Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “And he carries a cheap, ugly bag,” he added, as if that were a crime for a man driving a Mazda RX-8. The guard couldn’t figure out how a new, ultra-expensive sports car went with a beat-up suitcase. But Pratt understood: the musician knew his audience. His image inside the bar was one thing, and outside the bar, something else. Each required its own branding and symbols of success.

  “You need anything else, you just ask,” said the guard, walking back into the shadows. His heart was still thumping; he couldn’t wait to get away from the cop who had unintentionally humiliated him.

  The Skytrain screamed past overhead. Colonel Pratt waited outside a couple of minutes until he saw Calvino looking down from the walkway. Calvino waved. Pratt watched as his friend disappeared down the pedestrian walkway to the stairs. The Victory Monument gleamed in floodlights—a monument to the glory of what had gone down in some history books as a military loss but politicians had found a way to massage into a victory in what was largely a forgotten war. Colonel Pratt walked around the Mazda, considering why governments erected such structures. They built them to represent sacrifice and the warriors who had made it, all the while promising voters that under their leadership no one would ever be asked to embrace hardship. They called elections, using their victories to make money. That was the real monument they were committed to building.

  When Calvino reached the street, he hurried along the broken footpath between the encroaching footstalls. A couple of vendors in their greasy aprons were packing up for the night, stacking up the plastic stools and tables. Other merchants, mostly young women, called out to Calvino as he passed their tables, stacked with neat rows of T-shirts, panties, socks, sexy skirts and blouses, and children’s toys. He spotted a stuffed teddy bear and bought it for Ratana’s kid. The last of the food stalls offered a special price for the last two fishheads. He gave the fish vendor a shake of the head. Calvino found Colonel Pratt standing beside the red sports car.

  “What’d you buy?”

  Calvino showed him the stuffed bear.

  “It’s from China. Be careful of the button eyes.”

  Calvino looked at the stuffed bear and sighed. He’d forgotten about the reports of dangerous chemicals used in Chinese toys.

  “It’s like what my wife says, ‘It’s the thought that counts,’” said Colonel Pratt.

  “What’s the story on the Mazda?” Since Calvino had returned to Bangkok, this was the third red sports car they had tracked down.

  “So far there is no story.”

  “Could this be our man?” said Calvino. He was thinking that he should buy shares in the company. The other car owners had alibis; they hadn’t been anywhere near Pattaya the night Nongluck had died.

  Pratt shrugged his shoulders and shifted his sax case. “I’m on soon. Afterwards, we can check out the driver. I can’t stay for more than one set. I have an early morning appointment.” “Early morning” and “sax player” were rarely found in the same sentence. Great sax players ate breakfast in the afternoon. A life of morning appointments was everything jazz wailed against.

  But that was the political part of Colonel Pratt’s job. Meetings, conferences, and seminars had become more frequent with the elections. Fear of violence and disorder had the brass worried, exchanging information and gossip about who was up and whose star was fading. The death of a ying in Pattaya hadn’t registered on anyone’s list of important matters. Colonel Pratt believed that she’d been murdered and Calvino had been set up for the fall. He kept his investigation low-key. Plugged into internal intelligence, he was aware how much the election had distracted his superiors. They were far more interested in controlling hired hit men on the political party payrolls than looking for the killer of a woman in Pattaya. His knowledge of how the department really worked gave him an advantage.

  Colonel Pratt made himself appear busy enough on routine police matters to be largely left alone. He knew the game and it had come in handy. The two men who’d died in the motorcycle crash on Soi 33 had given him some extra work, but he had it under control. His boss had put him on an internal subcommittee to prepare rebuttals to the program of reforms promised by one party. It was a job he didn’t want. The fact that he agreed with many of the reforms, especially the ones aimed at ending corruption and nepotism, was something he kept to himself. A lot of other officers agreed with him and were keeping quiet, not wanting to tip their hand; it was too early to know who would win the election.

  Calvino circled the Mazda as if he owned it, the march of an owner admiring a trophy. Out of a shallow pool of neon light, a bleached-blond Thai woman in her twenties appeared, wearing tight white jeans and a pink cowboy shirt with white piping on the sleeves and collar. She smiled at Calvino, thinking that he and the car belonged together.

  She stood with her hands on her hips. “Hi. I’m Amy.”

  Apple, Ann, and Rose, he’d heard. This, though, was the first Thai Amy he’d met. She had woven colored strips of tinsel into her hair, wore a loosely knotted necktie printed with yellow happy faces, and carried what looked like a legit Prada bag. It was as if Calvino had been hit by a stun gun. He stood in the road with a sappy grin on his face.

  “You wanna drink, Amy?” he asked her.

  “Nice car,” she said, looking at Colonel Pratt before turning her smile on to Calvino. “Nice jacket.”

  Calvino flashed a smile. The jacket is doing its thing, he thought. He winked at the Colonel. But it wasn’t so much the jacket as the smile and clean clothes that signaled a willingness to spend money.

  Colonel Pratt looked at the ying, then at Calvino, and having sized up the situation went inside Saxophone. “Catch you inside,” he said.

  It was just the two of them on the soi.

  “Hey, would you like a teddy bear?”

  He held it out, and she squinted in the half light. “It won’t bite. But to be on the safe side, don’t lick the eyes.”

  She grinned, taking the bear. “He’s so cute. Where you from?” she asked. She had stepped into the light leaking into the street from the half-open entrance door.

  “New York.”

  A closer look showed the plastic surgery jobs on her nose and chin. The breasts looked like they’d been sculpted from a giant ball of wax. She had a small diamond stud in one nostril, a starter gem looking for a man to step up the size. The overall package created the impression of a ying who was comfortable prowling for Mr. Right at a jazz club. She’d thrown a line out, had Calvino hooked, and all she had to do was slowly reel him in.

  “Are you on holiday?”

  “I was on holiday, but things got turned around. I’ve been looking for a way to get back to my holiday.”

  “Good goal.”

  “I could use some help.”

  She laughed. “That may be the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

  Calvino looked at his fingernails, then his feet. “It was pretty lame. So why not let me make it up to you and buy you a drink?”

  She looked him over. “You’re slick. But do you like jazz?”

  “I’m crazy about jazz.”

  Amy rewarded him with a smile. How did men live in countries where their sex lives died when they still had another half-century to go? Calvino asked himself. How did they stop themselves from going suicidal or unbearably lonely?

  “I’m crazy about cars. Red and fast,” she said, looking at the Mazda RX-8.

  “I like it too,” said Calvino.

  “But it’s not yours,” she said.

  He flashed a crooked grin. “Any idea who owns it?”

  She smiled. “Be nice and maybe I’ll tell you.”

  “I’ll be nice. Promise,” said Calvino, knowing this was going to cost him more than a stuffed bear.

  Amy smiled as she reeled him in. He held the door for her and then walked in behind her. Sometimes a man knew when he was being played, but Calvino didn’t care. What mattered was that he was also playing her. She had information he wanted.

  They walked
into Saxophone knowing pretty much that a deal was in progress but the fine print was still being worked out.

  Calvino and the ying threaded through the crowd with a haze of blue smoke destroying visibility. They followed a waitress through the standing-room-only room, avoiding elbows and heavy trays filled with beer. She gave him a menu and pointed to two stools at a long, curved wooden counter right in front of the band. Calvino was facing the stage. The volume was cranked up loud enough that it seemed to be absorbed and rebroadcast from the throat and chest. The crowd, whacked-out on drugs and booze, moved to the music. The decibel level was a notch away from rupturing eardrums. No one seemed to mind. The music thundered, shaking the floor.

  The waitress couldn’t hear his order. He tried twice before mouthing the word, “Tiger.” She knew it was a brand of beer. Amy ordered Johnnie Walker Black Label—an entire bottle, with ice and mixers. He had offered a drink and she’d ordered for an entire party. After the waitress left, she pressed her cell phone to her ear and told the person on the other end that she wasn’t waiting outside; she was inside and sitting at the bar directly in front of the stage. “The best seats in the house,” she said.

  “What’s your name again?” shouted Calvino over the music.

  She rolled her eyes, “Amy. You don’t remember?” she asked. She set the bear on the counter, facing the band.

  He raised an eyebrow. He’d never had a good record with yings using farang names—or Apple, Anne, or Benz. The front end of the alphabet had usually proved a huge disappointment. He regretted having forgotten her name, but it was too late. She had already written him off as a loser, which she signaled by orphaning the stuffed bear. Spending a night with a ying named Amy had narrowed to the same range of possibilities that his night spent in Pattaya with two police officers had held.

  Calvino followed Amy’s eyes to the band. Assembled on a worn red-carpeted stage, the five musicians were giving it all they had. The lead guitar player attacked his electric guitar as if he and the guitar were on fire. The musicians jammed: guitars, keyboard, and drums taking a riff one direction, doubling back, and then taking off on a new high note. The guitar player with black kinky hair, gold earrings, and a deep, throaty voice, sang as the keyboard player jumped in a beat late. The packed bar watched him dance across the stage.

  In the upper balcony, which wrapped around a hundred and eighty degrees, heads peered down at the stage. On a shelf above the wall behind the stage, under a layer of dust and spiderwebs, were faded album sleeves from Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong. Behind the stage a four-year-old girl dressed in a frilly dress with silver glitter in her hair danced on a table. With her mother’s arms wrapped around her waist, the girl looked like part of a show-business act. Next to them was Colonel Pratt. He nodded at Calvino as he removed his saxophone from the case and pulled the leather strap around his neck. He let the instrument rest against his chest as he waited, catching the eye of the man seated beside Calvino. The smartly dressed Asian man nodded at the Colonel, saluting him by holding up a bottle of Tiger beer. He told Calvino that he was a scout sent by the Java Jazz Festival to see if a Thai police colonel playing the sax might be worked into next year’s program. Pratt failed to mention that his gig was a rehearsal. Calvino smiled at the Colonel.

  After he had looked the place over, Calvino’s attention returned to Amy, or whatever her name was, and reached out to touch her hand. He stopped, though, before making contact; it would have interrupted her eye-lock with the guitar player at center stage. He looked like a half-starved bird flapping its wings, jerky on its feet, head moving side to side as he worked the struts on the guitar. Amy sipped her Johnnie Walker Black and raised it to him. He returned her smile. By the end of the second set, three of Amy’s friends had arrived, and Amy had written her phone number on a Tiger beer coaster and slipped it to the guitar player.

  “Remember the red sports car?” Calvino whispered in her ear.

  Amy turned away from her friends, who had helped themselves to the bottle of scotch. “That’s him,” she said. “The guy who owns the Mazda.”

  She nodded at the guitar player in the middle. Colonel Pratt had gone on stage and stood a couple of feet away while the band played on. Calvino tried to imagine the birdlike creature throwing Nongluck off the balcony of the hotel. He had rarely seen anyone with less muscle tone. But in the heat of an argument it wouldn’t take much muscle to toss forty-three kilos off a balcony. It could have happened that way, Calvino told himself.

  Colonel Pratt’s eyes were closed as he played a Charlie Parker piece, his cheeks puffed out as if floating to the level where dreams are made. On stage with the saxophone strapped around his neck, he didn’t look remotely like a cop. He slowly moved the length of the stage, his head bobbing, stopping for a moment, bending his knees, arching his back as he hit a high note. Calvino had seen him play many times before but never quite in a performance like this one. Pratt’s lungs and body had channeled Charlie Parker and inside that envelope of bliss, the Colonel had gone over to some place Charlie Parker was still playing. Whatever world Pratt had been transported to, he carried the audience along with him. He had the Jakarta scout tapping the palm of his hand against the edge of the counter. No one in the crowded room talked; no one took their eyes off Pratt and his saxophone; pure emotion and impulse poured from his instrument.

  After the final number, Pratt and the band bowed to a standing ovation. A new band came on as they left. The Jakarta scout signaled a thumbs-up to Colonel Pratt as he walked offstage. The mother with her frilly-dressed daughter came onstage; they were part of the new act. The mother sang; the kid sang and danced. Pratt came back to the counter with the guitar player, who held the beer coaster with Amy’s phone number written on it. He looked like a garuda, a mythical bird, swooping down with talons exposed. Calvino looked at the guitar player and then at Colonel Pratt. “He owns the red sports car.” The information had set him back a bottle of scotch.

  The guitar player leaned forward, bracing himself against the bar, joking with Amy and her friends. Colonel Pratt asked if he might have a word with him outside. Calvino had gone ahead and was standing by the sports car when Colonel Pratt and the Birdman, also known as Nop, came out the door.

  “Nice car,” said Calvino, leaning against the side.

  “Were you in Pattaya last Tuesday night?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  The Birdman crunched his mouth into a pout, as if he had to think hard to recall where he was on Tuesday. “I might have been. Why are you asking?”

  Colonel Pratt showed the Birdman his badge. “What hotel did you stay in?”

  “I stayed with a friend,” he said, no longer looking cocky and strutting. Nop was becoming another kind of bird.

  “That’s not what I asked. What was the name of the hotel?”

  “I can’t keep them straight. One of the hotels on Beach Road.”

  “You stayed with a woman?”

  “What if I did?”

  “What was her name?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Tell you or she’d kill me,” said the Birdman.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” asked Calvino.

  The birdman winced. “Man, are you crazy? Why would I kill someone?”

  Calvino stretched his arms. “You don’t strike me as panya nim,” he said.

  Being called stupid or soft in the head by a farang wasn’t something the Birdman liked, but given the circumstances he had little choice in the matter.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my head,” he said.

  “Khun Nop, we can always go to the station and check that out,” said Colonel Pratt. He was always pleased when Calvino brought a piece of Thai out like a fast right jab, a verbal flurry that propelled his Thai listener against the ropes. In this case the Colonel thought that his friend’s assessment of the Birdman was right on the mark. He looked more like a Nop hanging on a thread than a Birdman ready to control an audience.

/>   SEVENTEEN

  COLONEL PRATT NEVER ARRIVED at Calvino’s office without some small gift for Ratana’s baby. Manee, the Colonel’s wife, bought clothes, toys, and food, making certain her husband was well-stocked. This time, the Colonel arrived with a hand puppet, a golden-velvet duck with green eyes and a red cloth tongue. Manee had picked it up at Siam Paragon. It had been gift wrapped. He handed it to Ratana before kneeling down beside the playpen and looking through the mesh at the babies. Unlike Calvino, he never had any trouble spotting John-John.

  Ratana looked at the heavy silver wrapping paper until Calvino said, “There’s something inside.” She slid a letter opener into the end and carefully folded back the paper. She slipped her fingers into the pockets for the upper and lower jaw of the duck. “John-John will love it. Tell Khun Manee I like it very much.” She pulled the puppet off her hand and handed it to the Colonel. “You show him.”

  Colonel Pratt moved the duck’s head from side to side as the baby’s eyes followed the movement. “Have you eaten yet?”

  Ratana smiled with delight. The baby’s legs kicked and a line of slobber rolled down one corner of his mouth. “He loves it,” she said.

  Calvino sat on the edge of Ratana’s desk. “She’s right,” he said.

  But for Ratana, nothing could ever be as simple as pure, spontaneous enjoyment; there had to be some underlying omen expressed in the baby’s reaction. “Last life, he rose from his sleep from the quacking of a duck as the house was on fire. He would have died. But a duck saved him,” she said.

  “Or he just likes cute puppets,” said Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt removed the hand puppet and gave it to Ratana. “You try it.”

  She slipped on the puppet and bent over the playpen. Her son kicked his feet and waved his hands like a turtle trying to right itself. The gravity of motherhood had pulled Ratana into a world where the child was everything; each act, decision, or thought started and finished with the child. Calvino tried not to feel excluded from her new world, but he couldn’t help himself. He was happy that she finally had what every Thai woman wished for: motherhood. To become the mother goddess was to have achieved a vindication, to have climbed to a sacred platform and claimed a throne.