“If you want to work for me to find the Black Cat’s mother, that can be arranged,” he said as she turned around.
She had the confused look of someone who wasn’t sure what she’d heard.
“Work for you?”
“Were you working for Reynolds… the guy with the P-40?”
“You thought that?”
“He might have assumed that from you bringing me to the table.”
“Missing persons, missing planes. I thought he might interest you.”
“Wet laundry isn’t that interesting,” he said.
She had a careless way of being in the world. It troubled him that she failed to understand what is truly worth looking for when it goes missing. Calvino called the confusion the wet laundry fallacy. A person dumped a lump of wet laundry at the door and asked him to believe freshly pressed shirts and pants on hangers had been delivered. He could never trust the judgment of such a person.
“What if I did it as a favor? Like helping out a friend,” she said.
Calvino watched her eyes as they stared back at him.
In the mutual mauling, the sex had buried all restraint, shyness, caution and civility. The post-sex intimacy had now flooded over both of them. But the thing about intimacy was that a man’s idea of what was in the realm of the possible mostly missed the woman’s target by a mile. For instance, about the worst thing Calvino could have said was, “Close the curtains on your way out.” Practical though the request would have been, it would have said far too much—that flooding of sunshine on a strange woman’s face while his mind tried to remember her more alluring countenance in the boozy darkness of the night before.
For a woman, Calvino thought, what she said and what he said before making love no longer exist after the deed is done. Those words are dead and gone to the past, where they should stay buried. What matter to her are the words that come afterward, the kind of words a woman can set to music and sing. And a job offer to find the mother of a talented and sexy woman who held men in thrall wasn’t the kind of overture Bianca was interested in.
“You volunteer to help a lot of people you don’t know,” he said.
She stared at him, making him feel the sting.
“I only wanted to help Reynolds,” she said. “Is that a sin?”
“Where’s your cross, by the way? The one you usually wear around your neck.”
The deflection caused her to touch her throat. She’d rattled him and he’d bucked back as if he’d taken a hard right hook.
“Are you always on the job?” she asked.
She was right. He was always on the job. Even in bed, the sex had only temporarily substituted itself for the case. He was always working on a case. It was what made him a good PI. It was how he found people who’d gone missing. But it also made him a lousy human being. Most of the time he avoided facing the brutal reality of his nature. Bianca, with the sunburned cross on her throat, had nailed him on the first day they’d gone to bed.
“People have feelings,” she said to break the silence.
“It was a crazy idea. I shouldn’t have asked you. I forget the Italian word for asshole.”
“Testa di cazzo!”
“That means dickhead. I remember that from my grandfather.”
She laughed.
“He called you that?”
“No. Maybe once or twice. Mostly he used it to describe a neighbor in Florence. Like that guy who was looking for someone to be his partner in the P-40 scam. My grandfather would have called that asshole testa di cazzo.”
She kissed his chest.
“I’ll look for the mother tomorrow,” she said. “Now tell me about Thailand. About your life.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you have a wife?”
Calvino grinned, stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. It was such a European question. Not “Are you married?” but “Do you have a wife?”
“That’s one missing person I’ve never been able to find.”
“Have you been looking in the wrong places?”
“I live in a wrong place for a wife.”
“Bangkok,” she whispered, as if that explained everything.
In a way it did.
He liked her. She was quick and bright, and had soft skin, tender lips and flashing dark eyes that locked like a predator watching its prey. He liked the missing cross on the throat of a sinner. They’d made love listening to jazz on her iPad. One of those twenty-four hour all-jazz stations.
“You’re thinking about your case again,” she said, watching his eyes.
“I’m thinking about what happened in the bar last night. The guys in the band, and how Mya Kyaw Thein appeared out of nowhere and made the whole place stop talking for twenty minutes. About how a few people have vast wealth and can do whatever they want.”
He was also thinking about something he didn’t want to talk about—had Yadanar Khin, son of a Burmese general and government minister, a keyboard player looking for his shot at the musical big time, told Colonel Pratt that the Black Cat would appear? If Yadanar had been surprised by her sudden appearance on stage, he hadn’t looked it. Why was that? After the show, the Colonel had stayed on to talk to Yadanar. Calvino had gone back to the hotel with Bianca and Anne. Anne had gone to her room, and Bianca had gone to his.
She brushed her hand across his face. “You are the quiet one. Missing Bangkok?”
“I always miss Bangkok,” he said.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t make you forget for one night.”
He reached over for the bottle of wine in an ice bucket, found his glass and filled it.
“Take a drink of this. It’s my prescription for forgetting.”
She sipped from his glass.
“Take a big drink,” he said.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Wine puts a woman in the mood to tell the truth.”
“And for a man?”
“His lies become easier for him to believe.”
She drank again. Calvino refilled the glass and put the bottle back in the ice bucket.
“What kind of lies do you tell in Bangkok?”
“Mine are small-change deceptions. It’s the ultra-rich who swindle and lie in a class of their own. In Bangkok, when a powerful man builds his big house, he has the builders draw blueprints for secret underground rooms. You see these mansions upcountry or in Bangkok, and you think, these people have some serious money. And that’s right, but where is it? Stashed in underground rooms. The generals, the big-shot politicians and the cops use bank accounts only for depositing their salaries. You look at their bankbook and it doesn’t look like this is someone hogging a huge piece of the pie. But what you’re seeing there is the crumbs. The real wealth is inside Mother Earth. You win wars by tunneling underground. You hide your wealth there. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle because everyone is looking above the surface. That’s the kind of lie that wine speaks about.”
They lay side by side, listening to John Coltrane’s Psalm album.
“How do you know I’m not after you for your room?”
Calvino finished the glass of wine.
“I hope that’s the case.”
“What do you mean?”
“As long as I have a room with a view, it means you’ll keep coming back.”
She kissed him long and hard and wet on the lips.
NINE
When a Facebook Friend Goes Rogue
ACCROSS THE TERRACE a Korean couple stood in the shallow end of the pool on either side of their two-year-old, teaching him how to swim. The kid looked tired, cranky as he kicked his legs. His mother shouted encouragement in Korean, while the father held a hand under his child’s belly, guiding him slowly forward. Calvino and Pratt had been sitting on the terrace, at a table littered with papers, for nearly an hour. They knew the family were Korean because, passing their table, the father had held up a piece of paper and said, “The MOU has been approved in Seoul by m
y boss.”
As Calvino watched the businessman in the pool with his wife and kid, he said to Colonel Pratt, “The old hands don’t call a memorandum of understanding an MOU anymore.”
“What do they call it?” asked the Colonel.
“MOM.”
“You want me to ask what that means?”
“Memorandum of mis-understanding. The script for the later drama. They call that drama ‘MOM.’ It’s like when you were a kid, and you’d run to your mom and tell her you’d been cheated, and she’d say, ‘Didn’t I tell to stay out of that neighborhood and not to trust that boy?’”
Hotel guests wandered out from the dining room, balancing large white plates heaped with eggs, beans, bacon and hash browns. Stopping, they scanned the terrace for a place to sit. None of them approached the table where Calvino and Pratt sat. The two men gave off a serious “Don’t interrupt” vibe.
At that early hour, only diehard businessmen, soldiers of fortune and fanatics had emerged for breakfast, heads bent over a cell phone or an iPad. They had the same crook of the neck and hunched shoulders as the women at the bar the previous night. No one took much notice of the private investigator and the police colonel from Bangkok. The one notable detail was that neither of them held anything with a screen on it. Two middle-aged men slipping between conversation and silence with no electronic device at hand suggested a social situation that was somehow unsettling.
“You think that kid will ever learn to swim?” asked Calvino.
The Colonel had continued to watch the determined Korean couple.
“Sink or swim. What choice does he have?”
Thai parents would have taken their kid out of the pool after a few splashes and laughs.
“I need to know something, Pratt.”
The Colonel set down his coffee cup as the waiter arrived to refill it.
“I didn’t know,” the Colonel said.
A moment passed.
“How did you know what I was going to ask you?”
“Because it’s what I’d have asked you if I were looking for someone and she showed up to sing in a band you were playing with. But I was as surprised as you.”
“You think she’s involved in the cold pill business?”
Pratt shrugged.
“I don’t know. It’s possible of course, but unlikely. What does she bring to the party? She’s a singer, and a talented one. She’s political too. That type is too idealistic for this kind of criminal activity.”
The dozen or so tables on the terrace were clustered just far enough apart for private conversation. Around the two visitors from Thailand, middle-aged presidents and vice presidents handed each other their business cards, drank their coffee and checked their email. They Skyped a boss at company headquarters sitting in a time zone where it was night, and somewhere nearby jazz bands played and bartenders poured drinks as couples shifted around the dance floor or slipped away to a hotel room to strip off their clothes. But the company never slept, never had sex, never got tired. It was never satisfied.
“Did you find out anything interesting from Yadanar?” Calvino asked.
“About the girl?”
Calvino’s head bobbed like a boxer.
“The girl, your cold pill case…”
“I didn’t want to push him. A saxophone player asks one kind of question, and a cop asks another. He’s the kind of keyboard player who’d notice the difference.”
The world’s companies had sent their men to Burma. They sat on the terrace all around Calvino and Pratt, reporting their impressions, loading and dumping data.
“How did you leave it with him?”
“I’m invited back. This time I get my solo.”
Company men were awake in the Myanmar Time Zone, and all of them knew their place in the network, linked, talking, filtering information about deals, money and competitors. Businessmen drank their coffee and eyed spreadsheets, financial statements and contracts while fueling up with hotel buffet food. Only the tourists at one table ate the Asian-style breakfast—rice soup with bits of pork and vegetables—slurping it audibly. But they were Chinese and that was to be expected.
“Meaning he doesn’t expect the Black Cat to return?”
“You could read it that way. Or he might not know.”
Calvino’s cell phone rang. He removed it from his jacket pocket and answered the call from a time zone half an hour away. Thailand.
Ratana’s voice came through from Bangkok as a uniformed waiter offered more coffee. Colonel Pratt was slicing watermelon with a knife and fork while, out of the corner of his eye, watching some crows near the now-deserted swimming pool. The Korean couple and their kid had gone. That left the birds to hop forward, inching their way to an abandoned table littered with buns from the buffet. Someone had left them in tattered shreds, as if they’d been using them as worry beads.
“You’re at the office early,” Calvino said. Catching Pratt’s eye, he said, “It’s Ratana.”
“I’m at home. I’ve been online checking Facebook and Twitter.”
Calvino took a bit of cold toast.
“You’d fit right in here,” he said.
“Before you say that, you should listen.”
“I’m listening.”
He chewed on the toast.
“I read a personal message on Facebook from a friend. It was disturbing.”
Calvino sighed, took a drink of coffee, noticing that Colonel Pratt was displaying one of his knowing smiles. One of the crows had snatched a piece of bun and flown up to a huge tree ten meters away in the hotel garden.
Calvino had previously told the Colonel how Ratana had discovered Facebook and suddenly found herself with thirteen hundred “friends.” They posted pictures of their food, their gardens, beaches they were on, new shoes, children, friends and themselves, and announced where they were at any moment. People like that never went missing. Calvino expected that one of these “friends” had sent her a message about Koh Samui, the vacation paradise in the south, because he’d told her that after he returned from Rangoon he’d take her and John-John, her six-year-old son, there on a long weekend. It was as good a way as any to spend some of the money Alan Osborne was paying him to find his son. He figured she’d asked her Facebook pals for travel advice.
“You found a resort in Samui?”
“I’ll read the message. ‘Hi, everyone. I’m in Rangoon where I met a stallion of a Bangkok PI. He asked me to help him out on a missing person case. Wow, I get to play a James Bond girl. How cool is that? Working undercover.’”
One of the other crows flew close to the table with the deconstructed buns, eyeing another piece. A waiter shooed it away and cleaned the table.
“Something wrong, Vincent?” the Colonel asked.
The color had drained from Calvino’s face.
“I’m glad you told me.”
“Be careful, Khun Vinny. The woman’s name is Bianca.”
“I know,” he said.
“She also posted photos with a young Thai guy on the beach. They looked to be more than just friends. He had his arm around her waist.”
The edge of disappointment and worry turned her voice into a blade that cut his breakfast appetite.
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“Bianca has over three thousand friends on Facebook. And they have friends, who have friends of their own. You’ll have to tell Colonel Pratt.”
“I get the picture. I’ve got a problem.”
He looked at Pratt as the Colonel lifted his coffee cup toward the waiter.
“So does Colonel Pratt.”
He closed his eyes.
“Let’s hear it.”
“This Bianca also said the Bangkok PI’s friend played saxophone at the 50th Street Bar last night. She said he’s a Thai cop.”
“Keep an eye on your messages, and phone me if she posts anything else.”
In the back of his brain the tune of “Big Mistake” was playing to the accompaniment of an
alto saxophone. It was a melody that wasn’t going anywhere but a blind alley.
“What should I reply to my friend?” she asked.
“Right now, don’t reply. Keep quiet.”
“That’s not how friends treat each other’s messages.”
“You can make it up to her later. Trust me. Don’t say anything. I’ll talk to Pratt.”
The call ended as Calvino looked across at the Colonel, who couldn’t help but read the distress in the American’s normally confident face. The crash and burn of self-esteem made someone like Calvino blink.
“You look like you have a problem.”
Calvino’s face never lied.
“It’s possible.”
Calvino told the Colonel about Bianca’s Facebook posting. The Colonel remembered Bianca from the first day in the lobby where they’d waited for Saxon. She and her friend Anne had a heated argument with the assistant manager. Pratt never forgot a confrontation.
“Bianca went back to your room last night?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“She came in for a drink. How did you know it was a woman problem?”
“Wild guess. And Manee phoned me before we came down. She had just talked to Ratana.”
Calvino shook his head.
“You’ve known all morning and didn’t say anything?”
“I was thinking about saying something when Ratana phoned.”
“Last night I saw all these women working their iPhones, but did I connect that with me? No. I thought, look at those guys, what suckers. Idiots hanging around women checking them out online. And what do I do? I take one of them to my room. If we’d done it on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium, I’d have had an idea there was an audience watching.”
“There is no privacy anymore, Vincent.”
Calvino twisted the blade of the butter knife between his thumb and index finger.
“I can’t stay here. Not after this.”
“I’ve already looked into changing hotels. But it’s not possible,” Colonel Pratt said. “There are no vacant rooms.”
Missing In Rangoon Page 11