“Stay the night. It’s late. Tomorrow you can catch the bus,” said Marisa. Wan started to say something but stopped. “I have a spare guestroom,” Marisa said. “Please stay.”
Wan felt the kid’s grip tighten, and she couldn’t think of any good reason not to trade a hard seat on a bus upcountry for a soft bed in this palace. Calvino held his breath, hoping his own invitation would follow.
Fon and Wan padded off to a large bedroom of their own. At last the two adults were alone. Calvino sat on the sofa with Marisa, waiting for her brother. “You’re close to your brother, aren’t you?” asked Calvino. He was killing time. Was he going to spend the night, or was he out the door? He’d delivered the kid. What else did she want? He moved closer, stretching his arm across the back of the sofa, just behind her head. She didn’t seem to mind.
Marisa explained that she’d been born five minutes before Juan Carlos. She had slipped out of the womb as the advance detail. From the beginning Marisa had had one mission in her life: looking after her brother. It had been the twenty-first of June, and Juan Carlos had been born after midnight, making his birthday fall within the sign of Cancer. He’d left his sister on the other side as a Gemini. Different zodiac signs, different missions, same mother. Juan Carlos spoke nine languages. Calvino was impressed. In America he’d never met anyone who spoke more than two or three.
Marisa said, “When I say, ‘speaks nine languages,’ you have to understand what I mean. He doesn’t just speak these languages; he recreates them, acts them as if on stage, becoming a native speaker as he says the words. He becomes an Italian, a German, a Frenchman, or an Englishman. It’s quite remarkable. I’m not saying that just because he’s my brother. Others have said the same thing.”
“He speaks Thai?” asked Calvino, slowly removing his arm from above Marisa’s head. The brother was becoming a more intimidating force by the moment.
“Do you speak Thai?” she asked.
This was a dreaded question. There was speaking Thai and then there was speaking real Thai. Calvino spoke Thai like an Italian working-class immigrant spoke English. “I get the message when someone threatens to kill me,” he said.
Marisa explained how there was something unearthly about watching Juan soak up Thai. He was a language sponge. He nailed the mannerisms, the gestures, and the facial expressions of a Thai, cool and friendly. Juan Carlos had an actor’s talent to transform himself through language. “It’s like having eight brothers in one,” she said. Marisa spoke five languages. “We have our language games. And we use our private codes and secrets in each language. Some people find that strange or annoying. For us, it’s quite natural.”
Calvino resisted the urge to lean over and kiss her but for how long he could, he wasn’t sure. He had a secret code of his own he wanted to share. But she got up and poured him a fresh drink, talking as she poured. “Everyone has a favorite story. Would you like to hear mine?”
He glanced at his watch. Why not? he thought. What else did he have to do but pay McPhail’s hospital bill, face a bitter bar owner named Reno, and proofread a fifteen-page article that General Yosaporn had written about the history of holy water in Thai culture, how it had been taken from India, and how it was different from Western holy water.
“I’d like to hear it,” Calvino said. He used every known facial muscle to not roll his eyes.
Marisa began her story. There was a Spanish naval officer who sailed with Vasco Núñez de Balboa. They set out on the same ship from Spain in 1500. Their journey had one goal: to return to Spain with two tons of pearls from the wilds of the New World. Travel at that time was very dangerous, and the outcome of any mission like this one was uncertain. They journeyed to many exotic places, crossing rivers, hacking through jungles, being attacked by Indians. They walked long expanses of virgin beach. Their divers submerged themselves in the offshore coves but found nothing much in the way of pearls. They discovered that the reports of pearls were nothing but a bar-room boast. But they pushed on, refusing to give up.
Along with other members of Balboa’s crew, the Spanish naval officer crossed the Isthmus of Panama. They were fighting off mosquitoes in a dense rain forest when they were ambushed by local Indians, one of those tribes that specialized in shooting poison darts from a blow tube.
Despite the difficulty of the journey up to this point through dangerous and hostile country, this naval officer had insisted on one thing: that he must always travel with a wooden coffin.
“Why a coffin?” asked Calvino. She had hooked him. After his experience with Apichart, he was a sucker for a coffin story.
“Exactly,” she said. “He was afraid of dying in a strange place. He didn’t want his body abandoned on a jungle path where it would be eaten by wild dogs. In death, he wanted dignity and honor as much as he had wanted it in life. And when he was killed, they buried him in that coffin. They placed a simple white cross above his grave and said prayers. He got the one thing that he’d wished for: not pearls, but a decent burial done with dignity.”
His arm had inched back around her neck. “I have a coffin story. Do you want to hear it?”
“Love to,” she said. The man continued to surprise her.
He told her about General Yosaporn’s deadbeat Chinese-Thai tenant and his coffin trick. He wanted to tell her what had happened with the hit team on the motorcycle, but he thought better of ending the night on a story of violence. He couldn’t imagine that this woman had ever witnessed such a death.
“Do you carry a wooden coffin around?” he asked.
She started to laugh. His story, his question had connected. The ultimate seduction drug was laughter. She laughed until tears came into her eyes. Before she could stop laughing, his arm had moved down with the speed of an anaconda dropping from a tropical tree onto a small deer. Calvino started unbuttoning her blouse. Before he got to the second button, they were both stripping off each other’s clothes. He slipped his arms around her, finding that she returned his embrace. He pushed his tongue against her lips. Marisa returned his kiss. She pulled back and took his hand to lead him into her bedroom. The single-malt whiskey and the bonding of the escape were making her do something she would normally never dream of on a first meeting.
He uncoupled the leather gun holster and laid it on a side table. Her eyes widened as she stared at the gun.
“I have a license.”
“Have you used it?”
“Never in the bedroom.”
“Should I be encouraged?” she asked, switching off the lights.
Calvino slipped out of his trousers and pulled her onto the bed. “To carry around your own coffin.”
Her smile returned. The threat of the weapon had passed.
They fell into silence, touching each other in the dark. The first touch of a stranger’s body, the smell of the city on skin, the smoke from the bar, perfume, scotch with a residue of chicken and sticky rice.
She reached over to a side table, opened a drawer, and took out a lighter. She lit two candles and three sticks of incense. The smell of sandalwood overpowered the other smells, and the flicker of the candle did wonders to hide the wrinkles around the eyes. She brushed her hand against his cheek.
“You’re a nice man,” she said finding his eyes in the candlelight.
“I was clumsy on the platform earlier. I’m out of practice.”
“What do you mean?”
“The things guys say to women they find attractive. The things that make them feel good about themselves, that make the women feel at ease.”
He didn’t have to explain that with yings for hire no smooth-talking was required. The coffin story hadn’t been his idea of fore-play. But it proved that foreplay can never be planned; it has to be improvised—matching his coffin with her coffin and above all making her laugh in the process.
Afterwards, his body lay braced against hers. “No boyfriend?”
She shook her head, which lay on his chest.
Raising her head, she found hi
s eyes in the candlelight. “And you, do you have a wife?”
“No wife.”
“Foreigners usually have a Thai wife.”
“Usually doesn’t mean always.”
She looked over his chest at the holstered gun. “I don’t like guns,” she said.
“Most people don’t.” He thought she looked offended as she turned away. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You don’t understand. I’m not like most people. Not about guns. I know what they can do.”
She was getting more than interesting, a woman with knowledge of what a gunshot inflicts on another human being. There weren’t many women in that category.
“I’d like to hear the gun story,” he said.
Her mother had told her that like her father, Marisa had a stubborn, independent streak. She dyed her hair and kept it short, tying it with red and yellow ribbons. She wore earrings bought from a gypsy in Mexico City who had told her they would always keep her safe. She’d worn them on the beach in Gijón the day a drug warlord from Colombia had been shot no more than three meters from where she stood.
Gijón, Spain—2003
Marisa looked at the open blue sky stretched across the water, their meeting point blurred in a seamless aqua apron. She glanced at her wristwatch as she walked along the quay. It was 5:05 p.m., giving her another five hours of sunshine until the last rays disappeared into the sea. Marisa was in her mid-twenties, carefree and happy—more than happy: radiant, as if the sun had transferred some of its energy to her body. Her head felt light as she moved through the crowd. It was as if she were many years younger. Time had reversed itself and she felt like a teenager, free and wild, as if anything were possible.
She had been reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She hadn’t read it since university and was just beginning to re-enter its remote world. She nibbled on a piece of apple and turned the page. Feeling hot, she put on sunscreen and drank from her water bottle. She laid the book on her blanket and set out to dip her feet in the water. She hadn’t registered the men who were walking toward her. When she did look up, she saw a man’s head explode. Bone, brains, tissue, and blood shot outward. She felt the warmth of blood on her face. When she touched her cheek and looked at her fingers they were sticky red. The headless man crumpled beside the edge of the sea.
The other men—she assumed that they were the dead man’s friends but later learned they were his bodyguards—stood beside him with guns drawn. They knelt beside their fallen comrade, scanning the beach, the quay, the buildings along the beach road. There was no second shot. Most people were unaware of what had happened. Twenty meters away children played. Bathers slept on their blankets, the sun hot on their faces. Only a couple of other people had seen the man die. Her hands outstretched, Marisa dropped to her knees and washed her face in the sea. She splashed the water over and over again as if the stain, the smell, the feel of death wouldn’t leave her.
In the following days, she went back to the location again and again. She isolated the possible locations of the shooter to a half-dozen and gradually reduced those down to one: the corner unit of a building’s seventh floor. The balcony had an unobstructed view of the beach.
Everyone, including Juan Carlos, her father, the police, and even her mother said she had to be mistaken. From that balcony, a shot would have had to carry a distance of over one-thousand meters. She had measured the distance herself. From the balcony to where the man was killed was exactly one thousand, one hundred, and four meters. Blinds covered the windows of the corner unit. No one would have seen the scope, or the spotter next to the sniper watching through high-power binoculars, the two of them scanning the beach until they’d found their man.
She stood before the building of sandstone, the same as the church at marker number two. In front of the building was a bar, Zafiro and Juber Motor. Behind the building was a towering construction crane. Some said the shot might have been fired from the crane. But no one knew. The police learned the dead man was from Colombia and had been linked to the drug business. The Americans had indicted him for cocaine trafficking. But he had never been extradited. The dead man’s mother lived in Gijón, and the son had come home to pay respect to his mother. He died on her sixtieth birthday.
Was what had happened that day like a black swan? No one could say. But, again, in Gijón, everyone agreed that black swans were common.
As she finished her story, Calvino took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry for what happened,” he said.
“In Gijón I was in the wrong place,” she said. “Maybe Bangkok is another wrong place. I don’t know after tonight if there is a right place for me.”
“You don’t forget seeing someone killed.”
“You’ve seen this?”
Calvino sighed, nodding, and kissed her forehead. Then he told her about the ying at the Pattaya hotel and how he’d seen her fall, and about the two motorcycle gunmen who’d died in the soi. “I know how you feel,” he said after he’d finished describing the police investigations into the deaths.
“Our lives are complicated in similar ways,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.” She was looking for reassurance.
“It’s neither good nor bad,” said Calvino. “Some people are connected by friends, neighborhood, and family. Others by the violent acts of strangers.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one these things happen to.”
She was about to kiss him again when she heard Juan Carlos open the door to the condo and walk in.
“Marisa? Are you back?”
He stood in the entrance looking at three pairs of strange shoes, one of them belonging to a man with rather large feet.
Calvino sat up in bed, instinctively reaching for his gun.
“It’s time you met my brother, Juan Carlos.”
“I’d like to get dressed first,” he said.
She started to laugh again, burying her head in the pillow to muffle the sound. From the huge living room, Juan Carlos called to her again, “Marisa!” When he stopped, Marisa knew that Fon and Wan had already crept into the living room. “I am Juan Carlos,” she heard him say with his usual charm. Nothing ever disturbed her brother. He rolled through the waves of life as if he had a gyro system that always kept him even-keeled.
Calvino’s cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He saw that it was McPhail’s number. “Excuse me, but I have to take this call.”
He disappeared back into the bedroom and closed the door. McPhail waited on the line. “Hey, buddy, I just got nineteen stitches. And it takes you five rings to pick up. Nineteen. I counted each one. I guess I’ll play that number on the lotto tomorrow.”
“You did well. I’ll cover the hospital bill.” He could hear the sound of drunks in the background, the slurred voices, hacking coughs, laughter and squeals from a ying.
“I know that. Here’s Reno. He wants to talk to you.”
“Jesus, Calvino, thanks for fucking up my business. The cops want money. McPhail wants an advance to pay the hospital. My lead dancers want a raise after the bloodletting. My mamasan is making a power play to take over the business. And that isn’t even the bad news.” Calvino waited while Reno sucked air. “And I probably lost two of my best customers tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The black guy and his friend. They were becoming regulars. I doubt I’ll see them again after what happened.”
“They didn’t look like men who scare easily,” said Calvino.
Reno ignored the reassurance. In his mind they were history. “I don’t mind helping a friend, Calvino. But you gotta understand I’m running a business, not some half-assed rescue operation.”
Everyone licked their wounds, counted the cost, glanced at the map of power to see what had changed, and trudged back to the bar, waiting for more bad news to find their address.
TWENTY-FOUR
FOLDED INSIDE the tight coil of greater Bangkok, like hidden dimensions of the univ
erse, were other, stranger Bangkoks. Places that farangs never passed. Or if they did, they wouldn’t understand what was in front of their long noses. There were many such places inside Bangkok, places locked in other times, places where even most Thais never ventured.
Calvino found himself in such a place as he was trailing Somporn’s mia noi. She had led him to a hole-in-the-wall in the middle of a self-contained neighborhood of hypnotic ugliness. What the Thais called a moo baan, recreating a small village atmosphere of narrow lanes with big-city three- and four-story row houses, shacks, howling dogs, runny-nosed kids, dust, poverty, and gossip. This moo baan ran along the rim of old Don Muang Airport. Election posters had been plastered on the front of the squalid shop-houses selling rice. Through his car window he stared at the three grinning Thai men in the posters with medals pinned to their suits. It took him a minute to spot that the candidate in the middle was Somporn, who wore a chest full of medals on a white uniform. Thais rotated between top-down coups and bottom-up elected governments. Somporn was hoping to gain leverage once his small political party would be needed to form a coalition government.
Calvino drove ahead, keeping an eye on the gray Camry. As he passed several more of the posters, it seemed like Somporn was following him. He had another look at the photograph. The candidates on the posters followed anyone passing as if tracking them, whispering, “Vote for me.”
Bangkok had the nickname of City of Angels, but few people believed that any angels lived inside the perimeter anymore. No one knew where the angels had gone, but they knew that those who had taken their places were not heavenly creatures. In the old days, the travelers called Bangkok the city of canals, the Venice of the East, but since then most of the canals had been entombed in concrete. More recently, public relations spin masters had come up with the phrase “Land of Smiles,” but like the angels and the canals, smiles had vanished.
Paying Back Jack Page 22