Paying Back Jack (37 page)

They clocked McPhail, a regular they recognized, and immediately noticed his sling. A farang with a busted-up arm, head, or leg gave them a certain pleasure. They laughed and nodded, as if it was about the funniest thing they'd seen all morning. McPhail had lived in Thailand long enough to know they didn't mean anything bad by it. If one of their own fell off his bike and broke his leg, they'd all be roaring with laughter.

“No, I didn't fall off a motorcycle. No, my girlfriend didn't get jealous. No, a giant lizard wearing an orange vest didn't attack me. A forest dwarf jumped me.”

The drivers shrugged, grinned, and whispered to each other. They hadn't understood a thing he'd said in English. For McPhail that was the whole point. They would never understand how a man like McPhail had come to live among them and how some men of their background had cut him with a knife. He wondered how many of the drivers leaning back on the steps were armed, and what it would take to have one of them plunge a knife into someone's body. He continued past them, thinking how it was less a language problem than a comprehension issue. Why, they wondered, would any man want to leave his homeland? Seeing a farang bruised or cut-up, from their point of view, seemed like a fit punishment for having abandoned his family.

In the Lonesome Hawk, heads twisted around as McPhail walked in. Stories about his fight had circulated around the Square since early
morning. The fact that McPhail had been the source of the stories wasn't something anyone talked about. He waved and smiled before pushing his stomach against the bar. “Honey buns, bring me a large vodka and tonic with two slices of lime. I need to take a pill.” He looked pale as his hand shoved deep into his pocket and emerged with a screw-top container filled with painkillers. He popped two into his mouth as the bartender slipped the vodka and tonic into his hand. He drank from the glass and then threw his head back and swallowed.

By the time Calvino entered the bar, McPhail had mellowed out. “You should have stayed in the hospital,” said Calvino. “You look terrible.”

“Vinny, you don't exactly look like Brad Pitt yourself.” He raised his glass in a mock toast. “To a couple of beat-up old guys. But we won. Tell George that we won.”

Old George frowned and shook his head. “What the fuck did you win? All I see are serious injuries. If that's winning, what the fuck do you call losing?”

“We rescued a kid, you old fart.”

Calvino stood close to the bar; he still hadn't got a drink. He raised his hand, pretending he had a glass. Old George looked pale, his eyes cloudy. All the years had accumulated and were pushing him from behind. He had started to feel his eighty-four years.

Old George sneered. “I've got socks older than you, McPhail.”

“That because you haven't changed them since I was born.”

Old George hummed and waved him off like he was one of the lottery ticket sellers trying to get into his bar. “How many stitches did they put in?”

McPhail looked at his arm, “A hundred and ten.”

“Fuck off,” said Old George. He leaned out of the booth and looked down the bar until he spotted Calvino. He waved his cane to draw his attention. “Vinny. That's right, it's you I'm talking to. What's this about you staying overnight with some Spanish princess?”

“Where did that come from?” asked Calvino, staring at McPhail.

“How would I know? But it's all over the Square.”

“You believe rumors on the Square?”

Old George looked sheepish, leaning forward on his cane. “Don't bite my head off. I thought I'd ask. After the war I was in Spain and,
ooh la la, those Spanish women were something. I thought maybe you got lucky. That's all.”

“Come on, man, you left Cowboy with her, a kid, and a hooker,” said McPhail, pulling a cigarette out of his mouth and gesturing with it.

“And a kid and a hooker,” said Old George, his eyebrows shooting up. “The story's getting a lot better. A tag team. That's my boy.”

The half-a-dozen people at the bar stared at Calvino, waiting for somebody to say something. “It wasn't that way, George,” said Calvino.

Baby Bear, the waitress, dressed in tight jeans and a T-shirt, appeared and put a Mehkong and Coke in his hand. She gave him a wide grin and nodded at Old George. He looked at the drink and then caught Old George's idea.

“It's on the house,” said Old George. “You helped some people out last night. That's what I heard. It's your buddy here who said you bagged a Spanish princess. What the fuck does he know about Spanish?”

“I speak better Spanish than you speak English,” said McPhail.

Old George's face knotted up as if he'd got a whiff of something dead behind the kitchen fridge. “I was speaking English to Nazis waving white flags before you were born. ‘Drop your rifle or I'll blow your fucking head off.' That's all the English you needed to know during the war.”

Calvino flashed an easy smile at Old George, whose heavily lidded eyes squeezed shut. The old man went still as if he was reliving some moment when German soldiers had refused to come out of a farmhouse. Calvino walked to his usual booth in the back of the bar. The plastic placemat, the spoon and fork, and the bottle of expensive ground pepper had already been laid out for him. McPhail followed with a fresh glass of vodka and tonic.

“You phoned and asked about Casey. That's why I'm here,” said McPhail, sucking on his cigarette.

Baby Bear climbed into the booth behind McPhail and began to rub his shoulders and neck. “Don't stop,” he said, eyes closed. “That feels good.”

“What's this about a Spanish princess?” asked Calvino.

McPhail's eyes half-opened. “I was joking with George. You know how he takes things literally. I know and you know the mem-farang
wasn't gonna get anywhere close to you. But do these guys want to hear that she brushed you off after you saved her ass?”

“Why do you think she brushed me off?” asked Calvino.

“After years bar-fining yings, you don't have the skill that it takes for a mem-farang. They want a young guy and they want to be wooed. When's the last time you ever wooed a woman? Sometime last century would be my guess.”

Calvino shook his head and pulled his wallet out. “How much did the hospital set you back last night?”

He saw that McPhail was looking past him, his brow furrowed. Calvino half-turned and saw the small corner shelf with the ceremonial plastic lotus painted gold, augmented with real flowers and a plate of bananas. A family of geckos had attacked the bananas. Calvino turned back around to find that Baby Bear, now kneeling, had both hands massaging McPhail's skull. As she dug her nails in, he made tiny whimpering noises.

“McPhail. Money. Hospital bill. Hello?”

“Sorry, man, I'm still on painkillers,” he said, finishing off the rest of his vodka tonic.

Putting down his empty glass, McPhail took out the envelope from inside the sling and passed it across the table. Calvino opened it, looked at the bill, and put it back in the envelope along with five-thousand baht. He slid it across the table. McPhail stuffed it back into his sling without looking inside.

“That fucker with the knife last night wanted blood. And he got blood. If I ever see that asshole, he'll wish he'd never been born.”

“Did you get a look at him?” asked Calvino.

McPhail shook his head. Only a few of the white skulls on McPhail's black T-shirt were visible around the edges of the sling. It was his I-almost-died shirt that he wore whenever he had a near-death experience. “But I can find out.”

“There's no point doing that unless you plan on taking things to another level.”

McPhail's face deflated. He lit another cigarette. With his arm in a sling, there was no other level to which McPhail intended to take the matter. He just wanted to drink and smoke and talk—and get sympathy from the yings over his damaged arm. “What happened with you and the Spanish princess last night? Come on, something must have happened.”

“Let's talk about Casey,” said Calvino. The waitress, a grandmother to two children, brought a chicken potpie to their booth, dumping it, steaming hot, out of the aluminum pan and onto Calvino's plate. She smiled like he was one of her grandkids.

“Casey? You wanna talk about Casey?” said McPhail. “Let's get it out of the way.”

“You see the newspaper?” Calvino asked McPhail.

Sipping his drink, McPhail shook his head.

Calvino continued. “There's a story about a secret CIA prison in Thailand, and it looks like Casey's got some information. They want to pull him in to ask some questions.”

“What kind of questions?” asked McPhail.

“Why he destroyed the tapes of the interrogations,” said Calvino.

“Casey knocking heads and smiling into the camera. That would be in character,” said McPhail. “That'll have them talking at JUSMAG bingo night.”

Earlier in the morning, Colonel Pratt had phoned Calvino, asking if he knew where Casey had gone. Calvino had had no idea. Casey was a client; he wasn't babysitting the guy. He could be anywhere.

“He's making himself scarce.”

McPhail exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed. “Who in the fuck wouldn't?”

The Colonel had been around to Casey's apartment and had been told Casey had left town. A lot of other people had been in and out of Casey's apartment as well. Last time anyone had seen him, he'd shown up at the security desk with two suitcases and asked the guard to call a taxi for the airport. He must have been tipped that the storm was coming and slipped out of the country while he could.

The security guard said he'd watched Casey climb into the back of a taxi, and that was the last anyone had seen of him.

“He may have left the country,” said Calvino. “If Interpol's after him, he's on the run.”

“What does Pratt think?” asked McPhail.

“That he's here in Thailand somewhere.” The Colonel had said it was doubtful that Casey had left the country. Immigration had a computer record of all foreigners who entered and left; Casey wasn't one of the foreigners who'd left. Calvino's reaction was that someone at
immigration had fucked up—put in the wrong spelling of the name, lost the card, or misfiled it. Or maybe Casey had managed to get through without the card getting processed or had used a fake passport. Or maybe he'd gone to the airport but hadn't left the country.

There were private ways of entering and exiting the airport, and a special-ops guy like Casey would have been familiar with how to come and go like a ghost, leaving no trail. “But why would he want to do that?” Colonel Pratt had asked. With someone like Casey there could have been a dozen good reasons bubbling under the surface. Colonel Pratt thought it most interesting that Casey would have told everyone he was going to the airport without saying exactly where he was going.

The point the Colonel had made was that a military man like Casey didn't go missing in action. Men like him knew exactly where they were going and the purpose for going there. Colonel Pratt thought it was more than a coincidence that Casey had left for the airport shortly after Ratana had come up with his phone number as the reason for Nongluck's bundle of playing cards.

After Calvino finished explaining to McPhail the Colonel's failed attempts to track down Casey, he cut open his chicken pie.

“Colonel Pratt found the taxi driver who took Casey to the airport. He'd dropped Casey and his two suitcases on the departure level. Casey gave him a hundred-baht tip.”

“And he went inside, took the escalator up to arrivals, and took another taxi back to the city,” said McPhail.

“Maybe, or maybe he just kept on going. If he doubled back, do you have any idea where he'd be hiding?”

McPhail sipped his drink and got Baby Bear to light his cigarette. Worry lines appeared on his forehead. He shook his head side to side, as if to dislodge the little box holding all the ideas he had about Casey. “I followed him for three days. JUSMAG, Siam Paragon, Chinatown, the Nana Hotel coffee shop, an outdoor restaurant on Soi 4, a short-time hotel on Soi 40, and an eye clinic on Thong Lo. The man had a full schedule. I don't see how he'd have time to draw the water for a waterboarding interrogation. Or rob banks or whatever other crimes they want him for.”

Calvino had gone over the list with Colonel Pratt that morning. “You said you lost him in Chinatown.”

“He fucking disappeared,” said McPhail. “Like a rat up a drainpipe.”

Old George looked down the aisle from his perch. He pounded his cane on the floor a couple of times until he caught Calvino's eye. “Does medical coverage come with McPhail's assignments?”

“Blue Cross all the way, George.”

“Don't talk to me about crosses. Are you paying his bill?”

“He's fully covered.” Calvino counted out the amount of the bill all over again, folded the notes, and handed them to McPhail.

McPhail flipped through the notes and turned around. “He's paid it, George. Twice over.”

Old George leaned over his cane and smiled. “Don't give him so much money, Vinny. He'll slit his other arm himself. Now order some more goddamn food. Think of it as rent. I can't make any money if all you do is come in here and use my place as your second office.”

“Two specials. Will that do it, George?”

“That's more like it,” Old George shouted.

Old George grimaced as he looked at the TV. He murmured under this breath, “I hate this cut-'em-up shit. But the girls love it. Go figure.”

“How's the arm by the way?” Calvino had forgotten to ask McPhail.

“It looks like Godzilla chewed on it, mistaking it for a Happy Meal.”

Calvino pushed the potatoes and carrots around his plate. He put down the knife and fork and leaned back, arms stretched out. Baby Bear worked her fingers into the knotted muscles along the sides of McPhail's neck. He might have been cut up, but he didn't look like he was suffering much.