One eye opened, no problem, the other half-opened, web-like frog skin hanging half-mooned. He found her staring intently at his wounds, assessing his condition. Smiling, he brought his head forward. “That feels better. Thanks. I want to read that good news message,” he said.
“Four thousand to act as a bodyguard,” she said, putting her things back on the tray. Looking at the money spread out on his desk. She had never seen so many one hundred dollar bills at one time. “Money like that means someone is very rich or in very serious trouble. Or both.”
A Thai woman named Noi had left the phone message.
Calvino looked up at Ratana. “Is this the same Noi we’ve been trying to track down for the past two weeks?” She had left a contact phone number as well.
Ratana nodded. “The same woman.”
An American named Gabe Holerstone had hired Vincent Calvino to find a missing woman. His missing woman. Noi’s photograph was in the file opened on his desk. He looked at the photo. She had a white sheet wrapped around her, her thick long hair sprayed across the pillow, her eyes closed. Behind the bed was a bank of windows where one could see dozens of boats moored in the harbor. Pattaya, Calvino guessed, was where the photo had been taken. Noi appeared to be in her early thirties, slim, a soft, sensual face. In the shot her eyes were closed. He tried to imagine what she looked like awake. What kind of face had inspired Gabe’s emotions that had been running the tightrope between desire and madness. She had been a singer in Gabe’s LA nightclub until she disappeared for a pack of cigarettes and ended up back in Thailand.
That was Gabe’s story.
He was crazy about her and he wanted her singing in his nightclub. That was the second part of the story.
There must have been a third part left out. Why hadn’t Gabe sent him the head shots that singers have taken to hand out to agents, clubs, fans, and friends? He must have had dozens of pictures of Noi. It was the one of her sleeping that he had couriered to Thailand, the one he wanted Calvino showing around the pool tables of Patpong where Noi was most likely to be found. Every other day Gabe had been phoning long distance for an update, and every day Calvino had to tell Gabe that he was working on it but finding someone who didn’t want to be found in Thailand was no easy thing.
“I thought that would make you happy,” said Ratana.
“Get her on the phone.”
A minute later Noi was on the phone.
“Noi, this is Vincent Calvino.”
“You can call me Diane. Gabe calls me Diane. farangs call me Diane. It is my stage name.”
A healthy dose of attitude textured her voice.
“Okay, Noi, you want to be Diane, then you can be Diane or anyone else you want to be. But Gabe wants you to contact him. You can call him collect. You can call him now. Just talk to him.”
“About what?” she asked.
“He likes your voice. He thinks you’re a great singer. He wants you to go back to the nightclub and sing like before. So the man wants to hear from you. Why is that such a big problem? I don’t get it. Is there something you would like to tell me about you and Gabe?”
“He wants me back in Los Angeles. But I am not going back. I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to argue with him. Tell him it’s finished. Tell him to leave me alone.”
She went silent. “Don’t hang up,” said Calvino. “Just chill out for a second. I’ve spent weeks trying to find you. Let’s work this through and not get too excited. At least not all at once. No one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. You understand what I am saying, Diane?”
“I understand,” she said.
“It’s easy to just phone the guy. Phone him collect. That means Gabe pays.”
“I am not a stupid country girl. I know what a collect call means.”
“Sorry. Sometime people get confused about who pays for long-distance. I was just trying to make certain you were not afraid of getting stuck for the bill. If you don’t want to go back to LA, then why not phone Gabe and tell him that you are finished? What’s so hard about that?”
“I don’t know. I am a little confused. I don’t know you. But I know Gabe and the people around him. He’s a bad man and has bad friends. And you don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”
Ratana was on the other side of the partition, listening; she could not help but hear his side of the conversation. It was as if he were losing someone who was drowning. His arm was stretched out to a person who couldn’t swim, but that drowning person was afraid of grabbing his hand and struggled against rescue as the tide pulled her out to sea. Life was never as one imagined. Noi (Ratana refused to think of her as “Diane”) was feeling pain or guilt and convincing her over the phone to contact Gabe was never going to work. She knew how a woman thought. Calvino was going to have to meet her. Ratana went back to his office and handed him a note. It read: Ask her to meet you. In person. In Bangkok.
Calvino glanced at the note.
“Why don’t we meet?” he asked Diane. “That way we can talk this problem through. I am not going to do anything you don’t want. But I think a face-to-face might do some good. Where are you now?”
“In Roi Et.”
He could hear a stereo playing in the background. The lyrics were from a popular luuk tung song Hello, Hia. The lyrics were about a mia noi who was trying to phone her husband but he won’t take her call because his mia luang or major wife is sitting beside him. The singer asks, “Why don’t you speak?” Tammai mai phoot? And her lover replies with a lie, “Because the line was cut.” Sai luut.
“When do you return to Bangkok?”
“Tomorrow,” she replied.
“Then we meet on Friday.”
She paused as if she were thinking this over.
“Tomorrow’s no good,” she said. “I get into Bangkok on a late bus.”
“What about Thursday.” He was thinking the bodyguard assignment would be out of the way by then.
“I go to Hong Kong on Monday. I’m tied up on Saturday.”
The private eye business always had a surprise or two, he thought. “That leaves Sunday,” he said. “So we make it Sunday. Does that work for you, Diane?”
Calvino leaned forward and wrote down a time in his appointment diary that was otherwise filled with the words bodyguard duty in bold letters.
“Okay, Sunday, can,” she said.
“Come to my office,” he added.
“I’d rather not. It’s better if you meet me in a public place,” she said.
“Where do you suggest?”
“The Emporium, first floor. I already tell your secretary how to get there.” The “tell” rather than “told” was her first grammatical error. She had come a very long way from her Isan roots. But that was a matter of language; where was she in the other ways that mattered?
Calvino looked at Ratana, cupping his hand over the phone. “She wants to meet me at a shopping mall.”
“It’s the best you are going to get out of her.”
He held his hand over the phone, and thought about this piece of advice. No way did Noi or Diane, or whatever her name was, sound like she was open for much bargaining. It was take it or leave it time. The Emporium, then Hong Kong, then one very irate client in LA. He didn’t need this.
“And when I meet you, you can tell me why you like Hello, Hia, and we can talk about calling Gabe.”
“You know Thai music?” Her whole tone of voice changed.
“I love Thai music.” Calvino was walking the rope between truth and fiction. He did like some of the music and found knowing even the lyrics to one luuk tung song would do more to gain the confidence of a Thai woman than sweet talk—which they distrusted instantly.
“No problem. We can talk,” she said.
“I’ve only seen a picture of you asleep.”
“That bastard, Gabe.”
“So how will I recognize you?”
“There is a UCLA button on my handbag. And how will I recognize you?�
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“I will be carrying the video of Hello, Hia. A present for taking the time to meet me.”
Calvino’s office opened half days on Saturday and it was nearly noon as he put down the phone with Diane. Ratana was working a half day even though he told her this was not necessary; she was always at the office by nine on Saturday, checking the mail, waiting to see if there might be a new case. His head was throbbing as he looked at the Bangkok Post. There was a photograph of a woman walking through deep flood waters with her child beside her. The water hit the kid about chest high and she looked frightened. The mother wore lipstick, jewelry, and an expensive dress; she was smiling into the camera. Go figure life, he thought. If she picks up the kid, she ruins her dress. Let the kid walk.
“Why didn’t you tell me she wasn’t going to phone Gabe?” asked Calvino, looking up from the newspaper.
“I thought you should talk with her first. And that you’d get her to change her mind.”
“But you knew she wouldn’t phone Gabe.”
“I had that feeling,” said Ratana.
“Like with the birthday card.”
“Something like that.”
Noi’s missing person case had been in his office for a couple of weeks and like a dead fish smelling up the place he had been about to throw it out. Gabe’s deposit of five hundred dollars had been chewed up trying to find her and what did the client have for his money? The client had nothing and that made Calvino feel like he had ripped the client off. Most of the money had gone to so-called informers, people who worked the edges of the Comfort Zone, including those in Pattaya where the photo had obviously been shot. They had taken the money and made promises. Promises came easy, performance came hard. Think of a pack of dogs when a bone is thrown into the soi. The dogs scramble and do what they need to do in order to be the first dog on the bone.
Informers were like a pack of mangy soi dogs; they fought over and devoured bones Calvino threw to them. And found new ways to get more bones.
The fact was that Calvino had been unable to turn her up. It didn’t do any good to explain that trying to find a Thai named “Diane” based on a photo of her sleeping on a pillow was not that easy. If it was, then the client wouldn’t have needed a private investigator. Gabe had been bitching at him on the phone every other day from LA, asking for a status report. Then out of nowhere, she appears. Like a broad in a magic act. Puff of smoke and there she is. Well, not that she exactly made her appearance but the phone call was the next best thing, and she had made a promise to appear on Sunday. Which led Calvino back to where he had started, thinking about how meaningless most promises were unless someone had a real incentive, a personal interest which meant they would follow through. Most of the time the only incentive was to get rid of the person wanting the promise to be made.
Why couldn’t she be available some other time? he thought to himself. Noi choses today to phone, and not from Bangkok—or so she says—but from some dive in Roi Et; Noi, calling herself Diane, of Roi Et who suddenly had learnt that he was looking for her and she couldn’t meet him until Sunday. He was on bodyguard assignment on Sunday. He had made a promise. Now he had a conflict. A full-time bodyguard assignment. Around the clock. He bargained to meet her on a day that he had already sold. He wanted Wednesday afternoon so bad that he could taste that day. “No can do,” she said. “On Monday I fly to Hong Kong.”
He did not need to ask what that trip was about. It would be a new nightclub. Maybe she would even do some singing; mainly it would be a fresh start at making money in the flesh trade far away from Gabe’s organization. Why not cut the ying loose? He asked himself why he was wasting time over a bimbo for this asshole in LA when he had a real job, one paying a grand a day? Because it didn’t matter that the ying was a bimbo and the client a low-life; he had already given his word to find her. Now that he had, it was a question of honor to follow through and not just walk away because someone had thrown some big bucks at him. The next item on the agenda was figuring out how to wedge an appointment to meet Noi or Diane into the schedule on late Sunday morning, and how to square his point of honor with Jess who believed no doubt his honor was already on the line.
MUCH to the surprise of the regular customers, the Thai cook had talked Black Hawk, who was the head American cook (on the advice of a fortune teller who promised this would work), into making chicken pot pie on Friday. Chicken pot pie had never been served on a Friday; everyone knew it was Tuesday’s Special. This was new and untested territory. Calvino closed the door behind him as he walked into the bar and found the place nearly empty. All those sixty-baht chicken pies and there were only a couple of takers. Black Hawk stood in the doorway with a frown on his face.
“Fucking fortune teller, what do any of them know?” he asked as Calvino strolled past a couple of empty booths.
“Someone give you a bum lottery number?” asked Calvino.
“Man, I got thirty fucking pies and only a couple of takers,” said Black Hawk. “I’d settle for a bad lottery number. Fat Ralph’s pissed off at me over these pies.”
“Twenty-nine,” said Calvino. “Bring me one of the pies.”
At the counter, most of the barstools were unoccupied. One middle-aged man with his gut hanging six inches over his belt hunched forward, his face in his chicken pie, only looking up to take a swig from his Singha beer bottle. Another regular named Ricky slumped forward, head resting on his folded arms, weeping over the Vietnamese he had killed during the war. He hit his forehead against the counter. Once, twice, as if to recreate the dull thud of distant mortar shell striking the ground. A friend sitting on the next bar stool put an arm around Ricky’s shoulder and tried to comfort him. Ricky didn’t look like he was in any chicken pot pie mood. A couple of waitresses sat in the booths watching the TV mounted on the wall and two more waitresses sat on stools staring at the ceiling. Something they normally did on their back. One waitress shuffled out of the kitchen with a steaming pie on a tray. She walked past Calvino and set the pie down on the table in front of Fat Ralph.
“Goddamit, who kicked you in the face?” Fat Ralph asked, sitting under the enormous horned head which had at some distant time belonged to a water buffalo. Flared nostrils, glassy-eyed, its ears half-erect. Like the Vietnamese that Ricky had killed, this trophy had had a place on the land, a desire to live, eat, drink, fuck, sleep. And instead would spend eternity in Fat Ralph’s bar—or until the lease ended, whichever happened first.
“Just a scratch,” said Calvino. He looked over at Ricky, his face all red and wet from crying. Some wounds were a whole lot more nasty than others. He wouldn’t trade Ricky’s psyche damage for what had happened to him the night before.
“At least you can talk. I had a guy in here the other day that had his jaw wired in four places. Try eating a chicken pie with your jaw wired. This is my third goddamn pie. The fucking cook made all these fucking pies on a Saturday. I need money. And what do I have? All these goddamn fucking pot pies that no one wants to eat.”
One of the waitresses who hustled drinks was twenty-eight years old, under five-foot and weighed about eighty pounds. Ewok was the nickname given to her by some Star Wars freak boyfriend from Austin, Texas that no one could remember. She tossed her long hair out of her face.
“Buy me a drink,” Ewok said to Calvino.
“Special effect creatures like Ewoks shouldn’t be drinking this early in the day,” said someone from the bar.
Ewok flipped him the finger. “Fuck you, McPhail,” she said.
She turned her attention back to Calvino. “Drink, okay?”
This was a sure-fire request. Calvino always bought Ewok a drink. Any eighty-pounder who could knock back five Mekhong shooters and still carry a chicken pie out of the kitchen had his admiration. She ran over to the bar and ordered her Mekhong with a side glass of water.
“Hey, Daddy-O, are you contributing to the delinquency of someone who wishes she were still a minor? Ain’t that right, Ewok? You’re an old special
effect trying to pass for eighteen,” said McPhail from an end booth, an imported Marlboro cigarette burning in an ashtray and a club sandwich on a plate. McPhail was the only guy at Lonesome Hawk bar who never ordered the chicken pot pie even on chicken pot pie day. And sometimes tried to order it on a non-chicken pot pie day. McPhail wore a black T-shirt with Kalashnikov in both English and Russian lettering. An image of an AK-47 ran from one side of his ribs to the other. Basic information also had been printed on the front and read: 7.62mm calibre, length: 880/645 mm and mass: 3.8 kg.
“Fuck you, McPhail,” said Ewok, flipping him the finger.
“You already said. You got to increase your vocabulary. You can’t go through life saying, ‘Fuck you, McPhail,’ and pretend you know more than three words of English. Giving the finger is a nice gesture, but you use it all the time so it loses its meaning. Besides, you don’t usually start talking dirty before you’ve had at least three early afternoon shooters.”
Calvino sat down across from McPhail, staring at his T-shirt. “It looks like you’re having a Kalashnikov kind of day.”
“Man, you look like hell, Calvino. Like someone’s been beating the shit out of your face with an assault rifle,” McPhail said, putting down a wedge of toast with tomato, lettuce, ham, and chicken inside. He retrieved the cigarette and took a long puff. His bottle of Singha beer was nearly empty and he held it up and motioned to the bar for another one.
“I was delivering a birthday card,” said Calvino. “And the next thing I know there is a fist in my face.”
“Working the Thai postal service in a rough neighbourhood is a bummer. I didn’t know you had gone into that line of work. I didn’t know a farang could get a work permit for mail delivery. Isn’t that one of those restricted professions like making amulets and planting rice? In any event, man, I’d say that you ain’t cut out for the delivery business. Jesus, your face is even more fucked up looking at it close up.” McPhail sucked in the smoke, put down the cigarette, and picked up the sandwich.
“Thanks for the advice, McPhail. I’ll keep it in mind as I plan my career.” He had gone to the bar half hoping that McPhail would be there (as he often was), thinking this might be a solution to the meeting problem Noi’s appointment had caused.
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