“You’re not a policeman, are you?”
She hadn’t believed his private investigator’s ID. “Like I said before, I am a private investigator.”
“Why is a farang interested in my husband?”
The reality was Calvino was running out of leads on Valentine’s estate. The only thread was the newspaper on the prayer-room floor that Prasit had placed so carefully. He must have knelt near the photograph of the remains of that dead reporter many times. The widow was a long shot, but the only one that he had.
“I know about a Thai who prayed for your husband.”
“Why didn’t he come with you?”
“He can’t. He’s dead.”
The baby coughed. Nueng reached down and wiped his nose. They all looked sick and exhausted. Whatever will to resist had long since evaporated.
She opened the door.
“Maybe you should come inside,” she said.
It was a simple bungalow in a small moo baan—a lower middle-class estate of thirty identical bungalows, tiny spirit houses, flowering bushes and stamp-sized lawns. Children’s toys were scattered on the driveway. Weeds grew in the small garden. Flowers—or what had been flowers—had turned brown and were drooping from neglect. Weeds grew every- where. Calvino removed his shoes and stepped inside. On a cabinet were framed photographs of the funeral. Mingled with the funeral photos were older photos of Pramote in a graduation gown, standing by the sea, with his children and wife, in a white shirt and tie behind a desk stacked with papers. The toddler Daeng was an infant in his father’s arms; Jep, the daughter, a toddler looking very much like her brother. The man in the pictures smiled easily; confident, determined, and proud. The large dark eyes stared back. A picture of Pramote’s life emerged—a graduate, a husband and father, a professional—giving flesh to the bag of bones pulled out from a well on the edge of a rice field. The widow had a lot of time to look at the photographs and go through all the things she should have told her husband but didn’t get around to. The children drained her attention. There was always some button to sew, food to buy and cook, errands to run, doctors’ appointments, bills to pay—and then Pramote got himself killed before she had a chance to wash her face, comb her hair and say those things people wait for another day to tell the person they love.
Calvino leaned forward on the long wooden bench that served as a sofa. Nueng brought him a glass of water and sat in the chair opposite. She gave the toddler half a banana, handing the other half to the four-year-old. On the coffee table, he saw a name card. The white card had Colonel Pratt’s name, rank, and phone number. He was trying to make sense of Pratt’s motive for having gone around to the house. A murdered reporter in Chon Buri was hardly within his jurisdiction. Calvino had already crawled through that hole in the wall. He had come out the other end knowing there was another reason for the colonel be poking around, probably half a dozen reasons for the colonel’s presence in Chon Buri. The dead reporter was just one of the graves that the colonel was exhuming for a larger purpose yet to be revealed.
The widow saw him looking at the card. He silently drank from the glass of water. For all of the words he’d used to get him in the door, the card had made him mute. It threw him off balance. Murders happened in villages and upcountry settlements along borders and the seaport. Business rivals, upstarts, troublemakers, activists, and inevitably meddle- some Burmese and Khmer migrant workers—especially the ones who demanded things such as their pay at the end of the month—might be killed. Perhaps Pramote’s widow was right—Pramote had been a fool to make a stand against such overwhelmingly powerful forces. His death had hardly made the news. Calvino was still trying to figure out Colonel Pratt’s interest in such a murder.
The obvious answer was that someone in authority wanted answers.
The local authorities would likely have shared the same view of Pramote’s actions as his widow’s. Upcountry, a killing didn’t need a green light if powerful interests were threatened, especially if warnings had been issued. After the warning, the light would stay green. There was an implicit understanding: whatever you do in your backyard is your business. Just keep out of my backyard and I will keep out of yours. Pramote had gone into someone else’s backyard, stayed there, wouldn’t leave, and predictably got himself whacked. There had been little outrage at his disappearance.
Less after his body had been found. Pramote had become another murder victim statistic.
Tolerance, like cholesterol, wasn’t universally unhealthy. There was the good stuff and the stuff that killed you. The tolerance that allowed locals to kill outsiders with impunity was a bad tolerance. The tolerance that acknowledged that everyone was protected equally, including those with different skin, religions, and opinions, and that no one had a right to slaughter the “other,” was a good tolerance. A country has grown up when its people have the ability to distinguish between the two.
The two kids played on the floor.
“You want a cigarette?” the widow asked.
He looked up from Colonel Pratt’s name card.
“I’ll pass.”
“The colonel didn’t smoke, either,” she said, smiling.
“We can come back to that. First, I’d like to know why your husband didn’t drop his investigation into the deaths of the two Khmer fishermen?”
She angrily exhaled a blue cloud of smoke.
“He’d gone to farang land for three months to work as an intern on a newspaper. When he came home, he’d changed.”
“How did he change?”
“His head was full of farang-land ideas.”
“Farang-land?”
“America.”
In the widow’s mind, the farangs were directly responsible for her husband’s murder. Without Pramote’s exposure to their ideas, he would still be alive, outside weeding in the garden and playing with the children. She had a point. Abstract ideas like truth, justice, equality, rule of law, and fairness were alien weeds. And when someone tried to plant them, he found out the seedlings were uprooted before their roots could take hold. She sat face-to-face with a member of the farang race, a representative of those who had taken her husband’s mind and turned it away from the basic instinct for survival. Calvino had talked himself into the house with the same ideas that had talked themselves into her husband’s head. Calvino wondered to himself, how he could tell the widow of a man who had died for an abstraction that his death was an act of valor. The answer was he couldn’t. Death was many things but one thing it wasn’t was an abstraction. He watched Daeng playing with a plastic flower with an eighteen-month-old’s delight.
“Did he talk to you about his work?”
“Sometimes he would tell me about a story he was working on.”
“Did he talk about some foreign fishermen who had disappeared? Maybe murdered?”
“He heard some bad thing had happened to them.”
“Anything specific?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
Nueng wasn’t making it easy. Why should she? Here was a stranger—and not just any stranger, but a farang—showing up without an invitation, asking questions about her husband. Pramote had been too curious and he had been taught by the Americans to hold onto a story until that curiosity was satisfied.
“Did he keep any notes on his stories?”
“I gave everything to the police in June. I told the colonel that the police already had everything.”
“Did you give him anything?”
“A glass of water,” she said.
“I meant about your husband.”
“I know what you meant. I am not stupid.”
“The colonel’s my friend,” said Calvino.
She stared at him as if she didn’t understand.
“I’ve known Colonel Prachai for more than twenty years,” he said. Calvino left out that he had called him Pratt for many years.
“If he’s your close friend, why didn’t he tell you that h
e talked to me?”
She had him nailed. Her eyes widened. It wasn’t clear whether she believed him. How could a farang have a police colonel as a friend? He leaned forward from the hard wooden sofa, and wondered what else Pramote might have squirreled away. Something he might have learned from his brief stay in America.
“Did your husband keep an expense record? Phone bills, entertainment expenses, travel expenses. That kind of thing.”
Nueng cocked her head, put the cigarette between her lips, reached down and stroked the neck of the toddler. “He might have.”
“Could I see them?”
She removed the cigarette from her lips. “Why, you make more trouble? Isn’t it enough that my husband is dead?”
“Isn’t it worth finding out who killed him?”
She had the expression he often saw on Thais when asked what was essentially an existential question. To find out would be worth what to her? That would be a difficult concept to translate. There was likely no value in finding the killer. The damage was done. Justice, if it would ever come, would not return Pramote to his family. If the man who was behind the killing was untouchable, then what? Calvino had no answer; he wasn’t certain Colonel Pratt would have one either.
“My husband was selfish,” she said. “Because he did his job?”
“He didn’t do his job the Thai way. A man thinks of his family first. He thought of himself first,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair. “He thinks like a farang.”
Calvino sucked in a deep breath. He was about to throw in the towel. She was holding her ground; bitterness makes people unwilling to step back.
“The other papers are likely something a farang taught him to keep. Why not get rid of them to a farang?”
She shrugged and looked for another cigarette. The pack was emptied. She wadded it up and dropped it into the ashtray. Then she disappeared into the bedroom, leaving Calvino with the two kids. They stared at him wide-eyed and leery, the way one watches another species for signs of sudden movement. She came out of the bedroom carrying a shoebox. She sat down and put the shoebox on the coffee table.
“Open it,” she said.
Meanwhile she tore open a fresh pack of cigarettes.
He raised the lid and looked inside at the tangle of receipts, invoices and clippings. If giving him the papers would rid her of the farang, then that would be a good bargain. Then she would have nothing left to remind her of Pramote’s selfishness. Pramote had put his sense of personal honor above his duty to his family. Calvino understood her.
Where should he begin? It was no use arguing that what Pramote had done wasn’t for himself, but for others. Her hus- band had been an idealist. Such a man accepted certain risks not because there was something in it for him but because he believed there was a greater good. In a world where most journalists mortgaged their souls for the greater story, Pramote had lost his life striving for something more important than just a story. For that reason alone, it was worth finding out who killed him. The widow didn’t share Calvino’s point of view; to her, Pramote’s thinking had been rewired to think like a farang, and that was the source of her bitterness. Her man had died for someone else’s ideals of how others should live.
“I will return them,” he said, standing up to leave.
“That’s not necessary. I have no need for them. They only make me remember what I want to forget.”
TWENTY
A WELL-BUILT thirty-something farang with short-cropped hair and a square jaw nodded at the box under Calvino’s arm as he entered the Tequila Reef. “Excuse me, sir. I’d like to check what’s inside the box.”
Calvino shifted the box from his arm to his hands, deciding whether to hand it over to this stranger. “Private documents. And who exactly are you?”
“Security, sir. Hand me the box, sir.”
“You’re just doing your job, is that it?” asked Calvino. He handed him the shoebox.
“That’s right, sir.”
“Are you the owner? Or on the payroll?”
He opened the lid of the box, sifted through the papers and handed it back.
“Thank you, sir.”
Pratt, who had been watching from the corner table, quickly left his seat and walked between the two men. He pulled the shoebox from Calvino’s hands. The other farang working the security detail never lost eye contact with Calvino for a second.
“It’s okay; he’s with me,” said Pratt. “I am expecting this box. I asked him to bring it.”
“I’ve checked it, sir. There’s no problem.”
Calvino did a double-take, looking first at Pratt and then at the stranger. For the first time since Calvino had come through the door, the stranger’s face relaxed; he unballed his fists. He had Special Forces written all over him. Every sentence he uttered ended in sir. The military salute offered to the colonel was sharply executed, and the stranger turned and walked back to the bar.
“I was waiting for the metal detector,” said Calvino.
“He’s doing his job,” said Pratt.
“In other words, cut him some slack. The entire world has become an international airport.”
“You want to get into a fight over a shoebox?”
“You’re right. That would have been dumb.”
“More than dumb.”
“Okay, stupid.”
“A few hours ago, in Pattani, two bombs killed six people. One of the dead was an American security expert.”
Calvino slowly closed his eyes and breathed out deeply. The news caught him off guard. He wished he’d known earlier. He felt foolish, having given the security detail at the door a hard time. Moving the terror out of the South was the next logical stage of escalation. Moving it into a bar filled with GIs had inherent logic.
Pratt looked across the floor. The place was filling up with Cobra Gold soldiers. Unlike the last time he had been in the restaurant, they weren’t dancing and singing, rocking and rolling. They weren’t listening to Eminem. A soulful Santana played instead. The men and women huddled close together, talking, nursing their beers. The music switched from Santana to Sheryl Crow, but no one was paying much attention except a solider feeding ten-baht coins into a jukebox.
“It’s not a good time to carry a shoebox into a bar filled with US servicemen,” said Pratt.
“I hadn’t heard about the last report from the South.”
“It only happened three hours ago. Security has been stepped up everywhere in the country.”
A dead farang in the south would make all the wire services. The nearly daily murder of teachers, government officials, cops or soldiers had barely registered outside of the country.
“The world’s on a perpetual high-security alert. Now Thailand has joined the club,” said Calvino. “No one seems to have a clue what’s dangerous and who’s the threat. Or exactly where the next strike will happen.”
“Everyone’s on edge,” said Colonel Pratt.
“The American who was killed. You remember the name?”
The expat world was a small place. There was a chance Calvino might have known the dead man. Pratt scratched the side of his jaw. He looked around the room at all the men and women. Any one of them could be next.
“Bob Dilley. He was an American journalist,” whispered Colonel Pratt.
Calvino didn’t recognize the dead man’s name. A farang journalist killed in the south would make CNN and the BBC. He slid into the booth opposite Pratt and put the shoebox on the table between them. Pratt had a nearly full glass of orange juice that looked like it was room temperature. A waitress came to the booth and Calvino ordered a Mekhong and Coke.
“I talked with Pramote’s widow today. She had one kid stuck to her hip while the other ran around the house eating a banana. I didn’t march straight into her house and say, ‘Give me the box.’ I asked her if she would let me have a look. And you know what happened?”
“What happened?”
“She gave me the box. She said, ‘Don’t bother to ret
urn it.’ And, by the way, I saw your name card on the table in the front room. When I left, the baby was chewing on it. Not the one with the banana. The toddler was teething on your name card. He’ll get teeth coming soon because of you.”
Pratt smiled. He seemed to warm to the idea of his card having some actual use.
“What’s inside?” asked Pratt.
“I have gone through the stuff several times. I didn’t take anything out.”
“That’s good.”
“I thought you would have asked for Pramote’s things,” said Calvino. “I did.”
“She didn’t offer.”
Pratt nodded. “She must have liked you.”
“It didn’t seem that way,” said Calvino, sliding the box across the table until it rested in front of Pratt. The waitress brought two large Mekhong and Coke and a second orange juice. She said the farang at the bar had paid for the drinks. It was the same guy that had stopped Calvino at the door.
Calvino turned in his seat and raised his glass to the military cop, who lifted his bottle of Singha beer in return.
“Make nice with the police, my mother always said.”
“Your mother was a wise and good woman,” said Pratt. Twenty years before, Pratt had lived at Calvino’s house in
Queens while the family helped sort out a problem with the Chinese Triad. One evening, after dinner, Calvino’s mother had reached over the table and patted Pratt’s hand. “I am glad to have a second son.”
“And I to have a second mother,” said Pratt. It was the first time in weeks that anyone in the household had seen him smile.
Calvino had caught Pratt’s eye across the dinner table. “That makes us brothers.”
His mother pressed her son’s and Pratt’s hands together. “Brothers look after each other. Brothers take care of each other. Always.”
The memory of that moment years before filtered back into Calvino’s consciousness as Colonel Pratt removed the lid and began sifting through the documents, sorting invoices, name cards and newspaper clippings into separate piles. Some of the contents were in English but most were in Thai. Pratt studied a receipt, sipped his orange juice, put it on the table, and studied the next one.
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