“I was having problems raising money for my brother,” Mya explained to Calvino. “Rob went to his father. The bastard wouldn’t help even though he was filthy rich. Rob said he’d help out Somchai. Only it turned out, Somchai didn’t want Rob for bringing back a few pills. He wanted him making a couple of regular runs each month. Rob thought about it and told Somchai he wasn’t interested. Next thing, someone tried to kidnap Rob. I think Somchai wants to kill him.”
“What kind of business was Somchai running?”
“Cold pills. He said there was no problem. ”
“No problem? Then why the need to smuggle them into Thailand?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You’re saying Yadanar found a way out of the mess for Rob?”
She got up from the stool and walked around the counter, stopping in front of Calvino.
“You don’t want to get too far into this. It’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“Yadanar said, ‘If I fix this, you’ll sign an exclusive with me.’ He owns me for a year. Rob kicks free of his problem.”
“Rob isn’t taking it well,” said Calvino. “He asked me to pick up a book about dreams. The one you said you were writing.”
“I’m still working on it,” she said. “Every night there’s more material.”
In Mya’s dream she saw Rob looking out a window at a blank wall and seeing himself with Monkey Nose playing back at the club. No singer, just three guys trying to get through a set with the audience talking and forgetting they were playing.
Calvino left five dollars for the biography on Chekhov and slipped the book in his jacket. It would give Rob something to read and think about until Calvino could get him back to Bangkok.
“Does Rob know that you and Yadanar are cousins?”
“At first he was relieved,” she said. “But it didn’t last.”
Another man might be competition for the affections of a woman, but a man who was part of the family and who wanted much more could never be defeated. Calvino started to understand why Rob had dropped the acid and saw fantastic visions. Psychologically, he’d always been better suited to live in the demimonde of Henry Miller’s world—his father’s world—only to discover he’d been isolated, left struggling inside a Dorian Gray underworld, chased by murderers.
TWENTY
A Windowless Room on 42nd Street
IT WAS AFTER 2:00 in the morning when Calvino quietly unlocked the door to his room at the guesthouse and slipped inside. Before he found the light switch on the wall, an old, foul smell mugged him in the dark. He kicked the door closed behind him and moved to the side. Like most flophouses at night, the room floated in near darkness, black enough for any occupant to qualify as legally blind. He reached inside his jacket, pulled out the Walther and crouched low, listening and waiting for his eyes adjust. Nothing moved. He heard pipes rumbling in the ceiling. He inched forward, staying low, until he reached the chair in front of the window.
Slowly he rose to his feet, leaned forward and pushed back the curtains. Light from the outside filtered through, revealing Rob’s body, slumped to one side in the chair. Defying gravity, caught in one of those stop-action controlled falls, he looked pinned in place like a collector’s butterfly. Calvino felt for a pulse on his neck. The skin felt clammy. Pulling his hand away, he holstered the Walther.
Calvino made his way back to the door and switched on the light. The first thing he saw was how blood had pooled on the floor around the legs of the chair. A pillow with a black burn mark partially covered a gun. Crawling around in the dark, Calvino had managed to track through blood, staining his pant knees and cuffs. Bits of stuffing from the pillow hung from the entry wound in the side of Rob’s head, making it look a little like a burrow hole used as a bird’s nest. The pillow would have muffled the sound of the shot.
Calvino went into the bathroom, took off his trousers and washed the blood and brains from them. He put them back on and walked back into the bedroom.
Suicide? When the world lost its power to enchant, and imaginary and real enemies merged on a dark brick wall, killing oneself floated to the top of the option list. But just because suicide was an option didn’t mean someone like Rob would have acted on it. Calvino searched the room again. The kid had been depressed and talked about Mya dumping him. Young men have killed themselves over rejected love from the beginning of time. Rob was a perfect candidate for a suicide verdict. Only it didn’t wash with Calvino. He asked himself, when did anyone ever put a pillow against his own head before blowing out his brains? And who ever tossed his own room before killing himself? The sheets had been stripped from the twin beds and thrown on the floor. The mattresses were pulled off the beds and cut open, the springs and stuffing spilling out like the guts of an animal hit by a speeding truck. Someone had been looking for something.
Calvino walked to the chair and had a closer look at the body. Rob’s right hand hung lifeless above the gun. The hand of the deceased and the weapon used to inflict death matched in the perfect suicide arc; it looked like the gun had dropped on the floor after the shot had been fired. The last image he had of Rob was of him miming suicide by gun.
“What’s happened here, Rob?” Calvino muttered, sitting on the edge of the bed with no mattress. He ran a hand through his hair. A man’s fist doesn’t turn into a gun. Dreams are dreams, play is play, and dead is dead. Calvino pulled out his cell phone. Colonel Pratt came on the line. There was a lot of background noise.
“I’m looking at a body with a bullet wound in the head,” said Calvino. “It’s the kid.”
“Hold on,” said Colonel Pratt.
The Colonel walked outside the bar and kept on walking until the noise streaming from the club was swallowed up by the night.
“Are you okay?”
First, control the situation by establishing the caller is safe. Even with Calvino, the police training automatically took over.
“I was out when it happened.”
“It must be connected with what happened in Chinatown,” said Pratt.
“Whoever it was knew what they were doing. They made it look like suicide. Anyone profiling Rob would buy the suicide theory.”
Calvino sounded frustrated, angry and desperate.
“That’s what thugs like that do, Vincent. I’m sorry about the kid. He got involved with people he should have avoided. And once he took that step, he was a dead man walking. Rob knew the score. Be honest with yourself. You saw this coming.”
Colonel Pratt had put the words as clearly as a man could, words that described Rob’s world and his short-lived place in it. Hard words, and only a few of them had been needed because the truth boiled free of the frills.
“I shouldn’t have gone out.”
“Sooner or later it would have happened. Head toward my hotel. Phone me when you’re about to arrive. I’ll go outside and meet you. That way it will look like we’ve come in together. Half an hour.”
As Calvino started to put the cell phone into his jacket pocket, his hand found the book inside. Pulling out the Chekhov biography, he recalled the playwright’s famous gun rule—show a loaded gun on the stage, and there’s no choice but to use it later in the play. Did the rule apply to a gun made from a fist? As in Chekhov’s time, the rich didn’t need to search their dreams for hints on how to steal and exploit. They did it with eyes wide open.
He slipped the book back into his pocket and quickly packed his clothes in his suitcase. He removed the visible evidence that he’d ever been in the room. No one would be dusting for fingerprints. No Burmese CSI investigators would be arriving to search with a fine-tooth comb for hair, skin or saliva. The death scene would get the usual procedure—the what-you-see-is-what-you-get system of
investigation—and what the police would see would depend on who paid them to see or not to see. Someone would dream the death, and the dream would be the report that had the weight to close the case.
Calvino took a final look at the
body. How would he explain what happened to Alan Osborne? He thought that was likely the one person who would comprehend the situation—understand the ties between players in the visible world and criminal gangs. Those worlds were so tight that a razor blade couldn’t be slipped between them.
It was late, and he passed no one on the stairs as he descended to the lobby. Whoever had shot the bullet into Rob’s brain had known what they were doing. In the bookstore he’d heard about Yadanar’s pledge to protect Rob. Nothing was going to happen to him. Promise. She might have told him where Rob was staying, thinking he would send someone to watch over him. But Calvino had no evidence she’d said anything, or if she had, that Yadanar had a reason to have Rob killed. Other than Mya, the only other people who knew Rob’s location were Colonel Pratt and Jack Saxon. Neither the Colonel nor Saxon would have told anyone. Calvino felt an aching feeling that he’d overlooked something; he suffered from the worst of all anxieties—the possibility of another that he had overlooked. The prospect haunted him as he walked towards the guesthouse.
Arriving at the lobby, Calvino walked to the reception desk. The old lady refused to look up from her novel. He cleared his throat. She ignored him. Her steadfast refusal to give him even a sideways glance surprised him. They had spoken more than once. It was small talk, granted, but they’d made enough of a connection for her behavior now to seem odd. Calvino was pretty sure that out of the corner of her eye she had seen him as he approached. Her faced was twisted in frightened mask, capturing the expression of someone who desperately wanted to crawl out of her skin, but there was no other skin to crawl into. She was attempting to pretend that Calvino had never arrived at the guesthouse.
“Still reading The Toll-Gate?” he said. “I thought you’d have finished it by now.”
Slowly she raised her eyes from the book and looked at him over the top of her reading glasses. There were bruises on the right side of her face. Georgette Heyer’s novels hadn’t prepared her for life in the twenty-first century.
He stood waiting for her to collect her thoughts.
Finally, she blinked away tears and whispered, “Go.”
No bill, no request for money. No nothing except that one small word that spoke a library of twisted suffering.
“They threatened you. Beat you up,” said Calvino. “I can help.”
“Like you helped the boy in your room?”
It was true that what had happened to Rob wasn’t exactly a recommendation of Calvino’s ability to protect anyone. There was nothing he could do or say to change things now. Whoever had killed Rob had covered the bases. That’s the way they wanted things to play out, he thought. They had closed the business with Rob. Finished, over and done with. Calvino was nothing to them. If he were smart, he’d walk away—and they expected he’d have no other choice, and that would be the end of it. They would have told the old woman at reception to play along, and the moment she’d put up the slightest resistance or asked the wrong kind of question, they’d taught her the lesson of simple obedience.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out their script. The Richard Smith whose phony name was on the registry was a young luk krueng, a half-breed, with braided hair and a beard. He had the look and the lifestyle of a terrorist. She’d found him dead inside the room. She would say he had appeared depressed. How was she to know he’d used a phony name? He’d looked like a drug addict and kept to himself. She had no idea why he would have killed himself. No, she hadn’t heard any shot. And no, she hadn’t seen anyone go into or out of his room.
Walking out of the lobby, it hit Calvino. Whatever deal had been done was in place. All he had to do was walk out the door and not look back. Not ask questions, get on a plane to Bangkok, return to his life and dream of new cases. His options were limited. He wasn’t Richard Smith, and he had a dead man in his room. If it wasn’t suicide, they’d be happy to let him take the fall, and for a moment he saw himself back at the courthouse. Only this time, he wouldn’t be a privileged guest but another shackled prisoner in the dock. No one would be in the room seeing that he walked out a free man.
The killers were covered, unless Calvino was stupid enough to think the ball was still in play when the game was already over. They figured him for a survivor, a private investigator who found missing people and so understood the nature of violence. Stick with the suicide theory and it would be a smooth, easy resolution. It wasn’t all that hard to make a murder look like a suicide, especially if the dead man was no more than a kid, someone who tested positive for drugs and had a history of running in circles where people die young. The police report would have enough evidence to support suicide. Unless Calvino wanted to make trouble, hang around and contradict the cops. Then they’d find his gun. Find out his real name. Maybe link him to the two men killed in Chinatown. No one wanted Rob to be a murder victim. That would look bad for the country’s opening party. Calvino felt he’d been lowered into a tight-fitting box, and the lid had been screwed shut.
It was 4:00 a.m. when Calvino pushed his suitcase into the back of a taxi, climbed in and asked the driver to drop him at the Shwedagon.
“I want to feed the monks,” he said.
It was too early in the morning for the driver to offer him a free ride to shop for discounted jewelry. As Calvino sat in the back of the car, he thought about Mya and Yadanar. Whether they had already been told what had happened to Rob.
After the taxi stopped beside the pagoda, he pulled out his case, waited a couple of minutes and then hailed another taxi. He leaned into the window and asked the second taxi driver how much to drive to Kandawgyi Road and drop him off at the entrance of Bogyoke Aung San Park. The driver sucked his teeth, looking Calvino up and down and noting his suitcase, and quoted three dollars. Taking a foreigner from Shwedagon to Kandawgyi Lake—one of the features of Bogyoke Aung San Park—made him scratch his head.
“I had a dream about making merit if I fed the ducks at dawn,” Calvino said.
The foreigner made sense.
“Get in. Two dollars, okay?” the driver said.
Colonel Pratt had walked out of the hotel, crossed the street and was waiting when Calvino’s taxi stopped at the entrance to the park. He waited until Calvino had paid the taxi and it had driven away before approaching him. Seeing the Colonel, Calvino shifted the suitcase to his left hand and extended his right hand to his friend.
“Sorry to pull you out of bed,” he said.
They walked along the pavement leading inside the vast garden. They had the park to themselves. Walking over to a bench, they sat down and Calvino looked at the lake in the darkness. A few lamps at the far end illuminated the water. It was a dead-quiet time in Rangoon, an hour of the morning without people or car sounds, just birds roosting in the treetops and the sweet scent of flowers on the cool breeze.
“I told Mya after you called me. We were about to do a final set,” said Colonel Pratt.
“How did she react?”
“She sang that song of hers. There wasn’t much of an audience left by then. The bar wanted to close down. Yadanar wouldn’t let them. He wanted to play all night. Cocaine makes four in the morning feel like noon. She got on the stage and sang ‘My Man.’ There weren’t more than five people in audience, but she had them on their knees. She put down the microphone, walked off the stage and out the door.”
Calvino’s cell phone vibrated inside his jacket and he fished it out. Mya’s voice came through from the other end.
“You heard,” he said.
He looked at Colonel Pratt as they sat on the park bench.
“Okay, we’re at Bogyoke Park, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake. You’ll find us.”
Half an hour later she walked up behind them silently, circled around the bench and stood looking at the lake, hands in her jean pockets. She’d been crying and didn’t want them to see.
“Tell me what happened.”
She turned and walked over to Calvino and sat beside him.
He told her how he
’d found the body after he’d left her bookshop. Whoever had killed Rob had made it appear as if the gunshot had been self-inflicted. They’d terrorized the old woman at reception into a story that Rob had checked into the room under a phony name, dropped acid, put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Colonel Pratt asked, “Would Rob have killed himself?”
She leaned forward, looking at the lake and the first crack of light on the horizon.
“No way. He wouldn’t have had the courage.”
“Didn’t your cousin Yadanar promise nothing would happen to him?” asked Calvino.
She glanced at him, her eyes red as if on fire.
“I don’t think…”
“Think what? That he knew this would happen and let it?” asked Calvino. “This isn’t a dream, Mya. Rob’s brains were splattered against the wall of the room.”
“Easy, Vincent,” said Colonel Pratt. “Rob was a Thai. I’d like to talk with Yadanar, not as a saxophone player but—”
“As a cop,” she said, finishing his sentence.
“As a human being,” he said. “But not at the bar. It’s not the place.”
“Tonight Yadanar has a birthday party at his house.”
“He mentioned it,” said the Colonel.
“You don’t need an invitation. You can just show up.”
“He should be relaxed in his own house,” said Calvino. “We should go. I have the perfect gift for the birthday boy.”
Missing In Rangoon Page 27