Rob butted the gun hand of the man seated next to him. A shot from the 9mm shattered the windshield to the right of Calvino’s head. The other goon jammed his elbow into Rob’s side. He screamed in pain. The gunman held the 9mm with both hands, looking for movement in the front seat. Calvino stayed absolutely still. Just as he squeezed the trigger, Rob kneed the shooter’s gun hand. The 9mm kicked, blew a hole through the front seat. The sound of firecrackers outside masked the shots. Calvino had dropped to the floor.
In the dark, Calvino found what he was looking for. He used the space between the driver’s seat and the seats in the back to make his move. Violence happens in seconds that seem to take an eternity to pass. Calvino squeezed off two rounds, hitting the shooter in the chest. He slumped against Rob, who used him as a shield against the surviving thug, who’d pulled out his own gun and was now looking to shoot Rob. The second thug then emptied two shots into the front seat, inches above Calvino. His gun jammed, and Calvino sat up, leaned through space between the seats and shot the gunman twice in the head.
A moment passed.
“You okay, Rob?”
Nothing came from the back seat but a long empty silence punctured by gongs and cymbals and drums from the street outside. The scent of fresh blood rose from the bodies and filled the Lexus with the gut-retching smell as it combined with the gore and gunpowder. Rob had blood smeared on his beard, face, neck, shirt and pants. He looked like a slaughterhouse worker who’d just ended a double shift.
“Christ, you killed them!” he said, sitting between two dead men. Blood seeped into the dead men’s clothing from their wounds.
“I asked if you’re okay.”
Rob nodded, the color drained from his face. Shaking, he pushed the body from his lap, leaning it against the side window.
“You hear them speaking Thai?” Calvino asked.
The kid had gone into shock. His ears still hadn’t cleared from the guns going off in the confined space. His mouth opened, but this time nothing came out. He had that glazed-eye look of someone in shock.
“You’ll have to tell me what that was about when I can hear again,” said Calvino.
Inside his head a thousand drum band played the close-range 9mm bogey.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Calvino.
Calvino shoved the door open on the driver’s side. Next, he popped the glove compartment, grabbed the papers inside and stuffed them in his pocket, and climbed out. He walked around the front of the Lexus, memorized the license plate number and circled the vehicle to check the perimeter before opening the back door. He waited until another group of dragon dancers had passed, their sound still muffled in his head. His ears felt like they were stuffed with sticky rice and cotton. He didn’t hear the 250cc motorcycle that pulled to within a foot of the door. He had his Walther in his hand and was about to raise it when the motorcycle rider removed her helmet. The Black Cat saw the gun.
“It’s me,” she said.
He could see that and holstered the handgun.
“Can you take two on the back of that thing?”
She had left the table right after Calvino and gone to her Honda, parked twenty meters away.
“Is Rob okay?” she asked.
“Ask him yourself,” he said, pulling Rob out of the back seat.
He was a mess—bloody and muttering, shaking his head like a crazy man. He swallowed like a man trying to clear his ears on a long-haul flight. But the main outcome was Rob Osborne had survived. He was no longer missing.
“Rob, get on,” she said.
Calvino helped him as he struggled to lift one leg over the motorcycle. Rob wrapped his arms around her waist and leaned his head on her back.
“You want to take him to your place?” asked Calvino.
She shook her head. “That won’t work. Get on, we’ll take him to your place.”
There was no time for argument. Calvino got on and gave directions to the guesthouse around the corner from the Savoy Hotel.
The Black Cat in her red silk Chinese costume steered her Honda Dream through another group of dragon dancers. To Calvino the sound of their drums and gongs seemed to be a long way off, but the drummers were only a few feet away. They left the Lexus behind in the shadows and finally in the dark as the motorcycle gathered speed. The night air felt cool on their faces. The sounds of the traffic seemed indistinct against the ringing echo of gunfire that bounced off deep edges inside Calvino’s brain.
Something had gone sideways faster than the fingers of a katoey pickpocket on a crowded, dark street. But the kid was alive. He was alive. And the sweet scent of the night filled Calvino’s lungs with the freshness and renewal of a man who was glad to have survived himself. His ears started to clear. He had the giddy feeling of having walked out of a firefight alive. Nothing was ever sweeter than the moment of feeling the pulse of life when, by the law of averages, it should have stopped.
Rob had gone missing for a reason. That didn’t matter now. He had him on the bike.
In missing person cases, he knew, there is always a reason—money, mental illness, anger or hurt. Or someone has got into something way over his head and people with guns have called his hand. But there was plenty of time later for reasons, he decided, as the heady experience of sheer life amazed and conquered all else.
FOURTEEN
Dreaming of Electric Eels Hatched from Mooncakes
CALVINO HAD GONE up to his room first to pull a shirt from his suitcase. Returning downstairs, he used the shirt to cover up Rob, who leaned against the motorcycle in the driveway. Showing up covered in blood would have invited a police report.
Inside the lobby the old woman at the reception desk watched them come through the door.
“Motorcycle accident,” said Calvino.
The receptionist noticed the ghost-like whiteness of Rob’s face.
“Does he need a doctor?”
“He’s fine,” said Calvino.
Mya Kyaw Thein said something in Burmese about how someone had cut in front of the motorcycle, but his condition wasn’t serious. He’d only been shaken up. That seemed to satisfy the receptionist, who studied Rob over her glasses. She returned to reading a book, the Georgette Heyer novel Death in the Stocks.
“My secretary thought Andrew Vereker deserved to die,” said Calvino.
The old woman glanced up from the book.
“Lots of people deserve to die, but the ones who deserve it are rarely the victims,” she said, displaying a command of English found in Bangkok five star hotels.
Once they entered his room, Calvino switched on the light and pointed to the bathroom door, telling Mya Kyaw Thein to take him inside and clean him up. She started to say something but stopped herself. Taking orders from anyone wasn’t something she was used to. Whatever the emotions brewing inside, she let the moment pass and led Rob into the bathroom and washed his face, pushing his head down to the sink. She wiped his neck with a towel as they emerged. Most of the blood had been cleaned away. But his clothes still smelled of fresh blood and gunpowder. The bruises on one cheek and the busted nose looked bad. Rob sat on the room’s one chair.
“Cool,” he said as he looked around him, blinking, fidgeting with his hands and groaning from the kidney punches. “I’m basically okay.”
The room had twin beds with threadbare sheets and pillows, flattened and yellow, and old headboards that looked like teak. The room was a dump, but it pleased Rob, who’d been sleeping rough in the basement of an abandoned house—Rob’s last address in Rangoon. He’d been on the run, and it had been a good place to hide out.
“You sure you don’t want to take him home with you?”
Mya Kyaw Thein glanced at Rob and back at Calvino.
“I can’t. My mother and my brother and sister don’t know I have a boyfriend.”
“Probably not a good idea, then,” said Calvino.
Rob had taken off Calvino’s shirt and dropped it on the floor. His own, blood-splattered shirt certainly would
n’t have given the right impression to the Black Cat’s family.
Calvino flicked a switch, setting the blades of the overhead fan to rotate slowly.
“Make yourself at home.”
“I haven’t slept in a real bed for a week,” Rob said. “Ask Mya.”
He was one of those men with the habit of referring to his girlfriend or wife for confirmation, as if a simple fact could never otherwise be accepted as true.
“A week is a long time to be hiding out in a city you don’t know,” said Calvino.
“I managed. Thanks to Mya. Isn’t that right, Mya?”
The Black Cat squeezed his shoulders.
“You’re safe now. That’s what matters.”
“Am I?” he asked, looking up at her.
She nodded, brushing the back of her hand against his cheek as he purred like a cat.
With a sigh, Calvino recalled the luxury hotel he’d left. It was as if he’d taken an elevator down to the basement while Rob had gone from the basement to the penthouse. Only the two destinations were the same place. Everything depends on where a man’s elevator has brought him from, Calvino thought ruefully.
“You saved my life,” Rob said.
“That’s right. I did,” said Calvino, unscrewing the cap of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.
Pouring himself two fingers, he raised the glass toward the two of them.
“Here’s to being alive.”
He threw the full storm into the back of his throat and swallowed.
“My father drinks whiskey like that. Neat, in one go.”
Calvino eyed him as he refilled his glass.
“No-stopping-to-breathe drinking,” said Calvino.
“I never heard binge drinking called that before.”
“Now you have.”
Rob’s nerves showed in his hands. Calvino watched him play with a lighter, the cigarette in his mouth bouncing up and down with his hand, doing a tango. The Black Cat helped him light the cigarette.
“You’ve got a real hang-up about your old man,” said Calvino.
Rob took a long drag on the cigarette, sucking in a lung of smoke before handing it to Mya Kyaw Thein, who helped herself before passing it back.
“If I’m going to stay in this room with you,” said Rob, “I want one thing understood. I don’t want to talk about my father. Are you okay with that?”
“Is that so?”
Calvino looked at his glass, then back at the kid.
“Why don’t you tell me about the men who jumped you tonight? What are you mixed up with that makes a couple of Thais want to kill you in Rangoon?”
Rob shrugged, his head lolled against Mya Kyaw Thein. Two cats rubbing against each other set off the purring sound that came from Rob’s throat.
Then Calvino could see that Rob’s adrenaline had kicked in again. His mind had flashed back to the Lexus, to getting beat up and watching two men get shot.
“Hands still shaking?” he asked.
It wasn’t really much of a question. Hands answered for themselves.
“How about we call your old man? You tell him you’ve decided to stay in Rangoon to finish up some business. When that’s done, you’ll phone him again.”
The bass guitar player for Monkey Nose had a fresh streak of blood leaking out of his nose. He looked like a suicide bomber who, after setting off the bomb, had through a miracle walked out of the rubble.
“Do it, Rob. Go back to Bangkok. Get Alan off your back. Sooner or later, it’s the only way, baby.”
Rob watched as Calvino phoned his old man.
“Alan, I got someone who wants to talk to you.”
Calvino held out the phone. Rob licked his lips, his hands trembling. He stared at the cell phone the same way he’d stared at the gun earlier that evening. It was hard to tell what part of him hadn’t been traumatized. He glanced over at Mya Kyaw Thein, who gestured at the phone and then back at Calvino. He could hear his old man’s voice coming out of the speaker.
“I don’t have all fucking day. Are you there?”
The kid sighed long and hard, took another puff of the cigarette and glanced at the door as if he was going to bolt. Calvino stepped in front of the door—though, really, what were the chances of the kid running out the door and disappearing in the street? About the same as Cherry Mann getting a Michelin star, a blind, barefoot Chinese lawyer appointed to the United States Supreme Court or Calvino winning a 10K race against two US embassy marines. Rob was bluffing. He stalled for time, praying his old man would hang up, staring at the phone as Alan’s voice spewed out a steady stream of threats and insults, tiny and distant as if from an echo chamber. Trapped. First into going to a meeting at Cherry Mann, then muscled inside a Lexus by thugs and now stranded in a run-down guesthouse with Calvino and the Black Cat waiting for him to take the phone. Rob saw with clarity that he had no place to run.
He took the phone from Calvino and raised it to his ear.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Just hanging out. Mya and me have some business to finish. When that’s done, I’ll give you a ring.”
Calvino finally broke into a smile, raised his glass.
“What’s the doctor say?” Rob continued. “They said you had a year over a year ago. Like you always said, what do those quacks know? Right. I gotta go.”
He handed the phone back to Calvino.
“He’s no longer missing, Alan. What I mean is my job’s done. If he goes to Bangkok, that’s up to him. You’ll have to work that out with Rob.”
He didn’t wait for Alan to react. He terminated the call and slipped the cell phone into his jacket pocket.
Calvino reached for the Johnnie Walker bottle as he perched on the edge of one of the twin beds. He listened to the tap leaking in the bathroom. The rhythm of the drops filled the void. They’d shifted down from an accelerated pounding of the heart to second gear, finding a speed slow enough to turn the corner and ponder what to do next, where to go and how to play out what had taken place.
“What happens when the police find those two men?” asked Rob.
“Will they come looking for you?” asked Calvino. “Not likely. Still if I were you, I’d think Bangkok might be a better place to be.”
“I didn’t kill them.”
“They planned to kill you.”
Rob pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek—one side, then the other—as he thought about what had happened in the Lexus.
Men like the two Calvino had killed always had stories—contradictory, sad, dangerous, punctured with the usual laughter and joy. The police would examine the bodies and write an ending for their stories, but in Calvino’s experience police write-ups usually left out the most important things about the dead person. Police reports everywhere, he thought, are pretty much variations of the same story: victim drove up the wrong side of the hill at night and slammed into a semitrailer with its lights off. Two gunshot deaths in Chinatown on New Year’s would offer the cops a laundry list of convenient theories to choose from: gambling debt, drugs, gangland dispute or robbery. In Thailand, the police always seemed to advance two theories in such deaths: personal conflict or business conflict.
The Black Cat rocked Rob’s head back and forth as she sat on the edge of one of the beds. She looked like a dragon dancer nurse’s aide.
“You sure you don’t want a drink?” asked Calvino, holding up the bottle.
She shook her head.
“I saw how you looked at Pratt’s groupie,” she said.
“And how did I look?”
“Interested. Jealous.”
“Kati is too high-maintenance.”
“Every man at the restaurant wanted her. You’re saying you didn’t?”
“As a woman, you’ll understand the difference between being wanted and being maintained.”
As he said it, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing over at Rob, who clung to her.
Calvino let it ride because it didn’t matter what she thought. He raised his
glass to drink and then snapped his fingers until he had Rob’s full attention. He was done playing along with them and their little act of mutual comfort, fear and sorrow.
“Tonight isn’t really about Kati or Pratt or me. It’s about two dead thugs who got themselves killed on their way to kill you. Why don’t we stop singing the daddy-hates-me blues and talk about what the two of you are doing to piss off important people? I don’t think it’s your song selection. Tell me, what is it? Which one of you wants to start with something called the truth? Reach down. It’s inside you, though you haven’t taken it out in some time. Start tonight. Start now.”
Like most stories involving a Lexus, two thugs and guns, the story came down to money and power. As in every part of Asia, the money god exacted a price for salvation, which was what true believers call payday. The idea of unsubscribing from the ruling system, going down and out with Henry Miller, had been a noble, romantic notion sixty years ago. Since then, nobility and romance had lost their virginity and become streetwalkers.
The Black Cat opened up first, and as she talked, Calvino thought he understood how a few artists had an ability to go deep down into where their demons hatched plans and pull them up to the surface, wailing and shrieking. She was taking him to that place.
“My grandfather, who owned a bookstore in Rangoon, was a good friend of Yadanar Khin’s grandfather. Yadanar Khin’s grandfather was a military man. He rose through the ranks to become a general. My grandfather had a different karma. He was arrested and thrown in jail, where he died. Yadanar Khin’s father, like his father before him, became a soldier. He was promoted to be a general and now is a minister in the government. His family is rich. Mine is poor. We needed money for my brother. Rob tried to help. His father refused, even though Alan Osborne’s father had known my grandfather and had been a regular at his bookstore.”
She gestured toward the Johnnie Walker bottle, and Calvino poured her a glass. The Black Cat sipped from the glass and put it to Rob’s lips. He took a swig.
Missing In Rangoon Page 18