“Alan’s plan is to get her pregnant. He wants a baby. A replacement for Rob.”
Calvino watched her smirk, something she rarely did to show her disdain.
“Crazy, right?”
“He’s far too old for that,” she said.
“He’s dyed his hair orange.”
Ratana laughed, unsure if Calvino was joking.
“Why would he do that?”
The hit man he’d killed inside his doorway was the answer. Calvino chose not to share that detail with Ratana.
“I don’t think he intended it to be orange. Accidents happen.”
Calvino sat in his chair, nodded and picked up a happy Buddha paperweight from Burma.
“You’re right about the fertility issue,” he continued, “but he’s thought of that. He’s bought the latest high-tech instruments.”
For a moment he considered describing the electron microscope hooked up to a computer, and how he’d studied the technique of separating bad and good sperm. Too much information.
“It’s all about Rob. I call it Vinny’s guilt,” she said.
“Guilt is a currency you should blow to the last baht before you die.”
“When you are a guilty billionaire, that’s not so easy,” she said.
She had worked with Calvino long enough to know that it was foolish to lie when she delivered an unvarnished truth.
“Guilt comes with the Jewish DNA,” he said, as memories of his mother’s family flashed through his thoughts.
He also knew that guilt was like debt bondage. No matter how hard and long you worked, you never got close to reducing the principal.
“He’s using it against you.”
“I am using it against myself,” said Calvino, raising his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “I need to call McPhail.”
“Which means you need a drink.”
“Yes, I need a drink, too.”
“My classmate’s grandmother was detained yesterday,” she said. “She was reading a copy of Orwell’s 1984 and eating a sandwich.”
“Why did they arrest her?”
“They said she had an intention.”
“An intention to do what?”
“They didn’t say. It was enough that she had an intention. She also wore a T-shirt with the words ‘Respect My Vote.’ ”
“I’ll phone Pratt. He’s still got friends in the department who can get her out.”
“You can tell himself yourself tonight. We have dinner with him and Manee, remember?”
His face showed that he had forgotten.
“That’s why you have the new dress. Sure, I’ll ask him at dinner.”
Her face flushed red.
“It’s okay. The police kept her five hours and let her go. They told her not to get in trouble again.”
“It got sorted out is what you’re saying.”
“In the Thai way. Both sides saved face, knowing underneath that no one had won,” she said.
Ratana returned to her side of the partitioned office. Calvino heard her settle into her chair and the soft tap resuming from her computer keyboard. There was a pause, then more tapping, and soon Ratana had gone down the rabbit hole of her own world, where hundreds of friends conversed over Facebook and Twitter timelines.
“Could you check if Fah is using the new iPhone?” Calvino said through the partition.
Replacing her old phone with a new iPhone 6 should be easy for Osborne to accomplish, Calvino figured, a task that even Osborne on a bad day couldn’t screw up. Fah’s face would expand to cover the campus in a dark shadow.
The previous morning Calvino had loaded up the new smart phone with the latest spyware apps. By the time he’d finished, the iPhone was enabled to take remote photos and videos, send copies of her Gmail, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and activate a voice recording of her phone calls. A GPS tracker would follow her movements between locations. Shoe leather manufacturers, like most industries, had taken a high-tech knock. Private investigators rarely had to leave the office anymore.
Ratana checked Fah’s Facebook page. She had already scrolled through her two thousand “friends” and through an extensive photo album of selfies at university, Lumpini Park, nightclubs, restaurants and shopping malls.
“She turned on her new iPhone 6 an hour ago.”
“It’s not just an iPhone,” said Calvino, who’d paid a small fortune to have the phone shipped from Singapore by one of the MBK gray market runners.
Ratana looked away from the screen.
“Then what is it?”
“A portable keyhole.”
Ratana took a moment to reply.
“What if I said I was on her side?” she finally replied.
“Privacy is dead. Her generation never had a chance to know what it meant.”
Like a clandestine radio station, Ratana went off air, turned silent, and that lasted for a couple of minutes. The silence was broken by a question that she’d been thinking about for some time and had only now mustered the courage to ask.
“Do you think Fah is beautiful?”
Calvino walked around the corner to her desk and looked over her shoulder. She felt his presence.
“Well, do you?”
That kind of question asked by one woman about another was always a baited trap, and he was in no mood to potentially chew off his own leg.
“She’s a looker. But is she a cheater?”
As intended, Ratana had to puzzle over whether that was the equivalent of beautiful or some lesser state.
“By Thai standards, she has an ordinary face,” she said.
“Trust me, there’s nothing ordinary about her.”
He noticed that Ratana was studying Fah’s dress in a photograph, and that Fah wore a fashionable vest in the same style as Ratana’s.
EIGHT
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
—George Orwell
FOLLOWING DINNER CALVINO Calvino and Pratt walked down toward a sandy beach fifty meters east of his country house. When Calvino looked back, he saw Manee and Ratana framed in the window overlooking the sea, the light behind them as they sat on the sofa watching the two men slowly move out of sight.
At the edge of the sand, Calvino removed his shoes and socks. Pratt had already slipped off his sandals and strolled to the loam bubbling on the sand as the surf washed over his feet. He had retired to a beach house in Chon Buri province, about 140 kilometers from Bangkok. His new life with his wife might as well be a thousand light years away from Bangkok by the measures of power, wealth and influence. As Calvino pulled up beside him, Pratt looked at the sea, breathed in the fresh sea air and held it in for a moment before slowly exhaling.
“Do you remember this line from Hamlet: ‘We know what we are, but not what we may be’?”
“I’m more interested in why on the beach tonight, with the moon and stars in place and a full belly, Hamlet popped into your mind.”
“I’ve been thinking of that line for a week.”
Calvino did a rough backward count.
“That must date from the time you would have heard the news about the coup.”
This was their first meeting in person since the government had been overthrown. They had talked on the phone, but the conversations had contained too many silences and pauses, and what had been said had been thin, vague and tentative. Pratt hadn’t come out and condemned the overthrow, but he hadn’t celebrated it either.
Nodding, Pratt squatted down, facing the sea, and Calvino did the same. Pratt liked the quick connections that Calvino made from bits of information. Hamlet’s characters had been saying lines inside Pratt’s head since the coup had been announced. He’d had a premonition the army would intervene, and ever since he had found himself changing his habits, choosing his words with care, leaving a trail of silence. He was watchful, scanning those who crossed his path for any small signal to indicate their feelings about the coup—a
small gesture or a word, anything that revealed their true opinion.
He knew that coups give birth to new power holders, and that in such circumstances people will naturally be fearful and anxious about how the new bosses will shake up the political world of civilians. The military generals and their supporters had started to explain their plans, hopes, intentions and fears in coded language. Like an evolution, the new order had spawned an entirely new structure, an organism that had consumed its predecessor. But as with a revolution, the change had been immediate.
“I’ve been asked to return to the department,” said Pratt.
Calvino sighed and stared ahead.
“You and the department are like a pair of mismatched socks. One’s black and the other’s white. Even if you’re color blind, you can see they don’t match.”
Water lapped over their feet.
“I told them that I like my life by the sea.”
Something in Pratt’s manner suggested there was more.
“But they phoned again,” said Calvino, figuring such issues are never resolved by one phone call.
“A senior person phoned and said my dismissal was something others had talked about. They held it up as an example of how corrupt the old government was, and it showed how unfairly the police department had operated under the former political regime. The politicians had forced out the good police officers, and that had caused damage. He said the only way to repair that damage was to bring back the good officers. In my case, they want to make me a department head. My job would be to sideline the bad guys in the department and help recruit back to the department the officers that the politicians had unfairly dismissed.”
“Yeah? Here’s the thing,” said Calvino. “With a coup, the head guy gets to play god and appoint lesser gods. The department is a big place to patrol. They need help.”
“ ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’—meaning, there is good and evil in the world. They’re both all around us. We are living The Tempest. And people are taking sides whether they want to or not.”
“The only Shakespeare quote I can remember is, ‘Now I will believe that there are unicorns…’ I forget the rest.”
“That’s from The Tempest as well.”
“So... You’re going back to the department.”
Pratt nodded.
“Next Monday. It’s probably not a big enough deal to be in the press, but there is that possibility. I didn’t want you reading about it before you heard it from me. I wanted you to understand why I made the decision to accept their offer.”
Calvino rose to his feet, arms folded over his chest. A necklace of lights from a dozen shrimp boats wrapped around the throat of the dark horizon.
“Now I will believe there are unicorns.”
“I’ve been called back, Vincent. We need to give them the benefit of the doubt, to withhold judgment for now. We can’t reverse what’s been done, and we might have a chance to influence what happens next.”
“Next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve been promoted to general.”
Pratt stared at the sea.
“The paperwork’s been processed. Yes, they’ve promoted me.”
He wasn’t seeking a second opinion. Calvino had been invited for a friendly stroll along the beach to hear his decision. Calvino noted that the pauses on the phone during their earlier conversations were starting to make sense. Pratt was being called back to duty by those who had defeated his enemies. In a way that made them his friends. Among the coup makers no one felt weighed down with guilt that force had been necessary to overthrow the government. Why would they? Force, or the threat of it, had always been the essential requirement for every coup.
“Manee is looking for a condo in Bangkok.”
“What about your new life here at the seaside?”
He figured that’s what Manee had been talking about to Ratana when he’d seen them through the window.
“Growing orchids, playing the sax,” Calvino continued. “The good life. What happened to those plans?”
“We’ll be back for weekends.”
“Charging at windmills during the week, and relaxing on weekends by walking on the beach. Ideal—if you’re Don Quixote, that is.”
“And Sancho Panza is my friend.”
In such a time as they were in, Calvino figured it was enough that a man continued to value friendship. He knew that maintaining that value when friendships all around them were being devalued demanded persistence and patience. More than that, such friendship required the conviction that it mattered.
Theirs was a time when the generals ruled throughout the land. Who wouldn’t want to join them in the creation of the new order, a new brotherhood? To salute the beginning of a time when strife and scandal and conflict ended? To usher in a time when the gentle breeze of happiness blew through the schools, villages, towns and factory floors, cleansing and purifying the squalid, corruption-infested politicians?
Calvino kept his misgivings to himself, but doing so disturbed him. He was already finding himself censoring what he said to close friends. It seemed to him that that might be the definition of submitting to power. He’d learnt that submission to power was toxic to truth and friendship. Those who value power over everything else have no true friends, only allies. He found himself studying Pratt as if seeing him for the first time, and wondering what he’d missed before.
“Manee will be worried,” said Pratt. “We should go back.”
He brushed the sand from his feet as they reached a fringe of wild grass. The shrimp boat lamps cast small pools of light swallowed by the vastness of the sea. Calvino stood watching the surface shimmer like a black mirror.
“Are you coming back, Vincent?”
He slipped on his sandals.
“I never left, General,” he said, feigning reverence.
“Let’s get a drink,” Pratt said.
“No, let’s get drunk.”
“ ‘I have drunk and seen the spider.’ ”
Calvino sat on the grass and put on his socks and shoes.
“One eye on the spider and the other on his web,” said Calvino.
“Ratana tells me Ballard has been your houseguest. I remember him from Bali. What’s he up to in Bangkok?”
“It’s a long story, involving a teddy bear, a camera and a conceptual artist who free-lanced as a hooker in London.”
Pratt shook his head, laughing as he walked.
“I’ve lived a sheltered life by comparison.”
“Compared to Ballard, we’ve all been living in small spaces.”
NINE
“Let us cultivate our garden.”—Voltaire, Candide
MUNNY LEANED OVER a small generator, using a damp rag to wipe the oil off his hands. He examined his fingers, dabbing a black speck of oil from the tip of his thumb. He stared at the machine as if trying to hypnotize it to his will, drawing in a deep breath as he pulled the cord on the side. A small plume of blue smoke rose, and he smiled as the generator sputtered and started to purr—a heavenly sound as the machine came to life.
Munny grinned, squatting on his haunches. He looked over at Chamey, his wife, and she nodded. She didn’t have to say anything. Her husband had performed his magic and got the machine to work. Now she could cook a catfish on the hot plate for their dinner.
They’d saved for over a year to buy the small second-hand generator, and last month she had scavenged an old fridge, which Munny had got running again. But despite their efforts to get ahead, someone always got ill or some relative had a problem, and there was never enough money to pay for their needs. Life in the Aquarium was never easy. It was a place where dreams evaporated. At least Munny had found work, until that too had ended badly.
The past week had started well. A wealthy Chinese customer from Hong Kong had come into the Khao San Road parlor and asked for a special Khmer-style tattoo, the Sanskrit lettering neat and in nine rows on the left shoulder. He had asked for Munny by name. Munny had been gathering a reputation a
s the magic amulet tattoo man to see among a small group of Khmer tattoo art aficionados. He worked for a Thai-Chinese man in a hole-in-the-wall shop off the main drag that had no neon sign or décor to speak of. The shop owner paid Munny 250 baht a day provided he did a minimum of three tattoos; otherwise a 150 baht sum was deducted from the payment, leaving him enough for bus fare and a bowl of noodles. The Hong Kong customer had known the score and slipped Munny a hundred dollar bill.
Munny had given tattoos to people of all different nationalities, but no customer up to then had ever been so generous—that is, until a few days after the Hong Kong windfall, when a young Thai woman named Fah had walked into the shop and sat in his chair. She sat flipping through a book of colored photographs of tattoos. From the way she turned the plastic pages of the binder with color photos inside, he could see she wasn’t studying the details. She was biding her time, wanting something, but it wasn’t clear that it was a tattoo. Munny thought that maybe she was nervous because it was her first time to get a tattoo. He’d seen the reaction before in young, conflicted kids. Wanting one, not wanting one. Tossing a coin in their mind, over and over, still unsure. Smiling, he took the book from her hands and put it back on a shelf.
“It’s a big decision. You think it over. No need to rush into things if you’ve not made up your mind. Come back when you’ve decided.”
“Isn’t it your job to sell me a tattoo?”
He smiled again.
“I never was much good at selling.”
She liked him and his smiling face. Her hands relaxed in her lap as she looked around the shop.
“You’re Khmer, right?” she asked.
He nodded and whispered, “Yes.”
She concentrated her focus on him like she was looking for something, and that made Munny nervous. She’d started her conversation neither with an expression of confidence nor with the usual questions about the inks, dyes or pain thresholds—and whether each person had a different one. From her chair, she’d managed to corner Munny with a stare. He had an uncle who could do that with dogs: make them stop in their tracks, tail between their legs, head lowered. He could see that she was working up to something, looking for the words. He couldn’t decide if she was one of those who worried about suffering under the needle piercing their skin. Those people didn’t have much pain tolerance. With their sheltered city lives, protected by money and family and friends, they didn’t have much experience with pain. It was something Munny knew a thing or two about.
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