When it came to missing-person clients, almost always a farang found Calvino through an Internet search (as Brad’s parents in Ontario had) or else through a buddy who’d said Calvino was the best private eye in Bangkok. This more flattering route was Osborne’s claim.
Calvino could remember the face of each client who’d leaned forward and with complete sincerity said, basically, “What I have in mind is so simple I’m embarrassed to ask you to take it on. Deliver a birthday card to an old flame of mine.” Or, “Go through this contract and let my Thai partner know if you have any problems.” Or, “My friend is coming to town and wants a bodyguard. It’s just a status thing. He doesn’t need protection; he needs someone who knows the ropes that he can pal around with.”
Yeah, sure. Not one of those cases ever came close to being simple.
Calvino had heard all the top ten client pitches. Any other pitch was just a variation of one of them. There were no new tunes, just new people singing old tunes, not knowing they’d been sung by other farangs in similar situations.
The way Calvino saw it, those tunes were the background music to a movie script that played inside the farang mind. They thought they had it all figured out—beginning, middle and end—like a butcher with a cleaver, starting at the head of the cow and working toward the tail. Whatever the client told him at their first meeting, he’d write it down, but when he looked at it after he’d wrapped up the case, that script never looked anything like the final cut of the movie. If he’d been a film producer, he could have reduced those first meetings and assignment pitches to one line: “People—some good, some not so good—are gonna get killed, and Plan B rolls over and dies in the same muddy, diseased ditch as Plan A.”
And pitch-makers always left something else out—some variation of, “Instead of seeing any money at the end of the case, you’ll get treated to coffee and donuts.”
Instinct whispered into Calvino’s ear to remember that there was a difference between what you could expect from an old hand, as opposed to the farang fresh off the boat. Old hands were the most dangerous clients, he found, because it was all too easy to let his guard down. They forgot they were client and investigator and fell into an easy conversation of friends, asking about people from the old days. Those who’d died. Those who’d had moved back to wherever they’d come from. The ones in hospital, in prison or on the run. Or disappeared in some upcountry village like Brad Morrisey, going native, living like a savage, held hostage by desire and fear, head buzzing with drugs or booze. Their names sounded from an old hand’s roll call of acquaintances from the past. An English writer once said the past is a foreign country. It’s something else, too: a foreign cemetery, with bodies and memories and secrets buried in a common grave.
The morning Colonel Pratt strolled into his office wearing civilian clothes, Calvino had spent close to a week avoiding a decision on taking the assignment to find Alan Osborne’s son, Rob.
Alan Osborne had built one of the most memorable wonders of Bangkok’s nighttime entertainment scene—the Mermaidium, a bar with a glass-walled swimming pool—and filled it with naked girls. On its opening night years ago, Sukhumvit Road had flooded with rain, which hadn’t stopped Calvino, his trousers rolled up to the knees, from sloshing into the bar. By ten o’clock a dozen yings were diving to the bottom of the pool to retrieve coins thrown by customers from the bar. Now, except for the old hands, most farangs hadn’t heard how the water world of the Mermaidium had revolutionized the bar scene in Nana Plaza by fashioning a Houdini, Flipper and Caligula trifecta. Osborne had gone on to commercialize the Garden of Eden as sexual fantasy into a highly successful business empire.
Osborne had been a stern, demanding father who had made his fortune in a tough business and a tough, corrupt neighborhood. Living up to such an example was never easy for a son, especially one who wanted to carve out his place in the music business. Rob played in a local jazz band, and no band was ever going to match the revenue of pimping on a mammoth scale.
“I am a pimp,” said Osborne. “It’s a good, solid business model with a long history of success. My son had me as a role model. I spent a small fortune on his education. I wanted him to join my business. And instead, what does he decide to do? Join a band. He’s nothing more than a glorified street entertainer. No better than a busker panhandling in someone else’s bar. He makes less than a bar girl during her period. People throw coins in a small box he passes around. How is it any different from throwing coins to the girls in the Mermaidium pool?”
Osborne didn’t expect an answer, and Calvino didn’t disappoint him.
Ratana brought him a glass of water.
“You have a little something in your desk drawer to put in this?”
Calvino leaned over, opened his bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He opened the bottle and poured. Osborne stretched his arm forward and pressed a finger on the neck of the bottle.
“Don’t be a Cheap Charlie, Calvino.”
No one ever stopped mentioning to Osborne the health consequences of years of trading food and sleep for cigarettes and single-malt whiskey. It wasn’t that he didn’t know or hadn’t been warned. He didn’t care about life itself as much as he cared about good whiskey, women and cigarettes. Osborne knew that he was dying. If he found a bartender had cheated on the nightly take, he’d shrug and fire her, but with death, what was available except a shrug? She—of course death was a she—could steal his life, rob him blind as he watched her stealing, and there was nothing he could do but rail against the death goddess and finally submit to the thief no man could defeat. Osborne took a long drink from the glass of Johnnie Walker and water.
“My father was born in Burma. His family owned property in Rangoon. He knew George Orwell. The country was under British rule then. Have you read Kipling? Of course, you’re an American. Americans don’t read Kipling. If they did, they’d know that this ‘opening up’ business is all rubbish.”
Sitting his glass down, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Calvino hadn’t known about Osborne’s father having a birth connection to Burma.
“My grandfather was a senior official in the colonial administration. I may be a pimp, but I come from a long line of colonial plunderers.”
“He hasn’t phoned? Emailed?”
Osborne shook his head and took another drink.
“The little bastard’s hiding out in the old family lair. Rob has always caused me fucking problems. While you’re in Rangoon, I want you to check if I still have any claim on the old family property. You were a lawyer. You can find that out, certainly.”
Osborne sat across from Calvino’s desk, smoking. His face was sallow, lined, the skin loose and in puddles like melted wax. Calvino had been waiting for him to raise the real reason he was interested in Burma.
“Hire a Burmese lawyer, Alan.”
His eyes rolled so far as to leave, for a brief moment, two full yellowish moons in his eye sockets.
“Come on, Calvino. They’re useless. No, I need you to investigate. Find him and bring him home. And find out how my father’s house can be returned.”
The only thing more difficult than a missing person case, Calvino thought, was an ex-colonial claim against property confiscated half a century ago. Calvino figured that Osborne knew the score, but knowing the score and accepting it were different things.
“Forget about the property.”
“My son hit me. Did I tell you?”
“You told me.”
“I am an old man. I never hit my father. And he could be a bastard.”
“There’s usually a reason,” said Calvino.
“Money,” said Osborne. “For his band, Monkey Nose. What kind of fucking name is that, I asked him. He hit me.”
The Thais have a saying about the moment when they can no longer avoid butting heads in the same physical space. It is khii-kai ji dang wok, which means sticking chicken shit on a monkey’s nose. The monkey is bound to take offense. It�
�s a primate thing.
Calvino visualized father and son circling each other, each man’s eyes narrowed to slits, jaws clenched, fists clutched into lobster claws as they sized each other up, waiting for the one other to utter a single word—the shit on the nose—that would ignite violence.
Rob wanted his father to front the money so that he could make a video of his band. The problem with naming a band after only half of a proverb is the message may get lost along the way. And Monkey Nose had wandered for years in obscurity, playing in dives before fifty people, most of them talking and drinking, checking their email on cell phones. Obscurity was the shit on the end of an artist’s nose. Alan Osborne had no problem pointing it out to his son.
Rob never got the money. He took a swing at his old man, caught him with a right hook that knocked him back in his chair. A trickle of blood ran down Osborne’s mouth onto his shirt. Rob had hit a man who was dying. Osborne smiled. The punch in the face hadn’t surprised him.
Calvino thought the father might have baited his son, daring him to hit him.
Osborne touched his mouth with the back of his hand, examined the smear of blood, looked up at his son and said, “Piss off. And don’t bother to come around again. My funeral will be invitation only. You’re not on the list. And you’re cut out of my will.”
Osborne had changed his will so many times as to establish prima evidence of mental incapacity to make a will.
The next day, Rob took off with the band’s Burmese lead singer, who had a sexy, smoky voice and wore black stockings, high heels and velvet dresses as she belted out “Mad About the Boy.” Mya Kyaw Thein was twenty-something, with a voice as hot as a boiling cauldron of honey, and a past as murky as a Bangkok klong. Unstable, talented, impulsive and theatrical, after the first song she owned the audience just as she owned Rob Osborne.
After the blowout with the old man, Rob and Mya Kyaw Thein had left Bangkok. No one had heard from them in six days. They’d disappeared into Rangoon. Enough time had now passed that Alan Osborne decided he wanted his son accounted for, and Vincent Calvino was the man for the job.
“It’s more like an audit exercise than any demonstration of paternal affection,” Osborne said.
Roughly translated, the words seemed to mean that having a loose end like Rob, his only son, his flesh and blood, disappear under the carpet in Burma, without his lifting a fatherly finger to find him, wasn’t any good for his reputation. If a man didn’t look after the welfare of his son, how could he be expected to look after his shareholders? These public-relations ramifications hadn’t escaped the old man. Even if the father did nothing, the kid would still cost him money. Osborne wanted to cut his losses. Getting his son back had become a personal fiscal policy.
“Have you tried contacting the girlfriend?” asked Calvino.
Osborne smiled, lit a cigarette, inhaled and took a sip from his whiskey water.
“She’s in Rangoon. If I had a phone number or contact, why would I be sitting here drinking your whiskey and wasting my time?”
“Hire someone in Rangoon. I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him.”
“If I knew someone I trusted in Rangoon, would I be sitting here drinking—”
“Okay, I get your point. Have you talked to anyone in Rob’s band?”
“They’re useless. They can barely find their way home at night. A bunch of cheap drunks who take drugs and live in dreamland. Just like my son.”
“You don’t know anything about the girl’s family in Rangoon?”
“Mya Kyaw Thein. I mean, what kind of name is that for a singer? It sounds vaguely Jewish.”
“I’m half-Jewish.”
“Your name doesn’t sound half-Jewish.”
“The girl, Alan. You know someone who can give you some information?”
Osborne drained the glass.
“I know someone in Bangkok who might be able to help. Will you take the case?”
“I’ll think it over and get back to you.”
Osborne sighed and dragged himself out of the chair.
“What the fuck does that mean? I don’t see a line of clients waiting outside your door. Take a few minutes, then tell me you’ll take the case, and I’ll see you receive a retainer.”
Calvino watched him finish the last sip of whiskey and put the glass down a little too hard on the desk.
“We’ll talk later.”
Osborne wasn’t the kind of man who liked to be kept waiting for an answer. The mention of money hadn’t done the usual trick of accelerating the decision in his favor. It was like pulling the pin on a grenade, throwing it and then waiting as nothing happens. Calvino hadn’t moved an inch. The money grenade landed like a dud.
After Osborne left in a state of advanced annoyance, Ratana waited a couple of minutes before going into Calvino’s office. She found her boss behind his desk, his fingers pressed together in the form of a wai as he watched a gecko crawling on the wall. She could see he was deep in thought. As she came in, the lizard uttered a tiny bark of menace. She looked up at the gecko, staring at its large bright eyes that stared directly back.
“Jingjok tak,” Ratana said.
The office lizard had squawked his verdict on Alan Osborne.
“It is a warning, Khun Winee,” she said.
He’d heard the squawk, too. He studied his secretary. She had graduated with a law degree from Ramkhamhaeng University. She’d lived in England. Travel broadens some minds; others, it closes down a lane. In Ratana’s case he felt it wasn’t possible to slip a piece of paper between her beliefs and those of a rice farmer’s daughter from Issan. Messages from house lizards weren’t something she’d picked up in school or abroad.
“Since when does a jingjok decide who I take on as a client?”
Ratana was ready with her answer when the lizard on the opposite side of the partition hit another two-chord melody. If someone had sworn to have heard the name “Alan” in that noise, Calvino wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow.
“If you don’t believe, you can’t say there wasn’t a warning,” she said.
He had long ago accepted that his business model as a private investigator in Bangkok needed to incorporate spirit house offerings, lizard and gecko yammering, fortune tellers’ predictions of auspicious days and times, and Chinese readings of faces and head shapes before any decision could be made. Adapting to crazy beliefs wasn’t that difficult, Calvino had found; the day soon came when they no longer seemed crazy. That was the day Calvino started worrying about how you could ever climb back up that cliff once you’d fallen over it.
At the bottom of that cliff was a house lizard. He talked to you. The Thais have an expression: Jingjok tak. The house lizard has a voice, and his advice is a factor not to be ignored. It comes from an old superstition that if a person comes to the house suggesting a plan or project, and the lizard talks, the wise man understands that the cosmos is using the lizard to tell him to avoid the plan. Like the chicken shit on the monkey’s nose routine, Calvino had found that house lizard yammering was a cultural message people took seriously. He’d learned that in Thailand, to survive, you needed to have a guidebook to animals and their shit.
Calvino had spent the better part of week avoiding a decision on taking Osborne’s case. Osborne had been in Thailand a long time, and that Thai lizard may have known something about him that was worth considering. But now that Colonel Pratt had come around with his plans for a trip to Rangoon, Ratana was singing a different tune.
“The jingjok changed its mind about Khun Alan,” she said. “He remained quiet after the Colonel left. It’s his way of saying you should take Alan’s case.”
The best thing about superstitions, Calvino thought, is their vast adaptability to the changing moods of the people who believe them.
“Let me get this straight. The jingjok barks. Don’t go to Rangoon. He doesn’t bark, it means go to Rangoon.”
A radiant smile crossed her face.
“That’s what I tell my
mother I love about you. Khun Winee understands Thai culture just like a Thai.”
He’d received worse insults but couldn’t think of one at that moment.
Later that afternoon a messenger arrived with a package from Alan Osborne. Calvino opened it. Inside were two books—a volume of collected essays by George Orwell and another volume containing the collected poetry of Rudyard Kipling—along with a handwritten note from Osborne. Calvino read the note: Forget about the guidebooks on Burma. Read Orwell and Kipling, and you’ll understand something about Burma. It was Osborne’s way of apologizing without ever saying he was sorry.
FOUR
Le Chat Noir
WITH A MISSING person case, the place to start is his friends. When someone goes off the grid, they often talk about it long before they act on it. Musicians in a band have a tight bond. It was as good a place as any to start.
Calvino stood at the entrance to a bar, studying a poster of the Monkey Nose band taped to the sliding glass door. Some design had gone into making it, drawing on Théophile Steinlen’s poster for Le Chat Noir circa 1896. Around a large black cat, five members of the band smiled into the camera: Rob Osborne, Mya Kyaw Thein, and three others—two Thais and a farang—whom he’d come to pump for information about the missing lead singer and electric bass guitar player. The portraits were all back lighting and attitude. Mya Kyaw Thein, lips parted a few inches from a handheld mike, wore a black vest over a white T-shirt and cargo pants, her long dark hair falling to her shoulders. The men members wore T-shirts and jeans. Frozen in that youthful posture where attitude mattered as much as music, they held their instruments in the play position.
Le Chat Noir was the place where drunks, drifters, the lost, crackheads, prostitutes, smugglers, bums, poets, musicians, singers and voyeurs from the straight world went out for a night of walking on the wild side. The non-voyeurs actually lived on the wild side and slept while the other world went to their offices, desks, factories and shops.
Missing In Rangoon Page 3