Crackdown
Crackdown
A VINCENT CALVINO NOVEL
CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE
Heaven Lake Press
Crackdown
Christopher G. Moore
Smashword Edition 2015
Crackdown is published by Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords.
Copyright © 2015 Christopher G. Moore
Author’s web site: http://www.cgmoore.com/
Author’s e-mail: [email protected]
Illustrations: Colin Cotterill © 2014
Jacket design: K. Jiamsomboon
Author’s photograph: Ralf Tooten © 2012
License Notes
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For Steven B. Samuels
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
—Albert Camus
ONE
“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”—Graham Greene, The Quiet American
THE THAIS HAD an old saying about trouble and people. Keeping company with thugs leads to trouble, the saying went, but keeping company with the wise leads to good things. Over the course of his many years in Thailand, Vincent Calvino had learned there was a small problem with the saying: the locals couldn’t explain what separated the thugs from the wise. That little puzzle was left for individual Thais to solve on their own.
Another proverb suggested they simply accept their elders’ judgment on such matters, but Calvino, as a foreigner, didn’t have a built-in vault of elders to draw on. When he was approached for private investigation work, Calvino had to decide on his own which side of the fence the potential client fell on. Sometimes he got it right; other times, tragically wrong. When things went pear-shaped, it always hit him that the truth had been in front of him all the time, only he hadn’t seen it. He’d been stumbling toward a lamplight that turned out to be the kind where thugs gathered like dragonflies. When that happened, he always resolved to update his skills on lamplight analysis and thuggery detection.
Thugs, in Calvino’s experience, shared certain qualities: self-righteousness, absence of doubt, greed, paranoia, love of guns and a history of using violence. Each lived like a frog within the security of his own individual coconut shell. But at least once in a while, the wise frog would look over the rim of his coconut shell in every direction. When he did, he would see that his comfy home sat on a forest floor littered with coconuts. The wise spoke of the futility of a frog defending any one shell. But their wise counsel always got lost in the noise of a world of trouble, a world left up to karma.
There was an even more defining characteristic of thugs, one Calvino had put his finger on early in the game. They always believed they could beat the odds, beat the house. They were doomed because no one ever beat the house, not really. Even with a gun.
The wise believed in the power of persuasion and reason. The wise smiled at the idea of someone trying indefinitely to coerce people through fear. Look at a world map, they would say, and color in the places where that belief was always being tested. The map is ablaze with the color of fear. Thugs hide out in every timeline, infect the corridors of power, whisper in the ear of those in the financial centers and approve the bonuses in big corporations.
Calvino knew that, like everyone, he had both elements in his character, and the struggle between the two invisible forces would inevitably play out, leaving him to defend the winner. Each new day was a choice between fear and reason. And many times the choice was blurred, confusing and difficult. No victory was ever decisive.
These were highly dangerous times for a troubled stranger to arrive at Calvino’s door. All the lamp-lit places danced with freshly hatched dragonflies. The stranger’s trouble always started with a woman. And a cynic would reply, “Doesn’t it always?”
The subject of women came up any time two foreign men drank together in Bangkok. After Oliver Ballard had carried his luggage through the door of Calvino’s condo, it was only a matter of time before they exchanged records of their victories and defeats, like a couple of soldiers of a bygone era. A battle-hardened veteran, Ballard had come to Thailand certain his luck would change, but his reminiscences soon turned to ambushes, wounds and bravery under fire.
Ballard, white cotton shirt sleeves rolled up above the wrists, belted tan slacks, barefoot, rattled the ice in his glass with his right hand as he rocked on his heels. He was a businessman in the logistics field and a transportation expert, or so he said. His work meant he was constantly relocating throughout the region. A hundred years earlier, Ballard would have been part of the tribe of “lost” people always on the move, stripped of nationality, birthright or allegiance. In the modern world he’d been refitted with worldly tastes for fashion and international jazz festivals and expensive hobbies like polo. Men like Ballard were no longer thought of as lost but envied for their positions inside the small community of global money men.
Standing beside his guest at the balcony window, Calvino listened as Ballard staggered through the war cemetery of his buried loves, blurry-eyed, shell-shocked, and no longer able to tell a windmill from an enemy combatant disguised in a bikini. By the time Ballard stopped to catch his breath, Calvino had him figured as one of those cavalry officers whose horse had been shot out from under him. He didn’t have to limp for Calvino to know he’d taken a hard spill.
In Calvino’s experience, when a man kicked down the door to his past, vermin tended to crawl out, but in Bangkok a visitor could always find someone to welcome the creatures home. For the moment Calvino was happy to be that someone. That night, as they shared the view of the city lights reflecting off the lake below, alarm bells were as far from his thoughts as Brooklyn was from Kansas.
Calvino had met Ballard a couple of years earlier at a jazz festival in Bali. Calvino’s friend Colonel Pratt, a Thai policeman turned saxophone player, was on the bill as a novelty. Calvino had gone to Bali like any other tourist, believing that the sun, beach and local women, along with the music, would recharge his batteries, run dry from following the protests and demonstrations in Bangkok. Pratt hadn’t had to twist his arm.
On the first day at the festival, Ballard had sat down at the hotel pool bar, ordered a rum and coke and watched a couple of young women take turns diving off the board and into the pool. Calvino, outfitted in sunglasses, swimming trunks and a Hawaiian shirt, had hardly noticed as the foreigner had taken the stool next to his. Then he wondered why the guy was staring at him.
“You’re Eric Marienthal,” Ballard said.
Calvino knew of the tenor sax player by that name.
With a smile he lowered his sunglasses, so Ballard could see his mistake, and responded,
“A sax player in New York once told me he learned all there was to know about the sax from Albert Einstein, who said, ‘You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.’”
“Einstein, that famous Jewish relativity player,” said Ballard.
“He mapped out the rules for universal improv,” said Calvino, watching one of the women climb out of the pool, water dripping from her body as she padded back to the diving board.
It was Ballard’s turn to smile.
“Nice eye candy,” he said, as he waved at the young woman on the diving board.
She looked Ballard’s way but pretended not to notice him.
“She didn’t see you,” said Calvino.
Ballard shrugged and looked out at the sea.
“That’s the story of my life. Women either ignore me or they obsess over my minor flaws. Not that I don’t have a few. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, big or small, too poor or too crazy. I’ve got a Walmart warehouse filled with rejected merchandise.”
Ballard and Pratt, when they met soon after that, had gotten along well immediately as Ballard had a Google-like command of modern jazz trivia and a couple of unusual theories about modern women. The three had struck up a friendship over the course of the three-day festival. At the end of the festival Calvino told Ballard that if he ever passed through Bangkok, he should look him up. It had been a casual invitation, the kind no one expects someone known for just three days to redeem.
Calvino had been wrong about Ballard from the start. As they traded war stories that first night in Bangkok, Calvino wondered if the Bali sun and beach had dulled his judgment when he’d befriended the man. He reminded himself that he had been wrong about many things in the past and buckled down to the fact that he now had an unexpected houseguest he hardly knew.
Ballard planned to stay on for four more nights before moving on to London. The following morning, Calvino could just arm Ballard with a key and plastic access card to get him into the building, and then continue his usual routines as if Ballard weren’t in residence. It seemed that Ballard had a schedule of business appointments and wouldn’t need babysitting, which was a relief.
But on Ballard’s first night Calvino would play the good host. They went out early for dinner. After Calvino paid the bill, he could think of no good excuse to leave Ballard to explore the streets and the bars alone. They would soon be forced to switch off their neon and interior lights in any case. Maybe Ballard was right; in a few days the curfew would end, the military would recede to the shadows, and the girls and the bars would welcome the tourists with open arms, as if it had all been a collective nightmare they’d woken up from.
They left the restaurant and walked up and down Soi Cowboy. By then it was half an hour before curfew and they found few punters on the Soi. The bargirls, discouraged, talked among themselves in front of the bars, avoiding eye contact, as if a shame greater than commercial sex had fallen upon them and made off without paying.
“It’s as if we’re invisible,” said Ballard. “Remember the hotel swimming pool in Bali? How the girl on the diving board looked through me like I wasn’t there?”
“How could I forget her? But this isn’t Bali. The mood on the Soi has changed since the coup,” said Calvino. “The police will be around soon to enforce the curfew.”
“That one looks defeated, but it’ll pass,” Ballard said as they faced a girl in an orange bikini who stared off into space.
“People adjust to their new reality quickly,” said Calvino as they walked on. “They accept that they have to read from a different script, especially when those running the show give them no choice.”
“You take me, okay?” said another bargirl, her large black eyes wild with urgency as she grabbed Ballard. “Na, na, na...” she added, the way a child softly pleads with a parent who has absolute power over her life.
“Desperation is not the way to close a deal,” Ballard said, untangling himself from her grasp. “Either they ignore you,” he said to Calvino, “or they try to inject themselves into your bloodstream. I can’t figure out which of the two possibilities is the least worse.”
He sounded frustrated, like a man whose humor tank was running on empty. There was something a little sad and defeated about the Ballard who had shown up in Bangkok.
They walked to the Asoke end of Soi Cowboy. Traffic was light on Asoke. They passed the worried, self-absorbed faces of more bargirls clad either in bikinis or in erotic showgirl outfits. The young women looked at their watches and played with their cell phones, killing time. Unless a customer offered an all-night buyout soon, they’d have no choice but to change back into street clothes and hurry back to their rooms. No after-hours second chance at a nightclub like the Thermae or one of the hundreds of small boltholes where customers had once drunk deep into the night and waited for the right woman to walk in.
The Soi Cowboy bargirls recognized the kind of man who came to the Soi weighed down with baggage. Who could have guessed that a man’s history could be that heavy? Such men left the Soi alone because they hadn’t drunk enough to find the courage to add more to their load. Ballard was such a man.
On both sides of Cowboy, rows of bargirls sized up each other and all passersby. In Ballard and Calvino they saw two middle-aged men who’d lost their appetite for a pre-curfew snack. The girls relied on hungry men, unburdened by their past, whose voracious appetites made them gorge and pay the cost. Ballard and Calvino stepped away from the Soi like light eaters, feeling the wrong kind of heat.
On the taxi ride back to the condo, Calvino listened as Ballard told him about a strange business in London, some time after Bali. He’d had an affair with a woman named Christina Tangier, an art school dropout from Essex who’d become an escort service girl. She’d told him a good story, all about how she had a plan to become a world-famous conceptual artist. Chelsea Monroe—her real name—had studied photography and multimedia at Wimbledon College of Arts in London, but she’d left that behind to sit in an Occupy London tent. Of course, she soon ran out of money. She decided to fund her lifestyle in a new way so she could carry on with her class project, even though she was no longer a student. Over time she had become “Christina Tangier,” earning three thousand pounds a shot as an escort.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Calvino.
“She wasn’t like other high-end escorts.”
“What made her special?” asked Calvino.
“It wasn’t just me. She eventually claimed to have slept with 284 paying clients over two years. I don’t know which number I was in the overall total, but I know the number she gave me.”
“What number was that?”
“That’s getting ahead of the story,” said Ballard. “From the start I knew she was gathering material for an exhibition. I took her for one of those arty-farty conceptual artists who live in a dream world. With a body like hers, I didn’t ask her for details, which of course was stupid and reckless. We spent four crazy days in bed. One morning I woke up and found out what she meant by conceptual art, and I booted her out. Christina looked at me and smiled. There was none of that desperation we saw on Soi Cowboy tonight. I was cutting her loose and she didn’t scream, threaten or struggle. She just got dressed and walked out the door carrying a teddy bear.”
“What was she doing with a teddy bear?”
“Again, that’s getting ahead of the story,” said Ballard. “Anyway, she’d taken me completely by surprise.”
“She pulled a gun?” asked Calvino.
Ballard shook his head.
“I could have dealt with that, but she told me she’d secretly snapped a series of pictures of me, sleeping. Nude. With a teddy bear.”
Calvino shook his head, laughing.
“You’re joking.”
“She’d photographed dozens of sleeping men with the same fucking teddy bear. Out of the 284 clients, she photographed seventy-eight of us with the bear. From those photographs she selected twenty-nine for her exhibition. She colorized them.”
“Paint by numbers,” said Calvino.
Ballard shook his head. “No. She used Lucian Freud as her teacher. You know, the English artist. She blew them into one-meter-high portraits and painted them.”
“With a teddy bear?” Calvno slowly shook his head. “Even by Bangkok standards, that’s weird.”
“Tell me. I watched her put an old teddy bear next to my head, next to my stomach, my legs and next to my dick. She said the teddy bear was more than seventy years old and had a history. It was slightly creepy. And it had this smell. Like something stored in an attic. She said Lucian Freud had painted a nude male wit
h a rat on his thigh. Before each session he and the model got the rat drunk and it passed out, so Freud could position its tail near the model’s penis.”
“I thought I’d heard every story about sexual kinks,” said Calvino. “You’re making this up, right?”
“I swear it’s all true. There’s more. She called the exhibition Crackdown: Teddy Occupies the 1%. Catchy title. Good timing. I forgot to mention that she dressed the teddy bear in a tailored dinner jacket with a red bow tie and cummerbund. Remember she painted the photos. The red is really red. She put a black top hat on its head. Some of the ‘Elite Johns’ had the teddy with the top hat ramrod straight, with some the bear had a raffish look, with the top hat cocked to one side, and in one case the hat was pushed forward, covering the eyebrows—if a teddy bear had eyebrows, that is.
“The exhibition opened in London. You’d think, so what? Who cares? There are thousands of openings and galleries there, and ninety-nine percent of the work and artists disappear like rocks thrown in the sea. Who knows why Christina Tangier’s exhibition didn’t disappear without a trace? Fate? Who knows why the art critics were bowled over by it? One wrote that she’d made an artistic contribution equivalent to the impact of Thomas Piketty, that French guy. That was just the start. She was compared to Lucian Freud, of course, but also Madame Bovary, Amy Winehouse, Russell Brand and Camille Paglia.
“Stories about Crackdown: Teddy Occupies the 1% were suddenly everywhere. The social media went nuts over it. You must have heard about it.” He waited for Calvino to say something.
“I might’ve heard something,” Calvino said, trying to recall some fragment of memory. “We have enough weird here it squeezes out the foreign weird.”
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