Paying Back Jack (29 page)

Everyone, including Juan Carlos, her father, the police, and even her mother said she had to be mistaken. From that balcony, a shot would have had to carry a distance of over one-thousand meters. She had measured the distance herself. From the balcony to where the man was killed was exactly one thousand, one hundred, and four meters. Blinds covered the windows of the corner unit. No one would have seen the scope, or the spotter next to the sniper watching through high-power binoculars, the two of them scanning the beach until they'd found their man.

She stood before the building of sandstone, the same as the church at marker number two. In front of the building was a bar, Zafiro and Juber Motor. Behind the building was a towering construction crane. Some said the shot might have been fired from the crane. But no one knew. The police learned the dead man was from Colombia and had been linked to the drug business. The Americans had indicted him
for cocaine trafficking. But he had never been extradited. The dead man's mother lived in Gijón, and the son had come home to pay respect to his mother. He died on her sixtieth birthday.

Was what had happened that day like a black swan? No one could say. But, again, in Gijón, everyone agreed that black swans were common.

As she finished her story, Calvino took her hand and squeezed it. “I'm sorry for what happened,” he said.

“In Gijón I was in the wrong place,” she said. “Maybe Bangkok is another wrong place. I don't know after tonight if there is a right place for me.”

“You don't forget seeing someone killed.”

“You've seen this?”

Calvino sighed, nodding, and kissed her forehead. Then he told her about the ying at the Pattaya hotel and how he'd seen her fall, and about the two motorcycle gunmen who'd died in the soi. “I know how you feel,” he said after he'd finished describing the police investigations into the deaths.

“Our lives are complicated in similar ways,” she said. “I don't know if that's good or bad.” She was looking for reassurance.

“It's neither good nor bad,” said Calvino. “Some people are connected by friends, neighborhood, and family. Others by the violent acts of strangers.”

“I'm glad I'm not the only one these things happen to.”

She was about to kiss him again when she heard Juan Carlos open the door to the condo and walk in.

“Marisa? Are you back?”

He stood in the entrance looking at three pairs of strange shoes, one of them belonging to a man with rather large feet.

Calvino sat up in bed, instinctively reaching for his gun.

“It's time you met my brother, Juan Carlos.”

“I'd like to get dressed first,” he said.

She started to laugh again, burying her head in the pillow to muffle the sound. From the huge living room, Juan Carlos called to her again, “Marisa!” When he stopped, Marisa knew that Fon and Wan had already crept into the living room. “I am Juan Carlos,” she heard him say with his usual charm. Nothing ever disturbed her brother.
He rolled through the waves of life as if he had a gyro system that always kept him even-keeled.

Calvino's cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He saw that it was McPhail's number. “Excuse me, but I have to take this call.”

He disappeared back into the bedroom and closed the door. McPhail waited on the line. “Hey, buddy, I just got nineteen stitches. And it takes you five rings to pick up. Nineteen. I counted each one. I guess I'll play that number on the lotto tomorrow.”

“You did well. I'll cover the hospital bill.” He could hear the sound of drunks in the background, the slurred voices, hacking coughs, laughter and squeals from a ying.

“I know that. Here's Reno. He wants to talk to you.”

“Jesus, Calvino, thanks for fucking up my business. The cops want money. McPhail wants an advance to pay the hospital. My lead dancers want a raise after the bloodletting. My mamasan is making a power play to take over the business. And that isn't even the bad news.” Calvino waited while Reno sucked air. “And I probably lost two of my best customers tonight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The black guy and his friend. They were becoming regulars. I doubt I'll see them again after what happened.”

“They didn't look like men who scare easily,” said Calvino.

Reno ignored the reassurance. In his mind they were history. “I don't mind helping a friend, Calvino. But you gotta understand I'm running a business, not some half-assed rescue operation.”

Everyone licked their wounds, counted the cost, glanced at the map of power to see what had changed, and trudged back to the bar, waiting for more bad news to find their address.

FOLDED INSIDE the tight coil of greater Bangkok, like hidden dimensions of the universe, were other, stranger Bangkoks. Places that farangs never passed. Or if they did, they wouldn't understand what was in front of their long noses. There were many such places inside Bangkok, places locked in other times, places where even most Thais never ventured.

Calvino found himself in such a place as he was trailing Somporn's mia noi. She had led him to a hole-in-the-wall in the middle of a self-contained neighborhood of hypnotic ugliness. What the Thais called a
moo baan,
recreating a small village atmosphere of narrow lanes with big-city three- and four-story row houses, shacks, howling dogs, runny-nosed kids, dust, poverty, and gossip. This moo baan ran along the rim of old Don Muang Airport. Election posters had been plastered on the front of the squalid shop-houses selling rice. Through his car window he stared at the three grinning Thai men in the posters with medals pinned to their suits. It took him a minute to spot that the candidate in the middle was Somporn, who wore a chest full of medals on a white uniform. Thais rotated between top-down coups and bottom-up elected governments. Somporn was hoping to gain leverage once his small political party would be needed to form a coalition government.

Calvino drove ahead, keeping an eye on the gray Camry. As he passed several more of the posters, it seemed like Somporn was following him. He had another look at the photograph. The candidates
on the posters followed anyone passing as if tracking them, whispering, “Vote for me.”

Bangkok had the nickname of City of Angels, but few people believed that any angels lived inside the perimeter anymore. No one knew where the angels had gone, but they knew that those who had taken their places were not heavenly creatures. In the old days, the travelers called Bangkok the city of canals, the Venice of the East, but since then most of the canals had been entombed in concrete. More recently, public relations spin masters had come up with the phrase “Land of Smiles,” but like the angels and the canals, smiles had vanished.

After the last coup, a client had told Calvino to wind up his clock to see if it still kept time; if it failed to do so, who was the timekeeper? The military junta that had been running the latest show had withdrawn into the shadows—setting up camp, waiting to see if they could live with the next round of elected civilians. People closed in around family, friends, and colleagues. With an election coming up, the military was doing whatever it could to retain its influence in the post-election era, and that meant backing the right-thinking people. Somporn thought of himself as being among those who thought and acted right. The difference between victory and defeat, all the players understood, wouldn't emerge only through an election; it would arise once the ever-shifting power connections had made a new deal everyone could live with.

In small, isolated pockets of Bangkok like this one, it didn't much matter who pulled the strings. Casey hadn't mentioned that Somporn was running for public office. But why would he? Calvino couldn't vote for him. An old woman rode past on a bicycle, giving him a betel-nut grin. You didn't see many faces like that on election posters. It was reassuring, he thought, that there was still one part of Bangkok where people rode bicycles as their main means of transportation—people who frequented mom-and-pop shops and massage parlors with rusty grills and green splashes of algae colonizing the outer walls. How much money is Somporn paying voters? he asked himself. From the look of the neighborhood, he could bag a lot of votes with a five-hundred-baht note.

With the sun overhead, Calvino kept his eyes on Cat's Camry. He stayed far enough behind to avoid her attention, but he was still
close enough to see the back of her head. He would have thought Somporn's mia noi would at least glance at the campaign posters. But as far as he could see, she never gave them any notice. If anyone could know the bullshit of a politician inside and out, it would be his minor wife.

He watched her park and wrote a note in his logbook. She popped the trunk from the inside and then got out of the car. Lifting the trunk lid, she pulled out a black carry-on case, the kind flight staff wheel through airports. She crossed the street, pulling the case behind her. A couple of motorcycles shot past in a blur. The humidity and heat had bred two competing organisms: a black fungus and a green algae that fought over the right to the half-melted caulking in the window. The street could have passed as a petri-dish experiment in a nineteenth-century science lab. An ice cream vendor slumped over his cart in the shade, quietly enough that bacteria could have been culturing on the side of his sleeping face.

She turned into a beauty salon with faded posters of Thai movie stars on the walls. A couple of old ladies with their poodles and baskets of snacks talked over moaning hair dryers while getting a wash and set. Two Thai women in their late twenties dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts were snipping, cutting, separating strands of wet hair.

Calvino parked a short distance away. He walked over and looked through the window long enough to confirm his target was inside. Then he turned and spotted an open-air restaurant across the street. He pulled up a metal folding chair, sat down, and ordered a coffee. Opening the
Bangkok Post,
Calvino pretended to read. Then he actually started to read one of the news stories about the election. He scanned the article about the major players in the upcoming election, but there was nothing about Somporn. He folded the newspaper and looked across the street, then at his watch.

Cat had led him to a place in Bangkok from which no news ever filtered out to the English language press. He tried to remember if he'd ever read something about Somporn's election campaign in the newspaper. He drew a blank. He sipped his coffee before adding another spoon of Coffee-mate. Behind cover of the newspaper, he took out his digital camera and snapped several shots of the beauty salon and the gray Camry, making certain to zoom in on the registration plate.

Finishing his second cup of coffee, he looked over at the row of buildings across the street. There were hundreds of beauty salons closer to where Cat lived. Yet she had driven her new Camry all the way to the boondocks to sit in a rundown place that looked like its business plan had imploded long ago. But the hair-cutting yings who worked inside and their customers had kept the business alive. The shops and the people inside existed in an archway, figuratively speaking, with the old ways on one side and, on the other, the modern world that was looking to displace them. It was a transition zone between two ways of life. If they wanted to see the future, they could go on the rooftops of their shop-houses for a glimpse of the big city sliding like an avalanche toward them.

Cat was inside for nearly an hour before the beauty-salon door opened and one of the beauticians followed her to the Camry. Cat was no longer pulling the small suitcase she had taken inside the salon. The two talked for a few minutes, Cat seated in the driver's seat, the air-conditioning turned on, and the beautician standing in the sun. Calvino couldn't hear what they were saying, but that didn't much matter. He waited until Cat had pulled away before he folded his newspaper and paid his bill.

Calvino flashed a smile at his waitress. “What's your name?” he asked.

“Dam,” she said. That was the Thai nickname that meant black. It was a traditional out-of-fashion nickname, light-years away from the trendy Bangkok nicknames of Seven, Benz, or Starbuck. The waitress's skin didn't look black or even coffee-colored, but that wasn't important. Her father must have thought her black enough at birth to pull the name out of the air. But then there were also color nicknames that depended only on the days of the week: Yellow for Monday, Orange for Thursday. Or if you were born on Sunday, you might get stuck being called Red for the rest of your life.

“Dam, do you see that beauty salon across the street?”

Always start with a simple, easy question. Assuming she wasn't blind, of course, she could see the salon. Dam nodded.

“Do you know the name of the woman who came out with the customer a moment ago?”

Then give them a simple test. Names are easy for most people. The salon was across the street. Dam would know the names of every
person inside. But it was better to go slow and easy, keeping the questions light and friendly.

“That was Fah,” Dam said.

“She must have been born on a Friday,” said Calvino, leaving a hundred-baht tip. That was big enough, he thought, to make him a big spender in this version of Bangkok. Then he remembered there was an election and everyone was laying down money on the table, looking to buy votes. She picked up the hundred-baht note and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans.

Dam smiled, “You are very good.”

“Is Fah good? Can I get a good haircut?”

“She cuts my hair.”

“You think she'd cut mine?”

“I think no problem,” she said with a large grin. “Tell her Dam sent you.”

“I'll do that. Thanks. Oh, by the way, all these election posters on the street. Who are you going to vote for?”

A pensive look replaced the smile. “Person who will help the ordinary people.”