Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

He was showered with goodbyes in languages he didn’t understand. Calvino assumed the message was goodbye, but given the evening, it could have been “Watch your step. It’s a long way to the bottom.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  CASEY FOLDED UP THE SUBPOENA and slipped it back into his pocket. It had been on his desk when he arrived for work. Each time he read his name on the subpoena, he balled up his fists in a flare of anger and paced his office. He phoned the company headquarters. He was told not to worry. It was a formality. Showing up in a suit and tie at the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., before a subcommittee of the military intelligence committee seemed no formality. The committee was holding hearings on the role of private contractors in the secret-prison system, and they were out for blood. His boss told Casey that at the company level, Casey had their full support. They promised him that he’d have at his side one of the best lawyers around.

  Casey knew the game. They were telling him what he wanted to hear because they wanted his cooperation. What burned him was the company’s using classic interrogation techniques, the same ones he’d used on insurgents before taking them down, inflicting pain, getting to the truth of what they knew. What Casey had wanted to hear was he didn’t have to testify, just keep doing your job.

  Instead, he had less than a week until he boarded the plane for Washington and the committee room. LRAS was preparing to cut him loose. He felt it like a man who sensed a subtle change in his wife’s attitude as she put in place her plan to leave him.

  Logistic Risk Assessment Services had been as cold-blooded as any private interrogator; what they were doing was nothing personal, but someone at the operational level had to be isolated and set up to take blowback. The handwriting was on the wall when the CFO at LRAS gave him the details of his legal representation: a twenty-six-year-old lawyer two years out of law school whose only job had been as a White House intern. His political connections would help them offer up Casey in a deal. Waters had told him that this was in the pipeline. “Be prepared, act first,” Waters had said. Waters had tipped him several months earlier that an investigation was likely and warned him to cover his ass. That was something Casey had a lot of experience with doing. He had zero intention of showing up in a committee room in Washington and testifying about activities in Baghdad and Bangkok. He’d tie up some loose ends and then disappear, something he knew how to do. He’d been trained to make independent decisions in the field—whatever was needed to accomplish the mission.

  Casey never forgot his training. He had already bought his outbound ticket. But it wasn’t to Washington, D.C.

  Casey walked into Calvino’s office wearing his interrogator’s smile and a floppy-eared dog hand puppet. He stood erect before Ratana’s desk and barked, the puppet hidden behind his back slowly emerging. Ratana brushed back her hair to one side, ignoring his intrusion but keeping an eye on him to see what he would do next. “Say hello to Ross,” he said, bringing the puppet within a couple of inches of her face.

  “Ross?”

  “The name of someone who works in my company,” he said. Ross was the company’s CEO. “Ross and Mr. Casey would like to see Mr. Calvino.”

  He stripped the puppet off his hand and laid it on her desk. “Or I could just surprise him. I think that would be better,” he said with a broad grin.

  Casey breezed past her like she didn’t exist and walked straight into Calvino’s office. Calvino had told Casey on the phone that he had a report on Cat and he wanted to deliver it personally. Calvino had expected to find Casey hardwired with his usual default settings: belligerent, self-confident, with a talent for discovering the weakness in the defense and destroying it. It had troubled Calvino that Casey had been gathering information about Colonel Pratt. He wanted to hand over the file and get Casey out of his life.

  The blinds on the window were open far enough for them to watch the neon One Hand Clapping sign. It looked like a dead hand in the daytime. Casey glanced in that direction but quickly looked away. What was outside didn’t interest him.

  “You know personal details about Colonel Pratt. It’s not too much of a jump to say you know a great deal about Cat,” said Calvino. “But you do a good job of pretending you don’t. A good job pretending that you need me to get information that you already have. Maybe you can explain why you’ve gone to all of this trouble?”

  Casey raised his hand as if to interrupt what was coming next. Calvino waited as his client paced up and down the wall, looking at the paintings. His training as a professional interrogator meant he looked for the breaking point, and when he found it, Casey had no trouble doing what was required at that point. Throw him off-balance, humiliate him, make his head spin.

  “In the intelligence business all information needs to be crosschecked, Calvino. Sure, I know about her. What does that matter?” He moved along the wall, turned around, narrowing his eyes and talking through his teeth. “What does matter is you. Who is Vincent Calvino? That’s a good question. I look at the wall. But I don’t see any degree in criminal justice. A real PI has it framed because it shows he’s had the training for the job. Also no license. Do you have something to show that you’ve met some minimal requirement or passed some test? Not likely. I don’t even see a framed certificate from some tin-pot association saying you’ve paid your dues. From the look of it, I’d say you fly by the seat of your pants. You take the money and do your best. But I heard about your police connections. In this place, forget about a degree or a license; it’s the guy who’s connected at the street level who delivers. That’s why I hired you. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit who you are.”

  Calvino leaned forward on his desk, his .38 police service revolver inside his shoulder holster. His jacket hung loosely from a coat rack to the side of his desk. He stared across his desk at Casey, trying to imagine him in an interrogation room with someone tied up, bloodied, yapping out of control, admitting anything to stop the pain.

  “I’ve heard that you’re in the pain business. I don’t like doing work for that kind of man.”

  Casey rolled his neck and a small cracking noise echoed from the bones inside. “If you worked only for people you liked, you wouldn’t cover your rent.” He smiled as if the exercise had eased up some stiffness. “That’s why I’ve thrown some business your way. I was never much into judging a man by what he has on paper. It’s what he can do in the field that matters. And if you play this right, I can throw you a lot more, if you’re interested.”

  Calvino had come across his fair share of con men, grifters, and boiler-room operators in Bangkok, men who were always just around the corner from starring in the biggest role of their life, and inviting you into their movie as the second lead. Suckers fell for the performance more times than Calvino cared to count. Behind Casey’s mask, beneath all the bluster, something about the man told Calvino that he had known Somporn wouldn’t show up for his usual appointment with Cat. Otherwise, Casey would have thrown him off the case. Why would he have bothered to shell out more to an investigator if he believed he was no good at his job?

  “What did you find out about Cat that you can’t tell me over the phone?”

  “She’s looking after a couple of her sister’s boys, putting them through international school.”

  “Her sister’s out of the picture, right?”

  Calvino wanted to reach across the desk and grab Casey by the neck and shake him until he was blue in the face. “Her sister’s dead.”

  “Sisters, brothers, dead or alive. I don’t care. All I want to know is her connection with Somporn and whether she’s showing up on a regular basis.”

  What was it that had wormed into Casey’s heart at an early age and turned it to stone? thought Calvino. An abusive father, an indifferent mother, an uncle or neighbor who beat him and made him eat dirt for some minor infraction of a silly rule? With a guy like Casey, it could have been anything, including the possibility that he’d been born without a heart. Or was that just another part of his act?


  He’d been thinking about the women in the beauty parlor, gabbing over their mah-jongg tiles and stacks of money, letting him know Cat knew about Nongluck. He looked hard at Casey, and he wondered if Casey knew about the love triangle as well. “Cat knew Nongluck was seeing Somporn. Convenient for her that Nongluck died in Pattaya. Someone pushed her off a hotel balcony. It makes you think, what if?”

  A slight twitch of Casey’s upper lip threatened to turn into a sneer for only a flash and then he regained his control. “What if what? I don’t see the connection.”

  “Somporn is an active man. There’s Cat, and then there was Nongluck. Women are natural-born monopolists. They hate competition.”

  “You’re moving away from the assignment, what I paid you to do. I’m interested in Cat and when she meets up with Somporn.”

  “I’d have thought Nongluck’s death would have interested you. If your endgame is to get Somporn, why not link him to a murder? It would make life messy for him.”

  Casey smiled. “I like that possibility. It’s good, Calvino. Real good.”

  Calvino got the impression that the compliment was false and that Casey was toying with him. Calvino rose from his chair and walked across the room. He opened a filing cabinet and removed a folder. He walked back to his desk and opened it. Inside were newspaper clippings about Nongluck’s death and more clippings about the murder of Casey’s son, Joel. One of the photographs was of Joel. He pulled out the clipping of the fresh-faced man, half as handsome as his father, and laid it on his desk. “Personally, I don’t think you have any intention of framing Somporn. You plan to kill him.”

  Casey laughed but was clutching his fists into balls at the same time.

  “Something happens to Somporn,” Casey said, “and I’m one of the first people they’d pull in to question. And they know where I live.”

  “He killed your son. A man might take some risk to put that right.”

  Casey didn’t blink. In the years that had passed since his son’s death, Casey would have had other opportunities to kill Somporn. He hadn’t done so. Why not? Calvino had to look him in the eye as he answered. There was an old Chinese saying about how the wise man waits until the dust settles and the emotions cool, and then takes revenge.

  “There’s more than one way to destroy a man,” Casey replied. “Ruin him in ways far more painful than killing. Somporn’s running for election. Your idea of pinning the Pattaya murder on him is good. I want you to run with that.” Casey smiled and looked away from the photo of his dead son. He’d seen a lot of photographs with the faces of anguished men who’d been tortured. He’d taken some himself. But when the man photographed was his son, all the professional detachment vanished. He’d stared at his dead son’s body in the photograph many times; it was an image he carried around in his head day and night.

  “I don’t want to work for you after today,” said Calvino.

  “Now you’re starting to fuck with me. I strongly suggest you don’t.”

  “Here’s the report on Cat.” He handed Casey an envelope.

  “You’ll regret this,” said Casey.

  “My only regret is not doing it before.”

  “You’d be wise, and your colonel friend would be wise too, to not get too close to things that don’t concern you.” Casey had an eerie way of flaring up into a white heat then pulling back a second before he exploded. Signaling his return to self-control with a knowing smile, Casey shook his head, slipped on his aviator glasses, smacking his lips before breathing out in a long sigh. “We all need to pull back a couple of steps. Give each other space. You and your colonel go back to your corner because my fight’s got nothing to do with you. Don’t ever get into a fight unless you have to. That’s my advice.”

  Before Calvino had arrived at his office, Colonel Pratt had stopped in and shown Ratana a set of cards like the ones they had found in Nongluck’s hotel room in Pattaya. He asked her if she had any opinion about them. Pratt bounced her baby on his knee, keeping him happy with another hand puppet—a penguin with large black button eyes—that he’d found in the kids’ department at the Emporium. Gifts for the baby, question for the mother. It was the Thai way of doing things: sweet, informal, and polite.

  Ratana thought about the cards. “Was she a gambler?” she asked. Women who gambled sometimes ran up large debts with the wrong people, the kind of people who might finally push the indebted gambler off a high place.

  “They were held together with a rubber band.”

  He laid the cards down in the order in which they’d been found. “That’s how the Pattaya police found the cards,” he said.

  “These are Nongluck’s cards?”

  The Colonel shook his head. “I bought these cards, but they’re identical to the ones found in her handbag. I’ve been wondering why she only had eight cards. Unless it was a poker game and that was the last losing hand she’d been dealt.”

  Ratana slipped off the rubber band and turned over the first card: the ace of hearts. The next card was the eight of diamonds, followed by the six of clubs and the six of spades. The last four cards were the queen of hearts, the six of hearts, the five of hearts, and the nine of spades.

  “Doesn’t look like she won anything with this hand,” she said. “But I can’t think of a poker game played with eight cards.”

  The Colonel nodded, slowly moving the penguin up and down in front of the baby. “It must have been some other card game.”

  “You didn’t find the rest of the deck?” Ratana asked.

  “It hasn’t turned up.” Colonel Pratt lifted the baby back into the playpen and put the penguin beside him. The baby started to cry for his mother. “Tell Vincent I stopped by. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to drop in and see if everything was okay.”

  “I’ll tell him about the cards. Maybe he can figure it out. Farangs know a lot about cards,” she said. Her baby was half-farang, but it didn’t stop her from thinking there were things that farangs knew that Thais didn’t know, and that it worked the other way around too.

  Colonel Pratt had restrained himself from saying that inside the skull the basic raw material was pretty much same; there was no farang brain or Thai brain, just brains that absorbed what they found in the environment. Like a penguin puppet. “Keep the cards. I’ve memorized them. You might want to show them to Vincent.”

  By the time Calvino had arrived back from the beauty shop, Ratana had stared at the cards for some time, as if they might speak to her. Ratana thought that a man who finds eight playing cards in a woman’s handbag would assume that she wasn’t playing with a full deck. A man would get sidetracked wondering about the rest of the cards. But a woman would understand that a deck doesn’t have to be complete, that eight cards could mean something apart from a card game. She played with the new penguin hand puppet, turning its head to her son, speaking through the penguin: “I am a funny bird. I am black and I am white. I am two things. But I am also one thing. A bird that loves water. And I live in a colony, which is like a playpen for penguins. Sometimes we play, sometimes we fight. But we never play cards.” She glanced at the cards side by side on her desk. She tried to get inside Nongluck’s mind. What had she wanted?

  By then, Casey was on the other side of the partition talking to her boss. She could hear them arguing. Casey’s bluster and temper echoed around the small office. Then it hit her, the way Thai women feel when under threat. They need to get to a safe haven, to someone who will protect them. Who would Nongluck have phoned if she had been in a life-and-death situation? She stared at the cards and then dialed the sequence of numbers they corresponded to, 1–866–7659, and waited. On the other side of the partition Ratana heard a cell phone ringing.

  On the third ring, Casey looked at his cell phone and stared at the caller ID. He recognized the number.

  He hesitated, the blood draining from his face, and punched the reject button. Ratana dialed the number again. On the third attempt, with Calvino watching him, he looked like a cornered Doberma
n and answered. “Can I speak to Vincent Calvino?” Ratana said.

  Casey, like a good soldier, handed the phone to Calvino.

  “Vinny,” said Ratana, “Do you mind if I bring in some playing cards?”

  Calvino stared at Casey, who rubbed his three-day growth of beard like a man trying to start a fire in a rainstorm. “Bring them in.”

  “What are you trying to pull, Calvino?”

  Ratana came into the office and laid the cards on her boss’s desk. “Khun Nongluck had eight cards in her handbag the night she died. The police found them. I wondered if they might be a phone number of someone close to her, in case she got in trouble.”

  “With a secretary like Ratana, I don’t need any qualifications,” Calvino said. “You might want to explain how she got your cellphone number.”

  Casey shook his head and sighed like a racehorse kicked in the guts by a jockey bringing him around the back stretch. “Yeah, Nongluck had my number. I gave it to her. She had it in case of an emergency.”

  “You lied to me about her.”

  “She had a thing with my son. They had lived together for a while. Then broke up, got back together, broke up. She wasn’t living with him when he was murdered. But that didn’t stop her from coming to his cremation. She came with a friend and stood in the back crying. There weren’t a lot of people shedding tears over Joel’s death. It got to me. She said she had really loved Joel and she wanted me to know that he was a good man. And I told her if she ever needed anything to call me on this number. It’s a private number. Not many people have it. She was one of them.”

  Casey was so convincing, it was nearly impossible not to believe him, though everything about the man said such an attitude was an essential part of his prison job.

  “You’re saying she would have called you if she were in trouble.”

  “That’s exactly what I am saying.”

  “Only this time, when you expected her to call, she didn’t get around to it.”