“I didn’t mean...” said Munny, dropping down on one knee beside the man.
The baseball bat fell from his hands onto the floor. He rolled Kiri’s body over on its back, and blood and brains spooled down the sides of the shattered face.
“I’m so sorry, Kiri,” said Munny, slowly shaking his head.
Calvino pressed his cell phone against his ear outside the building, like a baseball fan listening to a game on the radio. He’d heard the loud crack of the bat on Kiri’s skull, the bat clattering on the concrete floor and then Munny’s sorrowful voice. Calvino took the steps two at a time as he ran into the building. He drew his .38 Police Special from its holster beneath his jacket, half-crouching in and out of the shadows as he moved ahead. He heard the voices as he neared the top of the stairs. Ahead in the near dark he saw Kiri’s body on the floor and Nimol’s right arm stretched out with a gun. His left arm held the boy as a shield. Calvino couldn’t get a clean shot.
“I’m going to blow your brains out, Munny,” said Nimol.
Gop sobbed as he slowly made his way down the stairs with Heng’s arm wrapped around his shoulder.
“Let my boy go!” pleaded Heng.
“Shut up!” said Nimol. “It’s time to settle things that should have been settled a long time ago.”
“You’re right, there,” said Heng. “You can start by giving me my artificial leg.”
“Give me the money you owe me.”
“I don’t have the money.”
Nimol’s foot nudged a wooden leg on the floor of the landing.
“No money?”
He glanced over his shoulder to where the landing dropped off to the basement. He kicked the artificial leg. The force lifted it past Munny, and it arced over the edge of the landing and down into the water below.
“Why did you go and do that, Nimol?” said Heng.
“You don’t pay, you don’t walk. That’s the Eight-Niners’ rule.”
No more than five feet from Nimol, Munny stood facing Nimol in the open space. Nimol applied his second hand to the handgun, letting the boy run to his father. Nimol slowly knelt down beside Kiri, who now lay still. He looked at Kiri’s body, shaking his head as he examined the smashed face.
“Why’d you hit him, Munny? You’ve killed a man. And you shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t want to, Nimol. But he came at me wanting to hurt me bad. You let us go.”
“Or you’ll do what, Munny? I’ve got a gun. You’ve got a busted bat. How do you think that’s going to work out?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Gop.
He had lowered Heng to the floor and now held a gun that he’d found the courage to pull from the waistband concealed under his shirt.
Calvino stooped low, leaning forward near the top of the stairs. Nimol stood in a pool of light reflected from the water in the basement. The distant sound of a thousand of fish breaking the surface of the water echoed. Nimol stood with his back turned toward Calvino, who now had a clear head shot. Calvino watched as Gop’s hands held the gun unsteadily. Nimol ignored Gop and raised his gun toward Munny, concentrating on the Khmer and the half of a bat he’d snatched from the floor with one hand. Gop’s position was slightly behind Munny, who stood two feet ahead.
Calvino quickly ran the scene’s possible outcomes through his mind, pointing the gun at Nimol’s midsection. Should he just shoot him? Nimol had crossed that threshold where killing him was the only choice. The possibilities ran through his mind in a maze of outcomes. Calvino asked himself if he should take a chance on Gop. It was the most dangerous of moments, the judgment of whether to leave room for another man to find his courage.
Time stopped. A hypnotic trance filled the space. In an upstairs room of a mansion in Rangoon, the closed door guarded, the Black Cat pointed a gun at the head of a sobbing Thai woman kneeling on the floor as Calvino had watched helplessly. That moment had burnt deep in his memory, a scene that had repeated itself over and over again in his sleep. This time it was playing out among two Khmer and a Thai in an abandoned building in Bangkok. The runner in Chini’s Chinese New Year flashed across the darkness, a phantom suspended between Heng and Nimol. The boy had broken from his father and run forward, rushing and screaming at Nimol. A wild shot from Nimol’s gun missed the boy. Munny reached down and scooped him up from the floor, shielding him with his body. Time restarted, and the surge of the fatal instant filled the space. All these events that passed before Calvino’s eyes and through his mind were no more than small change that added up to a second. Then the sound of Gop’s 9mm cracked like a whip. A 9mm round blew a ten baht coin-sized hole through Nimol’s head above the right eye. His legs crumpled and he fell back; his body, in a free fall, after a couple of seconds slammed into the water below. Nimol’s life ended without him ever reaching terminal velocity.
Gop lowered his gun and looked at Munny, who let go of Vichet.
“Go back to your father.”
Heng, sitting on the floor, wrapped his arms around the boy’s neck and hugged him. Out of the darkness a dozen or so of the remaining squatters appeared, coming down the stairs, forming a circle around the scene. They were free.
One of the women looked over at Gop.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
Gop stood, the gun hanging limp at his side.
“You did good,” whispered Munny. “We can go.”
Kiri’s body, his head shattered like a pumpkin after Halloween, lay with his legs bent at strange angles. Calvino holstered his gun as he climbed the last two steps. He gently removed Gop’s gun from his hand. Gop blinked away tears and wiped his face with his forearm.
“What are we going to do?” asked Gop, looking at Kiri’s corpse on the concrete floor. Nimol’s body floated in the water a few feet away.
Several of the squatters came up and touched Munny as if his good luck would rub off on them. He nodded and walked to the edge of the unfinished floor and looked down at the dark void, hearing the fish flop.
“Give me a hand.”
Shards of concrete block soon appeared out of the dark. Several of the squatters worked to tie the shards to the arms and legs of Kiri’s corpse. Two more men descended the stairs to the basement and used a long pole to guide Nimol’s body to the side, where they weighted it down with bricks slipped into his clothes. Two of the squatters moved forward with a couple of pieces of rebar. They were construction workers and worked fast, fastening four ten-kilo jumbo steel bars with rope until they were secure against the chest and legs of Nimol’s body. After slipping Nimol’s body back into the murky water, they watched it sink. The remaining rebar was hiked up the stairs and tied around Kiri’s body.
Gop struggled to pick up Kiri’s body by the ankles as Munny held him under his armpits, getting blood all over his shirt. At the edge Gop dropped his end of the load. Munny stopped a moment as Gop stared at the body. Then he shoved it over the edge. Heng, sitting with his back against the wall, sheltering his boy, gently guided his head away so he wouldn’t witness this moment. The body made a loud thud as it hit one of the main half-rusted girders on the way down. Vichet peeked out from under his father’s arm but quickly turned away. He didn’t really want to witness the way two men that he had known had gone from being alive to being dead and dumped in watery grave. He could hear the fish splashing in a frenzy, tails hitting the water’s surface on the way back down.
Munny looked at the blood on his hands.
“The money!” he said. “Nimol had it.”
“Why’d you give it to him?” Gop asked.
“He had a gun.”
Gop nodded. Yeah, he’d remembered the gun, and he also remembered that it was his money they were talking about.
“I’m going to get it,” said Munny.
The flight of stairs from the ground floor to the basement ended halfway down. The bodies had both sunk to the bottom. Munny stripped off his shirt and jeans and stepped out of his sandals. He dove into the water. Gop and half
a dozen squatters watched as bubbles rose and fish jumped. A moment later Munny’s head broke the surface. He spit out water and wiped it out of his eyes.
“Did you find it?” asked Gop.
Munny took a deep breath and disappeared again under the surface. He was gone nearly two minutes before his hand broke the surface and then his head. In his clenched hand was Heng’s wooden leg—one of those crude limbs with no cosmetic cover, made with a jigsaw, a drill press and a grinder. He’d tucked the envelope into the knee hinge before swimming to the surface. Munny had a big grin on his face as he swam toward the concrete floor. Gop squatted at the edge, reaching out to Munny. Two other men helped him pull Munny up onto the concrete. His chest heaving in and out, Munny lay there for a moment, clutching the wooden leg, looking up at the faces staring down at him.
Munny put on his shirt and jeans, stuffing the envelope in his back pocket. He dried his hands on the sides of his jeans. One of the squatters handed him the busted baseball bat.
“You can go home now. No one’s gonna stop you,” said Munny. “You’re free.”
“We thought you’d never come up,” said Gop.
Munny held up the wooden leg like a trophy.
“Without this, there was no way I could have pried back the rebar and rope. You tied him up good.”
Heng had managed to hobble down, and the squatters stood back, letting him in close to Munny. Munny handed him the leg.
“I broke your leg, Heng. The foot got caught on the rebar.”
“It was worn out anyway,” Heng said.
“Get someone to fetch your things,” said Munny.
Munny sat back on the stairs next to Gop. He counted out eight wet thousand baht notes and handed them to the Thai.
“That’s the float.”
Gop looked at the rest of money, and then at all the squatters looking at the money and at him, and decided these were Munny’s people and it wasn’t a good time to ask Munny for more. After all, the basement water was deep, and Munny had dived to the bottom and fished it out of Nimol’s pocket.
They climbed the stairs back to the first-floor landing, where a couple of the squatters had brought down two old boxes with Heng’s worldly possessions and set them on the floor.
Calvino said, “Someone will have heard the gun shot. Let’s go.”
Munny walked over and picked up the head of the broken baseball bat. He looked around for the bat’s bottom half.
“Mr. Vincent, did you see the handle, sir?”
Calvino walked over and picked it up.
“Call me Vinny. You don’t want to be leaving these behind. Leave the bat with me. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks, Mr. Vinny.”
He handed Calvino the bloodied piece of bat.
Calvino and Munny then carried Heng down to the street.
“I’m sorry I broke your wooden leg,” Munny said to Heng. “I’ve got money to buy a new one when you get back.”
That was how Munny planned to spend the money—ten grand to Gop for transportation and ten grand to Heng for an artificial leg. That left nothing for Munny, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Munny was free in a way most men never were. He’d stopped caring about money.
Munny and Calvino eased Heng into the back of the van. Gop switched on the Road Kill engine, as Calvino watched Heng stretch out on the floor of the van.
“I told you trouble had a way of finding me,” said Munny.
“Maybe it’s time for trouble to take a holiday and visit some other people.”
“Yeah,” said Munny, “I’d like that. It’s been hanging around me too long.”
“See you around, Munny,” said Calvino.
“Thanks.”
“My secretary’s got a boy about your son’s age,” said Calvino. “May be one they will meet.”
Munny smiled. “That would be a fine day.”
The Aquarium squatters hadn’t needed any help settling their score. Letting go of being the hero, allowing someone else to save the situation, had given Calvino the feeling he’d found something he’d been searching for over many years. Munny had no cash he could call his own, but he’d found the gold in his life.
Gop swung the van around, and Calvino watched the taillights disappear around a corner. He walked back to his car and eased himself into the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock. Beyoncé’s “End of Time” played as he drove away.
The money delivery hadn’t been a drug deal or some other setup with him as bait. He’d decided to do it for Fah based on his gut instinct that she wasn’t just another of Osborne’s women. He’d seen her life unfold, the one she shared only with her friends, and she was the real thing. She was too good for Osborne, and Osborne knew it too. Not that it mattered. They were on their way to Madagascar, and what had happened at the Aquarium was already as inaccessible to them as if it had happened on another planet. New boundaries that would shape their lives had begun to form. Munny was going home, crossing his own boundary. Calvino wasn’t planning to cross any border. He was going to stay and see things through.
Gop drove fifty kilometers, eyes straight ahead on the road, before he said a word to the passengers. Munny sat beside him in the passenger seat, and the boy and his father sat in the back, clutching each other. Gop tried to process what had happened back at the Aquarium. It had been only a few minutes. But it hadn’t seemed like minutes. Time had elongated, stopped. Only now did it seem to resume at a normal beat.
Munny had experienced the same disassociation from normal time. The pendulum had paused as Munny swung the baseball bat. The swing of the bat had seemed to measure tiny units of time like a fastball pitch hurled toward the batter. In baseball, the scale of time and the speed of a motion are calculated by a hitter’s internal clock. Munny had that clock; he was a natural-born slugger. Not that it mattered much. A Khmer hunted in martial-law times wasn’t going to be playing any sport. He was playing a different kind of game.
Munny reached into his pocket and pulled out the baseball Calvino had given him. He tossed it to Vichet.
“You can keep it,” he said. “It’s a baseball.”
“I shot him,” Gop said with a tremor in is voice.
It was as if he’d only just realized that he’d killed a man.
“Nimol had a lot of enemies,” said Munny. “He hurt a lot of people, too. You saw how you were a hero to the people living there.”
“You killed the other one, Munny.”
“As sure as if I’d shot him,” said Munny.
“You think someone will find the bodies?”
Gop had been worrying about what would happen if the police got involved.
“No one’s going to find them. They’re staying on the bottom, and I can’t think of anyone who will miss them or report them as gone. Don’t worry about them, boss. Two men like that will be forgotten by the world by the time we reach the border.”
Munny watched Vichet turn the baseball over in his hand. He leaned his head back against the headrest. It felt good to be alive. The whole world, real but strange, felt sweet and free. He glanced over at Gop, who sat silently again, lost among the demons haunting his thoughts. He was driving in the middle lane, passing a convoy of army trucks. Munny managed a smile as Gop moved into the fast lane and accelerated.
“Who was the farang?” asked Gop.
“I don’t know. Doesn’t much matter. He was looking out for us,” Munny said.
“Why would he do that?”
Munny shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t know. But it’s a first. How about you, Gop? Anyone ever looked out for you?”
“My friends,” he said in an uncertain voice.
“You’re lucky, then. It’s good to have friends. Like tonight.”
“I did okay?”
“You were a superhero, Gop. Like Batman.”
Munny had tattooed Batman on Gop’s back almost one year earlier. If he could let himself believe what Gop and his friends had
said, it was one of the better Batman tattoos that anyone had ever seen.
“We’re going to sell two hundred burgers tomorrow,” Munny said.
Gop wasn’t listening to the boast about burger sales.
“I never shot a man before, Munny.”
“Let’s hope that Nimol is the last one.”
“He shot at the boy. Something snapped in me.”
“I know, Gop. You saved his life.”
Munny shifted around for a good look at Heng and the boy in the back. Vichet slept against his father’s shoulder. Kids could sleep almost anywhere. He missed Sovann, his own son, but was glad he’d been spared the experience of that night.
“Batman?” Gop asked, repeating his hero’s name.
“Just like Batman.”
Even a frog inside a coconut shell could lift his eyes over the edge in time to be a hero.
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”—Graham Greene, The Quiet American
ON ONE SIDE of his office desk, a Selectric typewriter idled in front of Calvino, making that low-grade buzz like a hornets’ nest deep inside a wall. A sheet of A4 paper half-filled with text sat in the carriage. Calvino turned away. He worked the wireless mouse in front of his iMac. Swimming across the twenty-seven-inch screen were fish. He’d found a YouTube video recorded by an underwater camera adventurer who’d hunted until he’d found a school of snakehead fish attacking a pig in Brazil. The blue lake water churned with blood, the frantic squeals of the pig fading to the sound of splashing water.
The voiceover, in a godlike tone reminiscent of Morgan Freeman, told the story of how the snakeheads could grow up to one meter in length. The snakehead was no ordinary fish; it was a meat-eating machine. It could live for days out of the water, and for months buried in the mud. They were thoroughly tough bastards. He wasn’t surprised to find that some species of the snakehead were native to Asia. Tough guys like eating tough guys.
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