Paying Back Jack (35 page)

“Money's enough. Fame don't have nothing to do with it.”

“Paying for an election takes money,” said Tracer. “Your shot.”

Jarrett smiled, surveying the lay of the balls on the pool table. Tomorrow it would be his shot all right, the shot that would settle the accounts. “You're my spotter, do you think that I can sink the three ball?” He pointed with his cue at the far corner pocket.

Tracer frowned, seeing it was a difficult bank shot. “You sink that shot, you should turn pro.”

Jarrett stretched over the table, one foot on the floor, brought the cue stick back, sending the cue ball off the cushion, hitting the three ball, which rolled toward the pocket.

“That has a nice ring to it.”

The ball stopped short of falling in. “Semipro,” said Tracer. It was his shot.

Tracer's eyes cut across the room to the sliding doors.

“I thought you wanted to play?”

Tracer shrugged, putting down his cue stick. Jarrett's almost-in-the-pocket shot rattled him; he didn't like thinking about his man missing a shot, even a difficult shot. It got him wound up. “I need some air, that's all.” He opened the sliding door and walked out onto the balcony. He drew in a deep breath. Nothing like fresh air, he said to himself. His chest expanded, making him look like the football player he'd once been.

He stood next to the railing fingering his mojo bag, looking across the road. Power wasn't just carrying a gun or having someone whacked.
There was invisible power too. Spirits had their say. There'd been a general once who ordered all of his troops in the south of Thailand to wear amulets. He thought they would work better than bulletproof vests. Everyone had laughed at him. Except for Tracer, who understood the general's way of looking at life and death. The way things worked in Louisiana wasn't all that different from Thailand. The man who controlled the invisible forces could stop people from getting water, food, clothing, and a place to sleep. He could shut down just about anyone if he was so inclined. All he had to do was draw on his mojo. Power was the way to resolve access to the things a man needed to stay alive. When someone had that kind of power, and they wanted something from you, then you had two choices: yield or die.

Jarrett, holding his cue stick, walked to the door. “I ain't gonna miss tomorrow. It's a straight shot.”

“I know you won't.” Tracer looked around at the buildings, wondering if any of the thousands of eyes inside had spotted him. It wasn't a good idea to stick around on the balcony. He ducked back inside, closed the sliding door, and pulled back the curtains. He walked back to the pool table and took his turn.

“Casey had a problem in one of the prisons in Baghdad,” said Tracer. “One of those shithole village insurgents died during an interrogation.”

“That was the guy who ambushed a unit,” said Jarrett. “They lost three men. I'd say Casey was doing his job.”

“They say the guy wasn't an insurgent. He was a civilian.”

“He shouldn't have been in a war zone,” said Jarrett. “That's askin' for shit to come down on you.”

Tracer picked the eight ball off the table. With a sloping underhand toss, he threw it to Jarrett who caught it in his right hand. “Sometimes you get eight-balled and you can't figure out why it happened. In Baghdad there wasn't any inquiry,” said Tracer. “No charges, no reprimand. No nothing.”

Jarrett put the eight ball back on the table. “You saying Casey's situation is like Somporn's? Because if you are, I'd be saying that's bullshit.”

“You know what bothers me about pool?”

Jarrett shrugged. “Enlighten me.”

“There's no gray ball. In life there's a lot of gray. That's a fact.”

“We weren't there. So how can we judge what happened in the village?”

No way that Tracer was backing down. His mojo told him that it wasn't so much a judgment on Casey's involvement in the death of an insurgent, but the question of why the man had paid them to do what he could do himself. “You're right. I wasn't there. I don't know. Casey's got a green badge and top security clearance, so somebody must trust him. And I wasn't there when Casey's kid got capped either. All I'm saying is there is something called karma. I just can't figure out his game.”

Jarrett looked up from the pool table. “Maybe there's no game. It's straight up.”

“You make my point.” Tracer's hands were wrapped around his cue stick, the end balanced on the floor. “It's no better than a maybe. Not like our friend from Spain.”

There was no maybe about the foreign woman with the private detective in Reno's bar. It was the same woman who'd been on the beach in Gijón.

AFTER HE'D LEFT Marisa's condo, Calvino had returned to his office. The neon One Hand Clapping sign over the massage parlor cast shadows from a thick clot of telephone and electric lines. The sign was on but there was no activity. No yings, no customers, no plastic stools outside. The translation service on the ground floor was dark. At three in the morning, it was quiet on the soi. In the distance a dog barked.

Calvino walked a couple more feet before he was jumped from behind. The attacker, a fireplug of a man, had moved out with a grunt from his hiding position behind a vendor's cart covered in canvas. Calvino had heard the fall of a footstep and immediately turned, crouching down and reaching for his handgun. The attacker held a steel rod like a baseball bat and took a wild, loping swing at Calvino. Strike one, thought Calvino. He half lost his balance as he fanned the night air. A second attacker ran out of the shadows holding a long knife. Not long enough to be a sword, but long enough to close a man's accounts in this life.

The man with the knife ran straight at him. Calvino held his .38 service revolver with both hands, counted to five, rose up, and swung, catching the attacker chin-high. The crack of bone echoed down the small soi, and the attacker fell head first onto the pavement. Home run, thought Calvino. The first attacker, having regained his balance, came back for a second round with the steel rod raised like a samurai sword. Calvino, holding the .38 service revolver with both hands, aimed at the spot between the man's eyes.

“You probably don't want to do that,” he said.

The Thai man froze, staring at the gun, and then glanced down at his fallen comrade. His hair was long and oily, like it hadn't been washed for a few days. Nothing about him looked like a cop.

“Put it down,” Calvino said. “Now lean up against the car, hands stretched out.”

Calvino removed the attacker's wallet and stuffed it in his pocket.

“Who sent you?”

“Don't understand,” said the man, spitting on the pavement.

Calvino hit him a sharp, hard rabbit punch to the kidneys. “Try harder.”

The attacker, a man in his late twenties, cried out in pain. “Who sent you and your friend?” The friend who had been face-down managed to stagger to his feet. The man on the ground was shorter and fatter. Those extra pounds had made him one step too slow to get the job done. No one goes to work with a steel rod and a knife unless they're intending to inflict some major damage. He moaned, holding his broken chin with both hands.

“You want more?”

He shook his head.

“Who sent you? Was it Apichart?”

“Big boss.”

“What's his name?”

“Boss.”

Calvino hit him hard enough to draw blood.

“Apichart. His name Mr. Apichart.” In Thai the name translated as “the great one in this life,” a man of destiny.

Calvino backed away, thinking the man's parents should have chosen a different name. The long-haired attacker eased away from the car, slowly turned, and made a cautious circle around where Calvino stood his ground, never taking his eye off the handgun. He helped his fallen friend to his feet, wrapping the fat man's arm around his shoulder, and they walked down the dark soi.

“You and your friend did better than the last two he sent.”

“I not forget you,” said the man, brushing the long unwashed hair from his eyes.

“I not forget you, too,” said Calvino. “You tell Mr. Apichart, I remember him, too.”

“Fuck you,” shouted the attacker as they reached the top of the soi.

The world was riddled like a machine-gunned corpse with such insane hatred.

Watching them limp off, Calvino thought to himself, The thing about Thais not speaking English was once again exposed as a lie. Then it struck him. They hadn't spoken that many words to him in any language. They hadn't been sent to find out anything. The two thugs
were
the message.
The messengers wanted to bust me up, and let that filter down
. Maybe Apichart was holding Calvino responsible, coming after him.

He climbed the stairs to his office, turned on the lights, and sat down at his desk. Rotating in his chair, he looked out the window at the neon signs below. There was no point in calling the police. He thought about how Marisa had been repulsed not so much by his resort to violence as by his absence of any residue of introspection. He hadn't broken into a sweat. He looked at his hands in the light, rotating them from knuckles to palms and back. Out in the night were the men who had attacked him. They'd been injured, broken up enough to communicate to their boss what he was up against. Predators underestimated their prey—overshot, undershot, missed altogether, then licked their wounds before circling him again. His message had been clear: he wasn't one of the weak, vulnverable farangs who could be easily pulled down; if they wanted him, he was going to make it costly and difficult. There was always the chance that these predators would move on to a weaker target. But Calvino knew that he was kidding himself; that the attack had been the first wave, others would be sent to finish the job, and if they failed, they'd be replaced. Somewhere in the city would be a man determined to use whatever force was necessary to secure his objective.

He thought about calling Marisa and talking to her about how without the promise of violence such forces could never be contained. He had an idea of what he wanted to explain to her. The proper response was never a prayer, an extended hand, or a friendly smile; it was a fist, knife, iron pipe, gun, or any available weapon. There is no time to sweat, to argue, to plan, or to reason. You take him down on his own terms or he owns you. Marginalize the role of violence. That's what you UN people talk about. But when it comes
to the street, violence marginalizes people. There are rules for the playing field, rules for the killing field, and you stay alive by knowing which field you are on.

He looked at the phone, then at his watch. After three in the morning there was no way he'd phone her. It could wait until tomorrow. Or it could wait forever. He thought also about phoning Colonel Pratt. But there was nothing he could do, and that also covered going back to sleep. He wondered about the men who had run off. He had fed them Apichart's name; they would have said anything to get out of the situation. It was like Casey and his torture buddies; inflicting pain meant the person on the receiving end would tell you whatever you wanted to hear. Gangsters on Cowboy might have sent them around. He wasn't known on the street. Roughing him up would have sent a powerful message for him to give up the kid. Or they could have been muggers, drug addicts looking for some quick cash. The underbelly of the night in Bangkok produced many plausible explanations. Listing the possible motives of thugs attacking a private eye at three in the morning could fill a notebook the size of the Manhattan phone directory.

Reaching inside his jacket, Calvino pulled out his microrecorder and set it on the desk. He plugged in a set of earphones. Her voice, a honeyed, smoky tone etched from cigarettes and scotch, came through loud and clear as Marisa told the story about the killing on the beach in Spain. He'd taped her in stereo and her rich, accented sound, the one from her bedroom, filled his head. There wasn't any background static. The recording conditions had been perfect. He fast-forwarded through the sound of their lovemaking.

The Colombian who'd been popped on the beach had met his destiny around the same time that Bakhita had been in another explosion a few thousand miles away in Baghdad. She had survived, but at a huge personal cost. She'd parted with her real leg that day at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad when a cement truck exploded at the front entrance. But when the dust settled, Bakhita realized she'd lost much more than a leg.

They'd first met in a therapy session, a UN-sponsored group session for those suffering from post-traumatic stress. Misery made for a friendship. Calvino rewound the tape and listened as Marisa talked about the importance of the anniversary of the day a UN official
named Sergio had been killed in Baghdad. There was a moment when it seemed the talk would end as the mind fogged with the possibility of sex. But the moment passed and Marisa kept talking, and Calvino kept listening, encouraging her to reveal a scene from her past that played on an endless loop.

“Unless you've lost someone through violence, you don't know how important the anniversary of a death is for the family,” Marisa had said.

Calvino flipped through Casey's file. He had gone underground two days before the anniversary of his son's death. Something Marisa had said that evening had stayed with him: “Either you remember or you let the memory die. Such a thing can fall so deep inside you that it bounces around in places where you can lose yourself. You may think what happened is gone, finished, buried in the past … but of course that's impossible. It will always be there, waiting for you. That's why every twentieth of August, Bakhita and I have dinner. We light a candle and we say a prayer.”

He turned off the recorder, leaned back in his chair, and rotated around to face the window. He dumped the contents of the thug's wallet on his desk. Three crisp one-thousand baht notes; the man's fee made Calvino reflect on how little it cost to have someone beaten-up or killed. He read the Thai ID card, looking at the picture of the man who'd attacked him. He stuffed the cash and the ID card back into the wallet and switched off his office lights. He looked out onto the soi. The neon light reflected off the windows across the way. Red, green, blue, and yellow, as the hand moved through the clapping-itself gesture.