Cold Hit

by Christopher G. Moore

  Inside the main entrance was a security checkpoint where guards ran hand-held detectors over people’s clothes. Calvino let Naylor go ahead in the line, which moved slowly as officials checked documents and bags. When it was Naylor’s turn, he pulled out his passport, “I am an American. Let me through,” he said. “The only thing the Thais are gonna blow up is that fucking traffic light outside.” He was talking to Calvino, joking around. Only no one jokes around American security people. The guard scanned Naylor half a dozen times and each time the scanner made a loud electronic noise. “That fucking thing can give you cancer. Will you stop doing that?” That just made them run the scanner over him all the more. Then the guards—there were two of them now—made him take out the keys and coins from his pockets and put them in one of those plastic trays; made him take off his belt. His hands were all scratched up from the fall into the rose bushes. Bomb maker’s hands, thought Calvino.

  Calvino flashed his passport. “Better to do what they say,” he said to Naylor. Another guard was checking a woman’s handbag. The search was more thorough than the casual shifting through contents of briefcases and handbags in more normal times. No one was sure who was behind the bombings, and the damage at the Emporium was a new, unexpected escalation, making the authorities nervous, suspecting that the dark forces behind the attacks might do almost anything now. There had been enough anti-American statements in the press to create a climate of distrust. The Americans just assumed they might be a possible target. American officials placed the security staff on alert, taking no chances. There was no friendliness in the questioning, in the searches. Thais had their ID cards out, showing them proudly like school children. The coolness of the checkpoint did not erase the smiles; they moved slowly towards the turnstile.

  “Bastards,” said Naylor as they finally were allowed inside.

  The guard glared at him. Calvino pulled him by the shoulder. “Forget it. We are in. Let’s do our business.”

  “You see the way he looked at me. I am an American.”

  “Keep it up and they will strip search you. Look inside you. Shove a little traffic light up your rectum.”

  That shut him up. Naylor didn’t want any Thai looking inside his rectum for a hidden explosive device.

  Calvino walked ahead a couple of steps with Naylor walking with his hands deep in his pockets. They followed the narrow walkway through a courtyard which led to a door with a sign: American Citizens’ Service. The Thais and other foreigners had to use another door in the grand tradition of the Old American South. Ahead of them on the walkway was a farang and a young Thai woman who looked about twenty-one or twenty-two. She was wearing a short dress, showing off thin muscular legs, and around her thin neck and slender arms were gold chains. She had long, thick black hair that looked freshly washed, her dark skin had a perfumed scent, and she had a pair of tits that looked like some kind of anti-gravity device had been built inside the cones just behind the nipples. Naylor muscled past Calvino and went straight up to the man, and placed his hand, that looked like it had been stuck in a bag of mad cats, on the farang’s shoulder.

  “Lark, you seeking sanctuary in the Embassy?” asked Naylor.

  The middle-aged farang with a two-day stubble of beard turned. His hair was almost totally white and the middle of his head was bald. The skin covering his skull was perfectly tanned. He wore sunglasses and never stopped smiling.

  “Wes, you sonofabitch, what are you doing here?”

  “Shipping out a dead body, what else?” said Naylor.

  Calvino looked at the girl, who smiled at him, trying to remember where he had seen her before. He guessed it was the Thermae. She looked younger than she was but she would never look younger than she looked today.

  “I’m getting a visa for Toy,” said Lark. “I am taking her to San Francisco. We are going to get married. Right, honey?”

  Lark was not alone. Several other winter and spring couples passed by them on the walkway.

  Naylor raised his fist above his head. “The Cause is behind you.”

  “Catch up with you later,” said Calvino, taking Naylor by the arm.

  But Naylor resisted, following his friend into the main room. “I’m networking,” said Naylor. “Lark fixes cars. Reconditions cars and sells them cheap. To his friends, that is.”

  Inside, fifty or so grim-faced people sat uncomfortably on folding chairs, filling out forms, looking through their papers, waiting to be called for an interview. They looked like people waiting to see a parole officer. Guys like Lark came along with Toy thinking his presence would make a difference but it never did; it hurt more than it helped. An old auto mechanic trying to export a forty-kilo ying with a fifth grade education would not inspire confidence. Lark wore a Cause-member pin on his shirt lapel; the interviewing officer wouldn’t miss that pin. Toy’s chance of getting to the United States was about as great as Daniel Ramsey rising from the dead.

  A side door led to a small room where advisories and advertisements had been posted on a bulletin board. In the corner was a service window with one of those metal drawers customers put things in that pops up on the other side like one of those windows in a self-service station in the heart of East Los Angeles. Special ammo might penetrate the glass in that window but nothing short of special ordnance was going to blow out the lights of the embassy official digging documents out of that drawer. Calvino waited his turn as a Protestant minister showed off his Thai with a local staffer—a middle-aged woman, who eyed him with an icy smile. Anyone speaking Thai that well and talking non-stop about God’s salvation was like the traffic lights on Wireless Road; the Thais were aware that such things existed, having seen them in movies or on TV, but when actually confronted by such a thing did not know whether to laugh, run away, pay respect, or simply stare, smile, and think about nothing. The clerk had taken the latter option. Her head moved mechanically but reading her eyes, the way she looked at the bulletin board across the room—she must have seen the posting a thousand times—it was clear she had gone into drift time, far away to a place where the minister’s words were like shadows in a forest. When it came to Calvino’s turn she was still in that other dimension.

  “Dwight Morgan left some papers for me,” said Calvino, leaning down on one elbow, staring at the clerk through the window.

  “We don’t have any. Come back tomorrow,” she said. Her reply made no sense. Calvino could see that she was reading some religious literature that the minister must have shoved into the drawer.

  “The papers are for Daniel Ramsey,” said Calvino. “The American who died yesterday.”

  “He’s on the third floor.”

  Calvino switched into Thai, explaining that Ramsey was dead and definitely he wasn’t on the third floor but in the morgue waiting to go back to the States. The preacher’s cheap paperback had pictures. She was looking at the pictures, ignoring Calvino as he tried to explain that Ramsey was an American, and that Dwight Morgan had prepared the papers and all she had to do was give him the envelope and she could finish reading her book with the title How Jesus Saves All True Believers.

  She used her finger to trace along the edges of a color drawing of the baby Jesus. It was difficult to know if she knew who the baby was supposed to be. There didn’t seem to be anything religious in her movement. Calvino thought she might have simply been fond of baby pictures, and maybe it made her think of her own baby. Finally she put the book to one side. The preacher’s sermon and the picture of baby Jesus were wearing off and she looked at Calvino for the first time. “Who did you say you were?”

  “Vincent Calvino. And this is Mr. Naylor. We are helping the Ramsey family,” said Calvino.

  Naylor’s patience had evaporated and he squeezed in next to Calvino. Leaning down with his elbows on the counter, he pushed his nose against the glass. “I am Wes Naylor, the family lawyer for the Ramseys. We need the papers to clear Daniel’s body through customs. To buy his ticket. It has been all arranged. Just get the fucking papers,”
said Naylor.

  “We don’t allow such language at the window,” she said.

  “Since Mr. Ramsey’s death, we’ve all been under stress. I am certain you understand,” said Calvino.

  She stared at Naylor “Do you have some identification?”

  Naylor pressed his passport against the window. “A United States of America passport,” he said. “This is the American Embassy or have I made a mistake?”

  The way Naylor was acting, Calvino thought they might bring in the security guards and start scanning him all over again. Instead, an American duty officer sitting a couple of desks away pushed his chair back and walked down the aisle of desks until he reached the service window. He had been listening to the exchange. “It is standard to ask for an ID, okay,” he said.

  “It is also standard to get some service,” said Naylor. “Here’s my passport. What else do you want? My mother’s maiden name? It was Whyte. That’s with a ‘y’ and not an ‘i’. She met my dad during World War II. I was born in New York City. I have lived in LA for twenty-seven and a half years. I practice law in LA and I have worked on the campaigns of two governors and one congressman. They were all elected. They all remember me. They all owe me.”

  “Mr. Naylor, may I have your passport?”

  Naylor slipped it in the drawer and the official pulled it out on the other side of the bullet-proof glass. He opened Naylor’s passport and looked at the photograph, then looked up at Naylor as if they were not necessarily the same person. He turned and went to the other end of the room where there was a photocopy machine. He picked up the telephone and dialed. A secretary made a photocopy of Naylor’s passport.

  “Ease up, Naylor,” said Calvino. “The idea is not to be noticed. You are making enough of an impression that this guy will be telling this story over dinner for the rest of his career.”

  “He’s an asshole,” said Naylor.

  “In that case, I am thinking you may be part of his family.”

  When the duty officer returned from the photocopy machine, the first thing that he did was return Naylor’s passport. “Mr. Morgan is unavailable,” he said. “He’s in an emergency meeting. The Ramsey papers are in his office. So if you could come back tomorrow, I can make an appointment for you to meet with him.”

  “I pay your salary.” Naylor’s face had gone rigid with rage. His clenched fists pounded on the window counter.

  About the same time Dwight Morgan’s head appeared around the corner at the far end of the room. Someone must have slipped him a note that two farangs were making a scene at the window and demanding papers. He came quickly to the window, looking pissed off. All the friendliness from the morgue had washed off. “Sorry I wasn’t here.” But he didn’t sound sorry. “I had an emergency meeting. Go through the door, down the corridor and I will let you in.”

  Once they had cleared the public area and entered the inner offices occupied by the Embassy officials and staff, Naylor seemed to loosen up. That rock grinding inside his bowels seemed to pass unnoticed. His humor came back. “That guy you got working at the window looked like a Mormon. But didn’t act like one. Like he was looking to turn people away from his church. Hey, we have enough believers. Come back another day.”

  “He was just doing his job,” said Morgan.

  Dwight Morgan closed his office door and sat in the chair behind his desk. Calvino and Naylor pulled up chairs in front of his desk. He didn’t offer them coffee or water. Instead he folded his hands on his desk and launched straight into business. Just like at the window, being inside his office hadn’t improved his mood. This definitely wasn’t the same guy from the Police Hospital. His expression was serious, concerned, and a little suspicious. “I just got out of a meeting with Thai military, police, and our own security people. The bombing yesterday has everyone running for cover.” Morgan paused, stretching his hand back behind his head. A framed photograph of a white woman and two kids under ten years old was on a shelf behind him. He was a family man, someone sent here to do a tour of duty, gain experience. Calvino thought Dwight was suddenly feeling wobbly on the State Department ladder. “And there’s something else, Vincent. The police have traced the car that blew up in the basement of the Emporium and it was registered to Vincent Calvino. The police are looking for you. God knows who else is looking for you, Vincent. But this has become a very serious matter.”

  “He’s suddenly a popular guy,” said Naylor.

  Morgan leaned forward balanced on his elbows. “This isn’t funny, Mr. Naylor. This is a shit-load of non-funny problems for me.”

  “What are you going to do?” Calvino asked him point blank.

  “I should play it by the book. Pick up the phone, let the Thai police know that you are here and they will soon be on Wireless Road.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Dwight,” said Calvino.

  “The assholes who tried to blow him up are working with the police,” said Naylor.

  “You don’t know that,” said Morgan.

  “No, he doesn’t know that,” said Calvino.

  “Can you tell me why I shouldn’t go by the book?” asked Morgan.

  “I can give you a lot of reasons. But one is enough. For the last few months I’ve been working on this serial killer case. Three months ago I told you my theory. A month ago, I let you know that I had been getting closer to convincing the Thai police that there is a pattern. I think maybe I have convinced someone there is something to link these murders. Your intelligence people told you about the link. Whoever planted that bomb in my car was a professional. They had access to Claymore mines. They knew exactly what they were doing. These people don’t want the serial killer found. You’ve been in Thailand long enough to know exactly what that means. What kind of people do such things, and the protection they have. If you make that phone call, then no one in Washington or the Department is going to criticize you for doing your job. They will defend you like you defended that guy at the window. And in a day or two or a week, someone will show up here on behalf of my relatives asking for you to sign the papers to have what is left of me shipped back to New York. You might be a little sorry but you can always say I did my job and what happened to Vincent Calvino doesn’t have anything to do with me. I see you have a family. A wife, a couple of kids. I am here alone. No kids, no wife, no family. No one is going to miss that I am not around.”

  “What do you want, Vincent?”

  “Have I always been straight with you?” asked Calvino.

  Dwight Morgan thought for a moment, then slowly nodded his head.

  “Give me twenty-four hours.”

  “I’ve known you since I arrived in Bangkok. You’ve always been straight. I said that in the meeting. I said you had never caused any trouble for us. You had actually helped us several times identifying people. You are trying to help stop the murder of American citizens. I told them that.”

  “Let me have the Ramsey papers, and twenty-four hours from now I will be in your office, and you can pick up the phone and make that call. I will dial the number.”

  Civil servants aren’t born risk takers. Morgan leaned back in his chair, balancing the pros and cons, trying to decide which way to go. “Okay,” he said. Dwight Morgan was that rare individual who was willing to give another a chance, the chance that he himself would have wanted had he been sitting in Calvino’s chair. He pulled a file out of his desk drawer and handed it to Calvino.

  “Get out of here. I have work to do,” said Dwight Morgan.

  On the way out of Morgan’s office, Calvino wondered whether Dwight Morgan had a heart of gold or whether he was the mole inside the US Embassy who knew how the heroin found its way to America and the last thing he wanted was for the Thai police to take him into custody.

  NOI had been drinking pretty heavily. She could stand but she swayed from side to side like she was hearing music and doing an on-stage routine. She had gone through half a bottle of Sang Thip, drinking it on ice. Leaving the cola bottle unopened. No mixer to di
lute the drink. She had wanted to forget about Danny’s body on the Emporium marble, about her brother in jail, about Gabe using her to walk Jess into a trap, about how fucked up life was, and how she was sitting around dressed like a nun getting drunk. Working in Gabe’s club in LA, she knew how to drink and sing. She could keep up with the Koreans, out-drink them, out-sing them, leave them glassy-eyed like day-old fish in the market and that was saying something, but even the Koreans could drink the Japanese under the table. Most of the time a half of a bottle of rum, gin, whisky would not cause her to blink. This time was different. The booze went straight to that part of the brain where demons and anger and hate live like a live virus waiting for liquor to hatch them full-grown into the world. More than liquor was involved. The accumulation of grudges swelled up in the back of her throat, making her feel like she was being strangled by her own and other people’s lies.

  She had overheard Jess and Pratt talking about her. She was in the bathroom and they must have thought she could not hear them. But she heard every last spiteful, horrible word.

  “She’s a risk,” said Pratt.