Paying Back Jack (21 page)

“Please tell him Casey's here and it's urgent,” said Casey.

Colonel Pratt glanced at Calvino. Calvino shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

“Is execution done on Cawdor?” said Casey in a loud voice.

“What does that mean?” asked Calvino.

“It means he knows a little Shakespeare,” said Colonel Pratt.

This hadn't been a side of Casey that Calvino had seen before.

Colonel Pratt finished putting the photographs and documents in his briefcase. He started to leave Calvino's office but found Casey blocking the narrow passage into the reception area. Casey wore his baseball hat and aviator glasses, with his hands in his pockets, chewing gum.

“‘There's no way to read a man's mind by looking at his face. I trusted Cawdor completely,'” Colonel Pratt quoted Duncan's speech in
Macbeth
.

“The king in
Macbeth
said that.” A certain pride was in his voice. “I heard that you liked Shakespeare,” said Casey.

“Which makes me ask why, with such good intelligence sources, you need the services of a private investigator?”

Casey didn't like the question. His jaw pumped up and down as he chewed the gum. The Colonel had upset him in some strange way.

“Colonel, I'll phone you later this afternoon,” said Calvino. The two men continued an awkward stare down before Casey stepped aside and let Colonel Pratt walk through. Ratana hovered near the playpen like a mother hen. She had the duck hand puppet on and tried as best she could to entertain her son. Her Donald Duck aria sputtered and died. The babies continued unconsoled in a tonality colored by their boredom and listlessness until Calvino couldn't hear himself think. Calvino heard the door close behind the Colonel. He returned, brushing his fingers through his hair, wondering at what point he'd start pulling out his hair, and sat down hard at his desk. He remembered how, the night before, Pratt had fused music and poetry on the stage. But that had been yesterday's performance and he was back on the ground as a cop, in a world with a different beat where the poetry was written as tragedy.

“He's your fucking friend. Big deal,” said Casey. “He knows a little Shakespeare like I know a little Thai. But I didn't come here to talk about your colonel. I want to know what you found out about Somporn's whore,” said Casey. He spit out the gum, balled it between his forefinger and thumb, and then pulled a piece of paper from Calvino's desk. Sticking the gum inside, he crumpled the paper and tossed it at the wastebasket, missing.

This client wasn't much for pleasantries and wanted to get straight down to business. He was one of those guys who had a genius for creating an urgent, supercharged atmosphere. “That was a senior police officer you stared down,” said Calvino. “That's not a good thing to do in this country.”

“Colonel, general, they're all the same to me. I stopped being impressed by that shit in about 1993. So save any lectures about how important a Thai cop is for another client.” Casey rubbed his perpetual
three-day-old beard and waited for Calvino. “What have you got for me? You've done the surveillance, right?”

Calvino ignored the jab like a professional boxer bobbing to one side, instantly recovering as if no serious punch had been thrown.

“Have you come across a jazz guitar player named Nop?” Calvino remembered that this was the Birdman's real name and how his real nickname didn't quite capture the full image of the man.

Casey looked perplexed. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”

“What about a Thai woman named Nongluck? Or a businessman named Apichart? Do you know them?”

“What is this? Twenty questions? I don't know any Thai woman with luck in her name. Or anyone named Dope who plays the guitar. And who is this Thai businessman? What did you say his name was? Applecart? Never heard of him.”

Casey had a better memory for Shakespeare than for Thai names. His nasty attitude combined with impaired pronunciation made his attempts to instill fear more difficult. He stared at Calvino as if he had a growing suspicion that Calvino was trying to spin him, make him dizzy and disorientated with references to some degenerate hippie guitar player, a whore, and a businessman. He'd strung together a bunch of civilians and thrown them at him. He didn't like for anyone who hadn't worn a uniform to talk to him that way.

Calvino brushed off the bad-tempered response. Surly was about as happy as someone like Casey ever got on a good day. There was no point fighting against a mountain of anger and regret. “Nop. I call him the Birdman. He has something going with Cat. Maybe you know something about their relationship, since you have all these sources on the street?” In most cases, it would involve a complex web with a trail leading to money. Maybe, Calvino told himself, there was a more philosophical dimension since Cat had her source of funding, and the Birdman had forged a private empire of relationships for special entertainment.

“They're fucking each other?” Casey was either a good actor, pulling down his aviator glasses to register his surprise, or he'd been caught off guard.

Calvino smiled, thinking that this was the kind of philosophy he understood. “I can't confirm that. They could be holding meditation
classes together or arranging flowers for Somporn's campaign. But probably not.”

The Birdman had been turning up in all the wrong places. He'd been at the hotel where Nongluck had gone over the balcony and at Cat's condo. Had parked his red Mazda sports car in the underground hotel parking lot in late afternoon. Calvino figured that even for a musician, Birdman got around troubled women a little too frequently to immediately write it off as coincidence.

It crossed Casey's mind that he might have underestimated this investigator. That was both a good thing and a bad thing for his plans. He started with what Calvino already knew: Cat had been going behind Somporn's back. It had fucked up the hit, but at least he could factor a jazz musician boyfriend into the equation.

“I want to know if Somporn's still seeing her,” said Casey.

“She's meeting him again on Thursday.”

“You're certain about that? That's very close to the election.” His eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched as he waited for the answer. “I need to be certain. Not a maybe, or ‘she's thinking about it.'” When a man spent too much of his life behind enemy lines, all he could think about was the certainty of the escape route and the men he needed to get him through that passage.

Calvino stood up, turned, and looked out his window at the soi. A van was delivering office paper to the translation service on the ground floor. It looked like business was good.

He turned back to Casey. “It's not like he's made an appointment for open-heart surgery. She's a mistress. He might have a conflict and cancel. Maybe she got her period. You know that happens every month, right? Or he might have a press conference or a speech to make. Any number of things can happen. From what I know, they plan to see each other late morning on Thursday.”

“You got a tap on her phone?” Like an animal licking an old wound that would never heal, Casey never let up the pressure.

“I'm listening to her every word.”

Casey seemed tone-deaf to irony. In a way, Calvino envied him the simplicity of his literal world. “You hear anything different concerning their next love fest, you phone me. How much do I owe you?” Casey pulled out a wad of cash. It was his way of dealing with civilians; they were a cash-and-carry crowd who'd howl at the moon
if they thought it would cause money to rain from the sky. The men he'd served with lived by a code other than money. It was called honor. Calvino wrote down “forty thousand baht” on a sheet of paper and showed it to him.

“Give me an extra fifty baht for the paper you threw away. I have to print it out again.”

Casey handed him forty thousand in thousand-baht notes plus a one-hundred baht note. “Keep the change.”

Calvino heard Ratana sigh with relief once Casey had left. He walked to her side of the office. She had Colonel Pratt's duck puppet on her hand. She pointed it at the door. “
Jai dam,
” she said in a Donald Duck voice. “That is a very jai dam man.”

He thought about Colonel Pratt's immediate reaction to Casey standing in front of him, chewing gum, looking hostile. He liked that the Colonel had nailed him to the floor—“There's no way to read a man's mind by looking at his face.” It was one of Pratt's talents, matching Shakespeare to the real-world petty thugs and big-time villains.

Ratana had nailed Casey in her own very Thai way. A black heart was a condition Thais wished to avoid in others. It meant a person who had a capacity for evil, and anyone who got in the path of such a person paid a price. The people around me are good judges of character, Calvino thought. They also warned me against sending a coffin to Apichart. He promised himself to listen better.

The babies had been brought under control, the silence ruptured now only by an occasional cough or fart. Whatever instinctive threat Casey had brought into the room had vanished. Ratana held John-John, hugged him, kissed his cheeks, and sniffed his neck.

There were clients Ratana didn't like. There were others who made her skin crawl. Even one or two she thought had been overshadowed with coldness and embroiled in a world of deception from which they desperately sought escape. Casey, she thought, was in the unique category of men who showed no sign of wishing to escape from their secret universe.

As he sat back at his desk, Calvino put on his leather shoulder harness with the .38 police special snug inside. There was something about Casey that he'd left behind him: a man with self-inflicted wounds, a casualty of beliefs and action that were on a course to
destroy him. Most of Calvino's expat clients had something shameful they tried to hide. Calvino understood such feelings as being normal; a tainted reputation was hard to shake off, and when the damaged reputation got out into the expat community, the person was finished. But Casey's wound was deep and jagged. What festered inside was the memory of a murdered son, and Casey's personal redemption—and reputation—depended on his ability to right that injustice, and until that happened, his outrage would eclipse civility, decency, and tolerance.

THE BEEKEEPER'S DAUGHTER, Wan, sat on a plastic stool brushing her hair in front of the mirror, one elbow resting against the edge of the sink. Standing behind her, two other dancers checked their makeup in the mirror. Wan's orange and black striped backpack rested at her feet. Everything she owned was inside it. Like the other yings in the back of the bar, Wan was naked. The natural aversion to nakedness in front of strangers had worn away, and she was no longer self-conscious of a public display of her body. The bar had overcome the native shyness of the country ying and killed it stone dead.

Another ying pushed back the beaded curtain and shouted, “Farang
ma laew!
” That was shorthand for Jarrett's having just walked into the bar. Wan's eyes grew large. She glanced at herself in the mirror. It was the moment she had been waiting for. Sitting on the stool, she wondered whether to put on her street clothes and leave, go onstage and dance, or stay and brush her hair and wait for some sign of good fortune.

She decided to let Jarrett decide her fate. He is a good man, she thought, smiling, putting down her brush. She'd had a feeling he'd be back.

It had been Jarrett's idea to take a break and go out for a drink. Tracer had the feeling that Jarrett had been thinking about her; she was in his system, and it only made sense to go out with him and make certain he didn't get into any trouble. Maybe get himself mistaken for someone else; his history included identity mistakes, and Jarrett and
Tracer only rarely brought it up, but that didn't much matter as there were constantly the background reminders, like the
Hua Hin Today
newspaper that Casey had left behind in the condo. The lead story was about an unsolved bombing in Narathiwat, which ran along with a photograph of a smoldering wreckage of a pickup truck.

Reno, the bar owner, ushered them to seats and told the waitress to bring two cold Belgian dark beers for his friends. Jarrett and Tracer eased onto the bench at the far end. This position allowed them to see who came in the door, and their backs were to the wall. Someone would have to look twice to spot them.

Jarrett looked at the yings dancing onstage and didn't see the beekeeper's daughter. “Don't worry,” said Reno. “Wan's in the back making herself pretty and waiting for you.”

Two bottles of dark Belgian beer arrived on a tray, and a waitress filled their glasses. Jarrett glanced at the beaded curtain in the back.

“She ain't going anywhere,” said Reno. “How was she? Another customer swears by her.”

That wasn't something Jarrett wanted to hear. Tracer raised his glass to one of the dancers who stood motionless with one hand grasping the chrome pole, as if she were a performance artist in a state of total stillness. Only she wasn't an artist; she was tired of dancing, and not that many black men came into the bar. She stared as if Tracer were the first one she'd ever seen.

“Wan says you put some crazy idea into her head about going upcountry and raising bees. Apiculture? You gotta be joking.” He said “apiculture” like it was a dirty word. “But I told her that didn't sound right; all the bees are dying. And all the honey is in Bangkok. But she said you'd told her to go home. That can't be right. I told her I'd discuss it with her later.”

“There's nothing to discuss. I gave her money and said she should go home.”

The bar owner bit his lip, stroking his moustache, deciding whether Jarrett was being serious. “You're not one of those guys who falls in love with a bar girl and gets a mission to reform her? After she's worked in the bar, you think she can go back and sleep on a dirt floor, take bucket baths, go to sleep under a bamboo roof, and not go a little nuts?”