He sighed, walked around to the other side of the car. All the time he kept his eye on the two police officers. There was something about their attitude that was disturbing.
Neither cop seemed overly concerned about whether the car remained wired to deliver another fatal shock. One way to find out—he popped the hood latch. “Have a look inside.”
One of the cops shone a flashlight on the engine housing. The key was in the ignition, and the back flasher lights blew red kisses on the concrete.
“We take your car to the station.”
“You do that. Check the tires,” said Calvino. “A tuneup would be good. Change the oil. Maybe get someone to wash it.”
The cops were terribly interested in what Calvino had to say; one of them squeezed the keys in his palm. He was about to say something when the cop in civilian clothes put a hand on his shoulders. “We’ll take your statement in a few minutes,” he said in good English.
Nothing about them suggested they were in hot pursuit of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhism took the view that all things were, by their nature, impermanent, and these men stared at Calvino with a mixture of contempt and loathing, as if he’d escaped the inevitability of the rule. It also spoke volumes about the absolute certainty—if not arrogance—of those who’d organized and executed the mission, that they never needed to change personnel. It was called recycling failure. Or maybe it was more basic: Using a different set of men might have suggested they had something to worry about. What better way of delivering a message of confidence than sending the same officers to the crime scene? Vincent Calvino should have been on his way to the next life. “Mission accomplished” should have been forwarded to the right person. What should have been had an elusive history.
One of the officers focused a digital camera and snapped photographs—every angle of Siriporn, who remained slumped forward in the front. The ambulance guys stood in a corner waiting to be told when they could remove the body. Meanwhile two members of the forensics team dusted the exterior of car for prints. The senior cop who’d walked back to the silver-gray BMW police car, looked disappointed, as his men worked the crime scene.
To their credit, a fully prepared police response team had appeared in the parking lot in record time; they must have been nearby, expecting a call. Calvino figured they’d timed their arrival carefully, not showing up too quickly or too late. It was called the Goldilocks arrival schedule—a variation on the “meet and greet” system that welcomed new people to the neighborhood; only this wasn’t a neighborhood anyone wanted to visit. It was a way of organizing police that had been perfected during the war on drugs. A dispatcher radioed in after she had talked with the condo security guard. The guard, who’d been upset on the phone, had neglected to give any details about the identity of the person found dead in a Honda City on the fifth floor of the parking garage of a condo located in Klong Toey district.
Two of the men shared a smoke, looked on with bored, listless expressions, hands on their hips, cigarettes in the sides of their mouths, smoke curling out of their noses.
They’d assumed that this call would be to investigate the death of a farang and instead found a Thai woman dead in the car. They had nearly finished their report before the security guard had called in the job. Tearing up the paperwork and starting over again had put them in a bad mood. The two cops talked out of earshot, taking turns to gesture in Calvino’s direction. They allowed themselves to show disappointment, masking a white-hot rage that lurked, boiling, occasionally breaking through the surface in their sideways glances, only to quickly recede, shoved back out of sight. The parking area around Calvino’s Honda seethed with cops smoldering and uncertain of what to do next.
There had been no Plan B.
Calvino had started his statement when Colonel Pratt arrived, coming up the elevator with the security guard who’d called in the incident. The interviewing cop closed his notebook, nodding for Colonel Pratt to follow him to the car. Calvino watched as Pratt and the cop had a discussion. The cop gestured with the notebook a couple of times, nodding at Calvino. They walked around the car. Colonel Pratt squatted down and looked inside. He knew Calvino’s car well. It might not have been serviced regularly, but Pratt had never heard of a Honda, serviced or not, delivering an electrical current through the ignition system to kill the driver.
Colonel Pratt had a look inside at the body before walking to the front of the vehicle. “Maybe you should have stayed in China,” he said.
“I was thinking the same thing about Wei Zhang,” said Calvino.
“Are you okay?” asked Pratt.
Calvino shrugged and looked away, lips firmly compressed. She’d died in his place. How was he supposed to feel? Happy? Empty, sad, angry? He’d run through the emotions like doing scales on the piano. It was a warm-up for the program he had in mind. The other officers on the scene didn’t seem happy with the way Pratt was handling the situation, but he outranked them. They said nothing as Colonel Pratt leaned over the engine and examined the wiring leading from a device the size of a landmine, menacing, homemade, covered in a green plastic casing, which had been expertly attached to the ignition wires.
Someone had connected the device to the electrical system and made little effort to hide his work, a marker that the mechanic who’d rigged the device had expected a fluff team to arrive on the scene, remove it, clean up the system, and leave a mystery behind.
“It looks booby-trapped,” said Calvino.
“The car, yes. The device, no.” Colonel Pratt looked at his fellow officers. None of them disagreed with his opinion.
The device had been planted in such a way as to allow for its easy removal. Pratt dropped the hood, and the sound echoed through the parking area. One of the ambulance guys, who’d been dozing on the side, jumped. Pratt walked over to Calvino as the police supervised a tow truck pulling into position.
“They’re taking your car in for further inspection.”
“You’ll get someone to put a trace on that device?”
Colonel Pratt nodded.
“Good. Siriporn, Siriporn.” Calvino shook his head, looking at her body. “Any chance the device will disappear between here and the station?”
They both knew the answer; the colonel had no need to confirm in the presence of the other officers that he had no control over the investigation once the car left the garage.
“You’re lucky. Those around you, not so lucky. Vincent, we need to discuss this in private.”
Calvino locked eyes with the senior cop and his junior who stood beside the BMW. “Some of these guys look familiar. They showed up to investigate the van that night.
We know how that turned out.”
“Is there somewhere more private?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“Not your condo. A place without windows.”
He said “windows” as if it were part of an ancient riddle.
Calvino had started to feel the broad strokes of his life were starting to match the regulars at the Lonesome Hawk—men whose lives, like their stories, ended in skid marks and permanent scars.
Calvino walked in front, the colonel a step behind, on the stairs up to the pool and recreational floor. No one was around early in the morning. They silently passed the stone feature wall with its waterfall, pots full of large, leafy tropical plants, and goldfish swimming in a pond. They passed the kids’ jungle gym, stopping in an open area near the pool.
The gray clouds, knotted and frayed as a homeless man’s blanket, rolled across the city, obscuring the high-rises along Sukhumvit Road, ghostly structures the color of old oyster shells.
“No windows up here,” said Calvino, looking out at three tall condos under construction. The only building fully occupied in Bangkok was Government House, and that occupation was illegal.
The recreational area had a forlorn feeling, as if the inhabitants had abandoned the space in a hurry, leaving behind toys, plastic bottles, and a couple of shoes. The table and chairs sheltered under an awning w
ere dry. They sat at opposite sides of the table.
Colonel Pratt had seen the way the police had stared at him, as if keeping Vincent Calvino alive had become his full-time responsibility. Fate interrupted the evil of men, thought Pratt, who no longer had any illusions about the forces confronting Calvino, their resources and intentions.
Sending him away hadn’t worked. Having him stay away for months or years wouldn’t work either. The colonel knew that he was going to have to deal with the situation the best way he could.
“One of those men was alive when I left him at the van,” said Calvino, glancing at the smooth water of the swimming pool, clear and blue, an undisturbed volume. But when he looked away from it, he saw that Colonel Pratt was staring at the city below.
“Vincent, they aren’t likely to give up. Double up their efforts, yes. A couple of the men in the garage aren’t excops. They’re working elsewhere. You are aware of the situation.”
“Militia. Only you’ve not been read into the program. They’ve left you standing on the outside looking in. Cops and mafia mixed together. See the way they closed ranks when you showed up? If there’s something we can agree on, it’s that I am aware of my situation—and yours.”
The real cops had backed off as soon as Colonel Pratt had appeared. The same thing happened on the night the van crashed against the wall of a condo. But they weren’t going to back off forever. Twice was about their limit. Colonel Pratt had talked with the plainclothes cop in the parking garage. That conversation lasted a couple of minutes. Long enough for Pratt to brief him on the choices open to Calvino. Pratt’s problem was that the choices narrowed to one: Calvino had to leave the country and stay away.
But Calvino had Bangkok in his blood; he would take his chances staying.
Colonel Pratt opened the conversation about the dead woman in Calvino’s car. “I remember her. She came to your door. I was behind you. She saw me and left.”
“She was my stockbroker.”
Colonel Pratt raised an eyebrow, slowly shaking his head.
“And nothing more?”
“Yeah, there was.”
“A loss like this is personal.”
“I’m not taking a pass on this one, if that’s what you mean.”
That was the problem, thought Colonel Pratt. He understood that stockbrokers don’t normally take a client’s damaged car into the shop for repair on the way to the office. The shock of her death hadn’t settled at the scene. Sitting across from Pratt, Calvino felt the full weight of sadness roll over him. Pratt waited as Calvino seemed to withdraw into a mood of loneliness and hopelessness that robbed him of his voice and left him temporarily lost in his thoughts.
Pratt put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You didn’t know, Vincent. Couldn’t have known.”
“Pratt, I should have known. Seen it coming. They made it clear they were coming after me. The van was round one. Disappearing to China was no solution. Today was round two.”
“They’re preparing the final round.”
Calvino’s eyes hardened. “So am I.” There was no bravado in his voice, only a sad firmness of intention. “You’re right, I’ve been walled off,” said Colonel Pratt.
“But I’ve narrowed down what happened to the fingerprint from Achara’s lock. In a couple of days, I’ll have a good idea who was behind it. You should have waited to come back. You’ve complicated my investigation. You poked a stick into someone’s life, and that can be dangerous. Poke at a snake and it strikes.”
The fragility of life, thought Calvino. Always just around the corner, an upside-down event came at you fast, too fast, and nothing could prevent the confrontation. In a moment it had been over for Siriporn. Whatever thought she’d had, the song winding through her mind, it had stopped.
“You’re not going to take down Wei Zhang by yourself,” said Calvino. “I can help with what I found in China.”
“In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote that ‘the evil that men do lives after them,’ and I used to believe that would keep evil in check. But it doesn’t work that way. Maybe it never did. All that can be done is to separate yourself from that evil.”
“You want me to turn and run?” asked Calvino.
Colonel Pratt shook his head. “ ‘Though the enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting. Scheme so as to discover his plans and the likelihood of their success.’ ”
“Shakespeare?”
“Sun Tzu, The Art of War.”
Calvino grinned. When Colonel Pratt shifted from quoting Shakespeare to Sun Tzu, the message was that a situation existed beyond what an Elizabethan playwright could be expected to imagine from Stratford-upon-Avon. Life was as fragile as glass in a landslide. Shakespeare was the glassblower. Sun Tzu put in the fine reinforcement wires to give it strength. In the end it came to a million pieces scattered down a nameless slope. Colonel Pratt worked on melting together the work of two great craftsmen, hoping to outrun what was about to come down on him.
“I would like to know what is making Wei Zhang so nervous. You didn’t find this in China or you’d have told me.” Pratt looked to Calvino for reassurance that he wasn’t holding back information.
“How much time do I have?”
Colonel Pratt shrugged. “Stay in your condo. Don’t go out. They’ll be watching the building, tapping your phone, picking up your conversations from the vibrations of your windows.”
“Zhang had Brandon and Achara murdered.”
“You can’t prove it.”
“Lack of Evidence is a criminal’s best friend.”
This time Colonel Pratt said nothing to contradict him, adding only, “That’s what people were saying during the war on drugs.”
Calvino’s face registered the defeat. “All the more reason to let me find the evidence.”
Zhang had gathered his troops and put them in place, ready to strike. Calvino had a colonel who’d offered help but had no forces behind him. However, that wouldn’t stop him from standing at Calvino’s side. When you were surrounded, there was comfort in knowing that there was one person who would not break ranks.
“You seriously think you can force him to reveal himself?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“Can I get back to you on that?” Calvino asked, rising from the table.
His hand stuck in his trouser pocket, Calvino rattled a handful of loose change. There were only two reasons in Bangkok to do that—a makeshift mating call in a bar or a distress call when a man understood how much someone had wanted to kill him.
FORTY-SIX
CALVINO SAT ON the sofa where the night before Siriporn had been next to him, smiling, full of life, happy and hopeful. He’d taken her iBook from its hiding place and was scrolling through her files. He opened a personal folder. Reading through her diary, he found his name. She’d recorded her impression of Tanny Craig the night she’d returned for her earring. “She’s using Vincent. Why are men so stupid? I saw contempt in her eyes. Hatred. This is a woman who is selfish, only cares about herself.”
He reread the words; they made him shiver as if he were reading about some other fool who’d made the wrong decision regarding a woman. He made a mental note to delete a bunch of old personal files—“password-protected” suddenly meant nothing—from his office computer and his laptop. He scrolled through Siriporn’s diary entries, her feelings about him, her sister, her parents, her friends and colleagues. When people wrote only for their own private reasons, it was unvarnished, raw, with none of the usual restraints, because no one else would ever see their impressions. The diary revealed the undisclosed face behind the one that Siriporn let the world see. He felt uncomfortable reading such raw, open sentiments. Thais were by nature indirect about their feelings. But, in private, Siriporn had written that she loved him and would wait for him, work for him, win him. In another folder were photos she’d taken with her cell phone. He studied his face. This was how she had seen him, looking into the camera smiling, giving the Winston Churchill victory sign. N
o cigar. What he saw was his own stupid, superficial smile, his tired, unhappy eyes staring into the camera as if seeing a demon on the other side. In the same file, she typed: Four Rules for a permanent relationship with a woman:
Make her laugh daily,
Make passionate love weekly,
Give her security always,
Never make her lose face in public.
She had checked off each line with a “yes” and a happy face. He reread her rules, thinking that she had left out the final rule: Avoid getting involved with anyone, in Nelson Algren’s words, whose troubles were greater than your own.
Calvino stretched back, exhaled long and hard, reflecting on how none of us ever imagined dying in the next ten minutes, dying before we had that last chance to cleanse away years of secrets and images that no other person should ever find. Who would be the first person to switch on his computer, comb through his old files, taking her time in the days following his own death, discovering inside each folder a different Vincent Calvino from the one she thought she knew? Or maybe she would pass on the job to Colonel Pratt. As he leaned back, arms folded, looking at the screen, looking at Siriporn’s world, now dead, he thought about the world they’d briefly inhabited. There was never enough time to mourn. Old George, then Achara, then Brandon had passed through the gate. Colonel Pratt had all but said that Calvino had been handed a ticket for the same gate.
He told himself that Pratt had been right the first time and he was right this time, too—he should leave the country. It was a time-honored remedy that many accepted in similar circumstances, and they were the smart ones. The bullheaded ones, those who believed that friends or gods or spirits protected them, or who were deluded into a feeling of immortality, they stayed, and they most often disappeared, or their bodies were found in submerged containers, stuffed into barrels or buried in shallow graves. Calvino told himself he wasn’t leaving and he wasn’t going to let them punch his ticket to the next life. He leaned forward and typed in Wei Zhang’s name for a search of the computer. A dozen folders came up. Gifts from a dead woman? he asked himself.
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