Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  “You going to Jerry Gill’s funeral?” Black Hank asked Patten as he sat down heavily next to Calvino and leaned his crutch against a barstool.

  “Where is it?” asked Patten.

  “Don’t know. Some wat over by the river,” said Black Hank. That there were a couple of hundred wats around the Chao Phraya River didn’t seem to matter all that much since no one had the slightest intention of going to see Jerry get burnt.

  “He have any relatives?” asked Calvino.

  Patten wiped the sweat off his face with a cold white towel.

  “He was married once,” said Patten. “He said her name was Doris.”

  “An ex-wife ain’t a relative,” said Black Hank. “Or I’d have more relatives than customers.”

  He laughed at his own joke, and then nervously tugged at his baseball cap as if he was sending a signal to a pitcher on the mound. Black Hank had played in the minors for four or five seasons back in the 60s before Vietnam dragged his ass into Asia.

  “Jerry Gill didn’t have any friends,” said Patten, looking at the card with all the names of strangers who had never known Jerry to talk to but were happy enough to sign the card Black Hank had put in front of them.

  “But he worked for you, Patten,” Black Hank said.

  Patten shot him a long, hard, mean look. “A lot of people have worked for me. You think I can go to every one of their funerals and still have time for business?”

  “I hope it ain’t raining when they burn me,” said Black Hank, a shiver of fear going up his spine. “No good sending up your smoke when it’s pouring down rain.”

  “What’d Gill die from?” asked Calvino. “Death certificate said ‘heart stopped.’”

  “Hell, Hank, that’s what the death certificate always reads for a dead farang in Thailand. Don’t matter if it’s a bullet in the head, knife in the gut, drug overdose, it all comes out the same. The heart stopped.”

  “They kinda gotta point, Patten. The heart does fucking stop. So I guess you can say that was the cause of death,” said Black Hank. “I mean they ain’t lying.”

  “Jerry’s heart stop all by itself?” asked Calvino. “Or did it have a little help before taking that long rest?”

  “I don’t give a damn, Calvino,” said Patten. “I didn’t ask to meet you here to talk about Jerry Gill. So why don’t we just forget him and get down to business?”

  “You’re a hard man, Patten. Some day you’re gonna be forgotten, too.”

  Noi, a waitress, shuffled to the bar with Patten’s soup and salad. Across the bar, a farang in a shirt and tie, watch with a gold bracelet, and a pinky ring with a one-carat diamond, shouted at Black Hank across the bar.

  “You said you were sold out of specials. Why is he getting a special when you told me they were all sold out?” asked the stranger. His face had turned red, and his neck was twisting under the starched white collar like he was trying to break out of a prison cell.

  Calvino smiled because he knew that in the Lonesome Hawk there were two answers Black Hank used; there was the long answer and then there was the short answer. One or the other was given when strangers found out they were lied to about the forty-baht special having run out when someone like Patten or Jerry Gill—before he got himself killed—came in late and was wanting his lunch.

  “He ordered in advance,” said Black Hank. That was the short-answer lie.

  “I’m a member,” said Patten, staring the stranger down. That was the long answer with a few dozen volumes crammed into three words. There was an unofficial membership of the regulars who ate at the Lonesome Hawk Bar; they shared information, stories, women, and a moral code, which excluded outsiders.

  “Jerry was a member too,” said Black Hank.

  “And that’s why I signed the goddamn card,” Patten replied, getting annoyed. “Now I want to eat my lunch, talk business with Calvino and I don’t want to any more bullshit about what is gonna happen to Jerry Gill’s ashes. Fuck the ashes. It don’t matter. Calvino, tell Black Hank that it don’t matter.”

  Calvino watched as Patten slurped his onion soup. “Let’s talk business, Patten.”

  “You see, Black Hank, Calvino knows what matters. Getting down to business.”

  Black Hank slipped away into the kitchen, chewing gum, and his jaw pumping up and down. He wore his Oakland Raiders cap as if he were a relief pitcher who had just received a call to go to the bullpen and warm up because the guy on the mound pitching was in serious trouble. One minute he was at the bar, the next he had vanished with the card.

  “This rain is playing hell with my hip,” said Patten. “It was six years ago today I got hit. I was flying at three thousand feet. I had dropped my bombs. Then some cocksucker got lucky, and hit my F-5 with a Vietnam War-vintage rocket launcher. One of those shoulder launchers. Putting a rocket launcher on a peasant is a dangerous fucking thing, Vinee,” he said.

  He waited for some reaction from Calvino who just stared straight ahead as if what he heard was not any different from what he had heard the day before or the day before that. This unsettled Patten a little; he knew that Vinee Calvino had a reputation as a tough sonofabitch with major police connections and that was why he had decided to hire him, but he thought some glimmer of sympathy might be in order. He was wrong. Calvino showed only indifference. Most people in Bangkok carried some wound; some healed faster than others. Some of the invisible injuries never seemed to heal right, leaving bitterness and regret.

  There were truckloads of people who would have traded Patten’s limp for the nightmare, which had become their daily life of hell in Bangkok. Traffic jams, pollution, water shortages in the hot season, floods in the rainy season. Still most guys like Patten didn’t have the strength or courage to leave. What they always had was a new scheme to change hell into heaven. Calvino’s law said that the Grifter’s Dream was to score the ultimate grift, which would make them rich, happy, and beautiful. Calvino was remembering what Lt.Col. Pratt had said when he learned that Patten had offered Calvino some work.

  “He’s evil, Vincent,” Lt.Col. Pratt had said. “Mean and with enough no-good friends to fill a town hall in hell.” Lt.Col. Prachai Chongwatana, who had acquired the nickname Pratt during his school days in New York City, was behind his desk in a building at police headquarters in Bangkok—one of scores of buildings running from Erawan to Siam Square. The police had prime real estate and no one was suggesting they leave the area.

  “Most of my clients are dirty, Pratt,” he had replied. “They roll along fringes which never get cleaned.”

  “Compared to Patten, they are saints. ‘Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth; there Minotaurs and ugly treason lurk,’ ” Lt.Col. Pratt had said, quoting Henry VI.

  “I’m two months behind in my child support payments,” Calvino had replied. Then he heard Black Hank shouting at one of the waitresses.

  “Give the man his hamburger and soup,” he hollered. A tiny waitress who was no more than sixteen came out of the kitchen chewing gum and carrying a tray of food for the stranger at the bar.

  “I should be dead like Jerry Gill,” said Patten. Yellow teeth filled his mouth as he smiled directly at Calvino. “Burnt to a fucking crisp with no one to pay last respects. Or sign a goddamn card. But I hit the eject button just like in a James Bond movie and bailed the fuck out. I was in the hospital for six months. The doctors said I was going to die. The nurses said I was history. You know what I said to those cocksuckers? I said, ‘Someone who’s gonna kill me has gotta look me straight in the eye. No little cocksucker living off bugs in the jungle is gonna kill me with a shoulder launcher.’”

  Patten was an American in his mid-40s, receding brown hair, a neat, brown moustache closely clipped like a gangster, and silver-rimmed glasses. An American flag decal graced the padded top of his crutch. He was a patriot, a businessman, a grifter, and a paranoid with a bad limp in the rainy season.

  Someone said Patten was full of shit; that his bad hip was his own fault. He had been d
runk and smashed up in a car crash near Korat. Some said that he had never been inside an F-5 let alone flying one on secret bombing missions for the American Government (who he insisted were helping the Thai military kick Laotian ass while the rest of the world looked the other way). Only the Laotians won the war. In Bangkok you could be whoever you wanted to be and you would find an audience in places like the Lonesome Hawk who would appreciate your performance. And there was the B-52 in Soi Cowboy where the same guys hung out after the forty-baht lunch, talking business, looking over the girls. If a farang hung around long enough talking about attack fighters, secret wars, and high-tech weapons, he attracted other combat freaks who were into heavy conspiracy theories about who had won and lost Southeast Asia. But the people who worked in the intelligence field didn’t sit around the Lonesome Hawk or the B-52 on empty afternoons bragging to guys like Patten about their close calls and the ambush patrols they had served on. There were enough black holes in the universe, windows through which, for reasons that were not reasons at all, floated odd pieces of information dislodged from old classified files. This information hovered inside bar table zones as if following guys like Patten who huddled together over a cheap lunch.

  Patten had called Calvino’s office that morning and arranged an appointment at the Lonesome Hawk. He was vague about details but said he wanted to hire Calvino to track down a guy he was looking for who had gone to Cambodia. He said this Cambodia business was urgent. Guys like Patten were always in a hurry when it came to doing the work and slow to pay for it. Lt.Col. Pratt, Calvino’s best friend, had recently been preoccupied with Cambodia. With Phnom Penh crawling with UNTAC troops, Khmer Rouge attacks along the border, and hit-and-run Thai business operators setting up, paying bribes to the government, and carrying on like cowboys. These merchant cowboys and their gangster friends had made for some bad international press. The kind of press that made most Thais cringe. The legal entanglements had begun to rise like baker’s yeast. And no one was about to throw it out the window. Cambodia was a new frontier for grifters, wide-open action, and enough crooked deals to keep politicians and generals enriched.

  Patten was about to start explaining his particular Cambodian problem when the stranger who had complained about not getting a forty-baht special leaned over and rang the bell in honor of his own birthday. The barkeeper, who was named Lek, had been taught to parrot back the word “motherfucker” when someone she didn’t know rang the bell.

  “The motherfucker rang the bell,” said Lek.

  The stranger didn’t get his forty-baht lunch and now had been called a motherfucker. This put him in a black mood, thinking that people at the Lonesome Hawk didn’t have the proper respect for him.

  “Who’s a motherfucker?” he asked Lek.

  “You’re the motherfucker,” said Patten standing up, leaning on his crutch. “You rang the bell, you buy the bar. That’s the rule.”

  “You want another Mekong, motherfucker?” she asked

  Calvino.

  “It’s okay, she calls everyone motherfucker,” said Calvino.

  This explanation seemed to calm down the stranger, who slicked back his hair with one hand and forced a smile.

  Black Hank appeared from the kitchen smiling under his baseball cap. He had heard the bell and was in a good mood now the bell had been rung and the ringer had to pick up the tab for a round of drinks for everyone. He sat in the back behind the stuffed head of a water buffalo. “Lek, don’t use that fucking language in this bar. This is a respectable fucking establishment.”

  “Monkey see, monkey do,” she shouted back.

  Patten winked at her. “Make this one a double, Lek. I feel lucky. I am going to the racetrack. And I’ve got this feeling I’m gonna win the big one.”

  Drinks were served around the bar. Patten was a gambler. Bangkok was lousy with them. But Patten exhibited just enough recklessness to make you think his story about getting shot down in a secret war over Laos might be true. It was an example of strange behavior. The unpredictability of the twisted character which Lt.Col. Pratt had warned Calvino about came packaged inside the soul of a man who had been blown out of the sky and lived to plan his revenge. One would have thought Patten would never have done anything more dangerous again than walk into a bar and eat lunch. But he hadn’t learned a damn thing. Patten knew Calvino by reputation and had seen him around; and when he checked him out with other people who drank away their afternoons in Washington Square and Soi Cowboy, the report came back that Calvino was a private eye who carried a gun and had an even-handed way of killing people with blue, green, or brown eyes when they cornered him in a dark alley. There was never sufficient evidence to connect Calvino to the shooting. The dead man’s heart simply stopped in the alley. This meant that Calvino had influence—like a shoulder-held rocket launcher, it was the kind of influence which knocked just about any evidence out of the air. After Patten finished his double Black Label and soda, he turned to Calvino. Patten thought, “This is my man.” He gave Vincent Calvino a check in the amount of five thousand dollars. Calvino stared at the check without committing himself to the job. He made no move to take it. He thought about those three zeros with a five in front. He knew the amount would pay the overdue child support, his office expenses, his secretary and rent for a few months.

  Calvino looked up from the bar.

  “I don’t take checks, Patten. It’s cash on the table.” “You saying my check is no good?”

  “I’m saying cash is better.”

  Patten held up his empty glass and ordered another drink. “I’ll bring around the cash tomorrow,” he said.

  “What are you buying?” Calvino asked.

  “What you’re selling. The services of a private investigator. Vinee, I want you to go out to the Sport’s Club. It’s race day. There’s a guy named Fat Stuart L’Blanc. He weighs about four hundred pounds. He’s from Montreal. Now he’s in the jewelry racket. He did some time in Canada before his family sent him here. Fat Stuart, he knows his ponies. Look him up. He’s got some information about this goddamn problem I’m having in Cambodia.”

  Calvino looked real hard at Patten, and then glanced at the check. He wondered what excuse Patten would have tomorrow for not delivering the cash.

  “Why don’t you go and talk to Fat Stuart?” He was halfway to turning down the job. It had problem written in bold-faced letters all over it.

  “Because that Frenchman hates my guts,” said Patten. “What makes you think he will talk to me?”

  “A gut feeling.”

  “You can do better than that, Patten. Five minutes ago you were going to the track. Now you want me to go. And you’re offering a lot of money. Which means you’ve left out a few parts of the story.”

  Patten made a move for the check. “The hell with this. I tell you what you need to know. And I’m offering you five grand to talk to Fat Stuart. So you’re telling me that you don’t want to talk to him? Then the hell with you.”

  “What do you want from the Frenchman?” asked Calvino. Patten reached over and stuffed the check in Calvino’s suit jacket pocket.

  “Ask him why the fuck I haven’t heard from Mike Hatch.” Calvino looked around the bar. All he had to do was take the check out of his pocket, lay it on the bar, get off the stool, and push out of the Lonesome Hawk Bar. It was oooh so easy. He watched the stranger finishing his hamburger, juice from the meat, mayo, and tomato bits dripping between his fingers. He licked his knuckles like a kid.

  “Five grand for asking one question?”

  Patten shook his head. “Five grand for the answer.”

  “I can’t think of an answer worth that kind of money that you can’t pick up a phone and get yourself,” said Calvino, watching Patten’s jaw muscles moving as he chewed a hunk of Black Hank’s special Salisbury steak.

  “Fat Stuart don’t like phones,” Patten said, some steak sticking to his teeth as he talked and chewed at the same time. “And he doesn’t much like me either.”

&nbs
p; “Where’s this Mike Hatch?” asked Calvino.

  “Phnom Penh. You ever tried doing business in Cambodia?” Patten asked.

  Calvino had to admit that he hadn’t. There was usually enough business in Bangkok to keep a hundred private eyes working full-time as skip chasers in town for a credit card company or bank, investigating local companies and gathering evidence on crooked employees—while it wasn’t much, it made for a living which just about no one would have ever called comfortable. The last couple of months business had dried up. Some said it was the economic downturn from America finally hitting Thailand. Whatever it was, once the safe, clean inside air-conditioned office work vanished, Calvino began getting calls from grifters looking to hire him to finger some other grifter in a shabby hotel lobby. Patten’s job had all the qualities of the usual grifter file—client with no visible means of support, ready to pay up front with a large fee for asking a question and reporting back with the answer. Once Calvino had been a practicing lawyer and he knew no one ever paid five grand for an answer unless it was the number of a rigged lottery.

  “Patten, are you setting me up?” he asked.

  “I’m asking you to go to the races and talk to Fat Stuart. What the fuck is wrong with that? Is there something illegal about going out to the Sport’s Club? Fat Stuart sitting on the concrete with his fat French ass taking up enough room for a half-dozen chinks, how can you miss him? And when you hear word of where Mike Hatch is, I want you to go and find him for me. He’s probably in Cambodia. Then you’ve earned the five grand.”

  Grifters always had more answers than brains to understand what information they had stored inside their heads. But Patten seemed streetwise, smart, controlled, and, as he wiped his moustache with a napkin, serious about the proposition. The assignment was more than picking up some information. Patten slowly was reeling out the rest of it—he was buying muscle, someone to pull in his boy.