Crackdown Read online

  “He didn’t happen to ask you about Dr. Marley Solberg?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I had a call from the embassy. Their liaison officer asked me if I had any information about Ballard finding information on the whereabouts of Dr. Marley Solberg,” said Pratt with a hint of a smile.

  “They’re fishing.”

  “They’re fishing in your pond, Vincent.”

  “Does it matter who Ballard worked for or what his mission was?” asked Calvino. “His life was in shreds. He’d been caught sleeping naked with a stuffed toy, and the photo went viral. That photo finished him. Whatever he was doing in Bangkok, he was a man in a hurry to grab some money and disappear.”

  “The embassy’s story suggests something else was going on.”

  “And that Ballard had done some fancy footwork, and I fell for his hard luck story?”

  “They might have played you, Vincent. That photo exhibition could have been a setup. Would Ballard be that stupid? He comes to Bangkok with the story and it takes you right in. He was taken in by a successful woman. Just like you. The two of you could get together, share stories and plot your payback.”

  “You think I’ve lost my edge?” Calvino said, leaning forward. “Okay, if it was planned and executed as a setup, why is Ballard dead? Why go to all that trouble only to have their man killed before the mission was finished?”

  The fact had caused General Pratt the same doubts. He’d tried to explain the unusual facts of the Ballard case to his own bosses. They’d written Ballard down as a crazy farang who might be a cause of public embarrassment for them. While the government had been changed by the gun, the fundamental fear of his bosses remained unchanged—a public sex scandal linked to the murder of an American agent working undercover as a businessman. Had the London affair toppled over Ballard’s life, left him disoriented and dazed, stumbling through the twisted wreckage, or had it been staged to give that appearance? Ballard had walked into Calvino’s life, admired his art, left behind a book and then ended up dead in the river. Calvino reminded himself not to invite any more strangers to stay at his condo.

  Picking up the plaque that Calvino had given him, Pratt looked at the inscription.

  “For future reference, if you ever buy another present with a Shakespeare quote, you should consider, ‘That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.’ From Henry V, Act 3.”

  “Who’s the flea in this story, Pratt, and who’s the lion?”

  The General had always worked inside the Thai system of periodic coups, which like California earthquakes were not precisely predictable but over time become inevitable. It was only a question of time before the tectonic plates shifted and the ground started shaking again. Since the coup Pratt had witnessed close up how those inside the department had adjusted to the new power grid. After searching how the newly constituted department functioned as it fired up for business with anxiety high as those who’d been excluded waited for the axe to fall. Not everyone emerged safely inside the circle of winners. Luk nong continued to be the cannon fodder in the aftermath.

  He handed Calvino a handful of fresh tissue.

  “I heard you’re helping Osborne in a personal matter,” said Pratt.

  Ratana had been talking to Pratt’s wife again.

  “He’s a character, one who’s never short of problems. You know the type.”

  Pratt waited for a further explanation. None was forthcoming.

  “Please give my greetings to Ratana,” Pratt said, signaling that the meeting was over.

  “I think she’s going through a mid-life crisis,” said Calvino.

  “Why?”

  “Short skirt. Wearing one of those fashionable vests sold to young women. New high heels. A new shade of lipstick. The stuff that women do to shed years.”

  “It’s a phase.”

  “She’ll work through it.”

  General Pratt nodded.

  “I have no doubt.”

  Calvino stuffed the tissue into his pocket and stood up to leave. His conscience had been bothering him. Alan Osborne. He asked himself, looking at Pratt, if he should tell him that Ballard knew Osborne. Their connection didn’t appear to have gone into Ballard’s diary. Forget the diary. Ballard’s job required him to file all contacts to his bosses. If he hadn’t done this, then Ballard was going rogue. It was also possible that the DEA or DARPA had that information and were testing to see if the Thai police could provide them with independent confirmation.

  Ballard had been at his condo the night Calvino had been called to Osborne’s compound. He’d found Osborne, hair matted with dye, standing over an armed dead man crumpled up in the doorway to his sitting room. Had the same person who had sought a hit man to kill Osborne taken care of Ballard?

  As Calvino reached the door, he thought of something else and turned to face Pratt again.

  “Back in uniform,” said Calvino, thinking his friend had made his choice. “I didn’t think I’d see this day, General Pratt.”

  “If you think of anything else Ballard said about his friends, colleagues or enemies, phone me.”

  “Sure thing, Pratt.”

  They locked eyes for a moment. Ballard had asked him, “How’s your friend, the sax-playing colonel?” He’d been irritated that Ballard hadn’t remembered Pratt’s name, and said, “His name is Pratt.” Ballard had said, “Now I remember.” Calvino had said, “He’s been promoted to general.” And finally Ballard, with a smile, had said, “If he plays the sax as well as he plays the system, he’ll end up in the Jazz Hall of Fame.”

  Calvino waited for the usual invitation to dinner, but Pratt remained silent.

  “I’ll give your regards to Ratana.”

  Pratt smiled with a slight nod of his head.

  Calvino had withheld information about the Osborne and Ballard connection, telling himself that the information would lead to Fah and the Tree Brothers appearing on the police radar screen. Before the coup he wouldn’t have hesitated to share that information with Pratt. But things had changed since the 22nd of May. Calvino looked at the man behind the desk. Why had they called him back? It was no secret. Who better to put in charge of a witch hunt than someone who’d been witch-hunted himself? Part of the coup cycle was to recruit men abused by the previous regime and watch them beat the bushes, exposing more members of the witches’ coven.

  As Calvino opened the door, he almost bumped into Lieutenant Pim, who waited on the other side. She stood straight as a rail, ready to escort him out of the building.

  “See you later, General.”

  Nothing like giving Pratt face in the presence of his luk nong. It was the system. Calvino glanced at the Lieutenant, who looked straight ahead. She was all business as they walked away from Pratt’s office. Where did she fall in the life cycles of a flea and a lion? She gave no indication.

  Pratt could rely on the history of how he was forced out of the department. He wore it as a badge of honor. That was necessary but not sufficient for the junta. The military would be watching him for any sign that he couldn’t be trusted to be a true team player. They seemed to assume that Pratt’s suffering at the hands of the previous overthrown government made him one of them, but things were a lot more complicated than that.

  Alone in his office, General Pratt picked up the gift from Calvino, opened his desk drawer and slipped it inside, closing the drawer. Western authors had become suspect. Thais who quoted them earned a place on a watch list, or a black list, or a social invitation list—there were many lists to take the names of Thais marching to the tune of Orwell, Huxley or Shakespeare. Pratt made a mental note to add Graham Greene to the list.

  Calvino hadn’t fully appreciated this basic, fundamental shift in ground rules about permissible attitudes, opinions and beliefs. The alternative was that Calvino knew full well the situation and had brought the gift as a reminder of how Pratt often quoted Shakespeare. Clearly it also had another message: the censorship of Pratt’s spirit
ual mentor came at a high cost, and he ought to bear that rising debt in mind as he helped the junta right the wrongs of the old regime. Pratt knew well that Shakespeare had lived during a time of plots and conspiracies. He felt that the Bard’s legacy was to question whether modern society had emerged with its lessons learned from the Elizabethan Age—or had there been a regression into a prior age that was much darker?

  FIFTEEN

  “Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.”

  —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

  THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the police HQ in Bangkok was a colonial-style adaptation. Isolated amid a grove of the languid tropical trees and bushes that lined parallel roads in and out of the spacious compound, the administrative offices enjoyed a peaceful setting far from the commerce and shopping malls of the big city. A large water fountain added a touch of Versailles.

  Before the coup, protesters had swarmed through the compound, trampling the grass and flowerbeds, tossing rubbish in the fountain, removing the letters on the HQ nameplate and spray-painting slogans on walls. Only small traces of the earlier vandalism now remained. A committee of generals’ wives had self-assembled after the coup with the mission of overseeing the renovation and redecoration.

  The committee had started before the coup. After the coup it had grown from three to fifteen members, all drawn from the ranks of the official wives of high-ranking generals. They decided a post-coup blessing of the fountain was in order. Manee, Pratt’s wife, had been invited to join even though her husband was not a senior general. His sterling political pedigree apparently compensated for her mia noi-like collection of jewelry and a five-year-old car. As with most decisions in Thailand, the official reason for establishing the committee was designed for public consumption. The real reasons lay elsewhere.

  Throughout each day, by phone and via Facebook and Twitter accounts, the generals’ wives exchanged private messages about people inside their husbands’ offices—who worked around their husbands, their gender, rank, family background, education and affairs. They’d established a credible intelligence network, cross-checking their husbands’ stories about official life with what other wives were learning about their husbands’ associates, meetings and activities and who was on their way up or on their way out. Memories of the annus horribilis of the previous year remained fresh. An anonymous tipster had used social media to expose hidden relationships with senior police officers, and a covey of minor wives and giks had been flushed out like quail from the undergrowth. The generals’ wives vowed that this year would be an annus mirabilis—a wonderful year, restoring the balance between yin and the yang.

  The wives had other reasons to monitor their husbands. At night, after working hours, the office lights burnt late into the night along with the flicker of TV screens. The lights dancing against the windowpanes could be seen through the trees from the road. Tongues wagged. Who stayed behind? What were they doing inside the offices late at night? It had been no secret to the wives that the department had recruited many young, attractive and educated women into the police force. Politics had its own set of serious risks and threats, but no general’s wife would have ranked the political risk faced by her husband higher than the threat of a younger woman who worked inside his office.

  The committee traded gossip about what went on at HQ at night. The female office cops who couldn’t afford to rent a room unfolded their sleeping mats from behind their office desks and slept coiled up with their desks as their roof and walls. The committee members worried about the temptation this presented. Lingering suspicions from the previous year ensured that the wives had not forgotten what social media had revealed about their husbands.

  As Calvino came out of the main building, he passed a group of middle-aged women dressed to impress—the thick black helmet of hair, the diamond rings sparkling, necklaces of diamonds, emeralds and rubies, and designer handbags, shoes, dresses and sunglasses. From inside the group one of the women waved at him. At first he didn’t recognize Manee. Near the water fountain, the women had broken into several discussion groups of two or three. It was hot, and none of them looked happy standing in the sun. Manee broke away from the others and walked up to him.

  “I just saw your husband. He didn’t mention you were here.”

  “He doesn’t know,” she said mischievously. “It’s a secret.”

  “Looks like you’ve made new friends,” said Calvino, glancing at the other wives standing and talking nearby.

  “I’m on the blessing subcommittee.”

  “The one that gets to decide which big fish to bless?” asked Calvino.

  “Sort of. It’s true. We’ve expanded our mission. We will recommend what to do with the fish in the fountain. How did you know about that?”

  He hadn’t until then.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Vincent, someone told you.”

  “Aren’t you hot?”

  She pulled an umbrella out of her handbag and opened it.

  “I’ll walk with you a bit,” she said.

  Calvino looked over at the other women, who watched Manee.

  “You should get back to your friends. This is no time to be seen walking with a farang.”

  “Pratt told you about the fish, didn’t he? We were just talking about the fountain last night. It must have been on his mind.”

  “That must be where I picked it up.”

  It was common knowledge that the fountain was filled with exotic fish. Each time the Japanese or Chinese generals arrived, they brought expensive tropical fish as gifts, and a brief ceremony to release them was held at the fountain. It was a way of making merit. The fish multiplied, and the fountain became a frothy fish pond. The protesters had taken fish, but they had only made a small dent in the teeming population.

  “I heard the Chinese carp eat the smaller Thai fish,” said Calvino.

  Manee looked back at the fountain and her new friends, who were now pointing at the water.

  “That’s funny, Vincent.”

  She explained how both Thais and foreigners had released different species of fish into the fountain over many years. The fish had prospered until the fountain boiled with exotic breeds, sucking the oxygen out of the water. The committee of generals’ wives then took it on themselves, in the spirit of the new order, to undertake a total cleansing of the fountain. What could be more noble and worthy than the restoration of purity, order and tranquility to this living symbol, this jewel in front of the police HQ? The chair of the committee urged the wives to press forward, applying the full force of their will and determination to the task.

  Manee stopped talking. She was distracted as two non-commissioned officers walked past, both attractive females. Calvino could see that the middle-aged women at the fountain were no longer interested in the fish as, whispering among themselves, they watched the two officers disappear into the administration building.

  “Looks like the committee has some other fish to fry.”

  “You must have met Lieutenant Pim,” said Manee. “Do you find her attractive?”

  “I hardly noticed.”

  “You are a terrible liar, Vincent. I say that as a compliment.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Pratt.”

  Calvino wanted to say that Pratt had learnt his lesson in Rangoon, but he couldn’t bring himself to mention the infidelity that had happened there a couple of years earlier. Besides, he’d already been labeled a poor liar, and digging up a graveyard of lies would serve no purpose.

  She squeezed out a smile. The reassurance of a friend had been what she’d come searching for, and she had found it. He watched Manee rejoin her group, which had retreated from the sun and the fountain to the shade of a tree. She held the green umbrella over her head as she walked. Pratt was a lucky man, he thought, as he turned and walked toward the main gate.

&nbs
p; Manee’s fears reminded him of Cambodia years before. A missing person case had taken him inside the old Khmer Rouge stronghold. He’d joined a group of landmine-clearing soldiers on a UN payroll. Their wives had set up camp on the opposite side of the road. They’d realized that all that UN pay in a place with too many poor women was giving the landmine clearers funds to set up homes for minor wives in villages near the minefields. All it took was a lousy $168 a month salary. And what a cover: a humanitarian reason to disappear into the countryside for weeks at a time to kick back with the minor wife. The Phnom Penh wives had caught on and walked through minefields to follow their men like shadows. Everyone watched everyone, as hidden landmines waited a misstep away. Memories of atrocities were buried deeper still.

  By the time he reached the street, Calvino had thought through the possibilities surrounding Ballard’s death. The last time he had seen Ballard had been in a sleazy bar. It had never occurred to him that it would be the last time, but then it never did. In Calvino’s experience life never issued a red alert—this will be the last time you see me before I’m dead. Only afterwards would he feel a regret that he hadn’t paid more attention or given the person a hug.

  He remembered Ballard leaving the Happy Bar after paying his bill, walking past a katoey. That was Calvino’s final memory of him, an unguarded, private moment, when the man’s mask had slipped off. It wasn’t the Ballard in the heavily painted Lucian Freud-like face, the one that hung on the wall of an investment banker’s brownstone in New York to generate pre-dinner conversation. As with Calvino’s own 1154 map, the story in the portrait was incomplete. The image of Ballard’s journey into sleep included an innocent child’s cuddly teddy bear, a spirit guide with unknowable boundaries.

  Ballard, an enigma in life and death, had left an image for others to puzzle over. The deeper one probed into the mystery, the more unreliable and uncertain the information, and each new layer of information came with more questions. Calvino no longer felt certain what had actually happened in London or in Bangkok, what were the causes, who were the principals, who were the agents and who was responsible for the outcomes. All of it was coming apart in his hands. What he was left with, as he walked out of police HQ, was an enigma, a kind of information loop, traveling fast but never going anywhere it hadn’t already been before.