“You know the secret of muay Thai?” Calvino asked.
“A good kick in the nuts,” said McPhail.
Calvino didn’t respond as he watched another series of punches knock the fighter in the blue trunks onto his ass. The boxer sat with his knees raised on the mat, looking dejected or shaken or both. Catching his breath, he counted to eight before rising to his feet, touched gloves with his sparring partner in the red trunks. There was a brute elegance in the way they moved around the ring, mindful, focused, in perfect harmony. A flurry of punches was followed by kicks. An explosion of hands and feet, a blur of motion, and then the boxers fell into their dance, reconnecting to a zone where everything is in balance, if only for an instant.
“The secret is waiting until the other guy makes a mistake. Then a good kick, a fair one, not one in the nuts, lands where it should and hits home.” He pushed his fist against McPhail’s chest. “Then his wind is knocked out. And he goes down.”
McPhail shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Speed’s more important. If you’re fast enough, you don’t need to wait for the other guy to screw up.”
“One or two such boxers who come around once every generation are that fast. But most men, they look for the weakness, the lack of concentration, and some hint that the opponent is distracted, and then they act, fast and with all the weight they can put behind their punch. That’s how a man wins at boxing. It’s how a man wins at most things.”
Muay Thai was the national sport. It was the negative image of their worst fear: Making a mistake. Even the thought of making a mistake paralyzed most Thais. Better not to act than to get something wrong. But muay Thai let them witness firsthand what happens when a mistake is made. Blam. The heel of someone’s foot strikes under your jaw, lifting you off the ground. To make a mistake in ordinary life risked the loss of face; to make a mistake in muay Thai was a surefire way to have your face smashed in.
The boxer in the blue trunks hit the mat a second time. He leaned forward from the waist, his face almost touching his outstretched legs. A sense of loss, a struggle ended, crossed his face. The boxer in the red trunks knelt beside him, touched his glove to the man’s cheek, and started to remove his gloves. The fight was over. One man had won, the other sat in defeat.
As they walked on, McPhail had his hands stuffed in his pockets. “I used to box. I could take a punch. I was one tough bastard,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.”
“ ‘I coulda been a contender,’ ” said Calvino. Sometimes an old movie line summed up a public library’s worth of weariness and regret.
McPhail nodded. He shot Calvino a sober, grim, distant look, as if he were somewhere else. “I really was. No bullshit.”
Calvino nodded in agreement as McPhail scored a direct hit on one of Calvino’s law: Everyone can throw a punch, but only a few can take one. They walked a while until Calvino stopped under the marquee of the old cinema house opposite the entrance to the square. McPhail said, “See you around.” He looked like he wanted to say something else but couldn’t find the words, so he said nothing and kept walking—hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, head down, feeling his age in the heat of the day. It wasn’t like McPhail. But the world was changing all around him. He was looking to find his place, like everyone else. The young reminded a man that his place was a temporary accident. McPhail headed in the direction of the bars on the other side of the square, a place with enough old rednecks to make him feel young. At a certain age, it took a fair amount of alcohol to ride the illusion train of youth when just about everyone knew that that train had left the station ages ago. It was the kind of illusion that rolled through a man, putting him in the right frame of mind to do a lot of serious drinking.
Calvino left Washington Square, stopping on Sukhumvit Road and waiting to cross over to the Soi 31 side. He waited not for the cars to stop at the marked crosswalk—that would rarely happen—but for the first person to edge into the road, making himself a human shield, and then gradually for one car to stop, followed by another, until the traffic briefly halted. As he waited, Calvino thought about Marshall Sawyer, wondering if he really thought he’d made a mistake in the risk assessment of the local Thai partner, or if that was a smoke screen for what was inside the envelope Tanny had handed to Brandon.
Men like Achara didn’t get arrested or go to prison. Calvino regretted that he’d not written that in the report instead. These were careful men who avoided silly mistakes, because only a boneheaded mistake would land them in trouble. He should have written that as well. All the things he wished he’d written and had never thought of at the time would have made a reasonable library. An office worker with a thin mustache, a white shirt, and dark trousers stepped into the road. Calvino followed the volunteer, half a step behind. Locals made much better human shields for crossing Sukhumvit than did tourists, who tended either to freeze in the middle of the road or start screaming and shouting, shaking their fists, making angry faces. That kind of farang behavior amused Thai drivers to no end, and they took it as an invitation to jam down on the gas pedal. Local drivers thought of it as target practice.
Inside Calvino’s office, two Thai women talked with an intimacy that suggested they’d known each other for years. Tanny sat in a chair facing Ratana, who positioned herself on Calvino’s desk. It was the first time he’d ever seen her sitting on his desk, ankles hooked like a schoolgirl, acknowledging him with a sideways glance without a break in the conversation. Tanny told her about Brandon Sawyer’s wrinkled brow as he’d watched her walk into his house with her shoes on. Ratana had seen Brandon in operation, and he never struck her as being a defender of Thai ways. Ratana saw Vincent standing in the doorway listening to them.
“Tanny told me the story about Brandon and her shoes,” Ratana said.
“You had to be there,” said Calvino, nodding at Tanny, who had turned around in her chair, facing him. “There’s something not quite right about a farang enforcing the shoes-off rule against a Thai who isn’t Thai.”
Ratana laughed, and that eased the atmosphere back to the fun zone. He’d interrupted one of those “Isn’t the world of farangs a strange one?” conversations Thais have among themselves. Calvino circled behind his desk, removed his jacket, and sat down in his chair.
“Nice building you’ve got here,” said Tanny. “Your wreck of a car is a good cover for the poor-farang act.”
It didn’t take much of a leap for Calvino to fill in the blanks about what Tanny had been digging around for. Looking for dirt that was as good as gold. The two of them had been bonding while he’d been at the Lonesome Hawk. Ratana looked annoyed. Why shouldn’t she look upset? Calvino thought. She had just been double-crossed. Given out confidential information to someone who seemed a little too pleased at her luck. Ratana had told Tanny about his financial windfall. How he came into a great deal of money, which had, among other things, allowed him to buy the building that had for years housed his office. If Tanny checked it out, she’d find that it was legitimate money—or at least clean enough under prevailing local standards.
Ratana moved to the door, halfway between Calvino and Tanny. She stretched forward and handed Tanny a photograph of a child. “Your boy is lovely,” said Ratana.
One of the things Calvino liked about his secretary was that her emotional recovery time was a couple of minutes. Whatever annoyance she felt toward Tanny for encouraging her to discuss Calvino’s increase in wealth had receded, vanished.
“Jeffrey. That’s my son’s name,” said Tanny, taking back the photograph. Calvino glanced at the boy’s photo as Ratana handed it back. But the passing of the photo happened too fast; the boy was a blur.
Marshall Sawyer sent the mother of a youngster to walk the front lines in Bangkok, thought Calvino. That was how capitalism worked. You deployed any asset that gave you an edge. Business always came first.
“Let me have a look,” said Calvino. “Seven years old?”
“Six,” said Tanny.
Calvino co
uldn’t help but wonder about the boy’s father. What kind of American would Tanny Craig have married? Was Craig his family name that she’d used on her passport? The kid looked luk-krueng, with the straight nose, brown eyes, and light-colored hair. He wore a New York Mets T-shirt and posed with a baseball glove on his left hand and a baseball held in his right. He had that Little League ready-to-play intensity. “Looks like a future Mets shortstop. Your husband’s influence.”
“We’re divorced. He has no influence.”
“None?” asked Calvino, raising an eyebrow.
“He’s in federal prison. Five years for insider trading. But you don’t want to hear about my little dramas. The point is—” She paused as the phone rang on the other side, and Ratana walked to her office and answered it.
“The point is?” asked Calvino.
“I get what I need. I’m on a plane and back with my son. That’s the point,” she said.
Ratana, standing in the door, nodded, her smile confirming the meager influence of men in the child-rearing game. The father of Ratana’s son had the best excuse. He’d been murdered in Bangkok. Tanny’s husband, from the way she’d described his role in the boy’s life, was as good as dead.
“Anything you need to get you on that flight, you let me know.”
“I will,” she said.
Calvino was starting to get an idea what Tanny was capable of doing to get what she wanted. Making Ratana her ally was another step along that path. He should have seen it coming, but Brandon Sawyer had authorized payment for the additional office equipment to be bought and delivered to Calvino’s office. He had insisted, and Calvino, not thinking it through, had given in. He’d never shared his personal space. Suddenly Tanny was in that space, in his face, budding up to Ratana, gathering information. “That was your Mr. Sawyer on the phone,” said Ratana.
Calvino looked up from his computer screen. “What did he want?”
“He said to tell you that Khun Achara will meet Khun Tanny on Wednesday afternoon at his office. He said you should go along. I asked if he wanted to talk to you directly. He said that he didn’t. I could hear splashing of water.”
Tanny shook her head, her lower lip in a pout. “Brandon would never get away with such behavior with young girls in America. He’d be thrown in prison as a sex offender.”
“He’s not living in America,” said Calvino. “For the record, the women at his house are not underage.”
“And next you’ll tell me he hired you to verify their age.”
In fact Brandon had. “It’s what I do,” said Calvino.
“Verify facts.”
She’d had some hard knocks, and, like a lot of people who had suffered from disappointment and anguish, Tanny Craig had a sala’s worth of teakwood on her shoulder. Ratana saw no point in getting into the middle of something that had the smell of conflict, and returned to her desk.
Tanny sat in her chair, her back to Calvino, and flipped through papers inside a file. She slammed the file on the desk, reached into her handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one lose, lit it, tilting back. “I tried to get you kicked off the case,” she said, exhaling smoke, slowly turning her chair around in time to watch his reaction.
“The thought passed my mind that you’d try,” he said.
“Nothing personal.”
She nodded. “Not personal at all.”
“It was … professional,” he said, smiling.
Tanny blushed, took a long drag on her cigarette, tapped the ash into a black oval ashtray with an advertisement for Singha beer. “I had no idea it meant that.”
“Life is a string of saying one thing but finding out it means something different in another country.”
“And you’ve got Thailand all figured out? Like what everything means?”
“Can we start over?”
Before she could answer his question, Calvino extended his hand. “Hi, my name’s Vincent. I’m from New York. I work as a private investigator in Bangkok. What kind of professional are you?” asked Calvino.
A long moment of silence fell between them.
“Aren’t you going to shake my hand?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
He was going to ask her how a professional investigator married someone who ended up committing insider trading, got himself convicted and sentenced. It said something about her judgment. The same judgment she brought to work, inside his Bangkok office on a corporate due-diligence case.
For the moment, he decided to let it ride.
“Corporate investigations,” Tanny said. “And you, what does Vincent Calvino specialize in?” She shook his hand. “Whatever walks through the door,” he said. “That’s my specialty.”
“But you graduated to become a senior consultant to Mr. Sawyer.”
“In life the unexpected happens. One minute you’re married and living the good life, the next your ex-husband is in jail and you’re a single mother. You didn’t graduate into that life. That life wormed its way into what you do and who you are.”
He had made it personal once he decided she was spinning him. Before she’d even left New York, she would have run his name through a criminal search website and found his old problem with the law in New York and his removal from the list of lawyers licensed by the New York bar association. On her computer screen was the result of her latest Google search. She made no attempt to block his view of the screen. In fact, she seemed to invite his attention to the fact that no matter how private his life seemed, she found ways to explore inside; no locked rooms remained. She carried a thumb drive that had fifty pages of documents from searches on Calvino and thousands of pages on the background of the joint-venture deal. His part of the overall position in the deal universe was a moon around a distant planet, circling an obscure star.
“You sound like an existentialist,” she said. “ ‘The unexpected happens’ is something my ex-husband used to say.”
Calvino smiled as if he’d ducked a bullet. “I don’t believe that most people have many good choices, if that’s what you mean. Mostly they’re left with the least-bad choice. I’m not so much existential as realistic. My opinion I draw from working the street, investigating people’s lives, seeing what has gone wrong and what they can do about it. In most cases they get around to doing something about their life, but it’s too little, too late; life has closed in, grabbed their collar, pushed them against a wall like a seven-foot mugger with a knife pressed against the throat. And they come through my door to ask me to help them.”
Tanny finished her cigarette and ground the butt in the ashtray. “Then why does Brandon Sawyer still have a knife against his throat?”
Calvino shrugged. “Some clients love the proximity of the blade.”
“You’re talking about Brandon,” she said.
He waited a couple of seconds, letting her wonder what was going on inside his head. “What was in the envelope you gave him?”
“That’s between Marshall and his brother.”
Small talk ultimately was a dance around the trajectory of the blade. The dance had started, and there was still a big question about who was leading and who was following. Tanny had gone secretive about some documents. Brandon wasn’t talking. It was just a matter of time before who was in control on the dance floor would become clear.
EIGHT
INSIDE MONTRI’S MANSION was a gallery, the size of an airport hangar, had a cathedral-like ceiling, walls slanting upward to a bank of glass skylights. On each wall was a framed Chini painting, perfectly lit, guarded by a small red velvet rope suspended between two brass stands. Beneath each painting was an elegantly handwritten description of the painting. The twenty-seven men in black ties and dinner jackets gathered in secret, showing no guilt or remorse about their wealth. One man was dressed in white, his neck heavy with amulets—that was Ajarn Veera, a professional medium (meaning that was how he made his fortune-telling livelihood, and not that he had any real science behind his predicti
ons) picked by Montri to choose the auspicious time for the opening. Owning most of the commercial enterprises in country was their day job. They were public figures, but not the kind who had their faces plastered on highway billboards, one of those smiling faces on the way to the airport, inviting a driver to buy a washing machine, a premium whiskey, or a condominium. These men were the ones who got the lion’s share of the money from such white, gray, and black commerce—it was hard to know when one color bled into the next. They had come to see a private showing of paintings.
Moguls, generals, a couple of cabinet ministers, a sea of big smiles, men who waied each other, cradling champagne glasses between their money-counting fingers. Men with real money never bothered to count it; the counters were in the wannabe category. But in Montri’s gallery the wannabes circulated with the real power brokers.
Twenty-seven distinguished men who’d come to see a private exhibition of twenty-seven paintings. Not just any art, but a private collection that had been in Siam for nearly one hundred years.
Calvino had never seen Colonel Pratt in black tie and dinner jacket. He looked like a different person, blending in like a penguin into an ice-shelf colony. What was on the surface and what was buried beneath the ice were two different things. In this colony, relationships followed clan lines, detoured through intermarriage, bonded at elite schools, and exchanged benefits and favors through overlapping business empires. It was like being in a room where everyone shared the same birthday. Colonel Pratt had been invited only after Calvino refused to attend without his presence. Finally Montri thought it was a good idea to let each person invite a close friend; it was a brilliant way for the guest to get an extra dose of face.
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