Crackdown Read online

  “I should have ordered the beer,” he said. “That’s what I want on my tombstone, by the way.”

  He placed a five hundred baht note under the glass.

  “We just arrived,” said McPhail.

  “I like your friend,” Ballard said to Calvino. “I like all your friends.”

  “Let me order you that beer,” said Calvino.

  He shook his head.

  “I’d like to, but I’ve got to go. I’ll be in town longer than I expected. I’ve checked into the Oriental. Here’s your key and keycard. Thanks for the hospitality. Let me know if you change your mind about the map.”

  Calvino felt ashamed. He’d been out most of the time since Ballard had arrived.

  “Let’s talk over dinner.”

  Ballard watched a katoey dancing to Beyoncé’s video in front of the cash register. Her hips and arms moved with the precision of the captain of the North Korean synchronized swimming team.

  “I’ve got that covered,” said Ballard. “On Wednesday night I’m taking you to dinner on the river. I left the details in a note back at your condo. The restaurant might not have the atmosphere of the Happy Bar, but it is highly recommended.”

  They watched Ballard walk out the door.

  “Buying and selling yachts,” said McPhail. “That’s something I should try. I know people. It sounds like an easy way to make money. Enough to buy a twin engine plane.”

  McPhail had Googled the model of Ballard’s airplane on Calvino’s phone. He whistled through his teeth as he showed Calvino the price tag.

  “Ed, haven’t you learned? There is no easy way to make a lot of money, and once you work to make some, it’s even harder to hold on to it.”

  “That guy was smooth. Dressed like a movie star,” said McPhail. “Come to think of it, he was a little too smooth, if you ask me.”

  “He’s carrying around a heavy bag of troubles,” said Calvino.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Exactly.”

  McPhail shifted his attention to his vodka and rattled the ice cubes. He didn’t like to be reminded of Calvino’s financial wisdom. He eased back in his chair, remembering how happy he’d been listening to Old George and Gator and the other guys, drunkenly telling stories at two in the afternoon.

  Calvino twisted around and watched three more katoeys join in dancing to the Beyoncé song. We all need a hero, he thought, someone to inspire us to sing and dance. This crowd found its fix in songs about a world of suffering and hurt. Beyoncé delivered them to a better place.

  “They’re happy,” said McPhail.

  “It is the Happy Bar.”

  What it was, was a shabby, run-down hole where, for the length of a song, the katoeys could connect with happiness, and that was good enough.

  “These girls don’t care about politics. Those problems are a million miles away for them,” said McPhail. “Their heads are filled with other worries.”

  Calvino shook his head.

  “You’re wrong, McPhail. Politics tracks them down like everyone else. It’s a shadow over their lives. They know the man can walk in any time, turn off the music and push them around. And what can they do?”

  “ ‘The man’? You mean someone like your friend, Ballard?”

  “That’s not his style.”

  But Calvino thought maybe he had been thinking of Ballard unconsciously. There are a hundred ways to push someone around, he knew, and some ways had more style than others. Still, for all Ballard’s style, it had been unsettling to find him waiting at the bar, and disturbing to find out that Ballard and Osborne shared a history. Next to sharing spit, it was apparently hard to beat the bonding that came from finding out someone owned the same plane. Calvino doubted that it was a coincidence Ballard had decided to move out of his guestroom and into the Oriental Hotel once he’d discovered the Calvino and Osborne connection. Had Osborne told Ballard about the problem with Fah, or the story of how his son, Rob, had been killed while under Calvino’s watch in Rangoon?

  In Calvino’s experience there were no secrets anymore except in a person’s imaginary world. The grids in the network constantly evolved new nodes. And yet each time a new one arose, Calvino never failed to be surprised. Why was that? He wondered if that was a question anyone could ever answer, in a land where surprise coups were a regular feature of the landscape.

  The Beyoncé video finally ended, and a reedy Thai voice came from the far corner. The boss barked at the katoeys to get back to work. In the man’s attitude Calvino heard an echo of Old George shouting at the staff of the Lonesome Hawk: “Turn down that fucking music!” Calvino turned around in his chair.

  Along with McPhail, Calvino watched the katoeys flip the man the bird as they filed out the door like a chorus line fired from a show. They gathered in front of the bar, sharing a cigarette and nursing their loss of face as they watched the street. Theirs was a life of watching and waiting, noting who came and went, and calculating what got left behind and what got taken away. They knew that although they had each other, they had lives that didn’t add up to much, and it left them somewhere between anger and despair. All they knew for sure was the size of their cage, a home a bit larger than the communal prison cells some of them knew from firsthand experience. They counted off their steps inside and outside the Happy Bar with the same dull awareness of movement on a treadmill. What did they have to look forward to other than an occasional Beyoncé fix to keep them from going insane and doing damage?

  After the katoeys left, a waitress came to the table. Calvino ordered the taco special.

  “Tacos...” said McPhail. “Yeah, I’ll have the same.”

  The waitress scribbled the orders down on a notepad and disappeared.

  “You know some interesting people,” said McPhail, “but have you ever noticed that most of them are criminals? Except for Pratt, of course.”

  “The department has hired him back. They’ve made him a general.”

  McPhail’s jaw dropped.

  “One honest man makes for a small fig leaf.”

  Every so often, idiot savant-like, McPhail broke to the surface like a blue whale, tail slapping the water hard. Calvino cherished those moments. McPhail saw straight through the bullshit with perfect clarity, and what he saw was the truth. He wasn’t afraid to speak it.

  The waitress shoved two plates of tacos across the table. Each taco shell was partly crushed, bearing thumbprint-sized holes, either from carelessness or vandalism. McPhail picked one up but it fell apart in his hand, expelling ground meat, cheese and tomato like shrapnel over the plate and table. Calvino watched his friend take a bite and chew.

  “It’s like this, McPhail. If you have too much crime, there’s something wrong. The laws are outdated and unfair, or maybe the government is in the business of running illegal sidelines for their own benefit. When that happens, people have freedom but no safe space to be free. Everyone runs scared. They shoot and knife each other to take what they can get, or maybe for no other reason than they’re fearful. If you have zero crime, it means the government is controlling everything using curfews and martial law. That keeps people off the streets. They are free but imprisoned. So... what’s your poison?”

  “You’re saying, people are a lot happier when crooks other than the ones in government are raking in the benefits of stealing and shooting,” said McPhail.

  “Sometimes you’re brilliant, Ed.”

  “Then why don’t you trust me on a new restaurant?”

  “There are limits to your brilliance.”

  McPhail started on his second taco.

  “They don’t look great, but they’re good. Aren’t you going to eat yours?”

  Calvino slid his plate across to McPhail.

  “You look hungry.”

  “What’s with you? I never see you eat.”

  “I’m saving up for my post-taco life.”

  “Okay, you don’t like Tex-Mex. So what’s this about taking on a new case? When you told me and everybody el
se...”

  McPhail finished by taking half a taco from Calvino’s plate into his mouth.

  “I’ve been hired to get the skinny on whether Osborne’s girlfriend is cheating on him. I was about to tell you the story in the taxi when a katoey dragged you out of the back.”

  Calvino glanced at his phone, reading half a dozen text messages from Fah’s phone.

  “Get the bill. We need to go.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “Osborne’s girlfriend is making a move.”

  “I’ve got to get one of those phones. Will it tell me when to make a move?”

  “Get the bill, McPhail.”

  “Okay, I take your point. As long as I hang around you, I don’t need a smart phone.”

  He’d lost Calvino, who was focused on the iPhone screen.

  McPhail looked around for the waitress. She’d vanished. The katoeys were outside and there were no other customers. McPhail stood up and walked toward the counter and the cash register. There, lying on a cot, he saw a bony-chested, shirtless man, whose rolled-up jeans exposed a pair of spider-thin legs and shoeless feet sticking over the edge. A copy of Orwell’s 1984 rested on his sweaty ribcage, which heaved with his groaning and moaning.

  “Noi, what are you doing over there?” said McPhail. “Are you okay? We walked right past you.”

  Calvino left the table with cash in hand and laid a five hundred baht note beside the cash register. He stopped next to McPhail.

  “This is Vincent Calvino, a good friend of mine. Noi’s the owner of the Happy Bar.”

  Mr. Happy himself looked like a hunger striker stretched out in his final lap around the wasting-away track. Under a backwards Red Sox cap, a pair of aviator sunglasses dwarfed his thin face, making it bug-like. Dark bags spilled down from his eyes toward oversized lips that vibrated around the butt of a cigarette like strings on a harp.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked McPhail. “Tell me it wasn’t the tacos.”

  That broke Calvino’s attention from his cell phone and he looked up. Noi seemed to be seriously ill.

  “Half right. It’s food poisoning from last night. There were some bad crabs in the som tum. Been puking all morning.”

  Another victim of the irresistible raw crabs, thought Calvino. He had seen it before.

  “Man, you shouldn’t eat that shit.”

  “But I love it.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  Noi held up a bag of medicine and lowered his sunglasses.

  “I went to the clinic. See that plate behind you?”

  Calvino turned to where Noi pointed and picked up a plate with a few tiny pellets of dry food.

  “Right, that’s it. Let me see it.”

  “Someone’s taken half the food,” said Calvino.

  “It doesn’t look like food,” said McPhail.

  “Can you feed what’s left to my fish? He should have been fed an hour ago. The katoeys are on strike. They’re trying to starve Dylan.”

  “Dylan?” asked McPhail.

  “After Bob Dylan. The katoeys hate Dylan. Don’t ask me why. They’re pissed off with me. And the curfew, no customers and no tips don’t help the situation. They’ve been out front most of this morning plotting against me. They sabotaged the tacos. Refused to feed my fish.”

  A huge silver-bellied fish hovered in an aquarium two sizes too small for its body. Dylan turned like a supertanker in a pond, tail brushing one end and the lips the other.

  “I’ll feed him, Noi,” said McPhail.

  He sprinkled taco shell crumbs into the top of the aquarium.

  “Thanks, Khun Ed,” Noi said.

  “I’ve put the money we owe on the counter,” said Calvino. “We’ve got to go.”

  “You’d better give it to me. They’ll steal it if you leave it out in the open,” said Noi, motioning with one hand. “Not one of them is honest.”

  Calvino retrieved the note and handed it to McPhail, who slipped it into Noi’s English-language copy of 1984.

  “Big Brother says keeps the change,” said McPhail.

  Calvino led the way out of the bar. The first thing he noticed was that all the katoeys had disappeared. McPhail joined him on the street.

  “Where did they run off to?”

  “McPhail, the old Lonesome Hawk Bar crew isn’t gonna flock to the Happy Bar. Best to keep looking.”

  Twenty meters away from the bar, McPhail stopped in his tracks and turned around.

  “Looks like the cavalry has arrived.”

  Calvino followed McPhail’s gaze and spotted a black police van and military vehicle screeching to a halt in front of the bar. Doors opened and shut as two-way radios squawked with static. Half a dozen soldiers in green combat gear, bearing M16s, clambered out. Four uniformed police, two of them senior officers, emerged from the van. Calvino and McPhail watched the group march into the Happy Bar.

  Ten minutes later they came out again. In the procession two soldiers, weapons slung over their backs, carried Noi on his cot. One of the military officers walked behind, carrying the copy of 1984 and showing one of the cops the five hundred baht note McPhail had left inside. Another soldier held up Noi’s Red Sox cap like a prize catch.

  “Man, that cap’s got the word ‘Red’ on it,” said McPhail.

  Anything red or with the word “red” attached was unlawful.

  Calvino walked a few steps toward the armed personnel carrier, and one of the soldiers rushed up to block his path.

  “What you want, farang?”

  A soldier behind him displayed a Che Guevara poster ripped from the wall—along with the book and the cap, damning evidence of Noi’s crimes. The soldiers looked proud that they’d apprehended an enemy of the nation. Calvino was certain that if he’d not been prostrate with illness, Noi would have been handcuffed and frog-marched out of the Happy Bar.

  Noi smirked as they loaded him into the police van. At the vehicle’s rear doors one of the cops and a soldier stood guard. Nothing Calvino could say or do was going to change Noi’s fate. He’d just been inducted into a seven-day attitude adjustment program. But that didn’t stop Noi from raising himself up and catching Calvino’s eye.

  “My own staff did this for revenge,” said Noi, nodding toward a couple of the katoeys who had drifted back and were giving statements to the police. “Can you believe it? I should have seen it coming. Stealing Dylan’s food was a sign. It’s not right. It’s not fair. I ain’t done nothing but read a book.”

  “You should’ve stuck with the New York Yankees,” said McPhail. “Wearing a Boston Red Sox cap was dumb, Noi.”

  Raising his head again, Noi lowered his sunglasses and flashed a victory sign.

  “At least I’ll get to see a real doctor,” he said.

  Noi’s head rolled to the side and he vomited. The sound of his dry heaves rose above the burst of static from the two-way radios. The van door slammed closed. The other police climbed in front, and the driver followed the armored personnel carrier as it made a sloppy U-turn, the wheels climbing the opposite curb. As quickly as they’d arrived, they were gone.

  “You think Noi is a Red Sox fan?” asked McPhail.

  “My guess is he couldn’t find Boston on a map.”

  “Or explain what ‘S-O-X’ means,” said McPhail. “But he bought it for the word ‘Red,’ so the soldiers probably are right.”

  Like the poster, the cap was a kind of signature of support for the losing side. At least in terms of baseball, he’d picked the right team.

  Calvino and McPhail exchanged a look and slowly walked away. Despite scenes like the one they’d just witnessed, life in Bangkok wasn’t anything like a movie. That was the weird thing, Calvino thought. None of it felt abnormal, when deep inside he knew that it was. What happened in the Happy Bar and in the street should have pulled alarm bells in a normal person. He looked closely at his friend.

  “Did that seem strange?” he asked McPhail.

  “Don’t start on about the tacos
.”

  Calvino was reassured.

  “You’re right. Not another word about the tacos.”

  A man living in Bangkok soon discovered that he needed to understand entries and exits, knowing the right lines to say at the right time. Even with those skills, things could sour quickly, attitudes darkening. From out of nowhere an unlucky card could get played, and that normal, abnormal thing fell on a man like green snakes from the trees. Calvino quickened his pace. He had work to do, and a solid lead had dropped on him in the Happy Bar. All he could think of was rushing to the main soi and finding a taxi.

  ELEVEN

  “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”

  —George Orwell

  FROM THE MOMENT Munny headed upstairs from the barbershop, he had the feeling that whatever awaited him there wasn’t going to be easy or friendly. As he stood framed by the doorway, Fah called to him.

  “It’s okay. These are my friends, Oak and Palm.”

  “I’m Khmer,” Munny said, when Oak asked him about his heavy accent.

  There was no hiding he was a foreigner. He let that word, Khmer, sink in as the room went silent. Oak pulled Palm, the third member of their cell, to the side.

  “Is she crazy?” Oak asked him.

  “Let me show you something,” Fah said to her friends.

  She opened a new window on her laptop, and photos of Munny’s tattoos filled the screen. She scrolled down to Munny’s Banksy-inspired tattoo of the schoolgirl pulled airborne by balloons.

  “Tattooing isn’t the same as graphic design. Can he do graphics?” asked Oak.

  She looked at Munny.

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  Fah opened a second window and scrolled through a slide show of Banksy’s street art: a homeless man holding a sign that said, “Keep your coins, I want change”; a man with his face covered, right arm cocked like a bomb throw ready to unload, only the bomb was a bunch of flowers; and a succession of rats and Mona Lisa-inspired designs. The last work in the slide show had been stenciled on a wall: an English policeman holding a flashlight and a leash attached to a poodle, under a sign—“This wall is a designated graffiti area.”