by Roland Perry
Moments later Marco Rodriguez appeared and spoke to the Mexicans.
‘Show some respect in this place!’ he ordered. The one who had drawn his weapon stood hunch-shouldered and crossed himself. Jacinta took the gun from him and thanked Rodriguez. While the altercation occurred, Pon kept tripping along the rows of graves until she stopped and fell to her knees. She laid out the flowers at the memorial stone for her great-uncle on her paternal side, Victor Donald Cavalier. She began crying. Cavalier, who had kept his eyes on her, took a deep breath. He felt tears welling. Every instinct was to run and hold her. Cavalier removed his glasses for a few seconds, wiped his eyes and sidled along with a group of travellers behind the Mexicans.
He felt someone beside him. It was Cowboy, wearing a big sombrero. His boot spurs glinted in the sun. He stared at Cavalier, who acknowledged him without saying his name, as he had met him as Edward Blenkiron. Seconds later, his mother arrived, apologised for her son’s behaviour and marched off, holding Cowboy’s hand. He kept looking back at Cavalier, his spurs jangling with every step.
Other Mexican guards caught up with Pon when she stood and walked away from the memorial stone. She pushed them away until Cortez arrived. He looked at the name on the stone at which she had left the flowers. He walked briskly to her.
‘Behave,’ he said. ‘You are making a spectacle of yourself!’
Pon spat in his direction. He seemed ready to strike her but could see Marco Rodriguez, wearing a light-coloured suit and black tie, striding his way.
‘Whose grave was that?’ Cortez demanded.
‘My great-uncle!’ Pon screamed.
‘He has the same name as your father. You continue this way and I swear I shall have his ashes buried there too!’
Pon reluctantly sauntered away, surrounded by the Mexicans, just as Rodriguez confronted Cortez, moving him aside as they left the grave area.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Who is this woman?’
‘She is my partner,’ Cortez said, wiping his one good eye, which was weeping, although not from emotion. It always leaked tears when he was stressed.
‘Let me remind you, Señor,’ Rodriguez said, making sure he was out of earshot of others, ‘I am now in charge of the cartel. I control the bullion and you will do as I say. Is that clear?’ Cortez nodded and Rodriguez added, ‘It was reported that you told your other girlfriend Talia Cruz and the actor Tyrone Risk that you controlled the gold. You said you would use it to bankroll a movie with, what, one hundred million?’
‘That’s a lie!’
‘Risk said it in his TV documentary,’ Rodriguez said, using a pink handkerchief to wipe his brow.
‘I never said it.’
‘You did say you’d help produce a movie, right?’
‘I may have said that.’
‘You also funded her tequila business.’
‘I was one of several investors.’
Rodriguez looked around again. His two heavies were now behind him in their usual stance, backs ramrod-straight and hands covering their trouser fronts.
‘I am in charge of the cartel, now, understand?’ Cortez nodded, submerging his contempt.
*
The train party of about seventy passengers were bussed to a jetty and then led onto a twenty-five-square-metre raft boat. The Mexicans and Pon sat near the front rows of seats as an Australian historian lectured the group on the Thai Burma railway. Cavalier stayed near the rear a few rows from Jacinta, who was joined by Azelaporn. He had remained on the train until then to entertain his Chinese courtesans. He heard about the disturbance in the cemetery.
‘I’ll have a chat to Cortez about keeping his woman in line,’ he whispered in Jacinta’s ear. ‘She always looks drunk.’
‘Drugged,’ she whispered back, ‘he controls her that way.’
‘It’s none of our business, especially with Marco Rodriguez joining the train. He is the new “Capo”. He has taken the reins of the cartel, although it’s unofficial. He has control of the purse strings and is likely to invest big in Thailand and the region. Rodriguez will move out of drugs …’
‘When?’
Azelaporn shrugged and replied: ‘When revenue from respectable businesses can allow it.’
‘So that will be about the year twenty-one seventeen, right?’
Azelaporn glared and pretended to listen to the lecture. After another minute, he leaned to her again and said:
‘This is boring, this farang history about the nineteen forties. I should have stayed on the train.’
Jacinta gave him a withering look of disapproval.
‘I hope you are keeping an eye on our three teachers,’ he whispered, ‘the Muslims and this Frenchman. I don’t trust any of them. They may be up to something.’
‘The Indonesians, I admit, are suspect. They would not earn enough for this trip from their salaries.’
‘I’m having their room searched.’
‘Is that advisable?’
‘Why?’ He nodded to the right, where the two Indonesians were sitting and listening to the lecture. ‘I am doing what you should have done.’
Jacinta bristled.
‘And that Frenchman,’ Azelaporn said, ‘I want you to stay close. Watch him. There is something about him I don’t like.’
‘His good looks and manners, perhaps?’
‘Don’t be frivolous,’ Azelaporn hissed. ‘Cortez is paranoid about someone assassinating him. Why would a single man board the train for the second leg of the journey?’
‘There are about six single men and women on board. There is an old American in a wheelchair. Perhaps we should put a guard outside his door too.’
Azelaporn was angered. Other travellers jerked their heads and gave disapproving looks.
‘I am ordering you to put guards outside the Frenchman’s door,’ he said angrily under his breath. ‘He is to be watched around the clock.’
‘I still don’t understand why you suspect him.’
‘Instinct my dear, instinct. You recall how good, how perfect it was in our police work.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said with a cynical look.
Azelaporn’s face burned again, but before he could abuse her, she asked, ‘And the Indonesians? Do you want them under guard too?’
‘Maybe. Depends on what security finds in their luggage.’
*
Early afternoon, the train chugged out of Kanchanaburi on the long leg down through southern Thailand towards the border with Malaysia. Cavalier ventured out of his cabin after a couple of hours as the train meandered on its way. He entered the library, which doubled as a massage parlour, with books lining one wall and open cubicles at one end of the carriage. Cavalier had tension in his shoulders, as he often did in the period before the culmination of an assignment. He asked for an hour’s Thai massage and was handed judostyle pants and top and directed to a change room. When he returned, he was told to lie face down and found he was next to Dr Makanathan on one table and her husband on the other side of her. Cavalier wanted to avoid conversation. Apart from her unsurpassed forensic skills, Makanathan had a reputation for being an incisive researcher, interviewer and thinker when investigating crime, particularly murder.
The three of them were attended by Thai masseuses dressed in navy-blue, red and white uniforms. Cavalier, stretched out on his front, turned his head away, so that he was not facing Makanathan. She was speaking loudly enough for him to hear and seemed to be inviting responses from him with comments about the French food and chef. He ignored them, shut his eyes and drifted in and out of a half-sleep, while enjoying the massage. He jerked his head when the masseuse pushed hard on his left Achilles tendon. She apologised. When he rolled onto his back, the masseuse pushed his shirt up and uncovered four scars on his abdomen. Her eyes widened.
‘Oh, sorry!’ she gasped.
The Makanathans turned their heads to see what had caused the masseuse to react. Thinking the Frenchman would not have Thai, Dr Makanathan spoke ra
pidly to the doctor.
‘Marks on his stomach!’ she said. ‘Injuries! I have seen wounds like that before.’
‘From what?’ her husband asked.
‘Bullets.’
Cavalier pretended he had not understood the exchange and inwardly cursed for having exposed himself, in more ways than one.
‘Arh! The man is a soldier?’ Makanathan said in English for Cavalier’s benefit. ‘A war hero perhaps?’
‘French Foreign Legion,’ he said with an enigmatic look while he let the masseuse manipulate his shoulders, arms, chest and stomach.
‘Arh, so I was right!’ Makanathan persisted.
‘I was joking,’ Cavalier said. ‘I’ve never been shot.’
‘Then how did you get the wounds?’ she asked, her inquisitiveness bordering on rudeness.
‘An industrial accident, Madame,’ Cavalier said as he shut his eyes and turned away.
‘I am sorry, sir,’ Makanathan remarked and let the conversation lapse.
*
Cavalier returned to his cabins and did not appear as either Blenkiron or Blanc for the rest of the day. In the evening, as the Express glided deep into Thailand’s south, he applied his ‘old man’ make-up, dressed again as Blenkiron and rolled himself out of the presidential suite and along through carriage 30, where several Mexicans paid him scant attention.
He could hear shouting and crying coming from the compartment harbouring his daughter and her captor. He hesitated outside the door, pretending he was having trouble with the chair’s driving mechanism. One of the guards glanced at him and was about to offer help when Cavalier moved on, pushing his way through the lounge into the observation car. Twenty people, including six men wearing dinner suits, were having a drink before the first of two sittings in the three dining cars, ‘St Louis’, ‘Merlin,’ and ‘New Orleans.’
Cavalier, earpiece attached to a phone, sipped another double malt Scotch and ice. He watched the passing parade of paddy fields, jungle and villages that flashed by in a continuous vista, like a video on a loop, with minor variations, as the flaming ball of sun drifted into cloud behind them on the horizon. The rice fields of the central plains turned from a sunlit, phosphorescent emerald to dark green. He was feeling almost at peace when Azelaporn burst into the car, followed by Jacinta. She sat as close to Cavalier as she dared so he could hear the Thai conversation. Azelaporn gestured at Cavalier in the chair and motioned for her to ease away from him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘he is nearly deaf.’ She glanced at his phone. ‘He’s listening to music too.’
‘I was right about the Muslims,’ Azelaporn began.
‘The Indonesians?’
‘Don’t interrupt. This is serious. We found maps and photos under the mattresses and hidden in suitcases. They are casing the train.’
‘Weapons?’
‘Not that the security guards found, no.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ll speak to Huloton, but I want to interrogate them. Then I’ll throw them off the train at the Malaysian border, where they probably belong.’
‘They’re Indonesians.’
‘They are fucking Muslims.’
Azelaporn demanded a Mekong whiskey from a steward. ‘Jacinta, you should have been onto them,’ he said. ‘I insist you find out about that Frenchman. He still worries me. Sleep with him if necessary.’
Jacinta gave him a reproachful look. Yet she had wanted Azelaporn to believe he was the one who had discovered them. Had she told him she had information on them, he would have become suspicious of her source.
‘I have placed you at dinner with him, along with that revolting Mongol retard and his mother. Be sweet; be charming. Take him for a drink afterwards; find out what he is doing. If we discover anything on him that makes us at all suspicious, we’ll kick him off with the Muslims.’
Jacinta began to protest, but Azelaporn stopped her.
‘If you want to be paid out,’ he said aggressively, ‘you’ll do as I say.’ Then, in his usual quixotic fashion, he added what he saw as a sweetener: ‘Provide some evidence that he is up to something, even a suspicion of it, and you’ll receive a good bonus.’
Jacinta stood up, glanced at Cavalier, who had heard every word, and stormed out of the observation car. When Azelaporn finished his drink ten minutes later and left, Cavalier backed up into the observation lounge. He ordered a glass of water, sat in his chair with his back to the door leading into the Mexican carriages, and watched the movements for the next half-hour. He observed the changing of the guard in the carriages, and noted the slackness of the Mexicans, who laughed and joked in carriage 32.
Finally, he rolled through carriages 32, 31 and 30, and returned to the door of his suite. Signalling to a steward, Cavalier put on his cantankerous act and said, ‘I am not coming to dinner. I don’t wish to be disturbed. Leave the breakfast outside the door tomorrow and don’t, whatever you do, knock.’
‘Of course, sir. We won’t do that again.’
‘Make sure you don’t,’ Cavalier said rudely, and bumped his way into the suite, refusing help from the steward.
28
UNMASKED
Once inside and locked in, Cavalier entered the adjoining suite, showered and changed into a light white suit and purple bow tie. He shifted any possible future incriminating evidence into the presidential suite, judging and hoping that a security or any other break-in would be in the Frenchman’s state cabin, and not the American’s presidential suite.
A note under the door from a steward assigned him to the New Orleans dining car, and a particular seat number. That left him an hour and half to kill before eating. He wandered down to the piano bar in the lounge car, the train’s social epicentre, with a book on Napoleon by a French biographer. There were five couples. The men wore dinner suits; the women were all in evening dress. He began to order a double malt whisky but checked himself. He may have been one of the few on board ordering this drink, and he had already devoured a few as American Edward Blenkiron.
Cavalier asked for a rum and orange juice and sat on a high white chair at a new marble-topped bar that had its initiation on this trip. He was joined by the Australian psychiatrist Hinkley and her son Cowboy. Hinkley was attracted to Cavalier is his guise as Claude Garriaud, and was happy to learn she would be sitting with him over dinner. She began asking him about his background and Paris.
‘I’m taking Cowboy there in a few months,’ she said. Cowboy was sitting, his short legs dangling, between Hinkley and Cavalier. He suddenly threw a hard punch with his left hand that hit Cavalier on his right shoulder. Cavalier pretended it had not hurt. Hinkley smiled sheepishly.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said without admonishing Cowboy, ‘he thinks you’re chatting me up.’
‘Pardon?’ Cavalier asked with a frown, ‘I don’t know this expression.’
‘Um, he thinks you are flirting with me.’
‘Oh,’ Cavalier chuckled. He smiled at the stern-looking Cowboy and added, ‘Mais, I am not, young man!’
‘Are you retired?’ Hinkley asked.
‘No, no, I am a teacher, looking for work at the moment.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Cavalier could see Cowboy lining up another punch. This time Cavalier swung his right shoulder back. Cowboy threw his fist and missed by a few centimetres. He overbalanced, clipped his face on the bar’s marble edge and collapsed to the floor. Hinkley and Cavalier lifted him to his feet. He was not badly hurt from the hit and fall, despite blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. Hinkley whisked him off to a bathroom with a steward in attendance offering first aid.
Cavalier left the bar and settled into a chair in a corner. He began reading his book but was distracted by the histrionics of a Singaporean pianist, different from the Thai who had performed the day before in place of Pon. His speciality was ragtime jazz, with a few variations. He kicked his chair out as if he were a latter-day Elton John, and climaxed a long bracket of song
s with a more than passable version of ‘Rhapsody in blue’. Cavalier returned to his reading for another half-hour.
The numbers in the bar built and the pianist returned for another bracket, beginning with a not-so-good version of ‘Dance me to the end of love’. The second sitting of diners drinking before the meal numbered about forty when Jacinta waltzed in wearing a short powder-blue dress and showing an impressive cleavage. The open back revealed she did not need a bra. Her high heels, adventurous for the sometimes jolting walk along the corridors, accentuated her ultra-slender legs and high calves, and pushed her height to above most of the others in the bar. Her jet-black hair, which until now had been arranged in a businesslike bob on top, was loose and touching her shoulders. She was accompanied by Azelaporn, his bull neck seeming more bulbous in an ill-fitting dark dinner suit and black bow tie. He was wearing his trademark mirror sunglasses, and looked agitated. They propped at the bar and whispered in Thai to each other.
‘I’ve had Garriaud’s compartment searched,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘We found nothing incriminating.’
‘So, he is not under suspicion?’
‘No, he still is.’
‘Why don’t you trust him?’
‘He is a farang, and French.’
‘That’s racist!’
‘So what if I am?’ Azelaporn nodded his head sharply. ‘He’s in the corner, reading. You must do your duty.’
‘My duty? This is not for king and country.’
‘I am ordering you to fuck him,’ he hissed.
Jacinta shook her head and was about to leave him when he gripped her arm. ‘You took this job knowing it might not be all peaches and cream. You must know that if you screw men they blab. You’ll learn all we want to know.’
‘I refuse to have you dictate to me with whom I should be intimate. That is an order too far.’
‘You fancy him, don’t you?’ Azelaporn sneered, ‘I noticed him watching you when we walked in.’ His tone softened. ‘He fancies you. Every man in this bar fancies you. You know that.’
‘I am not one of your bimbo Chinese courtesans or bar girls! You know that!’