He got another flash of the girl’s face. “It was there again,” he said to Carole.
She didn’t choose to remember him either, he thought. He understood why we need to forget faces; why some memories are better buried. He told this to Carole. And he told her about this girl. How every time she relived her memory of men who had entered her life it triggered too much pain—the drunkenness of her father, the school friends killed along the border with Cambodia, relatives who had gone to jail, or who ran away with another woman, abandoning their children, her brothers who hoped, living in sorrow and anger.
When someone like Mike Hatch stared at her long enough the warning light flashed and she saw a sign that no man could read in his own eyes—but she saw it clearly: Men flee the scene. Guys like Hatch never stay long. Men like L’Blanc are not permanent investments. They never work out. They were once in this room. With a girl. A girl named Thu. You know what she told me? Never trust them with what you keep inside yourself. Her life was shaped by a war, bombs, killing; the only currency she ever knew was denominated in fear, abandonment, terror, and hopelessness. She felt hunger and great physical labor to draw water from a well of tears. She found out how the network operates, giving her the basic choice: plant your rice yourself or steal someone else’s. Her future was set when she left school at age ten and entered the world of work—she had known the fields, factories, and shophouses. The whorehouses. Having been abandoned to her own fate, she was swallowed whole by events she couldn’t control or understand, by wounds that did not heal, by strangers who did not care. Her body was all that she had; all she could sell. She would never learn to pour champagne or to drink it. Mike Hatch might buy her a beer. As the months turned into years she realized that men like Mike Hatch or L’Blanc were temporary occupants who moved off the bed, down the hall, the road, wrecking other lives one by one, night by night; they come and go at will, make their demands known, use violence, take their pleasures, and in the end leave for someone younger. Or end up like L’Blanc—dead before his horse finished the race. Or like Hatch—on the run. Sex was the in-between thing they shared. It meant nothing more than yesterday’s dinner. Another exchange without any enduring value, said Calvino. Then he said nothing for a long time.
When he rolled over onto his side, sweat dripped down his chest.
“There are things we should keep inside our head,” he said.
She did not immediately respond, carefully folding her hands over her breasts, cupping them, touching the nipples, before she turned her face on the pillow and stared at him.
“You ever fuck a woman like that before?” she asked. He admitted that he hadn’t.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said. “Didn’t what?”
“Keep it inside your head. Sex like that could become addictive,” she said.
“An addiction is another name for a bad habit.”
“Like enemies, bad habits accumulate,” she said, leaning over and grabbing the champagne bottle. She drank straight from the bottle. Then smiling, she started to hum an old Beatles song, “It’s been a hard day’s night . . .” as she took herself off to the bathroom.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and went over to the balcony, pulled back the curtains, and looked down at the street. Dozens of faces in the darkness below. The intersection was filled with samlors, bicycles, and whores in short skirts and high heels. The sexual night world swirled outside the hotel, with people coming and going all night, the activity never stopping, secret transactions, money for sex, and sex for pleasure. When he turned around, Carole was fully dressed and putting on her shoes.
“See you tomorrow,” she said. “And thanks for last night.” He had slipped two purples—two five-hundred-baht notes—into her handbag when she was in the bathroom. That was less than he had paid Scott for information. But this wasn’t exactly information, he knew that. She wore all the gold and diamonds like any other girl he had ever known on the game. He had felt a lot better afterwards—the money had provided some distance. But he stopped himself from saying anything. He tried to tell himself it was a joke, a protest against political correctness, but he could not honestly know whether he was bullshitting himself. A twenty-five-grand strand of pearls and expensive champagne had weighed heavily on his mind.
She glanced over at his .38 Police Special. “Nice gun.”
“Nice holster,” he said.
After she left, he finished the champagne. He called through to Pratt’s room and told him that Scott had set up with Mike Hatch. Then he leaned back on his pillow, hooked one ankle over the other and closed his eyes. There was a knock on his door.
“It’s open,” he said.
Carole, her face flushed, stormed inside. She threw the two five-hundred-baht notes at him.
“You bastard.”
“I knew it wasn’t enough.”
She threw an ashtray and then a lamp before she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her. He closed his eyes again, listening to the hum of the elevator down the hallway.
******
WHEN he tried to make out the sky all he could see was a milky white net—like a circus tent with seams going up the inside like a nurse’s stockings. Sexy and silky but, like inside a hospital, the vast tent was a reminder of the confinement in a place no one ever voluntarily checked into. He walked around the streets. There were bodies hanging out of garbage cans. He turned and before he knew it, he was back to his old school on Flatbush Avenue, and there were more dead bodies and the rancid smell of week-old fish, this time teenagers with gunshot wounds where there should have been acne. Someone opened the trunk of an old Buick and it was filled with the bodies of murdered mob guys in thousand-dollar shoes. He stopped and watched as the driver got out of the Buick. He was expecting a wise guy. But he was wrong. It was Pratt dressed in his official dress whites.
“What are you doing in Brooklyn? You can get hurt here. This isn’t like Bangkok, Pratt,” said Calvino.
Pratt ignored the warning. “Need a lift?” he asked.
Calvino went over to the car and looked up at the netting.
“You ever wonder what holds all this up in the sky? I’ve been all around the streets looking for poles, wires, anything. Maybe it’s floating? Could you get that much netting to float above a city? Or it’s pollution. But since when does pollution have seams?” asked Calvino.
Then he got in the car, and they were driving through Brooklyn neighborhoods. “So where do you want to go?” asked Pratt.
“Outta here.”
Pratt stepped on the gas. The car raced through the deserted streets. They weren’t exactly deserted. The streets were littered with dead wise guys. Calvino remembered some of the faces from high school. Most never made it out of junior high, he thought to himself.
“You know what happened here?” asked Pratt, braking at the last moment to miss a body left in the road.
“Looks like a fucking mob war. Someone insulted someone else, got in their way, stole what the other guy wanted. So they whack a guy. Then his people whack the other guy’s people. And pretty soon you get bodies everywhere. Hey, but I just got here. Some of the bodies are dressed like wise guys except for all those blacks crumpled up in front of the school. Maybe the blacks were working local territory where they didn’t belong. So some wise guys took them out. You know about wise guys, right? They are working-class types. Eighth-grade dropouts whose brain never advanced beyond a fourteen-year-old with zits. Mob guys are a fraternity all over the world. They have the same motto—swagger and flash. The swagger’s in the walk down the street, which says,
‘I’m tough, connected, important, don’t fuck with me or you die.’ The flash comes from the expensive imported car, the clothes, the watches and jewelry, which say, ‘I’m successful, I’m at the top, a big cheese, a large fish, a big swinging dick. Don’t fuck with me or you die.’ But they are all living under this fucking net, Pratt.”
“How did you get out last time?” asked Pratt.
“Then why did you come back?” asked Pratt. “Some bullshit Chinese Triad tossed me inside.”
“The same Chinese who tried to kill me. I was responsible for that, Vincent. You didn’t have to get involved. You could have walked away. But you didn’t. You knew the risk. That one day they would come for you. Destroy everything mean- ingful in your life. Take your life and shove it down a rat hole so deep that even rats were afraid to go. And that’s what they did. They got to you. Patience is what they had. You wounded their pride. Their face is all that they have. Pride. Take a Triad member’s pride and he will get revenge. He will never forget that wound. Now you know why you’ve come here. This is the Triad’s revenge. Against you. Against me. Now what? You stay in the car and let me get you out of here. Or I let you off at the next intersection and you find a way to live in the old neighborhood. What’s it going to be, Vincent? Stay or go? Cut and run? Or be cut and run over?”
There was a pounding, first soft and then loud.
The door broke open and Pratt stood in the door holding his gun, his eyes searching the darkened room for an intruder. The curtains were open and there was enough light from the street to make out the furniture and bed and Calvino alone in the bed. The bed sheets soaked with sweat chilled Calvino’s body as he switched on a light.
“I had a call from reception. They thought someone was trying to kill you,” said Pratt, lowering his 9mm handgun.
“You were screaming my name. They thought you were being murdered.”
“I had a bad dream. Forget bad dream, a fucking nightmare,” said Calvino, his teeth chattering and his arms shaking. “That one about the old days. I told you before. Something knocked loose some memories. You know the ones I mean. New York memories that I thought were buried a long time ago.”
Pratt picked up the empty champagne bottle and read the label.
“You could get a few men killed in Phnom Penh for the price of this bottle.”
“Or pay one man to get you inside T-3 Prison.” Calvino leaned up on an elbow.
Pratt stuck the bottle back into the ice bucket filled with water. “You really think that Mike Hatch will show?”
Calvino kept thinking about the awful netting in his dream. Mike Hatch was from the same kind of neighborhood and he wondered if he had nightmares about going back as well. He wondered if Hatch was as curious as he was to meet someone like himself who had made the great escape.
“My guess is that he’ll show,” said Calvino. “The bar is in a shophouse near Independence Monument.”
“I know that bar. It’s two hundred meters away from a district police office,” said Pratt.
“That shows style,” said Calvino.
“It shows arrogance or stupidity, I haven’t decided which,” said Pratt. He was thinking to himself that if his intelligence sources were accurate then Calvino’s journalist friend had left behind an expensive bottle of champagne as a calling card. The mastermind they were tracking had contacts in the international press. He was rumored to be a French national who hung out with intellectuals. Pol Pot had been a French intellectual, Pratt reminded himself. He was running a background check on Philippe, the Frenchman with the gold cigarette case at the French restaurant. So far nothing had come back.
Was Philippe the man who had been code-named Kim? Had he used Carole Summerhill-Jones to set up Mike Hatch or Vincent Calvino? Was he paying someone to set up Calvino at T-3? Was this the man who had tried to kill Calvino on their first night in Phnom Penh? Those questions were on Pratt’s mind; other questions about Kim had been discussed at his last meeting with his superior in Bangkok. Some generals would be implicated. There was no one thing more dangerous than taking on a high-ranking officer, charging him with wrongdoing, making the charge stick, and seeing that he was punished for the wrong. It would likely happen. Too much face with too many important people were involved. The most Pratt hoped for was that the stain on the reputation of the department would be removed once the jewelry was given back to the Saudis. Then he and every other good cop could hold their heads up once again.
Whoever the generals in Bangkok were using, he was a professional, and he would do whatever had to be done to find the piece of jewelry that Fat Stuart L’Blanc had managed to take out of the country and hide in Cambodia. That meant finding Mike Hatch. The faction in the department which found Mike Hatch, would win. It was assumed that he had the necklace. The Saudi jewelry case had done more damage than almost any other case in recent history to the image and interests of Thailand, not to mention dividing and damaging the police department. Every time he picked up a newspaper, there was another story about who was implicated within the department; that information was based on leaks, rumors, and speculation. It was likely someone knew the facts. But Pratt wasn’t one of them. A lot of personal trust had been vested in him to find Hatch and return the necklace, thought Pratt. He could not let his superior down. He was a good cop who wanted to do right and for the right reasons. But so far he had nothing tangible to report to Bangkok.
He had invested some hope that Hatch would keep his appointment with Calvino. But why should he? Leading Calvino to a bar next to the police station worried Pratt. The longer he left Calvino hanging in the dark, the more uncomfortable he felt. He wanted to pull him in and tell him why he was in Cambodia and what was at stake. It was simple enough in Pratt’s mind—the reputation of the department; and the honor of Thailand. Gun smuggling was a nuisance. Pratt’s loyalties and sympathies were in conflict. Two sides pulled him. He had promised his commanding officer that he would not divulge any of the information to outsiders. Farangs didn’t understand Thai thinking, his superior said. Pratt didn’t contradict him.
There was constant danger with people who had links with the press. Corrupt people used the press; and corrupt people sometimes ran the press. More than once the media had been used by influential people to isolate and corner enemies, to humiliate them, and to destroy their face. It didn’t matter that these people had families, that they had served honorably their entire career. They could be ruined in one edition of a newspaper. The big boss had his favorites, enemies, vendettas; reporters were sometimes on the take, editors had political ambitions and friends with scores to settle. The only thing separating them from the police department was an idea—the press had freedom of expression—no matter what had gone down, how wrong the papers had been, they paraded out this freedom. The department had no way of defending itself against an attack in the papers. It was like a boxer with his arms tied behind his back and no one to step in and stop the fight.
His superior was said to have few friends in the department or in the press. That meant he played it straight down the line no matter who he was talking to, and a lot of people didn’t like that this general wasn’t for sale. This same general never directly raised Calvino’s name—that would have been un-Thai.
But Pratt knew ‘no outsiders’ included Vinee Calvino. He smiled to himself that Calvino had spent the night sleeping with the press. Maybe his superior was right that you courted press. And there was his family’s well-being to think of. He had a wife and two kids. His children attended a private school. Their lives could be destroyed by his actions. What had Calvino at stake? His life. And how seriously had Calvino taken that life in the last few years? He was like someone sleep-walking on a high-wire with no one waiting for him at the end, screaming out in his nightmares.
NINE
WEAPONS ON PARADE
THE FIRST WORDS the following morning came from a familiar voice who was using the lobby phone. “I thought you’d like to know. Thu got in the way of a grenade last night,” said Scott.
“Is she alive?” He looked at his watch. Three hours had passed since Pratt had broken down the door to his room. He had slept another hour and was
feeling rotten.
“So I understand. But she could probably do with some medical attention. Of course, you may think she’s just a whore and it doesn’t matter.”
“Richard.”
“Yeah?”
“It matters. So fuck off with the pious crap like you are the only one in the world who cares about someone else’s pain.”
There was a slight pause.
“I’ll be waiting for you in the restaurant,” Scott said. Calvino slammed down the phone, rolled over and looked at his watch. Eight a.m. He swung out of bed, his head pounding from the champagne and lack of sleep. And he was thinking that the chip on Scott’s shoulder was large enough to support Singapore and its 2.8 million Chinese inhabitants with room to spare for them to chew gum, spit on the street and leave the public toilets unflushed. Calvino stepped on something squishy; it stopped him dead in his tracks. It was soft and wet and had stuck to the bottom of his foot. He slowly raised his foot and peeled it off. It was a discarded strawberry-flavored condom. He hated the morning after casual sex with stuff wet from bodily fluids lurking like land mines on the floor, and his head felt like a couple of hockey goons were fighting with their sticks at the back of his skull. He showered, feeling the water on his face, thinking about the twenty-five-grand string of pearls Carole had worn, and reminding himself not to throw up in the shower. After he finished dressing he phoned Shaw.
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 16