Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn

by Christopher G. Moore

  “What if Mike Hatch doesn’t want to be found?” asked Calvino.

  A smile crossed Patten’s lips. “Of course, he don’t. That’s why the sonofabitch is costing me five grand.”

  “I don’t find people so someone can hurt them or worse,” said Calvino, finishing his drink.

  “Who said I’m going to hurt him? Jesus Christ, you Italians think the whole world’s a Mafia road show.”

  Patten paused to let the slur work on Calvino. Half-Italian and half-Jewish, Calvino had grown up in New York City, listening to this street talk about how the Italians were all Mafia and how the Jews owned all the banks and the media. He sometimes wished all this racial nonsense were true; he would be set up, having the right mix of genes to move alongside the mob, the banks, and Hollywood life was much too complicated to fit into the simple-minded photo plates that guys like Patten carried around in their damaged brains, confusing what they believed to be true of the world with reality.

  “Why do you want Mike Hatch?” asked Calvino, letting Patten’s bait slip off the hook.

  “I like a man who keeps it together, Calvino. It’s this way. I got fifty grand of his dough and he’s disappeared. I heard around that Fat Stuart saw Mike Hatch the day before he went missing. If I were an asshole, why the fuck would I care? I’d just keep the money. Fuck him. But I don’t do business that way. Mike Hatch earned his end. And when you find him, you tell him that. And to show you I’m a serious man, here is a check for forty-five grand. It’s made out to Mike Hatch. Hell, the five grand is a finder’s fee, Calvino. It’s ten percent of what Mike has coming to him. This check you give to Mike. Tell him that squares things between us.”

  “Why does a man hide from his friends? When one of those friends wants to give him a lot of money?” asked Calvino.

  “Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that question. But I don’t have a goddamn clue why he’s gone underground. The way I see it, he got himself lost. So he’s gonna have to pay the freight to get found.”

  Calvino looked at the second check. “It doesn’t hang together, Patten.”

  “Hell, you think life hangs together? It’s all pieces that don’t fit. You got a reputation for finding people who don’t want to be found. So do what you gotta do. You don’t find him, give me back the check for forty-five grand. You keep your fee either way. And don’t worry about your goddamn cash. You’ll have it. Guaranteed. Keep the check for five grand as security. It’s a fair deal, Calvino.”

  That’s the way it was left. Open. Nothing definite except Calvino had taken the check and climbed off the barstool. He didn’t look back at Patten. But he could see from the mirror on the wall that Patten was staring at him. From Patten’s wrinkled forehead Calvino was wondering what was really eating him. Making him all that worried.

  As Calvino stepped out of the Lonesome Hawk, a blast furnace of heat sucked away his breath. He stopped, slipped on his sunglasses, then walked ahead, looking over a couple of middle-aged farangs, guts hanging over their belts, going into the massage parlor for a little mid-afternoon slap and tickle, listening to piped Perry Como music coming out of the walls. Couple of conmen, thought Calvino. Bangkok was the only city in the world where young women loved Perry Como and Frank Sinatra while making love to a fat slob old enough to be their father. He watched them go inside. He knew the drill. In a few minutes the men would be led inside a massage room filled with piped music of a singer who had to be a hundred years old. Two middle-aged men and a couple of nineteen-year-old Isan girls would be sealed inside a sexual commercial loading zone. He kept on walking. It was hard thinking inside a bar; in the street, almost impossible. He had Patten’s check for five grand. That would have worked out to about ten years of massages in the joint across the street. A lifetime of Perry Como. He let the thought ride on past like a cowboy disappearing into the sunset.

  ******

  ON Sukhumvit Road he climbed onto the back of a motorcycle taxi and with some small change left out of an hour, arrived at the general public entrance to the racetrack. If you were not a member of the Sport’s Club—and unless you had the right family name or a lot of money you were never going to get a membership in this life—then you entered the track on Henri Dunant Road at the entrance used by the peasants, tuk-tuk drivers, street vendors, hitmen, smugglers, gangsters, thieves, and retirees.

  Calvino passed Bangkok police headquarters on the back of the motorcycle. He knew that Lt.Col. Pratt was working inside, and would disapprove of the case he had just taken on. But if you only took on assignments which others approved of, then you got out of the private-eye business, became a monk, went back home, or sold pirated Perry Como tapes in the street, thought Calvino. He paid the motorcycle driver. Ahead of him were some of the buildings on the campus of Chulalongkorn University, the leading university in the country, and as he turned around he watched a tuk-tuk driver pay a vendor to rent some shoes. He walked by several vendors seated behind tables stacked with large binoculars for rent. Chipped drab green paint had peeled off the handgrips, mak- ing them look like army surplus. Thousands of sweaty hands in this army had squeezed the binoculars tightly over the eyes, following the horses around the final stretch as they headed for the finish line. Other vendors rented shoes to punters who had arrived in flipflops. It was a track rule. A punter had to wear shoes. Properly shod and vision-enhanced the bettors pushed through the turnstile. Calvino paid for his ticket and followed the other punters. The poo-yai—the rich, connected, respectable Chinese-Thais and farangs who were members of the Sport’s Club—had, of course, their own private entrance on Ratchadamri Road. No one was renting binoculars and shoes at their entrance. The rich had their own air-conditioned, enclosed sections above the thousands of raw recruits—the cannon-fodder class—shifting in their rented slippers waiting for their horse to come in.

  There was no question in Calvino’s mind where he would find Fat Stuart. The fat man would have entered through the general public entrance opposite Chulalongkorn University. He might get stuck for a couple of seconds in the turnstile, take a large breath, suck in his gut, lift himself up on his tiptoes and squeeze through, as the Thais cracked up, tears rolling down their cheeks, watching this fat farang huffing and puffing, trying to unpin himself from the turnstile looking like a pig struggling on a rotisserie. The ones doing the laughing would have been the usual collection of uneducated factory workers, dreaming about striking it rich and going through the members’ entrance on Ratchadamri. That was about as likely as Fat Stuart changing his nickname to Skinny Stuart. The world was wired with small ironies—how the fat never got thin, how the poor never got rich, how the run-of-the-mill gangsters never scored big on the ponies or anything else. How guys like Patten never looked for people they owed money to, and got other people to do their heavy lifting, their dirty work, to clean up the blood and guts when it went that far.

  Smart money, easy money, old money, dirty money—there were a hundred ways to cut that pie, Calvino thought. The only common element was the root evil of money and the greed to possess masses of it. He had come to find some information about a guy named Mike Hatch who was owed money. He entered the school of hard knocks. One education you can’t get on a Rhodes scholarship. Some said this was karma. If you had done bad deeds in your last life, you came back on the wrong side of the road. You had to suffer until all that bad karma was spent out of the bank. If you’d done good, then you were on the other side of the street, on a tree-lined campus reading books. In between the racetrack and university ran a wide road busy enough that you could get yourself killed trying to cross it. Depending on your karma you were stuck on one side or the other. That was just the way it was. Call it destiny. Call it greed. Call it anything you want but to try to change the system was to square off against powerful, dangerous people.

  The Sport’s Club created worlds within worlds, worlds of privilege set next to worlds of the excluded. The center of the racetrack was a carefully maintained golf course, little blue wate
r traps, and bridges, lush green fairways twisting and stretching between the fences, and the flags on the greens motionless on the windless day. It was worth going to the races just to watch the rich Sport’s Club members playing a round of golf, concentrating on their shots inside their world, ignoring the horses and the thousands of people in the stands. The punters made side bets on the golfers playing on the par-three hole where the green was not more than five riding-whip lengths from the finish line.

  After the third race, Calvino found all four hundred and thirty pounds of Fat Stuart squatting on the terrace, his knapsack full of food and cans of Coke leaning next to his side. His hand involuntarily reached into the bag and emerged with a chocolate donut, which he stuffed straight into his mouth as if that was the way a donut was supposed to be eaten. Calvino didn’t go right up to him. He wanted to watch him, see who he was with, what he was doing besides betting the horses and eating donuts. Fat Stuart was the kind of guy who loved gambling. Of course Calvino knew about Fat Stuart. It was his business to know about men like him and also his business not to divulge what he knew to other guys like Patten. Patten got what he paid for; Fat Stuart got pretty much what he deserved. He had been around the fringes of Bangkok for years, a huge belly and those fatman legs, marbled with baby fat, which scuffed together when he walked down the street in nylon boxer shorts. He made the swish, swish noise of a fat lady. He had a reputation for violence. He had done a couple of years for a stick-up in Montreal. Then his family shipped him off on a one-way ticket to the jewelry center of Asia. Bangkok. He was a crook and he was violent. There were those who said L’Blanc’s criminal nature was a business asset for someone in the jewelry business in Bangkok, where jewelers had public fights on the definition of a gem. He was greedy, mean, and dishonest enough to cheat his mother when it came to food.

  His violent temper flashed like a snake striking out of a basket. Teeth sinking into the flesh and leaving a load of venom for the victim to suck out or die. Eighteen months before, he had beaten up three Thai hookers who claimed he had sold them underweight gold. He had spent four months in prison on an assault rap and was fired from the jewelry shop. Calvino once heard him say four months was nothing; you could buy anything in prison—drugs, booze, women, and food. He also carried a grudge, saying it was some anti-French bastard who had put him away. He had this French pride that you should think he was French rather than Canadian. Sometimes he would pretend not to speak or understand English. It was a little game of his.

  After he finished his stretch inside, Fat Stuart did freelance jewelry work. Black Hank said that prison in Bangkok hadn’t helped Fat Stuart’s attitude; it just made him meaner, more determined to inflict some pain for the fun of it. And gave him contacts with the wrong kind of people, who wanted a jeweler to do stuff no jeweler should be doing. Those kind of clients didn’t much care whether the jeweler liked beating up women. Some men hit someone because they were angry or someone paid them to do a job but a guy like Fat Stuart got pleasure from seeing another person suffer.

  Calvino sat down next to Fat Stuart, who was reading the race program. “Who do you like in the fourth race?” asked Calvino.

  Fat Stuart’s dead-fish eyes looked up at Calvino, and a thin smile dimpled his cheeks and cellulite rippled his face, making it look like a fat woman’s ass with eyes and a mouth.

  Sometimes in Brooklyn on a hot summer night, Calvino remembered seeing heavy-set women—as his father called them—sitting on the porch of rundown houses, dripping sweat, fanning themselves and sipping Kool-Aid. Fat people hated the heat, it made them suffer deep down in the way thin people could never understand; the source of hell’s ovens, one of the old women once told him. He never forgot that insight and every time he looked at Fat Stuart, he wondered how someone that heavy came to live in Thailand. Why not Iceland, Norway, Greenland—or France, anyplace where it cools down at night and you never have to sweat?

  “Calvino, what the fuck are you doing at the races?” He had a chocolate moustache. The Quebec accent roughed up with a mouthful of food.

  “Looking for a winner,” he said.

  Fat Stuart liked that answer. “And all you’re finding are losers.”

  With those kind of lines it was hard to think of Fat Stuart as a straight man for a standup comedy act. Calvino let the chance to score the line pass. “How you doing so far?”

  “Winning, of course. I’m French. We know horses. It’s in our blood,” said Fat Stuart. He ripped the tab off a Coke and drank like a drowning man fighting to get air.

  “I thought the French ate horses,” said Calvino. Fat Stuart shrugged. “But never a winner.”

  “What do you know about a guy named Mike Hatch who is in Phnom Penh?” asked Calvino.

  Fat Stuart crumpled the empty Coke can in his fist and dropped it on the concrete terrace, as he belched loud enough to turn the head of some nearby punters. “Who wants to know, Mr. Private-fucking-eye?”

  “A guy by the name of Patten. I guess you two aren’t exactly friends. But that’s not important. He thinks you can help him locate this Hatch guy. Seems he’s your friend.”

  Fat Stuart’s eyes narrowed like a pig’s when it discovers it’s next to walk down the ramp with the butcher waiting at the end.

  “How should I know?” he asked, the smart-assed smirk coming off his face.

  “Patten says you ran into him about a week ago.”

  “Mike Hatch is a fart head, an asshole. I hate his guts and hope the Khmer Rouge eat his heart and liver,” Fat Stuart said.

  “Why would Pol Pot’s boys want to do that?”

  Fat Stuart opened a pack of peanuts with his teeth. “Because Mike Hatch is selling guns and shit to their enemies,” said Fat Stuart. “If someone were selling AK47s to people who wanted to kill you, wouldn’t you want to eat their heart and liver, Mr. Private-fucking-eye?”

  “Where’d you see him last?” Fat Stuart belched again.

  “Fucking Thai donuts give me gas,” he said. “In Montreal, our donuts never bother me. And I saw the dirty little cocksucker in room 305 of the Monorom Hotel on top of a Vietnamese whore. And she was my whore. I took her off the balcony of the Lido. She was sitting out there drinking a beer. I took her out. I gave her a little cash up front. Then that asshole Mike Hatch fucked her while I was taking a crap.”

  It was too weird not to be true, thought Calvino. He won- dered what damage Fat Stuart’s bowels might have caused to the fragile infrastructure of Phnom Penh.

  “What were you doing in Phnom Penh? Making diamond rings?” asked Calvino.

  Fat Stuart smiled. “Patten tell you that?”

  “He didn’t tell me nothing.”

  “It was a business trip. That’s all I’m saying. Period. Fuck you and then period.” He giggled.

  Calvino had heard on the street about AK47s finding their way into Bangkok from Phnom Penh. Was there a farang connection? Or was it strictly a homeboy show? These were a couple of questions he had raised with Lt.Col. Pratt. Only on these matters Lt.Col. Pratt wasn’t saying yes, he wasn’t saying no; he went silent, his eyes looking at some point in the distance where people who didn’t want to talk saw things, like in a movie.

  “I guess Mike Hatch and you were doing business in Phnom Penh?” asked Calvino.

  “Why does Patten want Mike?” “He owes Hatch money.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty grand.”

  Fat Stuart laughed, coughing up peanuts, “Sure, you believe Patten? What kinda guy is gonna screw your girl for free and then hide out because he’s afraid someone’s gonna give him a fifty grand pay day? Go figure it, Calvino.”

  “What kind of racket are Hatch and Patten running?”

  Fat Stuart grinned, making his face dimple into some deep craters.

  “Whatever they can get away with,” Fat Stuart whispered. “Guys like Hatch are making a killing out of Cambodia. They are dirty, but they are getting rich. They’ve double-crossed some influential people. Bad caree
r move to cheat your friends.”

  The UN had been in Cambodia for eighteen months, the elections were over and the withdrawal of troops was already on the drawing boards. Everyone was going home. Except a few who would find a way to make money from the winding down. The Khmer Rouge remained an unplayed card; they had stayed on the sidelines. After the election, the heavy guns started crossing the border in substantial numbers. Warehouses of guns were strung along the border.

  “Hatch cheat you out of money?”

  “Ask Patten. Ask Hatch. Okay, Vinee?” asked Fat Stuart. The five grand had made Calvino not ask but he didn’t

  want to admit this to Fat Stuart. Hatch had betrayed Fat Stuart over a woman. There was a Calvino’s law—Never trust a man who jumps your woman while you’re in the bathroom taking a crap.

  “Who you betting on in this race?” asked Calvino.

  “Saddam,” said Fat Stuart. “You know, after the dictator in Iraq.”

  “Where you hear this?” asked Calvino.

  “What do you think? From the horse’s ass?” asked Fat Stuart with a wiry grin. He showed Calvino four computer-generated silver tickets, each for the amount of one thousand baht. It was a heavy bet for a guy like Fat Stuart who only bet on sure things. Calvino turned, walked up the terrace, through the crowd of thousands of people putting down money at the windows three minutes before race time. He bought a hundred-baht ticket, slapped the red note down on the counter, and took the betting slip. There were so many punters around the entrance to the stands, he decided to watch the race from the lobby where it was shown on a mounted TV. Chinese gangsters the size of sumo wrestlers, with four five-baht gold chains around their necks, shuffled around the TV area, sweaty bodies pressing against each other; men smoking cigarettes to the stub, coughing and spitting, and pointing at the TV with their mobile telephones.

  Hundreds of people in identical rented shoes, with cheap binoculars and gold chains, rushed out of the cafeteria and took up position near the TV monitors. Behind, on long tables, were their plates of chicken, Mekong whiskey, Singha beer, and plastic buckets of ice abandoned until after the race. This was the ritual. Eat, figure out the handicaps, drink, talk about the trainers, owners and jockeys, drink more Mekong, then place the bet, go back to the terrace, and look over the heads of thousands of Chinese-Thais making side bets. It was the kind of food-and-money-centered world that would appeal to someone like Fat Stuart. Only difference was Fat Stuart never stopped eating.