“It’s my money.”
Calvino cleared his throat.
“Just stop.”
They both fell silent. Osborne poured more Champagne. Fah returned to her iPad screen to open Facebook. Tiny dog breeds, bowls of soup, tropical beaches, Jimmy Carter and Woody Guthrie scrolled past. Calvino started to get up from the table, dropping his crumpled napkin on the plate.
“I’ve got to go. Have a good trip to Madagascar.”
“Sit down, Calvino. You’ll miss the smoked salmon. And we won’t have another chance to talk. You mentioned something you wanted to ask me about Ballard. Don’t go rushing off just because Sky is acting out one of her little public fits of rebellion. She’s young. The young define themselves through open revolt. Isn’t that right, darling?”
“I’m the one who wanted you to come today,” Fah said, looking up from chair. “Isn’t that right, darling?”
“You were a large influence,” said Osborne.
“That’s his way of saying yes,” said Fah. “I will give you the money. Phone him, please. If you don’t want to go to him, he’ll come to you.”
Calvino’s phone signaled that he’d received a text message. He picked up the phone and read: “Munny here. Meet me at building here. 9 p.m.?” Calvino clicked onto the link for the building location. It was in the triple-digit soi numbers on Sukhumvit Road. Calvino put down the phone. He looked worried as he glanced over at Fah.
“This is how drug deals are done,” said Calvino. “Are you sure this is something I should know about?”
Fah turned to Osborne.
“I swear, Munny is the real thing. Without him we would have failed. He didn’t let us down. He could have run, but he stayed. We all owe him. Think how it turned out—we were his audience. Aren’t you the one who always said loyalty is the most important of all virtues?”
Osborne squirmed in his chair. He grabbed the Champagne bottle and refilled his glass.
“Haven’t you already paid this Munny?”
“Can you ever repay loyalty?” she asked.
Calvino had loaded her iPhone with up-to-date tracking and surveillance apps. He’d known everything about her and her friends, from her playlist on iTunes to the names in her Line directory. He had read through her SMS texts and reviewed the graphic art snapshots taken inside the clandestine meeting space above the barbershop. He had records of her location at the times of each email or phone call. There had been no need to follow her. The iPhone apps had done the legwork, and everything that he’d collected in this mass of data suggested she was telling the truth. She owed Munny. And Oak and Palm. All three of them were in his debt.
“She’s right, Osborne.”
Calvino’s reaction brought him a peck on the cheek from Fah.
“Thank you, Khun Vincent.”
Osborne sighed and shook his head.
“Okay, gang up on an old man. What can I do? Let’s give him the fucking money,” said Osborne, peeling twenty thousand-baht notes off a thick wedge of bills. “Now leave us to talk,” he said to his wife.
Fah pushed back her chair, adjusted her hat and with her iPad in hand walked back to the main house, her high heels clicking on the tiles like the click-clack of a typewriter.
“You didn’t come here to say goodbye, Calvino. You came because you wanted to ask me about Ballard.”
Calvino liked Osborne’s brutal honesty.
“I had US embassy staff coming around asking me questions about him.”
“I thought he killed himself. That’s what the papers say.”
“I have some doubt that he’s dead.”
“They have a body, Calvino. Someone died.”
“Maybe someone other than Ballard.”
Osborne studied the man across the table.
“I never thought of you as one of those conspiracy nutcases.”
“Fah talked about loyalty. Does that extend to your relationship with Ballard?”
Osborne smiled and sipped his Champagne, making the sort of face Winston Churchill might have made on hearing that Hitler had killed himself in the Berlin bunker.
“Ballard was a slippery one. I presume the authorities are doing their job.”
“Today’s Bangkok Post says the autopsy report shows it was a suicide. Rocks in his pockets,” said Calvino.
“That’s how Virginia Woolf killed herself.”
“I didn’t figure Ballard for the literary type,” said Calvino. “I think I misjudged him.”
Osborne sipped more Champagne and smacked his lips.
“Ballard had more of a pulp fiction kind of mind,” said Osborne. “Keeping it inside the mind is enough for most men; they see no point in writing anything down. Your life is the ink that writes the story. However Ballard died, why do you care? Were you close to him?”
Calvino swallowed a mouthful of Champagne, imagining Churchill running World War II knocking back glass after glass.
“At first I thought his old outfit wanted to pin a murder on me,” Calvino said, smacking his lips. “Then I realized I had no idea what outfit, new or old, Ballard worked for. DEA? DARPA? NSA? CIA? I wonder if Ballard himself could keep straight who had jurisdiction over what he was doing. ”
“And?”
“Maybe he pulled a Snowden?” asked Calvino.
“He mentioned a Snowden in a novel called Catch-22.”
“This is a different Snowden,” said Calvino.
Calvino scratched the stubble on his chin. There was something going on inside Ballard’s life and head, and they could spin speculations all day long, but the fact remained that they were only guessing.
“Someone inside the chain of alphabet soup might have changed their mind,” said Calvino. “Or they used me as cover to show they’d investigated the death. It doesn’t matter what their intention was. A verdict of suicide clears me. What I’ve been thinking is maybe the body they pulled out of the river wasn’t Ballard’s. His death was faked. And it wasn’t some agency that did it. It was Ballard.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Like you said, he only works for himself. You spent a few days drinking with him in Madagascar. He must’ve opened up after a few drinks, said something he should have kept to himself but needed to get off his chest to someone.”
“Hold on. You said he wasn’t literary. That’s not entirely true. He talked about Catch-22. I don’t read American writers, but I believe it was made into a movie once. He was very American. He needed a Bible.”
“I know the book,” said Calvino.
“I thought you might. Ballard loved to talk about a character named Orr. It’s very American to use a fictional character as a role model as real-life Americans are such a bore. Really a quite dismal lot.”
Orr managed to get shot down during each flight, and that gave him practice in sea landings with all members of the crew surviving. Orr was a pilot and had planned a cover story as an escape from the insanity of war. Had Orr’s scheme been drawn from Harry Lime’s sleight of hand, to create the illusion of his own death?
“You never asked Ballard why he saw Orr as a role model?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Calvino. We were both drunk. Asking a serious question when you’re drunk is like reciting lines from Monty Python’s Life of Brian when you’re fucking. It’s terribly distracting to your mission.”
“What was your mission?”
“Oblivion,” he said as if that were his idea of the golden ticket.
The unfinished business from Rob’s death in Rangoon a couple of years earlier had accelerated Osborne’s desire for oblivion. His quest for reproduction was the other side of the unfair coin he used to wager bets with himself.
THIRTY-FOUR
“But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.”—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
THERE WAS A reason that the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Big Burger” van was parked on the site of the
demolished Washington Square.
McPhail’s big idea had come to him in the middle of a heavy drinking session, when he’d gone outside to have a smoke. A large black van was parked in front of a mom and pop shop across the street, with the driver’s side door open. He watched as the driver bought fruit from an old lady who weighed the goods on an old-fashioned balance scale, adding and taking away weights like an opium dealer. She then bagged the fruit and passed it to the driver. McPhail ran across the road, dodging motorcycles, taxis and cars, waving his arms and shouting for the van driver to wait.
The driver’s nickname was Gop—Frog, in English. Gop chewed on a piece of pineapple as he explained to McPhail that he couldn’t just open his van and make him a hamburger parked where he was, in front of the greengrocer’s. The cops would be on him in five minutes, hauling his ass to some military camp to cook for the troops until either democracy was restored or non-vegetarians launched a counter-coup. Gop said he had a family to feed, and getting locked up wasn’t the way to feed them. McPhail explained that ordering a burger there and then wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. He wanted to organize a party. He’d invite friends. He’d show the world that he, Ed McPhail, hadn’t given up and had found a way to bring back the magic of the Square, if only for one lunch. He guaranteed that Gop would sell a mountain of burgers. Would Gop help him make this miracle happen?
The next day, around eleven-thirty a.m., Gop’s mobile burger café, with the name Road Kill and a menu painted on both side panels, pulled into the old Soi 22, Sukhumvit Road entrance. The driver, a slim Thai in his mid-twenties, dressed in cut-off jeans and a polo shirt, sat behind the wheel. The Road Kill food van slipped into the Square like a hearse into a cemetery, moving slowly under McPhail’s guidance into a small green, flat zone in the overgrown parkland of what had once been Washington Square. McPhail did his best to mimic an airport ground crew worker guiding a 747 to dock with the jetway as the accordion neck slithered out for a coupling. McPhail walked backward until the van had stopped behind a pile of rubble—broken tiles, bricks, window frames—his hands raised, palms out.
The driver scratched his head as he switched off the engine and climbed out. He’d never seen anything like the beginnings of a jungle in the middle of Bangkok, only a hundred meters from Soi 22. Two men and a boy hopped out of the back of the van as the driver climbed down from the cabin.
“Gop, you can put the tables over here,” said McPhail, pointing to small patch of the old road that circled the square. Gop and his crew worked to set up five tables with three folding chairs tucked into each one. The late morning sun bore down, and by the time they’d finished, the workers dripped with sweat.
Glover was the first to show up and survey the setting. Gop opened the serving window, and the smell of cooking burgers drifted across the space between the van and the tables. Glover, hands on his hips, stood near the van, reading the menu. He ordered a Monster Hawaiian Burger with double fries. Gop nodded with a smile. He was in business. Glover, a camera slung around his neck, sat down at McPhail’s table, where a bucket of ice, two glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat waiting.
“I thought of death when I first saw the van,” said Glover.
McPhail poured Glover a drink.
“I don’t see the connection. Drink this.”
Glover gulped from his glass, rattling the ice against the side.
“One of my readers wrote a long letter about Chinese death vans. The authorities have equipped vans that look just like this one. They use them as mobile execution chambers.”
“Get out of here!” said McPhail.
“I checked it out. It’s true. They look like regular police vans on the outside, but inside is a different story. They’ve been outfitted with a mini-operating room. Video cameras roll as the poor sedated sod they’ve got strapped to a gurney meets up with a couple of doctors. Those are the last faces he sees. They inject him with a dose of sodium thiopental to knock him out, next comes a jab with pancuronium bromide, which cuts out his breathing, and to finish him off, the needle finds a vein to dump a large dose of potassium chloride. That stops the heart.
“Vans filled with death-inducing chemicals. Three shots of the right mix and ten minutes later you’re stone dead. The Chinese papers report that Mr. Wong was vanized last night after consuming his last meal of a bowl of red rice.”
“Or they could force feed him a couple of Gop’s burgers,” said McPhail.
After Glover had run the Chinese death van letter on his website, rumors had circulated that the Thai army had asked for a friendship price from the Chinese for a hundred of the vans. Glover had soon deleted all anti-military comments. There was no percentage in pissing off the very people who might or might not have placed an order for a fleet of death vans. Why take a chance? Why get yourself on the beta group list for a test run? As Glover waited for his burger, it made him think about how a man could go for years and never think much about the diverse functionality of vans but then one day realize that vans had expanded into all kinds of new niches: food trucks, execution chambers, massage parlors, campers, bookstores, clothing shops, beauty clinics—an infinite list of possibilities.
Glover snapped a picture of McPhail drinking. He had many such photographs. They lived in a time when life (and death) moved around on wheels, and few ever stopped to ask some basic questions. Glover was snapping more pictures of Road Kill when their orders arrived.
“You might want to hold off on eating your Monster Hawaiian Burger until they invent a way to grow new hearts,” said McPhail.
“If I clutch my chest, you’ll help me out?”
“Kiss of life? Fat chance.”
“Don’t be hostile.”
McPhail lifted the top half of the bun off his burger.
“Pass the mustard.”
“Where’s Calvino?”
McPhail watched as the first of the old Washington Square regulars drifted in and sat at the tables.
“I invited him, but he went to see Osborne.”
“The bar mogul,” said Glover. “Is he still alive?
“Ex-bar mogul. He’s alive.”
“There are miracles.”
“By the way, there’s no such word as ‘vanized,’ ” said McPhail. “That’s a fact. Vandalized, yes. Vanized, no.”
“There should be,” said Glover. “After my column it will go viral.”
“Some years ago you invented ‘herpesized.’ How did that go, Glover?”
After a few bites from his meal, Glover got up from the table with his camera ready.
“Got to get back to work.”
Three or four of the old-timers drifted into the grounds of Washington Square, their sagging jaws dropping as they looked around at the jungle that had reclaimed the area. Taffy’s, Moonshine, the Happy Bar were nothing more than weed patches and old piss marks on the concrete slabs. The massage parlor where their tired old bones had gone for loosening up was now a tangle thick with the kinds of tropical trees that grow like weeds. The Bourbon Street restaurant and bar had left no trace amid the undergrowth. In the far distance a thick canopy marked where the Lonesome Hawk had once stood. Like carrier pigeons after a nuclear blast, the old regulars were returning to circle a roost that no longer existed.
McPhail strolled over and shook hands.
“No rules against smoking in this restaurant.”
He held up his cigarette and laughed.
“You’ve got to go to the window and order your food.”
“What? No waitress?” asked Jack, whose freshly pressed safari suit had large sweat marks under the arms.
“Where’s the music?” asked Arnie, hair growing out of his nose and ears as fast as the jungle around him. “And where’s Calvino? You said he was coming.”
McPhail didn’t want to tell them that Calvino was sitting around Osborne’s pool drinking Champagne, and that he was missing what might be the last reunion of the old hands from Washington Square. It wasn’t turning out to be t
he happy gathering he’d hoped for. The old-timers moaned, complained, demanded and cursed—and then he remembered that they’d carried on the same way with Old George at the Lonesome Hawk. It was just the way they were.
“You know in China they use these vans to execute prisoners?”
That calmed them down.
“What are you saying, McPhail?”
“Count your blessings. This one is bringing the best burgers in Bangkok, and all you have to do is get off your sorry asses and walk over to the hatch and tell Gop how you want them cooked. If this was China, you’d be in the back getting injections in those sorry asses to put you out of your misery.”
Jack began a roll call of the old regulars who’d died, as Arnie strolled with McPhail over to the van and began reading the menu painted on the side. McPhail turned and walked back to his table to find Glover lost somewhere in cyberspace, trailing after someone on his cell phone screen.
“Let me tell you about my brother Chuck,” said McPhail.
“What about him?” asked Glover.
It was a big mistake to give McPhail an open-ended invitation to talk about his brother.
“You got time?”
Whenever a farang said that, Glover had to resist the impulse to run.
“Sure,” said Glover.
He liked McPhail.
“My brother lives in California. He’s retired from a desk job at the state pension fund. He worked there for thirty-three years, so he had everything he ever wanted—house, car, wife and a couple of kids he put through college. He’s sixty-six years old now and still married to the same wife. He has two grandkids. A couple of years ago, when I was back in California, we took a long walk by the sea. He was looking back in time and trying to make sense of his life. He went through all his successes and said they didn’t add up to much. It hit him.
“He stopped walking, looked out to sea, tears in his eyes. He’d had one of those moments. He realized there was so much in life but it was too late for him. He told me that everyone in the family thought I was crazy. Going off to Asia, taking nothing but a small backpack, traveling to strange places, getting lost in raging rivers, blue-ridged mountains and tropical jungles, and settling in the most exotic and indecipherable, crazy, unmanageably noir cities in the world.
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