She saw the faces of the two men inside the helicopter suspended in the air over the camp. The helicopter tilted, then banked to the side as it entered Zone 1, heading in a straight line toward their hut. It was easy to spot—brick in a row of bamboo. Mon Hla thought the men inside had found Ploy and were bringing her home. She raised both hands as the helicopter passed.
One of the men leaned out of the helicopter and tossed a flashing object. For a second it was framed against the sky, exploding like a Chinese firework. A rain of white sparks fell on the roof of their hut. Circling around, the helicopter dropped more sparkling objects in Zone 4 and along the perimeter of the camp where people lived in tents. In moments flames leaped from the bamboo huts, long tongues of fire licking the jaws of the sky as if seeking to submit. The helicopter circled one last time before gaining altitude and disappearing beyond the mountains.
Mon Hla ran back from the river. She couldn’t get close to her hut. A wall of fire and dense black smoke stopped her. Everyone was running, screaming, crying—men, women, children, everyone fleeing the flames. Some people ran with their clothes burning on their backs. Some lay still on the ground with their skin black and burnt. Hundreds of huts in the camp gathered like a giant lantern with an enormous orange flame. Within minutes the camp was no longer recognizable as a village where people had lived. That camp was gone, replaced by bamboo kindling feeding a huge bonfire. If there is a hell, the camp door had opened on that place and the devil himself danced in the flames. Mon Hla cried, her body shaking, her face covered in sweat, screaming the names of her mother, father and brother. And Mi Swe. The only reply was the cries of neighbors and the crackling of the bamboo on fire. The smell of wet ash clung heavy in the air.
THIRTEEN
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, THE first day of Songkran. At a table positioned on the far side of the bar inside the Beer Garden, McPhail watched Calvino sketch from memory the anchor logo he had seen on the hip of the dead girl’s tracksuit. When Calvino finished, he slid the paper over to McPhail, who looked at it the way a Bangkok taxi cab driver might look at a map. He turned it until it was upside down, then considered it sideways. Finally he shook his head.
“I give up, Vinny. What’s is it?” asked McPhail.
He took a long drag from his cigarette and then, tilting his head upward, exhaled.
“An anchor,” said Calvino.
“Man, that doesn’t look anything like an anchor. It’s looks like an octopus crossed with a gecko crucified on a swastika. You sure this is what was on her tracksuit?”
Calvino nodded. A television set was suspended over the bar. Calvino watched video coverage of a fire from a refugee camp.
McPhail tried to kick-start the conversation again.
“What if she was involved in some kind of cult?”
“The anchor’s a designer label, McPhail.”
“That company will go out of business unless a bunch of skinheads win the lottery and decide to take up jogging.”
He looked over at the TV.
“Another factory up in flames.”
“Refugee camp,” said Calvino, reading the caption under the video.
“Smoke ’em out,” said McPhail. “No more refugee problem.”
Calvino studied his drawing of the anchor logo and wiped a rim of sweat from his upper lip. He scooped the paper from McPhail, crunched it into a ball and tossed it on the empty tray of a passing waitress. It hit her on the forehead and she stopped, surveying the source of the attack.
“Three points,” said McPhail.
“Bring another round,” said Calvino to the waitress, “and a drink for yourself.”
“You have a real talent for throwing wadded-up paper. It’s big league next to your ability to draw,” said McPhail.
Calvino watched as McPhail lit another cigarette and waited for someone to come and tell him to put it out.
“She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”
“She was dead, Vinny.”
Calvino cocked his head to the side.
“The cops have no idea who she is. None. They’ve got nothing but a designer tracksuit to track her down. And it’s likely a fake from the Weekend Market, where they sell hundreds every weekend.”
“If her name had been tattooed on her forehead, they’d have missed it,” said McPhail. “Come on, Vinny, I’m joking. They’ve got DNA, fingerprints, so the forensic guys will ID her. Bet on it.”
The next round of drinks came. After the waitress left, McPhail, who’d palmed his cigarette, took a long drag.
“What did Pratt have to say?”
Calvino shrugged.
“He asked, ‘Why were you running through restricted areas of the Tobacco Monopoly?’”
“Good fucking question. And you said, ‘Sir, it will be Songkran this weekend. And I was looking to meet someone to play water games with,’” said McPhail. “He probably was happy there was an actual body. You’ve got a record of seeing bodies that aren’t there.”
He dropped the cigarette and ground it into the floor with the heel of his shoe.
“Sorry, cheap shot.”
It seemed to Calvino that cheap shots defined a class of expats with nothing else to do but pass the endless hours in a shallow ditch of knowledge, gliding through another day of non-stop happy hour. Calvino didn’t want to think McPhail had become one of them. He looked at the dozens of men sitting around the bar. One of them had asked the cashier to switch the TV coverage of the upcountry refugee fire to a football match. Men preferred to watch sports while choosing one of the freelancers. The hookers hovered at their elbows, doing their job—waiting, smiling, flirting. The flow of time was measured in timeouts on the TV and the speed of wallets opening and shutting.
Until one morning, each of those men would wake up, see the hooker next to him and understand why bars always had the TV turned to sports. The patrons were like midget basketball players who pushed an eight-foot ladder under the hoop, climbed up, dunked the ball and then smiled as if they were pros. The hoop was the pro. The hoop didn’t care whether the player cheated. It only cared whether the player scored.
Calvino had his own set of net and hoop delusions. That made him no different from the other guys at the bar. He’d accepted that he was the same. There was no high horse to mount. As McPhail drank his gin and tonic, Calvino withdrew deep into an internal space where he’d fled, a mental safe house he’d used since the Rangoon killings. McPhail lowered his glass, seeing that Calvino had spaced out into some other place.
“Man, it’s my fault. I should have gone to Burma with you. If I’d known it was gonna fuck you up, I would’ve gone. You’ve been in the shit before. How was I supposed to know you’d get PTSD? It’s like the clap. You can bang a hundred women, no problem, then number 101 gives you a dose.”
Calvino nodded, drank his Mekong and Coke.
“You’re on the pills the doctor gave you?”
“Morning is a red one. Nighttime I swallow two blue pills.”
“Ask for a white one. That way you can pretend you’re swallowing colors to make a happy flag in your head.”
“Okay, okay, it’s not funny,” McPhail continued. “But you’ve got a loose screw. Those pills are like a Phillips screwdriver tightening up what’s rattling around in your skull. They are working, right?”
“I’m trying. But the threads are stripped. Let me get back to you on my brain carpentry.”
Calvino had learnt that in the land of mental disturbance, everyone had a theory, a remedy and easy cure. The Internet had made everyone an expert. His secretary, Ratana, had arranged for private meditation. Once a week he sat in front of a robed meditation master, breathing deeply for forty-five minutes. Once a week he saw a therapist. These carpenters had the job of rebuilding his mind. It had been a slow process. Calvino practiced his breathing exercise as the waitress came to the table and set down the beers. Calvino slipped her a hundred baht tip with the quick flip of the wrist used to pay a bribe to
a traffic cop. She smiled, a cop’s smile, and Calvino watched her as she walked back to the bar.
“Pratt phoned you,” said Calvino.
There was no point in making it a question.
McPhail rolled his eyes.
“What if he did?”
“Innes complained, right?”
“We should’ve thrown the fat little fucker through his office window.”
Calvino saw McPhail squirm in this seat.
“Pratt asked for your help to pull me off the investigation. Am I right?”
McPhail, an uneasy grin crossing his lips, drank from the fresh beer.
“The dead girl has nothing to do with you. Why would you want to get involved? What’s the point? You go around Bangkok finding bodies and pretend the dead person is a client? That’s nuts, Vinny.”
Calvino shifted in his seat, hands clasped around the beer bottle. He raised it and took a long shot against the back of his throat.
“When you find a body, you are involved. I had three hours of getting knocked around by the cops. If that’s not involvement, we need a new definition.”
McPhail shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette.
“You found a body and the police gave you the third degree. So fucking what? Let it go. The police are handling it. That’s why the Thais have police. In between shaking down people for bribes, the police spend some of their time investigating murders.”
“How do you know she was murdered?”
“Okay, she had a teenage heart attack and croaked in some secluded part of the Tobacco Monopoly. The point is, after the autopsy the cops will know if she died of natural causes or was murdered. If someone killed her, the cops can find out who it was. It could be that Soi Cowboy nut vendor you think is innocent. Prepare for that. You can follow what they’re doing in the newspapers like everyone else. Finding the body doesn’t give you any special right to stick your nose into a police investigation.”
McPhail’s little speech sounded as if Colonel Pratt had written it. The words he’d chosen, the stringing of the phrases were a police colonel’s mind in action. Calvino would have bet on it.
“The police stuck their nose into my life. The cops, when they weren’t swinging the yellow pages, told me that ninety percent of the time, the person who finds a body is the killer.”
“And you’re drinking with me this afternoon because you convinced them you are in the ten percent.”
“Actually, they said that after the autopsy report they wanted me back for another round.”
“With your DNA on the body, you better hope they find someone else’s genes.”
“I couldn’t walk away,” said Calvino.
“Calvino, as long as I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you walk away from a woman’s body, dead or alive.”
A customer and two hookers walked past on their way out to a taxi and a short-time hotel.
“Sometimes it’s not about walking away—you need to run away. Get the hell out. This is why you’ve messed up your head, Vinny. You know what I’m saying?”
Calvino knew exactly what McPhail was saying and had heard it already from Colonel Pratt and Ratana. He’d told himself the same thing as well, for all the good it had done. Who is in control of how the mind registers a close-range shooting? Who could understand why in the past the rough stuff hadn’t troubled him? He’d been through plenty of those times. He’d been lucky and got the drop on two thugs who’d drawn on him. He was sure killing the two men wasn’t what had pushed him over the edge.
“You’re trying to control what the police decide to do about this dead girl like it’s your case, Vinny.”
“I want to know what happened. Is that wrong?”
They looked at each other, then away, drinking their liquor, watching the farang at the bar making deals with freelancers, climbing the ladder to make their winning dunk shot.
“There’s more wrong than right in life. Are you just finding that out?” asked McPhail.
One of the football teams scored a goal, and a couple of the punters watching the TV roared with approval. They ordered another round of drinks, and the hookers gathered in to help them celebrate. Somewhere in the back of Calvino’s mind was smoke and fire. Ice and Fire. A Jane Doe with an ankle tattoo and, on her designer tracksuit, a logo that looked like an anchor, the kind that keeps a ship from drifting into the shoals.
FOURTEEN
SHE WAS RUNNING late for their appointment. Calvino sat alone near a window at a coffee shop with a view of Sukhumvit Road from three stories above. As he waited, he passed the time by watching the street. Gone were the long lines of tinted-windowed cars waiting for the traffic lights to change. Gone too were the cops and security. In the void the water throwers set up their ambush points. Sukhumvit Road was a no man’s land, with roving bands standing in the back of pickups, searching for targets. Songkran was urban warfare with water guns. Every small band bonded by looking out for their own and attacking everyone else. It was the Thai version of Lord of the Flies, a descent into a state of nature, red in tooth and claw. People had forgotten how much fun it is to organize and send out raiding parties on the street.
One group of Thais and foreigners, hunting together like a pack of lions, cornered a motorcycle driver dressed in a pizza delivery vest and hat. A large carrier box rested on the tail of the bike, the takeaway phone number in large black letters. Squeezed between the driver and the warm box, a young woman rode pillion. A Thai no more than fifteen years old, wearing designer sunglasses, ran alongside the motorcycle and tossed a bucket of water at the driver. The water caught the driver on the shoulder and he braked hard. Turning his bike around as a second band charged in, shooting high-powered water pistols, the driver searched for an exit. The driver started out and then braked and turned his bike around again as yet another group with high-powered water pistols opened fire. Another exit blocked.
When a man is trapped on all sides, in that moment of truth he discovers something about himself. Like a squirrel cornered by a pack of dogs, the driver and the woman riding pillion tried one last time to escape, only to lose control of the bike as another bucket of water scored a direct hit to the driver’s head. Bike, driver and passenger skidded across the slippery road. The first water pistol brigade marched forward, shooting from the hip as the driver limped back to his bike. The woman passenger lay still on the road. One of the teenagers ran up to her and dumped water on her head. He and his friends laughed and danced around the woman on the street until she rose to her feet laughing too.
Late in the afternoon of Saturday, the first day of Songkran, Calvino waited for Judy Alice Ibsen at a local coffee shop. From above he watched from his water gun-free zone. The traffic had dwindled to a few cars and buses. People who could leave town had left. Calvino had sought refuge for his meeting at one of the dry zones offering a ringside seat to watch water throwers terrorize the diehards who remained. Songkran acted as an annual test run of what urban rebellion and anarchy would look like if the weapons fired only water ammo. Sukhumvit Road teemed with irregular water fighters from around the world linking up with the local slum dweller militias. Water thugs, like all armed bullies, owned the streets for three days.
She came up from behind him.
“You must be Mr. Calvino,” she said.
“You recognize me from the back?”
She blushed.
“My English isn’t so good.”
He turned around and looked at her.
“I recognize you, too.”
He’d gone through lists of NGOs, and an inside person at the airport had given him access to the immigration database for the previous year. Her initials, JAI, put Judy on his list of people to interview. He’d then received a substantial bonus—he found that she was in Bangkok and willing to meet him. Neutral Ground ought to have been the name for the coffee franchise, rather than Starbucks.
From the moment he saw her, Calvino knew she was regretting agreeing to meet him. Her hair and cl
othes were dripping.
“You got caught,” said Calvino.
A waiter brought her a hand towel, and she wiped her face.
“That’s better,” she said.
Opening her iPad, she checked the screen and then Calvino.
“You are Vincent Calvino.”
“You can never be too careful,” he said.
She sat down.
“If I were careful, I would not have come to meet you.”
“Nothing wrong with your English.”
The days when someone couldn’t recognize someone were over. Most faces were by then just a Google image search away. Though young and dressed for the part, Judy lacked the attitude of the foreigner who might seek thrills in chasing down strangers with water guns. Judy had a weary and anxious look as she sat at the table. A waitress brought her coffee. She parked her roller bag against the wall and collapsed the plastic handle flush with the top.
Her hands tapping against the side of her coffee cup, she listened as Calvino asked, “What it’s like working with refugees in the North?”
She’d been asked the same question dozens of times, and each time she wanted to scream, “Go outside and look in the gutter, then sit in the gutter and stay there overnight and the next night. Wait for food to be given to you. Be grateful for scraps.”
She wore no makeup. A few lines, the beginning of a spider’s web, had formed around her clear blue eyes. Thin-lipped, she had blonde hair cropped short to her head. An earring dangled from one earlobe, and she wore faded jeans with holes in the knees, dusty sandals with worn straps and a T-shirt with Che Guevara on it—bearded, black bereted and eternally young. She looked down at her iPad, switching between Skype and her Gmail account. She performed the anxious digital finger dance of someone waiting for a message.
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