Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Any more food?” asked Mao.

  Calvino shook his head. “Let’s eat this first. I can always order more.”

  Noriega grinned, picking up the phone. He ordered plates and real silverware. The concierge sent a lackey with a trolley loaded with plates, silverware, pepper and salt, pepper sauce, and raw red chili, twisted and ugly, in a porcelain bowl. Neither he nor his partner was feeling punished anymore by guarding the farang detail. It was something every man at the bottom of the ladder could appreciate: a party with good Western food and drink, and an invitation to eat as much as you wanted and to drink until the empty bottles rattled against one another on the floor.

  The Thais had a food-sharing culture; communal dining automatically overcame the circumstances of how the diners had been thrown together. Calvino poured the third round of vodka. Noriega asked about the United States. Calvino explained he was from New York and that it was a small island off the coast of the United States, no matter what anyone else said. It was no more America than Bangkok was Thailand. That explanation was accepted with knowing grunts by Noriega. Neither Noriega nor Mao was from Bangkok, and they bore the usual upcountry grudge against the big city.

  “In Los Angeles, you are what you drive. In Washington, D.C., you are your job. And in New York you are how much money you’ve got.” Calvino watched the cops chewing large slabs of steak, thinking about his description.

  The cops thought about this for a couple of minutes, digging into the pasta. “In Bangkok maybe we have all three American cities in one,” said Mao, the one who was fast on his feet.

  Cars, money, status, and women were warehoused in places like New York and Bangkok. If you value those things, it makes sense to live there, thought Calvino. He scored the case of expensive whiskey because he was a farang who had understood the nature of the Thai way of paying obligations. Mao got the point immediately. But Noriega’s brain sputtered and spat, trying to get out of neutral and into high gear.

  “I want to go to America,” said Noriega.

  “Why do you want to go?” asked Calvino.

  “So I can be rich.”

  “Any idea who was in the suite above me?” He pointed up at the ceiling.

  “The dead girl,” said Noriega.

  “Then you know she didn’t go off my balcony. She was pushed off her own balcony.”

  Mao frowned. “How do you know she was pushed? Unless she came to your room and you pushed her.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” asked Calvino.

  Noriega pointed his finger at Calvino. “You lose temper. Hot heart. You have a fight, she tries to hit you, you push her, and she falls. Not your fault. You don’t worry if you tell me this is what happened. Everyone will understand.”

  So much for the food and liquor. Neither Noriega nor Mao had let his dining and drinking pleasure interfere with what he’d already decided. Calvino lay back on the bed, an arm resting over his eyes. It was going to be a very long night.

  “How are you so sure?” Calvino asked.

  “She checked in yesterday and paid for your upgrade to this suite,” said Noriega.

  He rose out of bed. “She paid for what?”

  “An upgrade.”

  “You double-check with General Yosaporn. He paid for the room.”

  Noriega nodded and smiled at his partner. They’d obviously talked about this before.

  “The General paid for a room. Not for a suite. The dead woman paid to have you in the room below hers.”

  His heart pounded his chest and neck. No wonder the cops had wanted to lock him up. If these two flat shoes had this information, it must have been passed on to Colonel Pratt. He hadn’t said a thing about this on the phone. It was something Pratt would have wanted to think about long and hard. Pratt would want to look Calvino in the eye and ask him why a total stranger would upgrade him to a suite. How would she even have known that he was in that hotel? The situation was much worse than he had imagined. Somehow Apichart must have arranged it in the two days that had passed before he left for Pattaya. That was long enough if Apichart had known his plans. There was no way short of a gun pointed at her baby son’s head that Ratana would have divulged that information. His heart was still racing as he lay in bed, wishing he’d never rented the coffin. It had been a big mistake, and luck, bad or good, had nothing to do with it.

  SEVEN

  COLONEL PRATT had once told Calvino that he reminded him of the kind of guy who walked into a dynamite warehouse and lit a match to see where he was going. After he lit the first match and looked around at the stacks of dynamite, he’d wait until the match burned down to fingernail-igniting length, and then he’d strike another match. Pratt thought about that conversation as he drove to Pattaya.

  Entering Pattaya, he used the siren to clear a path through the traffic. He pulled into a hotel guest spot and then spent half an hour talking with two senior police officers in the hotel. They’d gone over the paperwork for the suite, looking at handwritten notes setting out the arrangements for payment of the room. The suite upgrade had been paid in cash. Then he rode in the elevator with the concierge, the manager, the two senior police officers, and a bellhop to the ninth floor. They stood in front of Calvino’s door, Pratt collecting his thoughts. He didn’t knock, letting the concierge slip a plastic card into the slot. The manager pulled out the card and opened the door.

  Colonel Pratt asked to talk with Calvino alone. The others waited in the corridor as the Colonel stepped inside and looked around, leaving the door open behind him. Noriega slept in a stuffed chair, his head resting against the sliding glass door. An empty vodka bottle lay at his feet. Mao slumped over the glass table, snoring, his face a couple of inches away from a plate of pasta. The room looked like it had been raided and pillaged by a band of Vikings. Bones, scraps of food, clothes, plastic bags, and Styrofoam containers were scattered across chairs, tables, the bed, and the floor. Ants, geckos, and cockroaches feasted on the leftovers. The jungle had begun to reclaim the building, starting from the ninth floor.

  Colonel Pratt cleared his throat as he stood at the end of the bed.

  The men jerked, and Noriega instinctively reached for his holstered sidearm. He looked groggy-eyed at Colonel Pratt, who stood with his hands on his waist, his nine in a holster on his right hip. Noriega thought he might be dreaming until he realized a superior officer had entered the room. He shook Mao, who sat up too quickly, knocking the plate of pasta to the floor. The two cops snapped to attention. Noriega’s hair looked like a bad wig, and his skin, a slightly greenish color, looked ready to be harvested for high-end boots. He saluted Colonel Pratt while Mao, smoothing the wrinkles in his trousers, waited for the Colonel to say something. Calvino raised himself on one elbow in bed and stretched.

  “What time is it?”

  Pratt walked around the edge of the debris. “Time to find out what happened yesterday afternoon. And you might start by explaining about this room.”

  “We had a small party. Then these two gentlemen decided to spend the night.”

  “Vincent, the police have two witnesses who claim they saw you push her off your balcony,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “They can get a dozen witnesses. It was getting dark. A woman fell from a hotel balcony. It happened in a couple of seconds. They saw nothing. But that doesn’t stop them thinking they saw what happened. Like I said on the phone, I was on my balcony and had just opened The Quiet American. I looked up and saw her falling. I leaned over the railing. A couple of seconds later she was on the ground.”

  “There’s something you should know. The dead woman paid to have you upgraded to a suite below her own suite. Why would she do that?”

  Calvino shook his head. “I heard about the upgrade from these two.” He nodded at the two cops. Then he stared at Colonel Pratt for a long moment, rolled off the bed, and walked over to the balcony. “Pratt, I have no fucking idea who she was. That’s the truth. The cops have been through my room and found nothing. Not a single print
, hair, or fingernail clipping.”

  “You didn’t know her?”

  Calvino swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I have no idea who she was. Or why she’d do that. It’s gotta be Apichart.”

  “On the phone, you said you’d seen her earlier in the day.”

  “I know it looks bad.”

  The other police and hotel staff had slowly filtered back into the sitting room area. Calvino now had a complete audience, just as on the previous evening. He paced in front of the balcony window, filling his cheeks with air, looking at his feet. He threw up his hands, resting forward with two hands on the back of a chair. “When I arrived at the hotel yesterday, I saw a woman at the hotel spirit house. A seagull flew up and startled her. She turned and saw me. We exchanged a smile. Does that amount to knowing someone? I saw her face for less than a minute. She didn’t say anything. If she’d said, ‘I just upgraded your room to a suite, big guy. This is your lucky day,’ I’d have remembered. The woman who went over the side looked like the woman in front of the spirit house. I only had a second to see the woman who fell. I’m trying to match a stranger I saw for less than a minute with another stranger I saw for a second.”

  “It was the same woman who paid for the upgrade, Vincent.”

  “I’m not denying it was. I’m saying I didn’t know who she was.”

  It was a defining moment, one of those flashes that make a man ask whether he really knows another person. Colonel Pratt had known Calvino for years, fought for him, defended him, and sent him work. He looked at Vincent as if trying to read something inside his own mind at the same time.

  Noriega and Mao gave up pretending to follow the conversation in English. Mao lit a cigarette and went out on the balcony. Noriega joined him with two of the cops who had followed Colonel Pratt up in the elevator. One of the senior officers was on his radio reporting that a colonel from Bangkok was interrogating the suspect in English and he wasn’t certain what was being said.

  “I’ve done it this time. I’m in big trouble,” said Calvino.

  “I’ve got someone checking to see if there is a connection between the woman and Apichart.”

  “And if there isn’t one?”

  The Colonel’s mouth firmed. “Then you’re right.”

  “I should have stayed in Bangkok,” said Calvino.

  “We’re going to work this through, Vincent.”

  Calvino nodded. “Thanks, Pratt.”

  When they stepped back inside the room, Noriega asked if Calvino had told him anything useful. Colonel Pratt stared at the policeman.

  “You can go now,” said Colonel Pratt.

  That wasn’t much of an answer, and certainly not the one they’d expected. A colonel didn’t have to answer to patrolmen who had spent a night drinking and eating. As far as Pratt was concerned, the two cops had done nothing more than average greedy babysitters, and now that the parents had come home, it was time to dismiss them. The two junior officers exchanged nervous glances. The two senior officers stared at Calvino. They made no effort to intervene.

  “Check in with Colonel Pin if you feel that is necessary,” said Colonel Pratt. He was the big boss who made the final decision.

  It was the kind of invitation that neither Mao nor Noriega would ever accept. To do so would violate a basic premise of Thai culture: one’s senior is never questioned. And a superior’s polite invitation to check him out is nothing more than politeness.

  “That won’t be necessary, sir,” said Noriega. They saluted and walked across the room toward Calvino. He shook hands with Noriega and Mao and promised to keep in touch. He gave each of them a bottle from General Yosaporn’s stash. Both men looked sheepish and waied Calvino. The gesture registered a hint of a smile on Colonel Pratt’s lips. What had happened that night was a reversal of the Stockholm syndrome. The captors identified with the hostage.

  “They have nothing. They should have let me go last night,” said Calvino.

  “The system doesn’t work perfectly, Vincent. It wasn’t until late last night that the police found that the dead woman had registered in a room on the fifteenth floor and that she’d paid for your upgrade. The eyewitnesses said they saw you at the railing. No one saw her going over your railing. The police just made an assumption, connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected, and that happens more than anyone would wish to admit.”

  “Who was she?”

  Pratt had the details from the Pattaya police. “She was an assistant manager at an insurance company in Bangkok. Khun Nongluck. They found her ID in her handbag inside her room. She’s from a good middle-class family. University-educated and single, but unhappy in her personal life.”

  “So she killed herself?” She’d prayed at the spirit house, and people who were intent on killing themselves didn’t interrupt their plans to light candles and incense sticks. Suicide didn’t make sense.

  “It looks that way.”

  “I can go?”

  Colonel Pratt nodded, took off his cap, and sat at the table. He looked around the room. “Stay until I’ve got things under control in Bangkok.”

  Calvino glanced over at his new friends Mao and Noriega, who were still lingering, and who would have liked to hang out for a couple of more nights. “Things aren’t under control here.”

  Colonel Pratt shrugged. “Up to you. But General Yosaporn went to the trouble to arranging a room for you.”

  “And a dead woman went to the added trouble to get me upgraded to this suite. Pratt, I can’t stay here. And I’m not going to another hotel in Pattaya. I’m going home.”

  Colonel Pratt had played the Thai social shame card. Only it was a card game that Calvino usually refused to play. What the Colonel was saying was that he’d lose face if his farang friend packed up and left after a long line of chits had been burned to get him the room. And Apichart’s failed hit hadn’t been resolved. He was still running around Bangkok pretending to be a victim.

  “I came to Pattaya so I’d be out of the way until the General and you decided what to do with Apichart. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. But I did what you asked. I knew it was important to you and the General. Now things are changed. Apichart’s going to know I’m here. The newspapers will make certain of that. Besides, I’ve got another case waiting in Bangkok, a farang husband in love with someone other than his wife, and the wife says it’s an emergency. The client has paid the fee in advance. Ratana has told me she’s desperate. Would the General want me to lose business?”

  The problem with a guilt card is that it can be trumped by another guilt card.

  “The General will understand.”

  Calvino started throwing clothes into his suitcase. He looked up as he held a Hawaiian shirt, black with vertical rows of yellow pig heads. “Before we go, can we have a look at Nongluck’s room?”

  “Don’t get involved, Vincent. Let’s go back to Bangkok and let the local police finish their job.” Colonel Pratt knew that Calvino wasn’t likely to follow his advice.

  “I am involved. The local cops still think I killed her.”

  “They’ve changed their minds.”

  “Maybe they’ll change them again.”

  The Colonel said his goodbyes to the Pattaya police and watched them take the elevator down to the lobby. They’d seemed surprised when he hadn’t gotten into the elevator with them. He waied them and waited until the door closed, then pushed the up button and waited with the hotel manager, whom he’d asked to stay behind.

  The manager let them into Nongluck’s suite. The first thing Calvino noticed inside room 1542 was the cloying smell: a mix of perfume, soap, and powder. The scent of a woman. On the table was a wine bottle. Beside it was a corkscrew with the cork screwed deep, the metal tip sticking out at the bottom. A glass with two fingers of wine was next to the bottle. Beside the French wine were some playing cards wrapped with a rubber band. “Doesn’t look like she was playing with a full deck,” said Calvino, reaching for the minideck on the table.
r />   “Don’t touch them,” said Colonel Pratt. The cards looked fairly new. Calvino was right; it was only a few cards. Pratt pulled off the rubber band and turned over the first card: the ace of hearts. He worked through the eight of diamonds, the six of clubs and the six of spades. The last four cards were the queen of hearts, the six of hearts, the five of hearts, and the nine of spades. He slipped the rubber band back on the cards, looked away and palmed the cards, slipping them in his pocket. Calvino pretended not to see Pratt take the playing cards.

  “Any idea what happened to the rest of the deck?” asked Calvino, looking around as if they might be elsewhere in the room. He walked over to the closet and pulled back the door.

  “They didn’t evaporate,” said Pratt, kneeling down level to the wine glass on the table and examining the lipstick on the rim.

  Calvino looked back from the closet. “Cards don’t evaporate, Pratt. That’s not the right English word.”

  Pratt raised his hands covered by surgical gloves. “In Thailand many things can evaporate, Vincent. That includes money, reputation, and life. Subtracting a few cards from the list, I am certain you will agree, does no permanent harm to the English language.”

  A suitcase had been slipped into the closet. A couple of dresses, some underwear, bras, T-shirts, jeans, and three pairs of shoes were also in the closet. Calvino remembered the blue dress. Nongluck had worn it when she’d made her offering at the spirit house.