Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  Marisa’s face had gone ashen. “Look at how afraid she is.” The threat of more violence on the roof had them all squirming. Wan, her body shaking, held on to her hand. Neon signs stretching the length of the soi threw off enough light to make out the ladder. Wan wasn’t winded, despite having doubled back a couple of times to check on Fon. Calvino kept an eye out so no one got separated.

  When Calvino looked back, the couple had vanished. They had no more than a couple of minutes before the thugs would hear that the kid had gone onto the roof. Marisa and the two Thais fumbled around in the dark. “What do we do?” asked Marisa.

  “Take the ladder,” he said, looking over the edge. “Wan, you lead the way.”

  From the moment they’d climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, it had been clear that she knew where she was going. Calvino looked back and saw movement in the distance. The young couple hadn’t just made up, they’d spread word of a farang with a gun on the roof. He said nothing to Marisa. With the neon sign for Penny Lane blinking a couple of feet away, Wan blinked as she stared at the fire-escape ladder.

  “You go first,” Wan said, looking at Calvino.

  “Any reason for that?” he asked, with a dose of old-fashioned suspicion.

  Wan clicked her tongue, cocked her head. “There’s a long drop. You need to put Fon on your back and carry her down.”

  He picked Fon up and swung her over his shoulders. “Hold on tight.” He twisted back and saw the terror in her eyes. She said nothing, but the way her small hands clawed around his neck, she didn’t need to. As he climbed onto the ladder, he told the others, “Keep down and quiet. Then come after me. Wan next and Marisa, you come down last.” He went over the edge, feeling the full weight of the kid on his back.

  He didn’t see he had much choice. Putting his life in the hands of a bar ying violated several of Calvino’s laws, among them, “If a ying asked for something, she was asking for money.” He slowly climbed down the stairs with his toes pointed to the brick wall. He had underestimated Wan, he thought.

  When he reached the last rung of the fire escape he measured the length of the drop. Below in the near distance he saw the Asoke underground station. But the pavement was a four-foot drop from the last rung of the fire escape. He reached back and tapped Fon on the shoulder. “Almost there, kid.” Once they were on the ground, it would be a couple of seconds until they passed the security guard and entered the subway station.

  “Climb off my back. And stay on the fire escape.”

  She froze again, clutching him with all of her might.

  “You’ve got to trust me, Fon. I’m not going to leave you.”

  But the kid hung on tight. She didn’t want to climb anywhere. The drop was high enough to break a leg if you landed the wrong way. Having a kid on his back was increasing the risk of getting hurt. He could hear, in the distance, angry Thai voices shouting Fon’s name.

  Wan whispered to the kid in Thai. “Climb up two rungs and wait or everyone will have a problem. You don’t want to make a big problem, do you, Fon?”

  Calvino felt the kid’s hands release from his neck. Her hands grasped the rungs as she lifted herself off Calvino’s back. He looked up and smiled. “After I’m on the ground, I’ll catch you. You understand?”

  The beekeeper’s daughter, just above them on the ladder, translated for Fon. The kid glanced at Wan and nodded. Calvino saw the exchange as he looked over his shoulder. He tried to judge the distance to the ground. He climbed down until he could lower himself from the last rung, holding on till the last moment. His body extended a couple of feet from the surface and then he let go. He dropped to the pavement and landed on his feet. Fon had watched him, and she climbed to the last rung, hung on with two hands, her tiny dress fluttering, and dropped. Calvino caught her. Wan and Marisa followed one after another. Calvino grabbed each woman as she dropped to the ground. At the entrance to the subway, a uniformed security guard checked Wan’s backpack. From the roof, Calvino glanced back to discover two men bent forward from the shadows and staring back at him. They quickly moved, disappearing like a bad hallucination. But Calvino knew that they would have phoned their friends on the street to intercept them in the station.

  “We’re about to have company,” said Calvino, as he slapped a hundred baht down on the ticket counter.

  “Where to, sir?” asked the woman seated on the opposite side of the glass.

  Calvino turned to Marisa, “Where do you want to take her?”

  Marisa looked pale as she stammered. “To my condo on Silom.”

  “Sala Daeng Station. Four people.”

  They ran down the escalator to the platform as they saw the light from the train moving down the tunnel. No one talked as they waited for the train to arrive. Calvino paced beside the down escalator, watching for men from the soi. Wan, Marisa, and Fon waited on the platform, palms sweaty, eyeing the other two or three people at the opposite end of the platform. No one said anything. A commercial for shampoo blared from large LCD screens on the platform. So far no one had followed them from Soi Cowboy. It seemed forever until a train arrived. When it did, they rushed inside, found seats, and flopped down, exhausted. Calvino caught a final look at the stairs and saw two Thai men running along side the train, shouting and gesturing. The train soon picked up speed and the men disappeared. Calvino sat close to Marisa and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “That was close,” said Calvino. He closed his eyes and exhaled, trying to clear his mind from the mistakes of the evening.

  “You might have killed that man in the bar,” she said. “And the man on the roof. You hit him hard.”

  He glanced at her and saw that she looked scared. There was only one source of fear remaining: she was staring at it. Her body tensed as he touched her hand.

  “They’ll have a headache. But no lasting damage.”

  She’d seen him use his gun to knock out the man who’d drawn first blood, and again he’d used violence on the roof. She had seen violence before, but it had been propelled by anger. What she had witnessed was cold-blooded, methodical violence carried out as a matter of efficient routine. At first Calvino’s actions repelled her, making her feel vulnerable, then they excited her, making her feel confused. “It doesn’t bother you? To beat someone up and then …” she paused, looking for the right words. “Then acting as if what you did was just another part of the day. It’s what I imagine a hit man’s emotions to be.”

  “What do you know about hit men?”

  She looked away, shrugged; whatever fear bubbled below the surface, what she showed on her face was part revulsion, part terror as she struggled to reply. No words came out of her mouth. Ice water for blood is what she had wanted to say, but couldn’t get the phrase out.

  “I’ve got some news for you. Violence always has and will have a place and purpose. It is part of life. You do move on and be glad that you can,” he said. “You don’t swing open a switchblade at a wedding and expect to get a piece of cake.”

  “This happened in a bar,” she said.

  Calvino smiled, hands behind his head, “No argument there. No cake either.” Violence was a secret companion haunting any bar. Most of the time it was inside the box with the lid on; other times, with enough liquor, a sideways glance, the wrong word, it flew out of the box at the speed of light, surprising everyone with how fast a room could fill with the smell of blood.

  “Afterwards, you feel nothing, do you?” she asked. “It entered you and left without leaving a mark. No damage. No nothing. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  He saw that it scared her. “I don’t take my work home with me.”

  She nodded, biting her lip, as if she understood.

  Flashing red and yellow lights shone on an empty stage. A dozen naked yings huddled in the back, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum. When the police showed up at the bar, the mamasan and two of the waitresses had finished cleaning up the blood left behind by McPhail. She hadn’t bothered to ask where Reno had go
ne. She didn’t want to know; lying was much easier that way. No one had seen him slip away on the soi. “Reno, he go home,” she told them. They looked around the bar, their walkie-talkies springing to life with grainy, deep-throated voices before going silent again.

  “You tell Reno, we catch him with an underage girl, we close him for sixty days,” said one of the cops.

  “I’ll tell him, sir,” said the mamasan.

  “Tell him we have a strict rule. Cannot break it.”

  She nodded, agreeing with the seriousness of the allegation.

  “We have four witnesses who saw a small girl come inside the bar. Where is she? Tell me and nothing will happen to you.”

  “I saw no small girl, sir.”

  They tried a few more times, but it took a sledgehammer to crack a mamasan, and what was inside was mostly rotten anyway. The lead officer made the calculation that Reno had gotten away this time, but they’d be watching the bar. “Tell Reno he’s on our blacklist.”

  “I’ll tell him, sir,” she said, giving him a wai, which wasn’t returned.

  The cops left after a few minutes, and she saw them talking to the thugs who’d been waiting outside. The mamasan smiled, leaning on the mop as she peered through the torn curtain.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THEY STOOD IN THE DOOR to Marisa’s three-thousand-square-foot condo—four bedrooms, three baths. Polished teak floors, Burmese artwork, Chinese vases, African ceremonial masks, and a Japanese samurai sword studded the vast living area along with tables and three sofas. The others behind Marisa stopped dead in their tracks, staring. Wan, the beekeeper’s daughter, slowly pulled off her backpack, mouth open, looking around the largest private living area she had ever seen, and Fon walked straight to the African ceremonial masks to peer through the empty eyeholes. Calvino removed his shoes, staying close to the door. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been invited inside or whether his duties were finished by delivering the others to the door.

  “How many families live here?” asked Wan.

  “My brother and me,” she said.

  “You must be very rich,” Wan said.

  Fon had taken one of the masks off the wall, walked over, and sat on one of the sofas, resting the fierce-looking witch doctor’s wooden face on her lap. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. “Can I have it?” she asked.

  “Keep it as long as you want,” said Marisa. The mask belonged to Juan Carlos.

  Marisa had recovered some of her color, but still looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Vinny, would you like a drink?”

  “A drink would be a good thing,” he said, looking around the room. “Where do you work?”

  “The UN.”

  He paused, looking around the apartment. “You people at the UN are paid like bankers.”

  Her hands continued to shake as she walked over to a cabinet and fiddled to open the door. Dozens of bottles were inside. She pulled out two glasses, bent her head forward as if she were bowing. Her forehead touched the cool glass, and a long sigh passed through her lips. Recovering herself, she turned back to her guest.

  “I can’t believe we did it. I don’t want to think what would have happened if they’d caught us.”

  “It’s not over,” Calvino said, as she pulled a bottle from the liquor cabinet.

  “Scotch?”

  “You look a little shaky.”

  “I’m okay. Really. Just out of breath.”

  He nodded, watching as she screwed off the cap of a single-malt scotch, the same brand the General had given him. It made him smile. Maybe his luck was changing.

  “You’re smiling.”

  “It’s just that you’re pouring my favorite scotch.”

  Raising one eyebrow, she poured three fingers into a whiskey glass and handed it to him. “I’m guessing ice isn’t something you like in your whiskey.”

  “Straight is fine,” he said, taking the glass from her.

  He sipped the scotch. It was the first time he’d actually tasted the General’s choice. Edging away from the door, he walked to the middle of the room, looking around at the kind of luxury that he’d read a few expats at the top of the food chain enjoyed in Bangkok.

  “Let’s toast to happy endings,” she said.

  He choked on the scotch. “Excuse me? This is just the beginning. I don’t see how happy is gonna figure into anything at the moment.”

  “I thought Americans were more positive,” she said.

  He ignored the play on nationality; it was a mug’s game, one he refused to play. “Here’s how I see this situation playing out. The kid has value to the people you snatched her from. They won’t let her go. They’ll go to the police and file a report that she’s been kidnapped. That’s the way they work. In their mind, they own her. It’s like you’ve stolen their SUV. It’s not likely they’ll throw up their hands and walk away.”

  “They were planning to prostitute Fon.”

  Fon sat across the room beside Wan, who was telling her stories about the faces on temples at Angkor Wat and about the Khmer people who’d built the temple. How these people also had ceremonial masks with the same hooded eyes, large lips, and flat nose. Wan’s father had taken her to Angkor Wat when she’d been about the same age as Fon, and she remembered the faces of slaves, soldiers, kings, and courtiers carved in sandstone. Wan lifted the African mask from Fon’s lap and raised it to cover her own face. Fon giggled as Wan lowered the mask.

  Calvino watched the two Cowboy yings bonding, one a child and the other just beyond childhood. How was he going to say this so that he wouldn’t come across like an asshole? Of course the kid’s handlers had planned to pimp her. To them, she wasn’t their kid. She was some poor peasant’s kid.

  “That’s how they make money on their investment,” Calvino said. “It’s all about business. Profit and revenue and, of course, expenses. Keeping expenses down is something they’re good at. Tomorrow, some relative, or someone pretending to be a relative, will sign a paper at the police station saying they never authorized you to take their kid. And the police have to make a decision. A Thai kid has been taken from her Thai family by a mem-farang. Whose side do you think they’re going to take?”

  He thought about the bar ying on the roof who’d chased her boyfriend down to kill him until she decided the farang on his chest was a greater affront to her honor than the boyfriend’s infidelity. The clan always closed in behind each other in the face of a challenge from an outsider. Marisa wasn’t their clan.

  “She’s not Thai. She’s Shan, Burmese.”

  Calvino shrugged, knowing that clan suddenly expanded to include neighboring ethnic minorities when a farang became involved in a conflict. Or they could play another card. “An illegal immigrant has no rights. She’s not a free agent. You can’t just grab her off the street because you think it’s the right thing.”

  The traditional system had been tailored to operate on a highly personal basis. It wasn’t modeled on law or rules, but survived on the basis that each level was connected, and breaking one of those connections threatened to collapse the entire structure. Marisa had pulled out one of the wires. That wire had to be put back. And the question was whether Marisa understood that her diplomatic passport, her UN position, and her ideals and values would not shield her.

  “I have Thai colleagues who will help,” said Marisa. She so wanted to drop Somporn’s name.

  More people to draw into the line of fire, thought Calvino. “Is carrying out rescue missions part of your job?” he asked. “If it is, next time you ought to ask for backup.”

  “My supervisor won’t be happy about it. But it’s done.”

  “I don’t know how to say this well. But I’d ask you to believe me. Nothing in Thailand is ever done in such a way that it can’t be undone in the blink of an eye. You think you’ve crossed a finish line. But the line you just crossed is the starting line, and the people who were after the kid tonight are long-distance runners. They have endurance. Do you?”

  Marisa poure
d herself a drink, steadying herself against the liquor cabinet. The last thing she wanted was to appear the stereotypical scared, weak female who couldn’t stand on her own feet, make her own decisions, and fight her own battles. The moment she asked Somporn for help, she would be lost inside a world she would never escape. “Thank you for your advice and for your help. What you did tonight, I can’t begin to say how grateful I am for.”

  He shrugged and finished the whiskey, setting the glass down on the long coffee table. “I should go.” The three words every man utters when he understands that sex isn’t going to happen and another day is waiting around the corner.

  “Please. Not yet. I’d like you to meet my brother. He’ll be home any time now.”

  Meeting a brother, what an attractive alternative, he thought. “Where are you from?”

  “Catalonia.”

  “Isn’t that Spain?”

  “Like Scotland is England,” she said. “Or New York is America.”

  He was starting to like the woman—her humor, her choice of whiskey, her fierce sense of right. “It’s just that I couldn’t place your accent. I thought maybe Italy,” he said. Italy was Calvino’s default; being half-Italian, he assumed a mem-farang had to be either Italian or Jewish.

  Calvino walked over and squatted down beside Fon, her child’s face painted like a whore’s, her dress seductive and sensual, advertising her arrival to the marketplace.

  “You did well tonight,” he said.

  She pulled a face, stuck out her tongue, and raised the African mask. She had been someone’s investment, but perched on the expensive sofa and wearing an African mask, she was still just a kid playing a game. Beside her was her stash of chewing-gum packets, a few wilted flowers, and half-a-dozen laser pens. She lowered the mask, laughing. She reached over and threaded her arm through Wan’s as if letting go would mean that she’d tumble into a freefall. Wan had also made murmurings about leaving. She had a bus to catch to Surin. Her backpack had been left beside the door, next to her shoes.