Cold Hit

by Christopher G. Moore

  As the van stopped, Naylor was first to climb out. He stretched as the others got out and joined him on the driveway. A servant opened Pratt’s door and he stepped down.

  “Doesn’t look like a funeral home,” said Naylor. “Except for those coffins. It looks like a regular house.”

  Calvino thought that once again Naylor was looking for the world to mirror his own warped vision. But Calvino knew that the world was so warped that it almost never matched anyone’s vision. To him the house looked like the perfect location for a funeral home; discreet, remote, commercially neutral like so many buildings in Bangkok. Not only were the Thais pragmatic, so were the buildings constructed and used by them, never disclosing a specified use in case that might offend or in case the use might need to change quickly. Nestled at the back of the compound was a large, two story house with a veranda around the side. Smaller buildings appeared along the back. What looked like maids’ quarters had been converted into a morgue where the owners embalmed bodies. Someone came through the door peeling off a pair of bloody rubber gloves. He looked embarrassed, grinned, and immediately darted across the driveway and into the main building. There was also a garage that looked like some kind of storage facility. Looking over all of the grounds, Calvino could not help but think that this was a large piece of land; even far away from the main hubs of Sukhumvit and Silom Roads single houses occupied a much smaller area. Someone had bought it years before the boom and held it or someone had bought late with a steamer trunk full of cash. Pratt had pulled the van tight next to the back entrance. Wooden coffins—the kind used for cremation—were neatly stacked to one side.

  A smartly dressed man in his twenties in a dark western business suit appeared at the back entrance, walked down the steps, and waied Pratt. The man introduced himself as Chaiwat, one of the three sons of the undertaker, and asked how he might be of help. At the same time, he eyed the van, as if half-expecting there might be a body inside. Chaiwat had a toothy grin and spoke with a perfect American accent. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses rode forward on his nose.

  “I am Colonel Prachai. These foreigners have come for the dead farang,” said Pratt in Thai. “They want to remove the body of Danny Ramsey.”

  The young man smiled, his eyes on the farangs, and nodded. “You had better speak with my father.”

  Chaiwat led them down the corridor with large potted ferns, passing the viewing room. The double doors were closed and the panels of glass were curtained with transparent white gauze. They walked up a flight of heavily panelled stairs, down a corridor and into an office on the second floor of the house.

  His father, Panya, was seated behind his desk doing some paperwork. The undertaker stood, bowed slightly and waied Pratt. His son filed in last and closed the door and then crossed over and whispered in his father’s ear. Panya nodded and grinned one of those execution-days-on-the-football-field grins. He was tall and skinny as a rail and his short-cropped hair was mostly gray. His narrow jaw made his teeth appear too big for his mouth and his deep-sunk eyes blinked as he looked at Pratt. He wore a brown suit and the shoulder material bunched up as if someone had lifted him in the air and set him down again. Under his jacket he wore one of those cheesy golf theme ties: green with inserts of golf clubs, golf bags, putting greens. He didn’t look like an undertaker.

  “I am sorry, I just got back from playing golf,” he said. “Please sit down.”

  They had caught him on his golf day unprepared for visitors. Several black ties hung on coat rack to the side of his desk. He immediately began to remove his golf tie and slipped on one of his solid black mourning ties. He was mid-loop as he motioned for everyone to sit down.

  Panya appeared nervous as once again his son whispered that a policeman had accompanied the visitors who filed into his office. He waied Pratt for the second time and handed him a name card. The name card was printed in English. Unexpected visitors, who included a police colonel, a priest, a nun and two farangs, were unsettling him. He was so rattled that it took him three tries to get the knot in the black tie right.

  “You have already met one of my sons, Chaiwat. But he is unable to tell me exactly how we can help you.” He gave a nervous laugh as he fiddled with his tie. He nodded towards Chaiwat, who stood next to the door, his hands folded together as if attending a funeral service. “We run a family business.” The office was furnished with two comfortable sofas covered in soft black leather. Orchids floated in a bowl on the coffee table. On the wall above his desk, several framed certificates and diplomas were on display as well as a large number of photos. Panya was in all of them, sometimes with high ranking army officers. Others were taken on the golf course. A couple of photos of golf foursomes outside a clubhouse with cute Isan caddies squatting in the background beside the golf bags. Photos inside various offices, including his own. In one framed photo, Calvino recognized one of the officer’s faces from the newspapers. Such photo displays indicated that Panya had influential friends; that those who exercised substantial power over the lives of others protected him. These photos were there for a purpose; they were displayed as Panya’s personal symbols that brought him safety. His umbrella protection system in case the dark clouds moved in and threatened him and his family.

  “The condo next door, is that part of the family enterprise?” asked Pratt, scanning the photos, registering the faces, rank, and names. The message was not golf buddies having a good time. The message was here are the people I know who fix things when they need to be fixed. Pratt read the photographs the way Russians used to read the line-up in Red Square as the tanks rolled past. The problem had never been a Y2K, it has always been a Y0K issue: the year Zero where BC flipped over to AD, where the old protection system was jettisoned and reliance on the powerful, the influential, was to be replaced by a system where everyone had protection. These new symbols were nowhere to be seen in his office.

  Panya smiled, his yellow teeth exposed through parted lips. “Like many people, we are having some problems. We are struggling but we still manage to keep the project alive.” Had his military connection kept the bank from pulling the plug, Pratt wondered.

  Calvino’s law—the shallower the bank balance the deeper the trouble. And the reverse was equally true: the larger the bank balance, the smaller trouble became until it finally disappeared altogether. Panya looked like a man who lived comfortably in a world of small troubles.

  A servant brought in a tray of glasses filled with drinking water.

  “Your card is in English,” said Pratt. “Unusual.”

  “Many of our clients are farangs, Colonel Prachai,” said Panya.

  Calvino stepped forward and spread the Report of American Citizen’s Death papers on Panya’s desk. “We have come on behalf of Daniel Ramsey’s family. We want to take the body. If you check, you will find all of the papers are in order,” Calvino said.

  Panya stared at the papers, shuffled them like a deck of cards; a Chinese grimace suggested a true desire for the undertaker to flee the room. He clearly wished he were somewhere else other than the funeral director’s main office. “Colonel Prachai, may I inquire as to the nature of your business here?” He treated Calvino as if he did not exist.

  Pratt nodded in Calvino’s direction. “As Mr. Calvino said, he has come for the body and I am here to make certain the coffin is taken to the airport.”

  “That’s quite unusual,” said Panya. “In fact, I can’t ever recall such a request.”

  “We plan a short church service. That’s normal,” said Calvino. “We have arranged for a priest and nun and that is normal,” said Calvino, watching Panya shift through the papers as if looking for an error. “You can check with Dwight Morgan at the American Embassy. Khun Dwight did speak so highly of you and how you understood farangs.”

  “We want the fucking body. Is that so hard to understand?” asked Naylor.

  Calvino wished he had smacked Naylor harder. It might have shut him up.

  “That language shouldn’t be used here
,” said Chaiwat.

  Panya grinned and started to reply, but his voice was so faint that no one could hear what he had said. From the back of the room his son Chaiwat repeated what his father said. “The body is no longer here.”

  Pratt knitted his eyebrows together. “Where is the body?”

  “Twenty minutes ago, Mr. Ramsey’s representatives collected his body,” said Panya.

  “What representatives?” asked Calvino. “You have seen the papers. We have the authority. So who did you give the body to?” He was getting mad. Angry that Naylor had to open his big mouth and throw off the questioning, upset that Panya was clearly trying to hide something.

  Panya pulled out a thick file from his desk. “They had all of the right documents,” he said, placing a folder on the desk and taking out a Report of American Citizen’s Death. The report had been filled out with all the details. A copy of the death certificate in Daniel Ramsey’s name was attached with a paperclip. “And they were Khun Danny’s friends.”

  “His friends?” asked Pratt. “Did they tell you that he was their friend?”

  Panya shook his head, his face clouding up with emotion. “He was my friend, too.”

  “You knew him?” asked Pratt.

  The undertaker leaned back in his chair, hands on the desk, one folded over the other. “Yes, he came here many times. I am very sad when we get his body from the Police Hospital. It was a very big shock for me. And for my sons. I think maybe his work was too much for him. He had too many young farangs friends die in Thailand. It depressed him. That’s why he killed himself.”

  Silence swept across the room. Only the faint hum of the motor on the side of the fish tank filled the void. Calvino looked up from the papers—all Reports of American Citizen’s Death. “Daniel knew all of these dead Americans?” There were about thirty reports in the folder.

  “His friends,” said Panya.

  Calvino made a point of looking at the age and the time of death on the reports, the deceased—all white males—who ranged in age between twenty-one and forty-nine years old. The cause of death was always the same: heart and breathing stopped. “Did it ever occur to you that Daniel’s friends were dying in substantial numbers?”

  “Farangs come to Thailand and play hard. That’s what Khun Danny said to me. They take drugs, they ride motorcycles, they do many stupid, dangerous things. And sometimes they kill themselves,” said Panya.

  Calvino handed the folder to Pratt. But he kept some of the papers. “The five OD’s are in the folder,” Calvino said. The five men who had died of heroin overdose and had not been robbed. Jess and Noi sat quietly in the back as if they were waiting for their part in a church service. Noi seemed resigned that it was going to take a long time to get Daniel’s body, if they ever got it. Jess looked like someone had blind-sided him with a foot to his head; he looked pained, lost, and hopeless. If they didn’t have the body he wasn’t going back to LA. His eyes focused on the fish tank. Naylor groaned as he listened to Panya’s explanation. “How many farangs are we talking about?”

  “Thirty-three,” said Calvino. “Over two years.”

  “Since the economic crisis started,” Pratt noted. He was still thinking about the unfinished condo next door and how Panya was the kind of Chinese who yearned for acceptance into Thai society, and would do whatever was necessary to achieve his goal. Mortality, success, status, standing—all were measured in number of stories in the family show-piece building.

  “The documents say they were all embalmed,” said Pratt. “Is that right? You embalmed all of the farangs and afterward you cremated the bodies.”

  “It wasn’t our idea to cremate them,” said Chaiwat, who was standing off to one side in the back of the office.

  Panya’s eyes closed for a brief moment. “No, that wasn’t our idea,” he said softly.

  “After they were embalmed, they were cremated? I don’t understand. You don’t embalm someone you cremate in Thailand, do you?” asked Calvino.

  Panya raised both hands palms facing up as if lifting a huge weight. “We cremate because of the cost of shipping the bodies back to America.”

  “You were paid for the embalming and cremation, and a large coffin, and now you will tell us what other payments you received? You had better tell us exactly how this worked.” No one in the photographs frightened Pratt.

  Panya smiled. “I did nothing wrong, Colonel Prachai.”

  “No one says that you did. We are asking you to help us understand some strange practices, Khun Panya. You said you knew Daniel Ramsey. How was he involved in this cremation business?” asked Pratt.

  From the expression of doom on the undertaker’s face, there was every indication that his world was crashing in. He had to make a choice. Answer the questions for the colonel in a way most favorable to himself or stonewall and hope that his military friends would intervene and have the colonel taken off the case. The same old Y0K problem.

  “No one wants to cause you a problem,” added Pratt.

  That was the small nudge of comfort that Panya needed.

  “Khun Danny always came with two or three friends to make the arrangements. He had all the right papers. The papers were in perfect order. Signed by the American Embassy. Everything was done properly.”

  “Did he have a friend at the Embassy?” asked Pratt.

  “I never asked him,” said Panya.

  “Did he ever mention the name Dwight Morgan?” asked Calvino.

  Panya shrugged his shoulder and looked down.

  After a moment, Calvino shifted away from names to the issue of responsibility, knowing the answer before he asked the question. “It was Ramsey’s idea to cremate embalmed bodies?” he asked.

  “We just did what the relatives asked,” said Panya.

  Just following orders, thought Calvino. Only Ramsey wasn’t any relative of the deceased and Panya knew this to be the case.

  “And you arranged the coffin?”

  “Khun Danny was particular about the coffin. He made that arrangement himself,” said Panya.

  “Particular? What does that mean?” asked Pratt, knowing that undertakers made a handsome profit on coffins. Why would Panya let a farang cut him out of this lucrative end of the transaction unless there was some other bigger reward involved?

  “Let me get this straight: Danny bought the coffins himself and delivered them here? Is this normal practice, letting strangers bring in coffins and ask you to fill them up with a box of ashes?” asked Calvino, who was tracking Pratt’s line of argument.

  “I thought he was making a little profit and never mind.”

  If there were ever a hand-held device to pick up bullshit, the red light would have been flashing, thought Calvino. Panya was a lousy liar.

  “Never mind that you helped Danny load and ship five pounds of ashes in a coffin built for a dead body. Sounds like fraud,” said Calvino. It was becoming clear that some kind of a Trojan horse scam had been hatched between Danny—or at least Danny was point man—and Panya and his sons.

  “Sound like fraud? Bullshit, this guy is a crook,” said Naylor.

  Calvino turned around and pushed Naylor out of the room and locked the door. He was a large man but only made half-hearted resistance. As Calvino stepped back inside, he glanced over at Noi and she looked like she suddenly wanted to kiss him. Throwing Naylor out of the hong had made everyone relax and made Calvino a hero for five seconds. They could see the outline of Naylor’s big head through the frosted windowpane.

  “Thank you,” said Panya. “It’s not true. I don’t make a fraud. They always arrived with a coffin and took away the same coffin. I never resold any coffin if that is what you are thinking. Never. Ask Chaiwat. Did we ever do such a thing?” Panya was suddenly becoming emotional.

  “Not ever, father,” said Chaiwat.

  “The other men who helped Khun Danny, were they Thai or farangs?” asked Pratt.

  “Always Thai,” said Panya.

  “Where did they take bodies f
or cremation?”

  “I don’t know,” said Panya, his head down.

  Pratt knew that he was lying. “I can’t help you if you don’t co-operate. The people who have done this may try and blame you for everything. Do you want that?”

  The Chinese fear of becoming the scapegoat prevailed. “They cremated the bodies at a wat a few kilometers from here. The wat is near a klong and on the way to the airport.”

  “All thirty-three were cremated at this wat?” asked Calvino.

  Panya nodded and a barely audible reply came from his dry lips. “And that’s where they have taken Danny?”

  “We’ve got to go,” said Calvino.

  WHENEVER his mind became overwhelmed with the debris of the day, of a situation, of a problem, Jess began to concentrate on his breathing. Noticing each inhale and exhale, soon his mind would start to clear, his thoughts would still, the bombardment of ideas stop until he reached a place of perfect peace inside himself. Or perhaps it wasn’t his self, but the non-self that had been achieved. While watching his breath, he looked straight ahead at a fish tank. Then he noticed for the first time something that had been before him the entire time but that he had not seen. He plunged his arm up to the elbow into the water, scattering the fish inside the tank. The splash had caught the attention of everyone in the room. They watched as Jess pulled out his arm, dripping water on the carpet, and walked over to Panya’s desk where he opened his fist. Water dripped from his knuckles onto papers on the desk.

  “Do you know what these are?”