a profession out of it.
Naylor rolled his eyes. The document with his signature on it had gone into the possession of the United States, and if anyone ever found out that he had signed that document filled with a recital of lies, the California Bar Association would pull his licence to practice law.
“We will aim for tomorrow. Again, no promises. Mr. Naylor come to my office tomorrow and sign some documents.”
“Mr. Naylor will be there,” said Calvino. “Won’t you, Wesley?”
Naylor decided he definitely hated having Calvino calling him Wesley. “I wouldn’t miss the appointment for the world,” he said, hands in his pockets; his face still flushed from his fit of hyperventilation inside the morgue. He saw himself standing in front of the American flag, a large framed photo of the President on the wall, swearing an oath.
“It should be okay, Vincent,” said Morgan.
But Morgan’s tone, his emphasis was different, as if they were already going to the airport, as if they were already on their way to LA. Working the system, massaging it with nimble fingers and strong hands, that is all that it took, and patience, a great deal of grim patience, knocking down walls with bottles of Johnny Walker Black. No one in Scotland would have ever guessed that a premium whisky had knocked down more walls in Asia than all the bombs that had ever been dropped since World War II.
Morgan had his car with blue US Embassy plates with the number 86 parked right in front so everyone had to walk around it. He was already inside the car when he opened the door and got back out. He shouted at Calvino, who turned and walked back.
“I almost forgot. About those guys who all died of overdoses. I did get back something you might find of interest.”
“What’s that?”
“It seems they were all members of some Internet sex cult calling itself the Cause. They have a website www.causemember.com. Check it out. You know, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for such slime buckets.” Morgan’s Harvard accent made the word “slime” sound horrible, like some evil-smelling effluvium of morgue fluids. His voice was filled with disgust. It was semi-official policy for US Embassy people to be totally disgusted about all sexual matters. At least if they wanted to climb up the State Department ladder. Morgan, holding onto his car, looked like a man balanced to make a charge for the summit.
Calvino was doing a little jig in his mind. Morgan wasn’t telling him anything that he didn’t already know. Calvino looked over and smiled at Naylor, “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Thanks for the information, Dwight.”
NAYLOR sulked in the taxi. He wouldn’t even look at Calvino he was so pissed off with Morgan’s parting shot. “You did well, Wes,” said Calvino, trying to break the ice. Nothing. Naylor stared out the window, sitting ramrod straight, his head slightly turned. They were returning to Sukhumvit Road. The Causeway. Taxis, motorcycles, and buses cut in and out of the lanes, running red lights, racing each other, going against invisible forces, looking for a small advantage. Flashing brights, hitting the horn, the nightly intimidation of road warfare in Bangkok. The taxi driver took both hands off the wheel for an instant to wai the Erawan Shrine. Fingers splayed, he ran his hands through his hair, and once again was in contact with the steering wheel. Keep me alive, give me a passenger, give me luck. The mantra of taxi drivers and prostitutes who prayed to the spirit of that shrine to guide their destiny onto a path of comfort and money.
“Calvino, you are a sick fuck. And Dwight Morgan is an Ivy League stick-up-his-ass piece of shit. He’s the one who’s slime. And those goddamn ball bearings rattling inside that drawer. Christ, I will hear those ball bearings banging on steel until the day I die,” said Naylor.
“If Dwight’s right, a serial killer has been knocking off your members right under your nose. You are supposed to know that kind of thing, Wes. Think what kind of publicity that would be if all of your members knew five of their brothers had been killed in Bangkok and you had done nothing to warn them.”
“You’re blackmailing me, aren’t you?”
“All that I am saying is you have a problem. Someone is killing your members. It’s not about blackmail. It’s about catching the person who’s doing the killing.”
Naylor scratched his tattoo and thought about this as he lit a cigarette. It was staggeringly hot and the taxi’s air-conditioning only half worked. At the same time it looked like rain clouds were closing in and that would be another excuse Morgan could use if there was any delay in getting the paperwork done. Everything came to a halt in the rain.
“Tomorrow we go to the Embassy and you sign the paper,” said Calvino. “Then we go over to the f
uneral home and arrange Danny’s one-way cargo ticket.”
“Why does Morgan hate us?” asked Naylor.
“He’s a pretty conservative guy. Or he wouldn’t be in the job.”
“Why do conservatives hate sex? I don’t get it.”
“Maybe they feel that liberals are better breeders. And sex is used by ghetto mothers to stuff the ballot box.”
Calvino frowned, looking out the window. He didn’t like Naylor using “us” as if Morgan’s disapproval applied to him. He did sprinkle baby powder on the floor of his apartment to track the movements of yings he brought back, and if Morgan knew about that strange quirk, he would have no problem fitting him in with Naylor, Weasel, Skeleton, Kashmir, and Roadster. “If I give you the names of the five guys I believe were killed by the same person, can you get me details from your data base?” asked Calvino.
“That information is confidential,” said Naylor, all huffy.
“It might help find the killer. It might help save lives.”
“I’ll think about it, Calvino. But don’t go fucking twisting things.” It was as if the balance of power had shifted back; Naylor flicked the ash from his cigarette on the floor of the taxi. He smiled, then took a hit off his cigarette as the first drops of rain splashed off the windshield.
AT the Grand Rose Hotel, Jep was sitting on the front steps, her face all stained with dried tears. After Naylor got out of the taxi, she came roaring down the steps two at a time and ploughed straight into Naylor, putting her shoulder and head hard into his gut. Hard enough to knock him off his feet and into some of the overgrown rose bushes. Thorns cut his hands as he broke his fall. Her fists were flying like a windmill with only about half the blows hitting him around the head. She kept it up until she wound down like a toy with the batteries gone dead. She kicked him in the knee and he howled.
“Why are you doing this?” he screamed.
Calvino walked up the stairs, turned and sat down.
“Aren’t you going to stop her?” Naylor yelled.
“Remember, I am no longer your bodyguard,” said Calvino.
Jep stood over him with her hands on her narrow hips, breathing hard, trying to catch her breath. A couple of the noodle vendors were laughing as they watched from behind their stalls. She reached down, picked up a rock and threw it at one of the dogs laying in the shade of one of the carts. The vendors knew the next rock would be for them so they stopped laughing and returned to cooking noodles.
“Would you please tell me what all of this is about?”
“It’s about Roadster,” she screamed. “He wanted to fuck me. He said you told him that he could fuck me.”
“That is a lie,” protested Naylor, picking rose thorns out of his pants.
“He’s your friend. And because of him I got fired.”
Naylor’s Cause buddy had asked her to go short-time. When she refused, he got nasty, called her a whore. Jack had to come downstairs. He took the side of the customer and fired Jep, saying it was her job to fuck customers, and if she didn’t want to fuck customers, then she should go back to planting rice. He had seen Jep’s photo on a yingzine wearing a tiny dancer’s bikini just as Naylor had and had made exactly the same plan to buy her out even though under the yings she belonged to Eric. Only after the mosquito attack, Jep gave up drinking and decided that Naylor was as good as any other guy and suddenly decided that she was unavailable for going out to have sex with customers. It was immoral to become moral in a bar. It was against the creed, the religion of Lovejoy according to Jack.
Naylor at last started to climb back to his feet.
“That’s terrible, tilac.”
“He said it was okay. He says, Wes takes me from Eric. So I take you from Wes. No problem. He says this to me. I scream at him? I not go with you.”
She collapsed crying against his chest, which again sent him sprawling back towards the rose bushes. They did a clumsy little dance until he regained his balance. He lifted her up, raised her above his head and eased her down over his shoulders. “I will look after you, Jep. Don’t you worry about that. What Roadster said was wrong. What Roadster did was wrong. I am going to fuck him up. You wait.”
These were the magic words for Jep, the score for playing the harmonics of guilt. It didn’t matter that Naylor had a couple of university degrees, weighed in at two hundred pounds, had a profession and a business. None of those accomplishments or his size mattered. He had surrendered himself to the total control of a bar ying with a sixth grade education. She knew how to play the guilt chords . . . she knew how to control him with his own guilt. It was as if he wanted her to tell him what to do. She had seen guys like Naylor before. After a year on the game she knew how to make a farang dance, to dance to the guilt tune that she played. But most of all she knew Calvino’s Law of guilt: Weaning a farang away from a strong guilt urge was harder than getting him to kick a heroin habit.
Calvino watched as Naylor climbed the stairs and disappeared into the lobby. Naylor’s distant voice echoed in the stairwell as Calvino walked to the front desk. The old woman, who was smoking a joint, smiled at him as she handed him a note that Pratt had left. The message read: “Meet me in the Board Room.” By the time Calvino arrived in the board room, Pratt had been pacing back and forth for more than an hour. Pratt had various papers and computer print-outs scattered on the conference table.
“If Jess doesn’t leave Thailand within the next forty-eighty hours, it could become complicated,” said Pratt.
Whenever Pratt used the word “complicated,” it meant someone was going to die. “Morgan says he can have the Embassy paperwork done by tomorrow. Or the next day. There is a police report he needs.”
“I have already arranged it with the sergeant.” Pratt picked up a folder and pulled out some papers and handed them to Calvino. “It’s here. Take these with you to the Embassy tomorrow.”
“We need transport to the funeral home,” said Calvino. “But you’ve already taken care of that, right?”
“I’ll have a van for you.” Pratt pushed aside a pile of papers and found a key ring. He took one key off the ring and handed it to Calvino. “It belongs to Manee’s brother.” Manee was Pratt’s wife, and his brother-in-law had lent the van as a favor. Pratt had told him that he needed it to pick up computer and office equipment.
“I will be careful.”
Pratt looked right at him. “You were careful with your Honda, too.”
“It was just a window, Pratt. The bomb doesn’t count.”
“Let’s go through the plan one more time,” said Pratt. He was sitting down, hands folded on the table. Calvino had rarely seen him so nervous. Part of this was the unknown identity of the highly influential forces trying to stop Jess. Or was it just Jess they were after? Taking out Calvino would also have ended the serial killer search, his asking questions, making waves. Was it possible that the sapper team and a hit team had been dispatched by separate forces to the shopping mall? Or were they part of the same unit, so after the monster fuckup by the sapper team, the hit team took over? Pratt didn’t pretend to have the answers. Nor did he have any clue who the mastermind was, assuming there was only one, but he knew that these men backed into a corner would cause problems, for him, his department, maybe for his family. What he hadn’t yet told Calvino was that an intelligence report on Daniel Ramsey said he had associations with people in the drug business. What it also disclosed were rumors of official involvement, including a rumor that someone inside the US Embassy might be involved. It was one thing to stand your ground against the narcotic big shots; it was another to be looking over your shoulder, waiting for someone on your own side to take you out. None of this was good news, none of this was encouraging.
“I’ll drive Jess and Naylor to the funeral home. Jess stays dressed like a priest. We have an official police document allowing us to remove the body for further forensic testing, then a funeral service at a church, before taking the coffin out to the Cargo Department at Don Muang Airport. T
he funeral home director, Khun Panya, will take one look at the documents and immediately co-operate. He’s afraid of the police like everyone else. Once we have the coffin, we remove Daniel’s body, get it cremated later, Jess climbs inside, we make certain he can pop the lid from the inside, check the coffin with him inside as cargo and eighteen hours later his commanding officer is at LAX with a dozen men, opens the coffin and Jess pops out like a Jack-in-the-box. Straightforward. Slam, dunk. I don’t see the problem. The cargo hold is pressurized and temperature-controlled.”
Pratt saw a hundred problems. Ugly spiders and snakes crawling over and under and inside the details of the plan. Only he could not think of a better plan to secretly get Jess out of the country. Pratt had thought of taking Jess out through U-Tapao to Samui to Phuket and then to KL. Too many people were compromised and too many people would need to know to allow this to happen; it was impossible to trust such a chain in an operation like this. “They know that if Jess goes back to LA, someone very powerful will have a very big problem. Whatever happens, it won’t be a slam, dunk. For instance the girl. Noi. We don’t know where she stands in all of this. She was sent here to set him up and she’s here. In this hotel.”
“Don’t worry about her,” said Calvino. “She’s not going back to Gabe and Kowit. Not after what happened at the Emporium. She knows Kowit would have her killed. She’s worried they might go after her son. I said you would send someone to protect the kid.”
“They can control her through her brother. That’s how she came here to start with. Are you sure she has a boy?”
“Why don’t you send someone to find out?”
FOURTEEN
THE PEDESTRIAN-OPERATED traffic light outside the American Embassy complex on Wireless Road was a testimonial to democracy. It may have been the only fully functioning and observed pedestrian traffic light in all of Thailand. The light was pure democracy in action. The idea that any rice farmer dressed in a pair of nineteen-baht shoes could push a button that turned a red light green and could cause a row of Benzes and BMWs to screech to a halt was so alien that peasants and office workers sometimes came to Wireless Road to push the button and watch. Push the light, cross the road. Even taxis stopped as the light turned red. For some reason, cars did not run this red light. At least not very often. That itself was a unique feature. The added security since the bombings made drivers nervous around the Embassy. A small army of security guards and uniformed police stationed outside the main entrance carefully watched everyone on foot, everyone behind the wheel of a car or on a motorcycle. Maybe it wasn’t democracy after all; maybe it was old fashioned fear that made them stop at the light.
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