“You’re not answering the question. What were you going to discuss with Ballard?”
Calvino opened his desk draw, took out a copy of The Quiet American and slid it across the desk to Howard.
“This.”
“I thought we agreed, no more bullshit.”
Calvino pulled out the note Ballard had left with the book.
“Ballard left a note with this novel. When I got back to my condo, I found the book and the note in the guestroom, where he’d left them.”
Howard read the note and handed it to Davenport, who read it.
“Ballard had time to read novels,” said Calvino. “Could that be a reason why he didn’t fit into your outfit?”
Calvino picked up the novel and turned to the opening passage.
“At the beginning of the book Fowler waits for an American agent named Pyle to show up.”
“And what’s that have to do with Ballard?”
“Fowler finds out later from the police that Pyle is dead. In the water near the restaurant where they planned to meet,” said Calvino.
“You’re saying he left you the novel as a suicide note?” asked Davenport.
“I’m saying he left the book and the note. Draw your own conclusions.”
“You are way outside your league, Mr. Calvino. Whatever you know about Solberg, you’d be wise to disclose it to us,” said Davenport.
“What he means is either you co-operate or you’re in for a world of hurt,” said Howard. “Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
He played with the wedding band on his left hand, pausing mid-spin.
“You might want to see your shrink again,” said Davenport.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Talk to her about your crazy ideas.”
“One more thing, Mr. Calvino,” said Howard. “Tell us about your meeting with Osborne, Cesar and Charlie last night.”
“Cesar ate a basket and a half of buns. Charlie ate ribs from a rack of lamb like there was no tomorrow. And Alan Osborne drank a fifty thousand baht bottle of wine and talked about spotting lemurs in Madagascar. That’s the place where you’ll likely find Ballard. As for Marley Solberg, I have no idea where you’d find her, and I suspect you don’t either or you’d not be wasting your time in my office.”
“You’re a smart guy. Maybe a little too smart,” said Howard. “My partner’s right, you should give Dr. Apinya a call.”
As they left, Calvino sat back in his chair and looked out the window, watching Howard and Davenport climb into a chauffeured car. He thought about the man running in his great-grandfather’s most famous painting. The fire in the sky, the balloons, the fireworks, the stationary figures waiting in the foreground.
Ratana walked into Calvino’s office carrying his computer. She had combed the bun out of her hair, and it fell in waves to her shoulders. John-John followed behind his mother.
“I like your shirt,” John-John said. “But I didn’t like those men very much.”
“Which shows you are wise beyond your years,” said Calvino.
“I’ll have you back online in five minutes,” she said.
He came around from his desk and took the computer from her.
“Wait a day or two before you hook it up,” Calvino said.
He carried the device back to her side of the office and put it on the side table. She followed behind.
“You’re worried they’ll come back?”
Calvino stared at the computer, the monitor and keyboard.
“I can’t be sure. But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point, Khun Vinny?”
“While I was typing on the Selectric typewriter, I had a feeling of being liberated.”
“Liberated from what?”
He didn’t answer, and after an awkward moment Ratana returned to her desk. He heard her typing on her modern keyboard.
He stared at his Selectric typewriter. It had been a private place. No one could access, record or analyze his movements, his contacts, messages and search history. The typewriter caused him to remember being happy in another time and place. He’d typed his daily diary on that typewriter—his homework for when he was seeing Dr. Apinya. He associated it with opening up to his inner self. He’d learned important things about himself, including what made him happy. Not the happiness the junta preached, but being centered, happy with who he was and what he was doing and what life meant. The computer reminded him of the person he’d become: distracted, focused on eight windows at a time, trying to make sense of twenty things at once and losing the thread.
There was another reason: Marley. It seemed she couldn’t stop herself from leaving a sign she was near. The high-level app that Fah, Oak and Palm had downloaded from their clouds had Marley’s fingerprints all over it. Was it her way of helping while staying in the background? If so, he was sure she wouldn’t look at her involvement as interfering. Marley looked at things through the other end of the telescope. He felt her presence whenever he logged on. She was always there, somewhere, in the background.
Calvino walked out to Ratana’s desk. John-John sat cross-legged on the floor, looking bored. “You want to go to the park after I meet Uncle Pratt?” Calvino asked him. A smile flashed across John-John’s face.
“Yes,” he said, rising to his feet, looking at his mother.
Ratana nodded.
“The typewriter is my way of taking a time-out, a rest from the game. Like sitting in the park and reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” He picked up the book from the desk and headed to the door.
She looked up from the screen.
“You won’t last two days,” she said.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You can’t stop the game just because you don’t want to play,” she said.
“I am still in the game. I’m off now to meet Pratt.”
“No matter how hard you try, Vinny. You can never go back.”
TWENTY-SIX
“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”—Voltaire, Candide
CALVINO WALKED TOWARD the main gate of the Erawan Shrine. A police BMW never looked out of place in that area, but something told him this wasn’t just any police car. Was Pratt waiting inside the idling car, keeping cool in the air-conditioning? Calvino looked through a side window. Lieutenant Pim Suttirat worked her thumbs on an iPhone keypad. He lightly rapped his knuckles on the window. He didn’t have to wait long. She immediately popped her head up and shot him an annoyed look, before she recognized him and let that annoyance deepen. She powered down the window.
“Sorry, miss, you’re double parked. You’ll have to move right along.”
“The General is inside.”
“Any particular dream you want to come true? Let me know, and I’ll put a word in with Brahma.”
Lieutenant Pim smiled coldly and powered the window up. A moment later, her head was bowed over her iPhone again.
Right, said Calvino to himself. She wasn’t going to admit to being a dreamer, something that would have been drilled out of her as a precondition for her job as the general’s assistant at the department.
She’d parked the BMW around the corner on Ratchdamri, with the left front tire turned and digging hard into the curb. The distance from the car to the shrine was only a few steps. Generals don’t seem to walk that much, thought Calvino. Ordinarily, a long line of tourist buses would have been parked along the same curb, but he saw none. The coup had diminished their numbers. Calvino examined the faces of the devotees. Tourists from Hong Kong, China, Japan or Taiwan were absent. Ratana’s Facebook friends speculated that the coup had rattled their confidence in the holy shrine.
As he entered the shrine, Calvino found the usually busy stall vendors looking bored and frustrated. He looked around for Pratt.
“How’s business?” he asked a vendor as he bought a set of candles, incense sticks and flowers.
“No customers, no business, no mon
ey,” the old woman said, as if she were reading a T-shirt mantra.
She saw no irony in complaining about business in the shadow of Brahma. Commerce and mysticism were joint venture partners in this large spirit house. Over the old woman’s shoulder Calvino spotted Pratt.
Pratt knelt at the first of four positions at the base of the golden Brahma image. Calvino carried the sticks of incense, candles and flowers and knelt next to him, offering a wai to the god.
“It’s always bothered me that the Thais have no trouble believing in Hindu gods, Buddhism and animism,” said Calvino. “They see no contradiction, yet in politics they end up as doctrinal purists. Maybe that’s inevitable.”
“How you think about your next life is one compartment. What you think about politicians is another. People don’t confuse them.”
“Have you had lunch?” asked Calvino, positioning one stick of incense into the sand in front of the shrine.
It was the most acceptable opening gambit in a conversation with a Thai. Above their heads a train roared through the Chitlom BTS station.
“What did you say?” asked the Pratt.
“I haven’t eaten. What about you?”
“Sometimes, Vincent, you are surprisingly Thai.”
“That’s what the two American embassy guys who showed up at my office thought. They’d talked to Dr. Apinya.”
“No surprise. They’re trained investigators, and following up on the mental health of a suspect is part of their job.”
Ratana had already told Pratt what had happened.
“What did you tell them?”
“That I was writing a letter to my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“I played to their Freudian side. And that was before I knew they’d leaned on my shrink.”
“What did they say?”
“That I was a person of interest.”
“And you’ve turned that into being an interesting person.”
Calvino smiled, thinking Pratt hadn’t lost his sense of humor as they walked clockwise to the second kneeling place, to face another Brahma head. He told Pratt about the conversation the evening before with Osborne and everything he’d learned about Ballard. He also told him how Osborne had ordered a bottle of wine that would have been a month’s salary for someone in Pratt’s position.
When they’d finished the fourth and final installment at the base of the shrine, Pratt asked, “This story Osborne told you, did you tell the embassy officers?”
“I thought I’d let you handle it. I had to give them something, though. So I showed them the Graham Greene novel Ballard had left and his handwritten note. Neither of the agents seemed like novel readers. Maybe a book with pictures, but a novel, no. But it was enough to get them out of my office. At least for now.”
Pratt liked Calvino’s ability to quarantine problems, shuffle them into the right container and pass them along to the senior person in charge as in Thai tradition, but he had upped the game by making sure his friend received full credit. In some ways it made Calvino invaluable. Either Calvino occupied the best of both worlds, or the worst, and Pratt had gone back and forth on the matter many times. He’d long since resigned himself to never eliminating that uncertainty.
Calvino walked with him to the BMW.
“If there’s a way to fast-track the release of Osborne’s girlfriend from military detention, I’d be grateful.”
“She’s being held at a camp in Chon Buri.”
Events following the coup had moved fast, with a lot of people rounded up. No one was sure how many would be hauled in, who would be next or how long they’d be detained for. Information was sketchy, and no one was willing to stick their neck out to guess when the arrests and detentions would end. Pratt had inquired about Fah and been told that she was in a military camp. She and two classmates had been invited to the facility in Chon Buri. The word “invite” had acquired an Orwellian twist.
Pratt nodded.
“She was picked up with two university classmates. There was an issue with a term paper they’d written. The military wanted clarification of their intentions.”
“Have they clarified things?”
“It’s not that simple. It seems the paper was anti-coup. The group wrote it together. All three names were on it.”
“How did the military get a university paper?”
Calvino saw Pratt look away.
“From their professor?”
“It’s a difficult time,” Pratt said. “Things will settle down soon. People need to be patient and trust that the right thing is being done.”
“Davenport and Howard are right. I should make another appointment with Dr. Apinya.”
Getting Fah out wasn’t something Pratt had the power to arrange. The military were watching the police for any evidence of loyalty to the old regime or to certain groups. He had to be careful.
“Her release is up to her. All she has to do is sign a document promising not to engage in any political acts or write any criticism of the junta.”
“That’s it?”
“They’ve asked her to rewrite the paper, following the notes made by her professor. Once she’s rewritten it and signed the release, she is free to go.”
“What the hell did they write?”
“An essay that showed a bad attitude.”
“And until she shows an attitude adjustment…”
“Her invitation is extended.”
“That’s fucked, Pratt.”
But matters could have been far worse for Fah and the others. Had her professor done the bare minimum, ratting them out on the paper while withholding information about the street art? He might not have known about the graphics, but one of them was right in the paper itself. Pratt had mentioned nothing about the Banksy-inspired graffiti images Fah’s group had produced to protest the coup. Calvino interpreted Pratt’s silence as meaning that neither the military nor the police had any such information. None of the three had divulged their existence as a protest art committee that used a room above a barbershop to produce its graphics.
“What’s the delay?” asked Calvino. “She won’t rewrite the paper or sign off, is that it?”
“They haven’t finished with the interrogations.”
“Meaning, if someone has written a paper like this, she’s shown her intention. They figure she’ll continue doing other things, and knows other people who share her intention. Will they get together and cause trouble? And after she fills in those details, you think they’ll release her?”
As Lieutenant Pim held the car door open, Calvino remembered there was another question he wanted to ask Pratt.
“By the way, what did Manee’s committee do with all the fish in that fountain?”
“They found a new home for them. No killing. That was their main goal.”
“I like a story with a happy ending,” said Calvino, glancing over at Lieutenant Pim. “I hope Brahma grants your request,” he said.
Pratt smiled.
“I hope so, too.”
He watched as Pratt’s BMW weaved into the traffic. He’d forgotten to ask Pratt what he’d asked Brahma for. That was the point of the ritual, making a deal with the god of creation to bring you a winning lottery number, a cure for some illness or a beautiful wife or rich husband. A long, happy life rounded out the usual dinner order. What had Pratt prayed for? Calvino suspected that, whatever it was, he’d ordered a wish that wasn’t on the menu. Calvino had put in his own request on the god hotline—to double the size of his database on Ballard’s killer.
Halfway along the pavement to the stairs leading to the Chitlom BTS station, Calvino saw a Thai in a university uniform standing near the gate to the shrine, holding an A4 sheet of paper with what looked like a large QR barcode on it. When he reached the top of the stairs to the station, he saw several other students near the railing overlooking the shrine. At 3:39 p.m. a dozen university students raised their smart phones and pointed them in the direction of the shrine. Calvino looke
d at the cell phone screen of one student and saw what looked like the QR code on the sheet of paper he’d seen the first student holding. When he looked again, the incomprehensible pattern had been transformed into a piece of art projected onto the station wall. He recognized it as one of the protest artworks from Fah’s workshop. A young, slim Thai in a white shirt and black trousers, his back to Calvino, aimed his cell phone at the station wall with a calm, firm hand. A small crowd gathered around the image, holding hands, saying nothing, standing in silence. When the police and soldiers ran up the stairs, the image vanished.
What they had missed had gone back to being a QR code and dissolved into thin air. But for thirty seconds the group had shared the experience of the image. Marley had even discovered a technical solution that made the images stand out under a tropical sun.
In the image a girl lobbed an unhappy face emoticon into the back of a dumpster. Flashing in soft neon-green tones on the side of the truck were the words “Unhappiness Recycle Unit.”
Calvino’s path had crossed Munny’s at the shrine, but Calvino had failed to recognize him. Munny was another face in the crowd. Munny watched the office commuters who’d gathered in front of the turnstiles, transfixed, admiring his art. And he saw a middle-aged farang man who might have been an old customer on Khao San Road. When Munny looked closer, he thought that Calvino clocked the platform like a cop; he didn’t have the scared or perplexed look of the other farangs.
Once the police arrived, Munny slipped his token into the turnstile and moved to the train platform side. He rode the escalator up to the train. He was headed back to the outer edge of the city. He’d done his work—opened his one-man show, his first public art exhibition. There was more to come. He felt a mixture of pride and terror. Munny had no way of knowing where Fah and the others were. He wished they could have seen the crowd and the happiness and hope that the art had inspired. He’d sent out a coded map to a hundred people, and he knew that the same art must have appeared on walls in twenty separate locations across the city. More than that, he knew that by spreading the images through the social media, Fah, Oak and Palm had sown digital seeds that would be carried as through the wind to the screens of many thousands of people around the world, until the digital seeds had grown into a dense forest. That’s what Palm had proudly announced—the images would be shared from London to Moscow.
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