Calvino toweled himself, feeling the night breeze blowing through the trees and rustling the leaves that curled around the iron bars. The cats silently watched him from their perch on top of the wall. With the moonlight on his face, he felt oddly at ease and happy. He might have stood there half of the night if it hadn’t been for the sound of the door from his room to the bathing area. It disturbed the tranquility of the moment. Alert and cautious, he wrapped the towel around his waist and quickly turned, his fists clenched, ready to strike the first blow. Two women stood side by side in the doorway. He recognized Maew, Valentine’s Number One, but the second woman, whom he judged to be in her thirties, he hadn’t yet met.
“Do we disturb you?” asked Maew.
A Thai-like question. Of course they had disturbed him, and of course they knew they’d done so but expected him to smile and shrug off the intrusion. Having entered the guestroom, and not found him inside, hearing the shower, they had no inhibition against opening the door the moment the shower had been turned off.
“Do I look disturbed? Undressed. Wearing only a towel. But not disturbed.”
“That’s good,” said Maew. “This is Fon. Her husband was Pee Prasit. The gardener. Her English isn’t so good.”
“How good is your English?” Calvino asked Fon.
“She asked me to help her,” answered Maew before Fon could reply.
“She has something to tell me?”
“She was the one who found her husband. And she knows
he didn’t kill himself. I believe her.”
He looked at the two women. Standing in the night with the breeze coming in from the forest, he had begun to understand the alliances that had been formed following the gardener’s death. “Let me get dressed; then we can talk.”
“Okay, we wait you outside,” said Maew. She turned at the door. “We thought you might have a gun. But you don’t have.”
They had searched his room while he’d been in the shower—no, they had waited until he was in the shower and then searched in room. It was a calculated act. He wasn’t about to tell them that he had left his .38 police special in his car.
“You think I need a gun?”
Fon’s expression never changed. One of those neutral expressions that one could read anything or nothing into. “I can get for you,” she said.
Bringing Maew in order to act as translator had been an excuse. She had wanted someone from the household for emotional support. Going into a strange farang’s room at night alone wasn’t something a respectable Thai woman did. The way Calvino figured it, Maew had the status of being Valentine’s number one mistress, and also she was younger, meaning she would find it difficult turning down Fon’s request. Not that Maew struck Calvino as someone who needed much encouragement. It hadn’t taken much observation to see that Maew and Fon were likely the strike organizers.
“We can always send out for handguns. It would be a good idea to talk first. If for no other reason to establish who needs shooting.”
After he dressed and combed his hair, he walked down a dark path to a series of buildings. A halo of light shone from the kitchen that was the center for cooking inside the compound. As Calvino stopped at the entrance to the kitchen: he noted the sinks and ovens and burners and large fridge and shelves of canned food. Spotless. Above the rear door was a pyramid of finger marks left by the monks. Ghosts on the prowl refused to cross a threshold so marked. That was the underlining psychology. He continued walking until he reached the staff living quarters. “Staff” in the sense of sanom—a fancy Thai word with multiple meanings. Valentine used samons to refer to his three mistresses. Windows in each room faced the path and each of the rooms which were half the size of the guestroom, was designed with the same basic setup: bed, lamp, TV, fan, and small fridge in the corner. In Bangkok most upcountry working yings—those who worked in the bars, massage parlors, karaoke places, pool halls—lived this way in the sois off Ratchadapisek and the high end numbered sois off Sukhumvit Road. No curtains or blinds covered the windows. Anyone walking past could stare in. But other than the gardener, the only other male was Valentine. In one room Kem—sanom number two who had served sea bass as her dinner duty and disappeared to her room because she had a stomach ache due to her mens—lay with a pillow under her stomach, balancing herself on her elbows, and watching MTV. In the next room, Gop—sanom number three—sat on her bed, looking at herself in the mirror, her legs folded beneath her and her hands with the pretty painted nails at her side. She appeared absorbed in her own image, glancing up to check the cartoon station on TV. Each of the rooms had been hooked up to cable; there were upcountry families who lived on less money than the cost of the monthly cable bill. Valentine had shelled out all the funds necessary to keep the sanom occupied in their off-hours. He not only knew about music, the man was an expert on employee relations, and on relations with employees. The next room Calvino walked past was dark. A few feet ahead, Maew and Fon waited in the half-darkness of the path. Fon knelt on one knee and stroked the Great Dane, drool hanging from the edges of its huge, floppy lips. The animal had a head the size of a grown man. As Calvino approached, Fon rose and rubbed her hands.
“We go to my house to talk,” said Fon.
She walked ahead with a flashlight and Maew followed her. They hadn’t waited for a reply.
“Better stay on the path,” said Maew, glancing back.
“Snakes,” said Calvino. “You smart man,” she said.
“I saw the row of jars with snakes inside. An impressive collection.”
It was a couple minutes walk across an open field. The three dogs came sniffing along the edges, following behind on the off chance there might be a meal ticket. Fon stepped out of her sandals and opened the door to a small cottage, walked inside barefoot, and switched on the light. After Calvino and Maew entered, she closed the door. Mosquitoes flew inside. She got a can of spray and soon a gray fog clouded the room. Calvino tried not to breathe in the fumes. He gave up in less than a minute taking as his punishment for not breathing an even larger hit of the poison. Two wooden chairs and a coffee table were the only furniture in the main room. Fon sat on the bamboo mat and Maew joined her. Fon pointed to one of the chairs. Calvino shook his head and slowly eased himself down onto the mat.
“It’s okay, I can sit on the floor,” he said.
Fon, her eyes intent and fearful, continued to point at the chair. “I found him in that chair,” she said. She pointed to over Calvino’s shoulder. He turned and looked at the chair. He touched the chair the dead man had been found in as if to show he understood the importance of that piece of furniture.
“Your boss believes your husband killed himself.”
She shrugged as if it wasn’t very important what her boss thought on such matters. “He’s wrong.”
“And the police are also wrong?”
Fon rose to her knees, and then raised herself up with the agility of a dancer. She slid across the bamboo mat over to an interior door. She glanced back at Calvino and smiled. “There is something I want to show you.”
Fon struck Calvino as someone who once had smiled a lot; the smile had been her default face to the world, then her husband died and the default setting changed. Death and divorce reset the default expression. The new setting converted a smile into a serious, saddened flat-line look of desperation; or, depending on the circumstances, death healed a sour face, turning the lips upward into a glowing smile. It was a question of whether the passage of the person from life to death had been seen as a loss or gain, and in Fon’s case, it was a certainty that Prasit’s passing had been a great loss. Her expression spoke about the true nature of her feeling and spoke volumes about how her husband hadn’t failed her. He had only gone away when he should have stayed. She wished none of it had happened and now that it had, she was duty-bound as his wife to see his memory wasn’t tarnished by a verdict of suicide. Fon was, in other words, a fighter, and she had found something worth going to battle for.
&nb
sp; NINE
FON HAD FOUND her husband in a chair, leaning forward from a door. Not an ordinary door. She stood beside him as Calvino examined where a monk’s index fingerprint had left a smudge of white paste on the door. The smudged paste had hardened, turned flinty, and the edges of the fingerprint swirled out from the center. Starting from the bottom there were four neatly placed fingerprints, in the middle row were three-print, and at the top row were two more fingerprint marks. A triangle of prints expertly centered. At the four points of the compass around the finger-painted three rows of prints was the Thai script for the number nine, looking like an ancient Thai dancer’s headdress or, to an American eye, a Dairy Queen ice cream cone. A dead dragonfly had been taped in the southern position of the Thai script. A large dragonfly with its four long translucent wings—two on each side of the dark, shrunken body—a system of tiny ribbed translucent veins against the door. The tail curled into a semicircle like a scorpion’s in the strike posture. The markings left by the monk were in a similar pattern to the ones above the door to the kitchen. Such markings were common occurrences above the doors of a room, office or above the rearview mirror of a car. Thais believed that the monks’ blessing ceremony, with the impression of a set of his fingerprints, acted like amulets, stopping evil from entering through the door. They promised protection from evil.
Calvino had never heard of a monk killing a dragonfly and taping the creature to the ritualized markings as the pièce de résistance. The ritual had nothing to do with Buddhism. It was a leftover from the animistic world. Still, monks, even when performing quasi-Buddhist rituals, remained under a vow not to kill, and that applied to all creatures. Not even a mosquito sucking blood fell outside that vow. The dragonfly stuck to the door bothered Calvino; it was at direct odds with custom and tradition. Something strange had happened and this was the first evidence that somewhere something out of the ordinary, something connected to black magic, had entered the gardener’s house. Then it wasn’t a custom to hang oneself using a belt on a doorknob and leaning forward on a chair. The door, belt, chair, the death—all of it was weird.
As Valentine’s story of the falling coconuts hinted, the dangers of life were in the mundane, the innocuous things that blended into the background. A simple door was the site of a violent death. Valentine’s opinion was that his gardener was fearless. Assuming Valentine had been right about his lack of fear about snakes, it didn’t necessarily follow that Prasit was not haunted by other fears. The black magic images stuck on the door told a different story; of a superstitious man who sought refuge in omens and magic. It would have been the rare gardener or servant who wouldn’t have shared Prasit’s beliefs.
“When my husband wasn’t working, he spent many hours inside this room,” said Fon.
Maew watched as Calvino stared at the door, running his hand around the doorknob. The belt would have been looped around the doorknob. Prasit would have leaned forward on the chair, and slowly, he would have strangled.
“Pee Prasit put the dragonfly on the door,” she said. “After his brother died,” said Fon.
“Did you ask him why he did that?” Calvino asked. Valentine had said his gardener wasn’t a man who was afraid.
Fon nodded. “Yes, I asked him why he had done that, and he told me, ‘For power and protection against the bad thing.’ ”
“What kind of bad thing?”
“I want to show you his room. He felt safe inside.”
“Safe from what?” asked Calvino.
“The most brave man can have weakness. Don’t you agree?”
“I agree that you don’t need Maew to be your translator.” As Fon opened the door, there was a strong smell of dead flowers and stale incense. The smell hit him like the stale air of a closed tomb. His eyes immediately began to water. He followed Fon inside, thinking, why had a gardener like Prasit living on a wealthy farang’s estate required the protection of a dragonfly on the door to his prayer room? Animism and Buddhism often walked hand in hand with upcountry people. But there was something more involved. Fon flipped a switch and a string of Christmas lights that stretched over several tables came to life, spraying the walls with reds, blues, and greens. The small room was an elaborate shrine. Looking around, Calvino concluded that it was no ordinary Buddhist shrine. Many Thai houses had such “prayer” rooms. A sacred place inside the house decorated with Buddha statues; a sanctuary where offerings of flowers and food and prayers were made. Prasit had created a holy room using Buddhist objects. There the comparison stopped. He also had taken pagan objects as the central motif, and these objects suggested dark, compelling forces. Why had this gardener gone to all the trouble to build this shrine adorned with animal images and covered with pots of flowers?
Fon slid across the floor on her hands and knees, and, stopping to strike a match, reached over the table and lit each of the nine yellow candles. She worked silently as she performed the candle ritual. Maew sat on a bamboo mat a few inches away, her hands cupped in a wai. Shadows from the candles flickered against the walls, illuminating the flowers, Buddha images, and offerings; the candlelight revealed layers of old editions of Thai Raht newspapers. The newspapers had been carefully laid in front of the ceremonial tables. Care had been taken to preserve the pages. Calvino thought of McPhail’s uncle who collected newspapers. This collection served a different purpose, Calvino thought.
Fon sat back and cupped her hands together, her eyes closed; she bowed from her hips, hands stretched forward, until her forehead touched the floor. She bowed two more times, then sat straight up, shoulders arched back, and ran her hands through her hair. Maew performed the same ritual.
Fon pushed the Start button on an ancient tape recorder, which was within arm’s reach of where she knelt. Twin speakers were positioned on opposite ends of the tables. From the speakers came the voice of a middle-aged Thai man, soft and soothing, speaking deliberately, as if giving comfort. He spoke of dispatching a spiritual bodyguard whose job was to protect Prasit and Fon. The bodyguard would become the spirit of the place. The voice dissolved into a chant. Pali chants boomed from the speakers. The expression on Fon’s face was serene. The chanting was one of those ways of transforming the mind to a state of elevated awareness. Maew’s face was a blank—whether that was elevated awareness was anyone’s guess. She might have been bored, stoned, or her mind turned off. Or she might have been drifting. Wherever she was, it was a place beyond where the chanting could reach her. She appeared to have entered another universe.
Calvino sat on the floor, listening to the tape and watching the women, as the yellow flames from the candles gave a strange sense of unity to the series of small ceremonial temple tables. The tables had been pushed together to form a seamless surface and on top were bronze statues of monks and Buddhas and cheap vases with real and artificial flowers. The real flowers were shriveled, dying, drooping and lifeless. One of the bronze statues, a monk, appeared in the dim light to be larger than the others and tiny, thin pressed gold sheets had been stuck onto the bronze. Among the statues were plates of bananas and oranges, unopened boxes of milk and juice. Scattered here and there were small statues of two-headed elephants, snarling monkeys with pointed incisors ready to draw blood, and turkeys with tails fanned as if seeking to mate or escaping the monkeys. Some of the incense sticks stuffed into a vase were half burnt, others untouched. On the floor, bamboo mats and cushions were laid out over newspapers. Fon knelt on one of the mats. From the amulet on a gold chain, the empty one next to her must have been Prasit’s prayer mat—not a difficult guess. The gold chain was wrapped in a circle from left to right around the amulet encased in a small coffin-like case. She gently brushed the amulet with her fingertips and, fingers splayed, ran her hands through her hair.
This was the place a frightened man had taken refuge. These were the things that had given him courage.
What a man clutched onto as he stared into the void left an imprint of his fear.
Somewhere between a man’s dreams and hi
s fears, he saw a truer reality. Maybe Prasit saw that reality and couldn’t live with the image and decided to end with a dragonfly taped on the door behind his back.
Beads hung from a hook on the whitewashed wall. A toy TV and baby bottle straddled the sides of a plastic doll in a gold uniform holding a sword upwards. This had to be the bodyguard, thought Calvino. Flowers—pinwheels, orange, white and yellow—lined the wall where the tables ended. Beside another doll figure were large fake carnations in gold and white. Pink lotus like polished hard rock candy.
Near where he sat, by candlelight, Calvino noticed that the tiled floor was bare except for many old newspapers. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he examined the newspapers more closely. They had been spread out to form a rectangular shape. It wasn’t apparent at first. But each of the newspapers had photographs of the dead. Smashed, broken, torn, shred- ded, drowned, bodies; headless bodies, bloated and ripped as if beasts had taken them in the dark of night, eaten their meat and left the carcasses behind. Calvino removed one of the candles and held it over the newspaper. He examined the photographs by candlelight. The large headlines in Thai script above one of the pictures spoke of murder. Uniformed police officers and a couple of farmers stood beside a well. Two of the cops wore surgical masks. Behind them in the distance a tarmac road wound through a sea of rice fields. Calvino bent closer for a better look at the photo. In the foreground, on a white ground cover, human bones were visible—a skull, sternum and ribcage, femur, and scapula. The muddy bones had bits of cloth attached. From the way the bones had been laid out, it appeared that a paleontologist had reassembled bones from an ancient burial site. Inserted beside the photograph of the officials and the bones was another smaller photograph of a young Thai man wearing a shirt and tie, a narrow mustache on his lip, very much alive and smiling into the camera. You didn’t have to read very much Thai to figure out that the bones in the one photograph were the remains of the grinning man in the other photograph. Calvino moved his attention to another Thai newspaper a foot away. A body slumped over the wheel of a Honda that had smashed into a utility pole appeared in another picture. Others had bodies with gunshot wounds in the chest and face, with the eye socket empty from where a bullet had entered. One body lay face up in a field with burnished pills spilled over the arms and shoulders of the dead man. As Calvino looked over the newspapers, the chanting from the tape echoed off the walls in the small room. Fon sat in front of the ritual images on the table, a million miles away, her lips moving and her hands in a wai. More photographs of bodies in the street, beside a canal, along a dirt road, in the driver’s seat of a van. Many of them had pills sprinkled around them. Bodies spilling pools of dark blood and small reddish pills. There wasn’t a newspaper covering the floor—and dozens of newspapers appeared to be laid out according to an order—which didn’t have the lifeless form of someone found dead in a public place. He made a mental note to check the dates and names of the Thai daily newspapers.
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