“You should tell him yourself,” said Calvino.
“Will he come back?” asked the Thai with a long, drawn face cut with harsh lines; the kind of face that looked mean or a face that mean things had been done to.
Calvino nodded. “Yeah, I think he will come back. Once he knows that he does belong here. And you showed he does belong.” He leaned down and picked up one of the bloodied, discarded two by fours, turned it over in this hand, the men watching him. He walked alone through the dark and he was remembering his dream about the stranger who had come to the village to teach the art of fire, and how the villagers had turned on the man, thrown him into the fire that he had started, and how Calvino had done nothing. Like in the slaughterhouse, he had observed, passive, detached, knowing the outcome was fixed and determined. Revenge substituted for law. In a culture of revenge, getting even was the way—perhaps the only way—of curing a wound. A wound was healed by inflicting on another an equal or greater harm. If there couldn’t be justice, there could be an equal proportion of pain inflicted to balance the cosmic scales of right and wrong. Father Andrew would understand these people had taken it upon themselves to avenge his harm, and how the message from the Old Testament was far stronger, powerful and accepted in a place where the seeds of the New Testament had yet to take root.
By the time Calvino entered Father Andrew’s house, the priest had several people from the slum hovering around him with towels, washing his face, his arms, and his feet.
Calvino sat down at the table. “They want you to stay.”
“How can I, Vincent?”
“It’s like this,” said Calvino, putting the bloodied two by four on the table. “The Khmer don’t look so good. Seems about a dozen of the men in the slum weren’t too happy at what they did to their priest. So they put things right. They did it the Thai way. They can’t undo what those men did to you. But they did the next best thing. They showed everyone in this community that you belong here. That no one can insult their priest. But if anyone tries to do so, then those people have to answer to everyone in this slum. They made a statement. You aren’t just a farang living here. You are one of them. You can’t go. And it seems pretty clear they believe you have your dignity back. And they believe they have their own dignity back. The way I see it, there’s no longer any reason for you to leave. They have put it right in the Thai way.”
Father Andrew nodded.
The same reasoning definitely didn’t apply to them. The whole community would be talking about it tonight. Authorities would come to the slum. Questions would be asked about the strange Thai priest who went with the men into the slaughterhouse. The Thai nun with blood on her hands. And the farang who came with them.
“We’ve got to go, Father Andrew,” said Jess.
“He’s right. We can’t stay. The police will be coming around checking out the slaughterhouse.”
They walked back to the Por Tek Tueng van. The stiff was loaded in the back and the two workers were squatting on plastic stools eating a bowl of noodles. Calvino whispered to Jess, “Let’s go back to the Grand Rose Hotel.”
“You’ve got to be crazy,” said Jess.
“It’s the last place they will be looking for us. Take Noi and check in. I’ll see you there.”
Jess said nothing as Calvino turned and walked off. There was doubt in his eyes but Calvino knew that Jess and Noi would go. He went to the table where the Por Tek Tueng workers were finishing up. “The priest and sister will go along with you. They need to say prayers. Otherwise the ghost will be angry. Do you understand?” He pressed a thousand-baht note against the hand of the one worker. The man looked at 208
the note and nodded. A thousand baht and an angry ghost were powerful reasons. The two men didn’t bother finishing their noodles and headed straight back to the van.
Calvino walked back to Jess. “They will take you.”
One of the men opened the Por Tek Tueng van doors and Jess climbed in first, then held out a hand for Sister Teresa who followed after him. The doors were shut and Noi folded her hands in prayer over the dead body. Even the Por Tek Tueng crew bought the performance. As the van pulled away, Calvino watched it wind through the ten-wheel trucks in the parking lot and then disappear.
WAS going to the Grand Rose Hotel the right call, Calvino asked himself in the taxi ride back to Sukhumvit Road. Jess didn’t think so and maybe he was right. The fact was that no place was safe. Going to Klong Toey to seek sanctuary with Father Andrew proved that nothing was ever predictable in Bangkok. As he sat in the taxi, Calvino thought about what Father Andrew had said about dignity and knew that the priest was right. Dignity was all a man had of any worth and when that was lost there was nothing else left of value to lose. The life was there, of course, but it was no longer a life with any consequence, any meaning, or a driving force for good. There were ways of losing dignity and there were ways of gaining it back. Killing was one of those ways. In most times, in most places, men killed other men because they lost their dignity and used murder to recover it. The men in the drug business—a business devoted to stealing another person’s dignity—exercised their power in the cloud line above the reach of the law, and these robbers of dignity found their dignity was on the line because one LAPD cop might trace the line of powder to their door. They weren’t about to let some low-ranking LAPD officer come onto their turf and throw pig’s blood in their face. And the fact that Jess was Thai made the indignity all the more difficult to bear. Jess had forgotten a few things over the years of living in Los Angeles. That this powerful hidden class demanded without any exceptions honor, respect, and deference. He was like the Khmer killing pigs in front of a priest having no idea of the consequences of their act. What had started as a routine stakeout of a cheap Hollywood hotel had led to the arrest of Noi’s brother, who had been caught with a suitcase of heroin in Ziploc bags. The chain reaction began at that moment and the consequences of the arrest were still playing themselves out in the streets of Bangkok. Where to hide? Where would they think to look for them?
Calvino paid the driver and got out of the taxi. The Grand Rose Hotel looked deserted. He went inside, walked through the empty lobby, and leaned on the reception counter, hitting the service bell with the palm of his hand.
An old woman’s voice croaked out a “Hallo.”
“Hallo hallo hia, la ka,” he called back. The lyrics to a song.
In the back he heard an ancient, hoarse laugh. The old woman had been sleeping on a mat behind the desk. She rose up, a tiny, frail figure of a woman with her gray hair sticking out. The same old half-blind woman who had been at the desk the first time he had arrived with Wes Naylor and Jess.
“You have a vacancy?” Calvino asked in Thai. He said this without any sense of irony. He wanted to see her reaction.
She smiled with her black teeth. “Single or double hong?”
“A single hong,” Calvino said, sliding a five-hundred-baht note on the counter.
“You like Thai music?” she asked him in English.
The old woman could speak English all the time. He wondered if she hid this from not only the farangs but also her own family.
“I love Thai music.”
“Fill this out.” She slid a registration form across the counter.
He filled in the blanks—Smith, John, Student, New Zealand, born on 1 June 1964, and Nepal as the next destination—and handed back the form. The old woman didn’t even look at the form, knowing whatever lies it contained didn’t matter. She handed him a key attached to a long clear plastic handle with ornate roses inset.
“That is 495 baht a night,” she said, rolling a five- baht coin over the counter. It fell onto the floor and rolled over the floor and into the darkness.
He knew the rate was 350 baht but said nothing. Calvino’s Law: Knowing too much was never a good thing when one went into hiding as a farang in Thailand.
“I have a friend who checked in before,” said Calvino. Yeah, that was right, before, nice an
d vague and Thai in its inability to describe what before meant.
“What’s his name?” asked the old woman without blinking a blind eye.
“I met him on the plane. He’s a member of the Cause. If I could see the register, I am certain I would remember it. That was three, four days ago. I am sure he came here. Can you help me?” he asked as he folded a five-hundred-baht into her old papery palm.
“Since you like Thai music, okay.” She put the five-hundred-baht note inside her bra, then looked down under the counter, murmuring to herself. She might have been trying to make out the denomination of the note or she might have been looking for the registration cards from the last week. There were only six cards. She laid them out on the counter like a fortune teller with Tarot cards putting them in a semi-circle. Calvino looked at the cards. There were only five customers for the day. A man and woman. The man’s name was Axel and the woman’s name Joanne. The hong numbers were 419 and 420. He memorized the numbers. McPhail had registered under his own name as had Wes Naylor. They were on the fifth floor; hongs 527 and 512. And he saw another farang name that he did not recognize. He figured the hotel might actually have one real guest on board.
Calvino turned over his hong key. Thinking it takes a thief to catch one, or, in this case, to make theft difficult. Someone in the family had designed the large plastic handles so a guest couldn’t argue he had simply forgot to return the key; the guest—or the person staying for a short time in the guest’s room—had to make a conscious effort to steal the key. An anti-ying theft device. They obviously knew their guests and the guests of their guests as well.
The old near-blind woman had put him in hong 421.
Blind but not stupid.
TWELVE
CALVINO FELT WINDED as he walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. He stopped at the landing, thinking that Jess had to be a good fifteen years younger than he. He pushed the fire door open, turned right and, still catching his breath, walked down the corridor. And the guy was fast with his hands and his feet. A couple of the lights were burnt out in the corridor. Naylor was right about the place being a slum. It could have been in the middle of Klong Toey. A large rat ate off a plate left outside one of the hongs and showed no fear as Calvino passed by. The hallway had a closed-up attic-like smell of musty decay; the air thick like walking through a thin wet spider’s web. Only junkies and backpackers would feel comfortable breathing such air. He got his breath back before he knocked on Noi’s door. Nothing. He put his ear against the door. No answer. No sound. No movement inside. Then he knocked on Jess’s door and again no one was inside the hong. So he tossed his hong key up, the ugly red plastic end spiraling down. He caught it—a one handed catch—and walked two doors down the corridor to his hong; he was nervous, thinking they should be in their hong, trying to decide if they were having dinner somewhere, or maybe they had run into Wes Naylor and had gone out with him, and other possible explanations started to build up in his mind. Such as that they were inside the hong. But they were dead. Calvino reached out to put his key into the lock and stopped cold. The door to hong 421 was ajar. The TV volume was on low and the flicker of light from the screen danced through the opening. Were Jess and Noi waiting inside and that was why they hadn’t answered when he knocked? Or it might be that someone connected with the drug ring that Jess had struck was waiting inside to blow his brains out.
He reached inside his 199 baht jacket and in one clean, smooth motion pulled his .38 police special from his holster, kicked open the door, and went in, low, his arms extended, both hands around the handgun. Pratt, dressed in casual civilian clothes, sat with his back to the door watching television. Calvino let out a long sigh as he holstered his gun.
“Jesus, Pratt, don’t do that to me.”
Pratt raised his hand, slightly turned his head. “I had a bet with myself. He will pull his sidearm, I thought. Then, I thought, no, Vincent won’t do that,” said Pratt. He never called a gun a gun or handgun.
“Why not?”
“That’s why I left the door open. Would someone who wanted to kill you leave on the TV and the door open?”
Calvino shook his head in disbelief. “Would someone put a Claymore in my car at the Emporium? Pratt, anything is possible”.
Pratt watched him holster his .38. “You should be more careful with your sidearm. That’s all I am saying.”
Calvino, regaining his breath and composure, collapsed in a chair next to Pratt. The TV was tuned to the Discovery Channel and on the screen two great apes were at the foreplay stage of what promised to turn into a Monster Fuck. The male ape circled the female who was obviously in heat. As he approached her, the male reached out his hand, touching a finger to the female ape’s vagina. The male ran the finger under his nose, grimaced, backed away, smelled it again, and fled the scene. The female let out this loud wail of a whooping sound, her lips pursed into a perfect “O”, the echo of that painful rejection in a long, pitiful scream coming from the back of her throat.
McPhail came out of the bathroom zipping up his fly, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Bombs blowing up. Now, guns, guns, the place is filthy with guns. And while I am at it, hey Calvino, we’ve been waiting for you. I mean, what took you so long? Did you go for a short-time?” McPhail did not wait for an answer. He pinched the cigarette between his forefinger and thumb and pointed it at the TV. “Man, I once fucked a nun short-time and missed a crucial business appointment. I didn’t know she was a nun. This was in Burma. I had her in the bed, and grabbed her hair and it came off in my hand; I have this wig hanging limp in my hand, and my equipment immediately goes south. Her head is bald. Smooth, shaved clean so you can see every blue vein in her skin. She had just left her order and was getting a little nest egg together as she adjusted back into, should I say, lay life.”
“Where’s Naylor?” asked Calvino.
“Upstairs in his hong with his whore from the Plaza, nursing her mosquito-bitten ass back to its perfect unblemished state. Where else would he be?” said McPhail.
“And Noi and Jess?”
“They’re up on the fifth floor also,” said Pratt, leaning forward and switching off the television. “Jess’s been asking her some questions about people in Los Angeles. He’s made some phone calls. I have made some calls.”
“What’s she told him?” asked Calvino.
“He’s still talking to her.”
Calvino shifted in his chair. “Naylor’s staying here with Jep?”
“Sure, Daddy-O, he closed the deal on this baby. The Brandy’s history. He now owns the Grand Rose Hotel. Or at least five percent of it.”
“How did he pull that off?” asked Calvino.
“While you and your friends were taking the Kong Toey scenic tour, we did some business. Let’s say we offered a couple of reasons why they should do the deal.”
“Like what?”
“I said to the head of the family, ‘hey, that bomb that blew up at the Emporium is just the start. Who are these dark forces, these mysterious bombers? No one knows. But there are some nasty rumors, man. Right-wing Thais. Next thing, this group is gonna follow the script of those crowds in Indonesia, man, they’re going straight for the Chinese. Remember all those raped Chinese yings? Terrible.’ And I paused, let them stew for about a minute, thinking about their yings getting fucked, then I said, ‘And all those burnt-out Chinese shops? And they also went after the Chinese hotels. Next week you might not be able to give this place away. Assuming someone doesn’t burn it down. Now here’s a guy with a million and a half dollar check on the table in a city with things being blown up by forces that probably don’t like the Chinese. And given the unnatural way your father died in this hotel, I don’t think the family karma is all that good. I don’t want to rub it in about the old man dying from the bottom up, but that’s how it happened.’ Bull’s eye. You never saw a family who hates each other’s guts fall in line so fast. The blood drained out of their faces. They looked like ghosts. Next I tell t
hem where they can put their funds to work. I told them about the Japanese guys I am doing business with. I showed them pictures of jade chops we made right there in a beautiful catalogue. And how we have this huge profit margin, and with my help, I could get them part of the action. That was it. I appealed to their worst fear, then hit them below the belt with a chance for excessive greed.”
“And they went for your jade and Japanese connection.”
“Went for it? They couldn’t get enough of it. Seems the old man was a Burmese jade freak. Roses and Jade. A good name for a gay boarding house in San Francisco, don’t you think? They signed every paper that Naylor gave them. Put their company seal on. You never saw a hong of Chinese sign up a deal so fast. No negotiations, no arguing over the fine print. Whoever did your car, Vincent, did Naylor a favor. That bomb and the old man’s butt melting were two deal closers.”
Calvino was out of the chair and moved towards the door.
“What do you mean the old man died from the bottom up. Where did you get that?” asked Calvino.
McPhail leaned closer. “You know the old woman at reception? I smoked a jay with her. Some of my best stuff, and the old man’s story just slipped out of her lips before she knew what she was saying, the whole enchilada flew out the oven door. We were out in the back standing near weeds that came up to her shoulder and there was this big piece of pottery like they keep water in upcountry and she starts to laugh. She’s turning blue from laughter, and I say, ‘Hey, what’s so funny?’ And she tells me one of those family secrets you shouldn’t ever tell a stranger and if she hadn’t been really stoned I don’t think I would have got it out of her. It turns out the old man had not been able to get it up for a number of years. He’d tried all the Chinese herbs and other bullshit remedies his buddies swore would give him a woody and nothing happened. Then Viagra came out on the black market and he got one of the bellboys to buy him some blue pills under the table at a drugstore in Patpong. The bellboy brought the pills back, the old boy pops two of them, and forty minutes later, that maid he’d been watching over several months walks past and he grabs her, pulls her into his hong. He hands her a couple of thousand baht, takes one of her hands and puts it down his pants. She’s grabbing him and he’s stripping off her clothes. He does the maid every which way but loose. The old man is suddenly sixteen again and he’s not wasting a moment, Baby. This humping goes on all through the next day and he’s popping more Viagra like it’s candy. Poking the maid, who seems to be having a good time. After this forty-eight hours of debauchery, he collapses. I know you’re thinking heart attack. So did I. But no, he passes out from all the exertion and sleeps straight through for about sixteen hours. The next day he drops a little boast to the old woman, who is his sister, saying how he had shagged the maid ten hours straight. The old woman said, ‘Oh, yeah, her sister had come around, we looked everywhere for that poor girl. Her sister was worried about her. Thought she might be sick. The girl had gone in for one of those HIV tests and it came out positive.’ His face, which had been full of pride and new-found youth, turned pale and aged about twenty years right before her. He ran off into the garden. When they found him about six hours later the damage had been done; it was irreversible and fatal damage. He had stripped off his pants and sat his butt in one of those large clay urns which he had filled with weed killer. The stuff you spread to keep the roses from getting choked out by the weeds. Anyway he sat in that shit long enough that it got into his rectum, discolored his balls, Daddy-O, fucking melted that man right down like he was a weird species of dandelion. They fished him out and got him to hospital but he was in toxic shock and died about three hours later. That’s the story. The old bastard died slowly from the butt up.”
Cold Hit Page 24
