That had been the plan, a pretty good plan at that. But like life, plans were impermanent, subject to change, and this plan needed some radical changes. For starters, they didn’t have Daniel Ramsey’s coffin. They might never have that coffin at the rate they were going. There was a duplicate set of paperwork floating around. Checking in a farang body with the same name and paperwork twice on the same day would cause more than one or two phone calls to be made at exactly the wrong time.
“But I haven’t told you my best idea,” said Calvino.
“I am not certain I am ready for this.”
“I am going inside the wat,” he waited a beat and then added, “Alone. As a tourist. You drop me off like you are a tour guide.”
“That is the worst idea you ever had. No tourist ever goes to that wat along that klong . It’s not on any tourist map. That hit team knew your face.”
“But they’re dead. I figure on a division of labor between the grunts who do the heavy lifting and the gunmen who do the killing. If I am wrong, I’ll let you know. I’ll do my Forrest Gump routine, ‘You mean this isn’t Wat Arun? First my guide takes me to buy jewelery and then he brings me here. Am I being cheated?’ This approach always works magic.”
Pratt turned down the jazz. “You’re a natural. But these are drug smugglers and they don’t use magic to make someone disappear. They would shoot Forrest Gump.”
“Do you have a better plan?”
“I turn around and drive to the airport. Jess goes out on the next flight. I can walk him through using Panya’s passport.”
“But he’s got nothing right now. The guys he’s been chasing, the same ones you’ve been after, can shut down the entire smuggling operation. Just change routes. Kill Panya and what is there to prove any of this was a drug smuggling operation? They are still in business. And what have we accomplished?”
The uncertainty of the situation made any telephone call Pratt might make to the department a dangerous alternative. It was unclear who might be involved in the operation. Colonel Virat of the special narc unit was the only man he thought could be trusted. The amount of money involved over the past eighteen months was staggering. He wouldn’t want to guess who might have been tempted. He drove in silence. Calvino’s plan was to buy some time and to gather some solid evidence. There was a feeling of a cold hit being made; what was missing was the casing, the link between the heroin disappearing from Burma and ending up in a smuggling venture operated by Panya and Kowit.
“You come up with a reason for the serial killer yet?” asked Pratt.
“One thing, Pratt. How did Jess get you involved in this from the start?”
“Why?” asked Pratt.
“I am starting to think that whoever teamed me with Jess was a two-for-one deal. They weren’t wanting to kill just Jess or just me. They wanted us both out. And there has to be a good reason for that, don’t you think?”
Pratt glanced over at Calvino. “A guy named Gabe told him we were friends.”
“Maybe these guys were going for three for the price of one, Pratt.”
“Vincent, hand me the carphone. I need to make a call.”
He didn’t ask why Pratt didn’t wish to use his own phone. Other ears would be listening, wired to that number. He already knew they had been tracking Calvino’s number. His brother-in-law had had the vision to install a phone in the van, and now he would be drawing his sister’s family into the vortex. Pratt had no choice but to take that risk.
SIXTEEN
TO MOST FOREIGNERS most wats looked fungible—the basic architectural design was nearly identical, as if built—like fast-food restaurants—from the same design bible. This was an illusion of epic magnitude. Thais immediately knew the differences in each wat like they knew the difference between forty different kinds of rice; the difference was in subtleties within the interior of a sala, trees growing on the grounds, the mixture of stray cats and dogs and clients who came to kneel and give offering under the sloping roofs with ornate carvings; mostly, it was the abbot, the monks, novices, and others who lived inside that gave the wat its personality. Most offered a cremation service. Panya had changed his story about the wat where the men had taken Daniel Ramsey’s body. It was no longer the wat near the funeral home; the dead farang had, as it turned out, never been taken to such a neighborhood wat. Undertakers were trained to deal with others’ sadness and loss but if Panya was any indication, undertakers had some trouble applying this training to their own woes. Perhaps Panya had never thought it would come down to this precise moment, that is, a moment of truth. He adhered to the belief there was always a way out. An escape hatch through the highest wall. His faith was being severely tested for as hard as he tried he couldn’t find any wiggle room left. The options were bleak—either he kept on lying and getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble, or he just got on with it, got it over with quickly and hoped they would go away and leave him in peace. He hated making such decisions. It was better to do nothing than to decide, but living with nothing was living with the adverse nature of any decision.
Chaiwat tried to provide comfort to his father. “Dad, we take them there. No problem for us.” The old man’s face collapsed into deep thought, then he nodded. He sat in the back of the van as if in a dream, a half-stupor, his head bobbing back and forth like a puppet on a string, his eyes wide open, one hand on the knee of his son, pressing it hard, a touch of fear, a touch of regret in the way he inhaled and exhaled as if he were counting his breaths. His other hand clutched three amulets, which hung on a gold chain around his neck. Panya was mumbling to himself, either praying or he had gone over the edge into incoherent madness. Chaiwat sat next to him watching his father fall apart. Father and son sat opposite Jess and Noi. Her nun’s habit with the patches of dried blood was a mass of wrinkles from Naylor’s fat ass, and Jess’s clerical collar had turned brown from sweat and was coming undone at one end. In his hand he fingered several of the blue Cause pins, turning them over and over in his hand. It was dark in the back of the van with tinted windows, the sky had clouded up and it was raining outside. No one felt like talking. Except Naylor who had a tune in his head and couldn’t remember the words. It was driving him crazy watching Panya finger his amulets and talk gibberish. He hummed the song but he was flat, off-key. It could have been anything. “Come on, Noi. It’s driving me fucking crazy. Help me.” Noi ignored him, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in her habit. “It goes something like this, ‘Why I can’t meet your major wife? Why I can’t meet your major wife?’ ” On and on he sang those words. Naylor was demented enough that the entire rant might have been nothing more than an ugly way to humiliate her further. Maybe he simply wanted to hear a singer dressed up like a nun. One of those Cause fetish things, debasing a woman, making her an object through any crazy scheme at hand, words, gestures, music. The way Naylor remembered the words made it a crazy tune. Naylor knew almost no Thai but the luuk tung song wouldn’t leave him alone.
“Hello, Hello, Hia, la ka?” Hello, lover. She finally sang the words.
“That’s it. Goddamit. That is it exactly.”
“Tammai mai phoot? Tammai mai phoot?” sang Chaiwat. “Why don’t you speak?” The words had an ironic meaning as they headed towards the wat.
Noi and Chaiwat shared a laugh and that seemed to ease some of the tension. They were going to a funeral after all. They might be going to their own funeral. No one knew.
Naylor clapped his hands and tried to sing the song in Thai. Of course he got the words all jumbled up so they made no sense, and so he reverted to singing, “Why I can’t meet your major wife?” words which carried some general meaning from the song but weren’t even close to an accurate translation. Finally Jess looked up from the blue pins in the palm of his hand and shot Naylor a long, evil look. “Shut the fuck up, Naylor.”
It was the first time anyone had heard Jess curse. It was the first time Panya or Chaiwat had heard a priest curse. But they rarely spent much time in the company of priest
s.
Jess told Naylor that if he didn’t shut up he would throw him out of the van and looked at him the way a cop looks at a homeless drunk in front of a 7/11 at Hollywood and Vine. Naylor doubted Jess would do that; after all, they still needed him to clear shit at the airport and if they threw his ass out of the van, it would make their own lives difficult. Still, from the expression on Jess’ face, he decided to back down—he might not actually throw him out but he could definitely inflict some pain—and he continued a low-key humming of the tune to himself as a minor defiance. They were all in this together. Sitting in the back of a van, off to find, if not the Wizard of Oz, then at least Daniel Ramsey’s body and the little cocksuckers who were burning it into a five pound bundle of ashes, thought Naylor. Besides, he wanted to be present when the smoke came out of the chimney signaling that Daniel’s naked soul had been sent to hell.
As it turned out the wat where the Cause-members had been taken for cremation had never been a famous one, or even one widely known by the locals. In a crossword puzzle, very few Thais would have been able to fill in the right letters—except Father Andrew. He knew it. The wat was in his backyard. Too close to a slum, the wat was neither fashionable nor popular. It survived from a few donors and no-questions-asked cremations and the funds were just enough to prevent it from running to complete squalor. The location was rotten and no one who was important ever turned up unexpectedly so authorities left it alone as unworthy of their attention. Situated next to a klong the color of melted iron, whose water carried a heavy stench of decay and chemicals, which lay like a mist above the salas and kuti—living quarters for the monks. The monks lived next to a klong totally devoid of any ability to sustain life—an illusion of existence. Except for the smell of garbage, dead animals, and toxins that drifted through the wat. Such a location was ideal to cremate unimportant people; nobodies, the destitute from the slums, victims of upheavals, and others whose presence was best reduced to a small box of ashes and would never be missed because they had never counted in the first place.
Pratt slowed the van over a narrow concrete bridge and reached over and turned down the volume of John Coltrane’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” Down below Calvino on the klong were several sand barges stretched out like portable beaches. The sand was still wet from the rain, though the hot sun had broken through the clouds and dried the streets. Calvino found a digital camera in the glove box of the van.
“That belongs to my brother-in-law.” Pratt sounded alarmed.
“I am not going to break it if that is what you are worried about.”
“I didn’t say I was worried.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Calvino rolled down the window and snapped several shots. He squinted one eye and with the other stared through the viewfinder, looking, looking. But there was no sign of life below the bridge; not on the barges or along the klong or in the central courtyard of the wat, as if this was a forsaken place, a place abandoned by others who once lived here and avoided by those going about their daily business. On the same side as the wat were a number of Shell Oil storage tanks. Mainly the landscape was dotted with squat, ugly industrial buildings and water bobbing with the debris of the industrial age—Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, milk cartons that floated on the surface, still, lifeless, as if in a painting. Calvino snapped a photo of a spirit house on the edge of the dock; potted flowering plants lined the small dock as if someone either innocent or crazed had taken some pride in beauty in this ugly sea of squalor.
Pratt gunned the van through the main gates, made a hard right turn, kicking up gravel in parking lot. “Remember, it’s your brother-in-law’s van,” said Calvino as a thin haze of post-rain freshly baked dust settled down on the windshield. A dozen cars and pickups were parked near the entrance. Pratt had pulled alongside a red Toyota pickup. Wooden railings formed a fence around the bed of the pickup. A few feet ahead, several food vendors worked under the shade of big umbrellas, and next to them was an old woman with small wooden cages with birds to be bought and released to make merit. No place in Thailand was ever empty, especially the parking lot of an obscure, isolated wat. Always someone was selling food and someone was eating the food being sold. Two monks walked on either side of an elderly man who slowly opened the pickup and crawled inside with a crablike movement of his thin old legs. The old man kept the door open as he started the engine. He looked over smiling at Pratt as if something funny had crossed his mind. But no doubt this was the old man’s default smile, the expression he assumed when he saw a stranger looking at him. Pratt reached around and flipped back the small window panel and looked into the back.
“Jess, open the back door,” said Pratt. “Just push it open. But stay inside for the moment.”
Jess leaned forward and pushed the door open.
“Khun Panya, do you recognize that van?” asked Pratt.
“No. I don’t. My boys wouldn’t stop here. They would have gone down the side road and parked near the crematorium. It’s too far to carry a coffin from the parking lot.”
For someone who knew nothing about the wat, suddenly Panya had disclosed that he knew a great deal about the layout of the grounds. How would he know where the van they were looking for might be parked unless he had been here before? Chaiwat rolled his eyes as his father spoke. The son was obviously no one’s fool but what could he do other than stick a rag in his old man’s mouth and it was too late even for that.
All of Panya’s explanations made sense: heavy lifting in the heat was to be avoided. The rain had brought some relief; the sun was out, and all the cars in the parking lot were bone dry. Not a drop of rainwater on any of them. The grounds dusty.
“Tell me again, how many men are involved?”
“Three or four.”
Pratt showed a flash of anger. “Which is it? Three or four. Or four or five?”
“Four,” said Chaiwat. The kid seemed to have a knack for details like knowing the exact number of the blue pins salvaged from the dead. And the number of men who had come to collect Daniel’s body.
“Are they armed?”
“I didn’t see a weapon,” said Panya.
“And Khun Chaiwat, what about you, did you ever see any guns?”
“Not directly. But they could have been packing under their shirts. They wore them outside, loose fitting.” Chaiwat, flashing a toothy grin, was smooth with his American accent.
“My son has seen too many gangster movies,” said Panya.
“He speaks perfect English. Why the fuck he’s working as an undertaker is beyond anything I can understand. I would hire him in a minute for the Grand Rose. You want to change careers, Chaiwat? No more dead bodies? I will cut you a deal,” said Naylor.
“My boys are very happy in our family business,” said Panya. “And very lucky, too. They make big money in the stock market. Internet trading. Very smart, my boys. We finish our condo and maybe we all retire.”
Calvino knitted his brow. “Big money?”
Calvino opened the door but before he could climb out, Pratt grabbed his arm.
“You don’t need to prove anything about this serial killer. I want you to know that I was too hard on you. I think I was wrong. There may be something to this serial killer business.”
Calvino grinned, and then he lowered his voice. “Who’s proving anything? And you are right. There is still no reason. No motive. So let me take a few pictures of the wat. No big deal. I’ll look around. Loosen up, Pratt. No one is going to stick a needle in my arm. Besides, Jess thinks that a farang would never cross the street to help a Thai. Let me show him that it ain’t true.”
SEVERAL bony dogs growled as they scratched patchy areas of furless hide, drawing blood from scabby sores, eyeing Calvino as he walked down a path between a sala and another flat, low building with rows of chairs inside. One of the dogs limped away with one leg hiked up like a society lady’s little finger as she raised the teacup to her lips. Calvino swung his arm back as if pretending to thr
ow a rock, and the dogs—which would never call such a bluff—scattered back into the shade and resumed their scratching. A monk came up to Calvino. He waied the monk before he could stop himself. A tourist, he thought, wouldn’t likely wai a monk unless they had memorized the cultural section out of the Lonely Planet Guide. Even then a tourist would likely deliver the wrong wai. Like varieties of rice, there were many kinds of wais; each appropriate to the person and the occasion. There were charts with dozens of photographs of Thai men and women demonstrating the various wais that hung in upcountry schools so the children of peasants could learn that respect was not absolute; there were fine degrees of paying respect.
Calvino surprised himself. Anyone who had lived in Thailand for a very long time found himself doing what he did: making a wai to a monk as if he were on automatic pilot, one of those unthinking reflex reactions. The young monk acknowledged Calvino’s wai with a smile. Monks never returned a wai with a wai. It didn’t matter who delivered the wai. This was a one-way street of respect. Besides, the wai was to the robe not to the man.
The monk was young, handsome; his freshly shaved head had a couple of small nicks that looked like hairline fractures on his head. As he turned, his head glistened in the sunlight.
His robes appeared new; Calvino thought he was a novice who had only recently entered the monkhood. His new status was written all over his face, the small cuts on his head, and his robe. He smiled at Calvino and greeted him in English.
“Where are you from?” the monk asked him. There were rarely any foreigners who came to the wat, and the monk had no chance to practice his English. He was an upcountry Thai with blue tattoos on his neck and arms. His English sounded self-taught. But he was curious and brave enough to approach a stranger and risk making a fool of himself in a foreign language.
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