“Let me guess? This goes in my ear,” said Calvino.
Jess didn’t smile. He was into toys.
Let Jess take point, Calvino thought. He was beginning to understand that Jess wasn’t much of a follower. This was more than just who led and who followed at the dance but who became the prime target if a shooter appeared. Something told Calvino all those years in the States had changed some core value in Jess, or was he simply trying to prove something to Calvino or to himself? Or it may have been even simpler than that: he didn’t trust Calvino to be on point.
FIVE
LEK WORKED BEHIND the bar, her arms wet to the elbows, washing and stacking cocktail glasses and beer mugs. Steam from the coffee machine fogged the mirror. With her usual line of vision clouded, it was difficult to do the washing up and manage the bar. She stood with her back to the dance floor and the door. She’d half turn from the sink, hands dripping, take in the action, before washing another glass. She spotted Calvino on a stool tapping his fingers against the side of his glass.
“What happened to you, Khun Vinee?” asked Lek, wiping her hands on a towel.
“I fell off a motorcycle,” he said in Thai. She smiled at him.
A motorcycle accident was an old bar ying stand-by lie.
“Or maybe someone get angry with you. Want a drink, Khun Vinee?”
“When you have time.”
“Just washing glasses. It never ends. So I just stop. Say finished. Look at my hands. They look like an old woman’s hands,” she poured him another Mekhong, put more ice into his glass and topped it off with an ounce of cola.
“Get one of the yings to help.”
She laughed. “They don’t know clean from dirty. Give a customer a dirty glass and unless he’s drunk, he’s gonna complain and not come back. No, I wash the glasses. Besides, I’ve got lots of time. And I go to see the doctor today. He check everything. Stomach, chests, down there. Take my blood. Everything okay. No HIV, no problem. He say I can have kid. I think it is time.”
“Jack and you are long overdue,” said Calvino. Jack Mellows, a fifty-eight year old American from Alaska, was Lek’s old man. He’d financed the bar from the sale of his fishing boat which had been called “Lovejoy”. He called the bar by the same name. From a commercial point of view the Lovejoy was probably less seaworthy than Lovejoy the boat, but he managed to keep the business afloat by doing odd jobs. Being single didn’t mean that one lacked attachments; it meant that you slept alone in your own bed at least five nights a week. Any other arrangement was a kind of putative marriage. Many gray-area marriages existed; men who were neither single nor married, somewhat like the living dead or a Benz station wagon—odd, strange compromises that seemed to deliver the worst of both worlds. But Jack and Lek were “married” not in the way most farangs were married to a Thai woman. These two had actually registered their marriage in the district office and that made the union as official as any marriage could be under Thai law. There was no ambiguity in the legalities of their relationship; but the actual practice of being married was riddled with many contradictions for both of them.
“Jack can not make baby.”
“Yeah,” said Calvino arching an eyebrow. “What’s his problem?”
“He shoots blanks,” said Lek, making her index finger into a gun barrel, her middle finger the trigger and her thumb the hammer. No question she’d picked up the expression and gesture from Jack. Calvino raised his glass and touched her index finger.
“Don’t shoot,” he said, smiling. “I am in bad enough shape without getting shot.”
“Do you know what a blank is?” she asked him.
“A fake bullet.”
She shook her head. “Wrong. Blank means sperm is no good.”
This was how English was absorbed in the bar. He wasn’t going to argue with her.
“So who is the lucky father going to be?”
“Not sure who I want. You want baby, Khun Vinee?”
“I am a solo act. And look at me, do I look like Darwin selected my genes for another generation?” said Calvino, glancing at his watch and gesturing for another drink.
“You mean Dwayne?” She had never heard of Darwin. Dwayne she had slept with.
“Where is Jack, by the way?”
“Upstairs watching Larry and eating pizza. Why do you Americans all eat pizza?”
“Because Larry and pizza go together.”
She laughed, an easy laugh. Lek was about twenty-three, twenty-four, easing into a career shift from mamasan to motherhood. Running a bar was on-the-job training in how to discipline children. And after all, Motherhood (with a capital “M”) with a farang was a good direction to head after the younger yings made competition in the bar more and more difficult. Not that a married woman like Lek was competing in the bar for customers . . . but there had been Dwayne, and a couple of other chances for romance and income, actually several others.
“Who’s on your short-list? The guys you’d consider for father material?”
A puzzled look crossed her face. “A short what?”
“The top three guys you want to father your child.”
“Only three? Not enough.”
“I figured your short-list might turn out to be a long list. You thought it through, right? You have a luk-krueng and you take her straight from the hospital to the TV studio to do a Johnson and Johnson baby powder commercial, pick up a fat paycheck on the way out the door. Then when she’s older, she gets a huge contract from Grammy Records. You never have to work again.”
The TV had lots of air-time about the paycheck the parents had pocketed after their luk-krueng scored a major commercial, increasing the birthrate overnight among yings who got the message that having a luk-krueng was the fast track way to pick-up truck, motorcycle, condo, and a new wardrobe. No one mentioned all the ugly half-breed kids that no advertising agency would put on camera to push baby powder or dog food.
“farang stay in Thailand too long, know too much about Thai girl. No good.”
Early on a Friday evening, Lovejoy was subdued, yings shuffling like their legs were numb. A few regulars sat in the back keeping to themselves, ignoring the yings. Or were the yings ignoring them? Some were tourists—they had the look of someone who had strapped on roller-skates for the first time—off-balance, wobbly, awkwardly moving around the half-dark interior, their Dobie Gillis/Forrest Gump smiles setting them apart. What Lek was saying is that this kind of farangs they wanted in the bar; yings could draw down some real cash from such farangs. Like taking money from the IMF but without all those reporting and spending conditions and paperwork.
Two offs had been chalked on the white board.
“Two yings out early. Business must be good,” said Calvino, looking at black numbers 31 and 45 on the white board.
“Not really.”
“Maybe the numbers are from last night. With all the washing up you haven’t had time to clean the board,” said Calvino. Sometimes the mamasan wrote the numbers on the board on the same theory that a beggar puts some coins in the hat. Seeing someone had gone first inspired confidence, thinking that it is okay to bar fine a girl. One of those great comforts of life is that someone else has been there, done that. One of the great fears is, if you don’t act now, who knows, there might not be any yings left.
“You thinking I’m joking about a baby?”
The yings on stage in bikinis looked like a warm-up act for superstars that had yet to arrive. The real talent didn’t show until nine or so if they showed at all, and that depended on whether some Dobie character had dragged her deep into some domestic fantasy about getting married and going back to Portland with him. Lovejoy pulled most of its talent from a couple of Isan villages and this created a family-like environment where yings shared their problems and fried grasshoppers, but all that good feeling didn’t stop the yings trying to scratch out the eyes of someone who had poached another girl’s customers.
“No, but I think you need to work on your pitch. It
needs a polish.”
“What a pitch?”
“Your story line is rusty. You’ve been out of circulation.”
“Just married to Jack.”
“Whatever. If you want stud service, then you need a good pitch.”
“Pitch. What do you know about pitching?” asked Jack Mellows.
He appeared at the bottom of the stairs wearing sandals, overalls, and a carefully ironed red shirt. Jack walked behind the bar, picked up a freshly washed glass, put it under the Johnny Walker Black bottle dispenser and pressed the plastic button, releasing a shot. He hit the dispenser one more time. It wasn’t clear how long Jack had been standing at the foot of the stairs listening. With the fogged mirror, he was outside of Lek’s field of vision and Calvino sat with his back turned away from the stairs.
“Some of the world’s greatest major league pitchers are from the Plaza.”
Jack thought about this, wondering if Calvino was fucking with him. He decided the smart move would be to forget it since Calvino owed him money and Jack owed him some photos of dead farangs and getting into some extended conversation about pitching was going to lead nowhere he wanted to go. But the booze told him to forget the smart move and push this asshole who had the full attention of his wife.
“Why didn’t you come upstairs?”
“And interrupt ‘Larry King Live’?” Calvino knew that Jack was a TV freak, and that this show was one he always watched.
“Larry interviewed a guy who heads Sex Addicts Anonymous, California branch. The guy is belly-aching that he was a total addict, has screwed eighty-four yings in the last twelve months, and I am thinking to myself, eighty-four in twelve months? Has he got an impotence problem? Eighty-four isn’t even a good start. The guy doesn’t know fucking addiction. And what in God’s name is wrong with screwing? I kept asking myself, this guy has started a support group for Sex Addicts Anonymous. Anonymous? I say to myself this guy’s on national television talking about all the yings he’s fucked. That’s not exactly anonymous, that’s bragging. Support? Support for what, I ask myself. Do these guys sit around crying about how ashamed they are of themselves, handing each other tissues? How has America got itself so fucked up? It don’t make sense, Vinee. Then I remind myself, hey, this is from the U.S. of A. And I remember the reason I pay for sex in Thailand is because free sex is too fucking expensive in America. No wonder this guy is on Larry telling his story. If he doesn’t cut back on sex, he will end up in the poorhouse. Half-fucked and totally broke. Ain’t that right, honey?” He looked over at Lek, toasted her with his glass. He was rambling, and Calvino was thinking that Jack had been into the Johnny Black upstairs watching Larry King.
“Lek told you she wants to have a kid,” said Jack. He sipped from his glass, leaning forward on his elbows close enough for Calvino to see some cracker crumbs in Jack’s white beard. “And that I shoot blanks?”
He had been listening for a while, thought Calvino.
“Jack, I didn’t come around to talk about Larry King or your fertility problem. I came on business.”
“Excuse me. I was trying to explain about how fucked up Americans are and how lucky we are that we don’t live in that Nazi-feminist state.” He punched back the double shot.
After the long sigh, Calvino hit him with the question that had brought him to Lovejoy in the first place: “What did you find out for me in Phuket?”
Jack, a big boned man, his nose puffy and lined with blue veins, his jowls saggy, reached into his overalls and pulled out a brown whisky-stained envelope and tossed it on the bar. Calvino had no trouble seeing him pulling in nets filled with salmon over the side of Lovejoy the boat.
“The photos are inside. I don’t know if your man is there or not. Some of those bodies had been in those drawers for going on two weeks. Some are pretty ripe as well. They had two or three stacked inside each drawer.”
Calvino opened the envelope and flipped through the photos, looking at faces of dead farangs. Bloated, twisted, discolored death masks of farang men in their twenties. Their naked, dead bodies in an apparent embrace with the other bodies in the drawer, limbs tangled together, hair matted onto the chest of another body. The face he was looking for belonged to Dale Macdonald, a young Canadian back-packer from Toronto. Dale’d gone missing during the Full Moon party. Every month on Koh Pha Ngan thousands of young travelers slept on the beach, did drugs, fucked each other, and watched the full moon over the sea. Each month some of them died of an overdose. It was the law of averages. Drugs and booze culled the weak members of any herd. Calvino had been paid to find Dale, twenty-one years old, just graduated from the University of Toronto and gone to Thailand after he had read on the Internet about the Full Moon party every month on Koh Pha Ngan. Dale’s father, a newspaper editor, hired Calvino to find his son, comb the beaches, talk to people, find someone who had been on the local scene and might have information about Dale. Calvino had done that but no one had any information about Dale and either they were lying or Dale wasn’t on Koh Pha Ngan.
Ratana had suggested the morgue in Phuket. Good idea, only Calvino wasn’t going to the South to check out any morgues. So he sub-contracted Jack to do the job.
Calvino laid out photos of stiffs on the bar counter. Like playing cards. Thirty-seven jokers inside Phuket hospital morgues. The bodies had come from Koh Pha Ngan and been shipped to Phuket. There was no place to keep bodies on the island. Phuket had the facilities for handling and disposal.
A good business? Not really. No one was claiming the bodies and they were piling up, becoming a health problem, a public relations problem. The image of all those young dead farangs wasn’t good for tourism. But it would have been worse to bury the bodies on the beach or tie some weights around the legs and dump them in the sea. And it sure wasn’t any good for anyone to keep them decomposing in half-assed facilities in local hospitals.
Calvino found Dale among the photos; Dale looked like he was in a deep sleep. His body was in a lot better shape than most of the others. What had Dale been looking for? Adventure, enlightenment, sex, love, and friendship? The search had ended in the morgue. The family would be notified and arrangements would be made to ship Dale back to Canada for burial.
“That’s him,” said Calvino, turning the photo around. Jack looked at the photo in a detached way like he wasn’t thinking about what he was looking at. Calvino had been half-hoping the kid wouldn’t be in any of the photos. Now he had the unpleasant job of phoning Toronto and breaking the news to the family.
“I mean what is a sex addict?” asked Jack. “Think about it. These assholes hate sex. It’s not a drug or cigarettes or picking your nose. Getting laid is about the best thing you can do.”
Soon a half-dozen bar yings edged around Calvino, elbows on the bar, handing each other the photos.
“Jack, this is my guy. I don’t want to talk about Larry King. I want to deal with this. Are you with me?”
“You’d better phone the hospital. A doctor said they were thinking about tossing dead farangs into the hospital incinerator. They’ve got unclaimed bodies coming out of their ears and no place to bury them. No money to pay the wats to burn them. They are pretty pissed off. The cemeteries want money. Everyone has their fucking hand out. So the doctor says they will burn the bodies with the garbage. Kind of makes you think, Calvino.”
“Jack, don’t you think Khun Vinee’s baby would be nah-lak dee?” asked Lek.
“I’ve got pictures of dead people on the bar that look in better condition than Vinee.”
Calvino took out a hundred-dollar note and pushed it over to Jack.
“Who are you bar fining, my wife?” He blinked at the note, then looked at Calvino.
“That’s for bringing back these.” Calvino slipped the photos back in the envelope.
Jack held the C-note up to the light, one of the new ones where the engravers had made Ben Franklin look like the man in the moon. Having cleared up two missing persons within the space of twenty-four hours (and onl
y getting beat up once), combined with the grand a day bodyguard assignment had Calvino thinking that he was coming out of some dark tunnel; the place of that nightmare where the locals were burning up farangs. He watched Jack fold the C-note in half and stick it inside his shirt pocket. Then Jack leaned over and slapped Lek on the ass. “You’re pushing the edge of the envelope, Lek.”
She extended two fingers like a double-barreled handgun, tapping her thumb as the hammer rapidly several times. “Bang, bang,” she laughed. “Not dangerous. It only shoots blanks.”
“I catch you fucking around, I won’t be shooting blanks,” said Jack.
Calvino was thinking that would make an interesting Larry King: owner of Lovejoy goes postal in Bangkok. She wrapped her arms around Jack’s thick fisherman’s neck, kissed him on his bearded cheek, and looking past her husband, she locked Calvino in the cross-hairs of her sight and squeezed off a wink. If a picture is worth ten thousand words, then Lek’s wink was running the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Calvino’s mobile phone rang, giving him an excuse to pick up the photos and step outside to answer it.
“This is Father Andrew, and I have an extra bottle of a pretty good French wine and no one who can appreciate it. So I thought about you. And I am putting together some dinner. Say you come to my place in about an hour?”
“Tonight is Friday. You never go out on Friday nights.”
“That’s right. That’s why I am asking you to come in.”
“You’re not flooded in?” asked Calvino.
Father Andrew laughed. “What’s this? Vincent Calvino’s afraid of getting wet?”
Calvino watched the passing farangs. Mostly middle-aged men fingering a Viagra in their pocket, eyeing the bars, trying to decide which bar to try next. The blue pill was like the hoola hoop or bell-bottom trousers, a time lock forever freezing the takers as creatures of the late nineties.
Cold Hit Page 8
