“Marshall’s wife invited me to their apartment. She wanted me to buy jewelry for her in Bangkok. She’d heard about the high quality and low prices. You have any ideas about jewelry beyond lost earrings?”
“I guess I deserved that,” he said.
“It could have been worse. It could have been your earring.”
He lifted her in his arms and carried her across the loft, around a shoji screen, and into the master bedroom. The “Get in” sign flashed inside his head. “I didn’t think you had a sense of humor.”
“You can’t do this job without one,” she said.
He laid her down on the bed. “But we’re not working now, right?”
Curtains drawn, the light from outside, dim and soft, was set ablaze by a jagged scar when lightning flared, then thunder rumbled as if a camera flash had caused the skyline to growl like a lion in heat. The wall of light lasted a couple of seconds, long enough for Calvino to find her eyes, reflecting something between sadness and desire. Her hair was pushed over the sheets, and she lifted her hips as he slowly removed the bath towel and tossed it onto the floor. She sat up naked in bed, legs crossed. Nothing self-conscious as she reached out and pulled him forward until their noses touched. His hands ran up her stomach and sides, sliding over to cup her breasts. There’d been enough recoil in her passion to give a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun a run for its money. As in everything else, Tanny was dedicated to getting the maximum from her effort.
Half an hour later, legs coiled together, they lay in bed, watching the rain outside.
“Those lions were weird,” she said, turning her head and finding his eyes in the near darkness. “The state of emergency is weird. And so are most of the people. They think I’m faking it because I don’t speak Thai. Why don’t they believe me? It’s stupid.”
“It’s called culture shock. All foreigners go through it. It’s like boot camp, where a whole new way of thinking and doing things gets drilled into your head. It’s difficult to adjust. Some people handle the stress; others crack up, go home. In your case you give the Thais culture shock. You’re shocked, they’re shocked. That generates an excess of electricity in the system, enough to run a citywide grid.”
“If you’ve got plenty of money, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ve got your own generator. Or a couple of them stashed away.”
It was the earring left behind cropping up again. He ignored it.
“I didn’t have much until a couple of years ago. Before that, I lived in a place that, depending on your point of view, was either run-down or a slum. Then I had some luck, things turned around, and everything changed. I no longer had to worry about paying the rent. I had a lot of memories in that place.”
“Like what?”
“The people. Like this young American who lived in my old building. Jerry Hutton was his name. He came from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was twenty-eight when the police fished his body out of Lumpini Park Lake with a necklace of wooden penises around his neck. I had to identify the body. He got mixed up with people way above his pay grade. We used to call guys like Jerry ‘third-shifters.’ The guys normal people never saw, people who worked the shitty jobs for shitty wages during the middle of the night while everyone else was fast asleep. I wasn’t living much different from Jerry.”
“But now you’re set. You don’t have to do anything. Just enjoy.”
He thought about this in silence, running his hand over her body.
“Yeah, it does. Most of the time. Once you get used to the money, everyone ends up asking the same thing as a bar ying: ‘Okay, got the cash, what’s next?’ ”
“Maybe you’ll never be content.”
“Maybe.” He stroked her hair. “Soon I’ll be finished with my last case. Then I’ll have no reason to roll out of bed. Kinda like how I feel now. We could hang here and let the world go by. Order in takeout, and with my money we can hole up for a hundred years. What do you think?”
“I think I’d end up finding a jewelry shop full of strange earrings.”
Calvino laughed. “You’re tough. But you make me laugh. That’s a good thing.”
“I told you that I have a six-year-old son waiting for me at home. I learned to be tough. And funny.” A lonesome echo stayed in the room.
“Jeff, right? You make him laugh?”
“Yes, Jeff.” She smiled, thinking he had remembered her son’s name. “You bet I do.”
Calvino thought how he’d been going on at Montri’s exhibition about the meaning of family, and said much the same to Tanny, and now he’s acting like her boy is an afterthought. She felt an immediate distance open up. From his face she saw that she’d driven a knife through his heart and twisted it. “Why don’t you try to find my mother? I don’t give you much of a chance. But you got lucky with your inheritance, you got lucky with me, maybe you’re just a lucky guy.”
He’d slammed face-first into a brick wall, and she’d picked him up and put his face back on, ignoring that for a minute it had been lost in the darkness. Tanny Craig had finally given a glimpse of a slipstream of Thai-ness flowing deep below her New York ground-level setting. He was inhaling the smell of sex as he traced figure eights on her hip, hoping that she’d forgive him, when the phone rang. Reaching up, he grabbed the receiver. Siriporn was on the other end, asking him if he’d eaten dinner. No matter that it was after ten at night. But a Thai often needed no better excuse for phoning.
He rose up on his elbow as Tanny rolled over and looked out of the rain-splattered balcony windows. “I found your earring,” he said, clearing his throat.
Calvino slammed his forehead. “To tell the truth, I didn’t find it. Tanny found it in the bathroom. Here, why don’t you tell her where it was,” handing Tanny the phone.
She brushed away the hair from her face. It went downhill from her first words. “After I finished my shower, I looked for a towel. You left it on the edge of the towel shelf.”
Afterward the two women exchanged a couple of lines frosty enough to freeze a monkey’s nuts against a coconut tree. Tanny handed the receiver back to Calvino. He turned, put the phone to his ear, but the line was dead. By the time he hung up, Tanny had bolted out of bed, wrapped the towel around her, and padded across the marble floor. A moment later Calvino heard her turn on the shower. She reappeared dressed, and he’d already dressed, too, and stood shaking a ring of car keys.
“It’s late. I’ll drive you to your hotel.”
Her expression reverted to the one he remembered from Brandon and Achara’s meetings; she returned to her default professional, doing-business face. It was like one of those before-and-after advertisements: The woman who wants to cook morphing into the woman who wants to kill. “I can take a taxi,” she said.
“But you don’t speak Thai. You’ll end up in Cambodia.”
Her eyes widened, as she’d obviously forgotten about that slight limitation. She raised one hand as if she were about to take some sort of oath. “Promise me that what happened tonight stays in this apartment.”
“You think I kiss and tell?”
“It would be a mistake to complicate things beyond our control.”
“I thought that’s what women spent a lifetime doing.”
“Bastard.” She smiled.
He wasn’t certain what he’d expected, but this wasn’t it. Over his own lifetime, he had done a lot of less-thannoble things—hurt some people, killed more than a few—but he’d never been a snitch. That was where Italian and Jewish genes had reinforced themselves in his psyche. “I was hoping we might do this again,” he said.
“We should get to know each other better,” she said. Sex without intimacy for most women was like drinking wine without alcohol, but for most men sex without intimacy was straight bourbon that burnt all the way down.
He almost laughed. “I thought we already knew each other.”
“Not really,” she said. “I’d appreciate if you’d be discreet.”
Raising his hand like swearing an o
ath in court, he looked her in the eye, lower lip quivering, doing his best. “It stays confidential.” Then he hugged her, and, much to his surprise, she hugged him back.
Strange woman, he thought.
He took the long way to her hotel, turning left onto Soi 16. It was just after 11:00 p.m. Slowing the car down as hundreds of construction workers in yellow hard hats, long-sleeved blue shirts, and rubber boots, weary from backbreaking work, walked three, four deep, spilling from the pavement onto the street.
“Who are these people?” she asked. “Looks like a mob. Some kind of a demonstration.”
Calvino registered a hint of panic in her voice. The headlights shone on the throng of roughly dressed people.
“They’re construction workers,” he said.
“It’s late to be working construction.”
Calvino watched them filing past on the shoulder of the road. “They’ve walked over a kilometer from the work site and still aren’t home.”
“Christ, that’s terrible,” she said as they passed a number of young women in the crowd.
The men and women, bone weary and gaunt, showed up in the headlights of cars coming from the opposite lane. Both sides of the road, gorged with the crowd, slowed the traffic to a crawl. “They’ve been working since seven in the morning.”
He nodded at a couple holding hands the way lovers do on an evening stroll. “That’s what passes for romance. Dead tired at the end of the day, walk to a shanty, holding hands on the road,” said Calvino. “Anytime you start feeling sorry for what’s gone wrong in your life, remember them.”
She leaned over and kissed him. “I think you’re an okay guy.”
Some of the workers lined up for a motorcycle taxi, the first in the line climbing onto the back of a motorcycle, then another, and another. They’d had it; the kilometer walk was beyond the energy they had in reserve. “In a sixteen-hour day, they earn about eight dollars. You see the high-rise over there? The people inside spend five times that taking a friend to lunch at a fancy hotel.”
“I don’t understand. Shouldn’t these be the people who are demonstrating? If it isn’t these people, who are they?”
Calvino grinned, glanced at her, touching her chin.
“Those are the people in the high-rises, who believe that people like these shouldn’t vote.”
“Where in the world don’t the rich run the show?” she asked. “I’m starting to feel as if Thailand isn’t that much different from Latin America.”
Tanny had a point: Southeast Asia was the Latin America of Asia, Calvino admitted. Hot-blooded people, coups, street demonstrations, powerful military, arrogant elites, poverty, and corruption. But one point doesn’t add up to the final score. “I’m showing you Zen Traffic Lesson number two: A luxury car has more right-of-way than a Honda City, a car has a bit more of the right-of-way than a motorcycle, a motorcycle trumps a bicycle and all pedestrians. Thailand isn’t a place you want to find yourself as a construction worker or a walker.”
SIXTEEN
CALVINO TURNED UP at the Lonesome Hawk around noon to find McPhail on his hands and knees on the table inside the booth underneath the stuffed water buffalo head—years ago a customer had shipped it to George from South Africa. George had been proud that water buffalo hadn’t come from Isan. At the far end of the bar next to the kitchen, the cook, a couple of her teeth missing, grinned and called out, “I bring special for you, Khun Vinny,” then disappeared like a spider into the kitchen.
Calvino ordered a drink and stood beside Bill, a sweet old man who’d cried at Old George’s funeral. Bill’s face looked like a badly bruised mango left out in the Bangkok noonday sun. Drink caused that kind of erosion, carving canyons and ravines in what had once been fine, smooth skin.
One of McPhail’s knees bumped against a hammer and nails. A couple of nails fell off the table, bounced down onto the floor, making some of the drunks sitting at the bar jump.
“Incoming!” shouted McPhail.
“It’s crooked,” said Bill, an eighty-year-old ex–army gunny, wearing his glasses on a chain like a half-blind librarian lost in the stacks. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his liver-spotted hand extended, lining up his thumb as a rough-and-ready measurement tool.
McPhail was hanging a framed picture on the ghost wall. In the photograph, Old George held up a bottle of Singha beer, his hair combed, a long strand woven by one of the yings into a micro-ponytail. He was smiling into the camera.
“What do you think?” asked McPhail. He spotted
Calvino. “Hey, buddy, will you pass me those cigarettes?”
“If you ask me, it’s still crooked,” said Bill, hands resting on his huge stomach as if it were a prayer stool.
“Calvino, is it straight or crooked? You’re the man with the art collection. You ought to know. Bill’s got me moving this way, that way, and back again. It’s like doing the tango with a drunk.”
“I’m sober,” protested Bill.
“We ain’t getting anywhere,” said McPhail, catching the pack Calvino tossed him. “Working with Bill is like trying to get change back from a whore.”
“That’s not true,” said Bill. “I just think we owe it to George to get his photo hung straight. It’s his bar. For at least one time in his life, he should be remembered as straight up. Not off kilter.”
McPhail bounced a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “You know, if Elvis had lived to eighty-four, he would have looked just like George. What if—”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Bill, defending George’s memory against McPhail’s about-to-be-delivered conspiracy theory.
“Bill, I’m starting to think it’s your thumb that’s crooked. George’s photograph was straight the first time. Jesus wept,” said McPhail.
Bill had jammed his hand in the breech of an artillery piece and almost lost his thumb and forefinger, which had been stitched up in a field hospital. The doctors had done the best they could with what they had. But as a metric measuring device, Bill’s thumb wasn’t much use. It wasn’t even—it was closer to the way the crooked bartender measured shots.
A couple of the other regulars, daytime drunks, came to stare at the photograph of Old George smiling like the fox that had raided the chicken coop. Bill tilted forward, glass in hand, squint-eyed, looked hard at the photograph.
“Straight,” he said.
McPhail said, “Fuck you, no wonder we lost the Vietnam War.” He drained his gin and tonic and started on another one, and only then did the number of drunks expand, their eyes shifting from Old George to the half-remembered faces in the other photographs hanging on the knotty-pinepaneled wall. A former navy pilot, his eyes puffy, the fissures of broken blood vessels turning the whites of his eyes into an alien, lifeless moonscape, said a few words about how much everyone would miss Old George but that he would always be in everyone’s heart.
McPhail rolled his eyes, holding the hammer and nails and standing next to Calvino. There was a moment of silence. One of the drunks farted. A belch escaped from the gaseous region, and slowly was released from a rumand-Coke-bloated belly. All eyes focused on the smiling faces of a long line of dead men who had once sat at the bar, bullshitting about wars, sometimes proving that false memories outnumbered real ones, crying in their glasses about Thai girlfriends, weeping about some ache of the soul that they couldn’t identify. Once Old George had died, in the ensuing couple of days, someone had the brainstorm, fired by Mekong whiskey, to regroup the photos and add one of Old George. Big Henry, whose highest accomplishment had been being chosen as the understudy for a village production of Hamlet, christened it the “Wall of Ghosts.”
The Brits had a flair for language and soon everyone called it the Wall of Ghosts, or the Ghost Wall. Bill had paid to have the photo of Old George framed, and he claimed that his payment entitled him to the right to decide where on the wall to hang it. McPhail drove a nail into the wall next to a photo of the mustached Colonel Bob, an ex–CIA spook who had run the “secret w
ar” in Laos. Then there was Gator, another mustached ex-warrior, teeth and fingers missing, hollow-eyed, holding up a beer; and Josh, one of two black faces on the Wall of Ghosts, another ex-Vietnam vet, who’d knocked around the Square as a cook, quiet unless the subject turned to baseball; and Joe, who said he’d been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and who fell in love with every new waitress who came through the door, promising to marry her and support her family; and a ninety-year-old bald-headed man whose name no one remembered, his arms around two waitresses who were kissing the sallow craters where cheeks once rose. The only photo everyone immediately recognized was a grainy black-and-white of John Wayne in a cowboy hat and shirt, looking about thirty years old. A heroic cowboy was one of the honorary dead.
The dead men’s club rattled the drunks, who were doing their best to ignore the work that McPhail and Bill were doing. They shuffled their feet, cracked their knuckles, and drank. No one said anything, but everyone wondered who’d be next to go up on the Ghost Wall, joining the club. The old Navy pilot had already reserved a place below John Wayne, the way people reserved cemetery plots in Louisiana: They paid the mamasan, who wrote down their names in a book that she kept under the cash box. Drunks had a knack for organizing a spontaneous memorial service. Given their lifestyle, they had a lot of practice saying good-bye to people who’d occupied the barstool next to them for years.
The cook came out of the kitchen and put a plate of tacos and fried beans on the table inside Calvino’s usual booth. He winked at her, and she returned her toothless smile. Calvino slid into the booth, and a moment later McPhail joined him, putting the hammer and nails on the table. “If Bill had organized the crucifixion, they’d still be trying to get Jesus straight on the cross,” said McPhail.
“I’ve got a new case,” said Calvino, pouring hot sauce on the tacos.
McPhail let out a long sigh. “I thought you’d retired.”
McPhail was like a wife who remembered every word a man regretted and forgot everything of pride he wished she’d remember.
The Corruptionist Page 14
