Paying Back Jack Page 2

  The impact of the two bikes occurred with maximum force. In the collision, the first cylinder exploded, setting off a chain reaction that burst the other three, each adding more fuel to the large orange ball of flame shooting up the banyan tree. The vendor looked at what remained of her cart, bugs strewed over the road, and then at the fire leaping up the banyan tree, catching the dry and brittle veins on fire until the umbrella of branches and veins ignited a virtual New Year’s fireworks display. The wrecked bikes and riders were enveloped in the ball of flames. The helmeted head of the driver shattered, sending fragments of plastic and skull across the road, splattering the dwarf and the tree, and coated the legs of half a dozen girls.

  The yings from the Japanese karaoke place backed away in horror and fear. The vendor stared, hands clutched into a ball. There were tears in her eyes. Her livelihood had just been destroyed. Calvino reached inside his new jacket, unholstered his .38 caliber police service revolver, and ran down the street. Sidestepping the flames, he came up level to the General’s car. The General waved at him. But Calvino was looking past the General at the motorcycle rider who had tagged the old man using a laser light. He had managed to stop a short distance behind the General’s car and remained a threat. With the point bike out of action, was the hit still in play? Calvino had no way of knowing. It was possible that the rider of the second bike was also armed, but he showed no sign of pulling a weapon. When the biker saw Calvino running at him then kneeling with a handgun pointed at his head, he wheeled his bike around and fled in the direction from which he had come. Calvino holstered his .38 and opened the General’s door.

  “Did you see that accident?” asked the General.

  Half out of breath, Calvino nodded. “Yeah that was something.”

  “Doesn’t look like they survived. What a tragedy!”

  “General, let me buy you a cup of tea.”

  The General stood beside his car, looking out at the burning remains.

  “We should phone the police.”

  Calvino took out his cell phone and called Colonel Pratt.

  “The General’s had a problem,” he said. “He’s parked on Soi 33 outside Goya.”

  “Crazy driver,” said the General.

  Calvino ended his call with Colonel Pratt. He knew that it would take Pratt a while to arrive at the scene in front of the dead artists bars. Meanwhile, it was just the two of them, the General and Calvino, standing downwind, waiting as they watched the smoke and flames shooting out of the wreckage. There was the pop of ammo exploding. Calvino figured it must have been spare rounds one of the men had squirreled away for a rainy day that would never come.

  “Driver’s training,” the General continued. “That’s what we could use.”

  The fire brigade drove up at about the same time as the police. They sprayed foam on the wreck, and the body snatchers (they were one of the voluntary Chinese benevolent societies who raced to crash sites and collected the dead and injured) arrived to sort through the remains—bone in this container, metal in that container. “Colonel Pratt will be joining us,” Calvino said, walking the General toward a restaurant between the closed bars and nightclubs.

  “I didn’t want to bother him,” said the General.

  “He’s in the area.”

  “Well, in that case, that’s my good fortune.”

  “‘Good fortune’ is one way of putting it,” thought Calvino.

  The General pointed his remote at his car and it automatically locked. He hadn’t seen the second black motorcycle, or the guys with their heads covered coming at him at high speed.

  Calvino walked back to the vendor and gave her five thousand baht. “Buy a new cart,” he said.

  “You bad man, you kill those boys,” she said, taking the money.

  A witness to the slaughter, he thought. Not the line he wanted her taking before the police, at least not until Colonel Pratt arrived. The ball of orange flame had climbed down the side of the banyan tree, burning through the dozens of old nylon ribbons. That should piss off the spirit, thought Calvino.

  He found the General again, open-mouthed, standing beside his car. “We’ll need to make a statement,” said the General.

  Calvino’s new jacket had a slight tear near the front pocket. He sighed, pissed off, as this meant a return trip to Venice Tailors and Tony shaking his head in disapproval over the damage to the masterpiece. Walking toward the burning bike, Calvino knelt down and picked up a nine-millimeter gun from the street and showed it to the General. “Driving and shooting should be against the law.” Calvino slipped the gun into his jacket pocket.

  “I could use a cup of tea,” said the General.

  Calvino had the feeling the General said that every time he saw something blow up.

  Thais, in the presence of a stranger or someone with authority over them, fall into a default of stone silence. They clam up. What few words they muster fall into the category of nondescript pleasantries. Have you eaten? Where are you going? These two questions are the staples of a Thai inquiry. A stranger could be forgiven for thinking that given the long silences in these official circumstances that words were exchanged with the same reluctance as a woman pawning her mother’s gold necklace. But the reality is that they’ve figured out it’s usually better to smile and say nothing of substance.

  As the police, the body snatchers, and the fire brigade appeared at the scene of the wreck, Calvino reached down and picked up a piece of chrome. Colonel had arrived and circled the crash as General stood in the shade. It had been decided, after consultation with Colonel Pratt, the ranking officer at the scene, to rule what had happened a tragic accident. Only a miracle had prevented a larger loss of life. And no one said a word about an attempted hit on the General.

  “That’s it? What about the gun?” Calvino found himself asking awkward questions about evidence that didn’t fit Colonel Pratt’s report.

  Colonel Pratt smiled at his American friend, nodding. Sometimes a farang friend could be amusing at the strangest of times. “It’s been bagged and will go to the lab.”

  Such a statement might have on the surface suggested that the police investigation would focus on the ownership of the gun and the identities of the two men who’d been burnt beyond recognition.

  As the three of them walked to Calvino’s office, Calvino asked the Colonel about the carefulness of Thais when drawn into a conversation. The Colonel thought long and hard and then simply smiled at the General.

  Ratana, who hadn’t expected Calvino to be back so soon from his appointment with the General, was at the park across the street with her baby. Calvino led the General and the Colonel upstairs to his office. Once inside, the three men sat down. It was the first chance they’d had to talk openly, without others around.

  “I saw the guy riding pillion pull a gun. The rider on a second motorcycle coming from the opposite direction had pointed the laser beam at the General.”

  The old man with his short bristle of white hair raised his hand.

  “There’s a Thai saying, Pla moh taay praw pak,” said the General, a veteran of the Department of Special Investigations.

  “The fish is dead because of its own mouth,” said Calvino.

  “He knows this one, General,” said Colonel Pratt.

  A few months ago Calvino hadn’t fully understood the proverb. On that occasion, the Colonel had sketched a sea bass for him with a large mouth and bulging eyes. The mouth of the fish brushed against the surface of the water. Colonel Pratt, an artist at heart who had secretly studied art in New York, had taken pleasure in his drawing. It wasn’t an elegant rendition, but that hadn’t stopped Calvino from having it framed and hung on his office wall. But the line of bubbles that rose from the open mouth of the fish served now to illustrate the General’s point.

  The General looked at the drawing.

  “Pratt drew that one,” said Calvino.

  Pratt had signed his name at the bottom and given the sketch to Calvino. It wasn’t a Picasso—more
like Warhol: Marilyn Monroe as a fish.

  “And you framed it and put it on your wall,” said the General, as if not believing his eyes.

  Pratt’s drawing stared down from the wall, reminding Calvino that a man who was careless about what he said sooner or later got himself hooked, pulled out of the water, gutted, and cooked. That was a Thai way of referring to trouble. Two men had been gas-fried in the street, and pieces of a vendor’s cart and a small forest’s worth of dead bugs had been strewed about the wreckage, but the General didn’t want to talk about what had happened on the street. Colonel Pratt sat back in his chair, arms folded, asking no questions of the General or Calvino. The three men sat in silence.

  Calvino found himself studying the sketch. People had this fishlike nature. They couldn’t help but float to the surface and blow bubbles, even though it gave away their position to the fisherman on the riverbank, and put them one step away from a dinner plate.

  Calvino turned his attention to the large box wrapped in silver foil paper with red ribbon. It had been delivered that morning. General Yosaporn had signed the card in classic, refined handwriting, curls and swirls that only a fountain pen could make. It was a thank-you note. Before he’d gone to Venice Tailors, Calvino had read and reread the card and stared at the bottles in the open box. The General beamed with pride as he watched Calvino pull out a bottle of whiskey. Calvino asked himself what to do with the windfall. Altogether there were a dozen bottles of single-malt whiskey, the upscale stuff that sold for two hundred dollars a bottle at the airport duty-free.

  “I hope you like whiskey,” said the General.

  Calvino thought the single malt went well with his new jacket. “One bottle would have been enough,” he said.

  “Share it with your friends,” said the General, glancing over at Colonel Pratt.

  “Vincent, you did the right thing,” said Colonel Pratt. It was the first time he’d acknowledged what had happened earlier in the soi.

  “I almost shot him,” said Calvino. “It crossed my mind. But they were moving fast and I didn’t have time.”

  “That was a good thing, Vincent. It avoided a problem.”

  Someone being cooked to a dark leathery brown like a rice-field rat in a bonfire could be explained as another example of reckless driving. A gunshot could not be ruled out as the dead artists bars had been known to draw armed patrons.

  Calvino nodded. A crooked smile flashed across his face as he handed the Colonel a bottle of whiskey. “Now that’s doing the right thing,” he said. “Isn’t that right, General?”

  The General agreed. Colonel Pratt accepted the bottle, turned it around, read the label, and nodded to the General. The two had spent a few minutes alone before they walked over to Calvino’s office. Whatever they’d said to each other, Calvino hadn’t been briefed on. It stayed between the General and the Colonel; they’d closed ranks for whatever reason. Cautious, security-minded men, they were distrustful of anyone not on the inside. This wasn’t like Colonel Pratt. It took some getting used to—Pratt’s show of total deference to the General. In addition to the case of single-malt whiskey, the General had also sent a large stuffed bear for Ratana’s baby and a dozen long-stemmed red roses for the mother. All bases in the gratitude department had been neatly covered. Like Pratt, Ratana had shown more than the usual respect to the old man.

  “It was Apichart,” said Calvino out of the blue.

  Calvino guessed that this was what the General and Colonel had been talking about. Coldness crossed the General’s face as swiftly as an arctic wind. His upper teeth bit gently down on his lower lip as he caught himself stooping in his chair. He sat erect like a soldier at a mission briefing. “That business is finished.”

  “In New York,” said Calvino, “there’s an old lesson that business is never finished with a wise guy. And that’s how I make Apichart. He put a hit on you. We’re alone. We can say it the way it is. You’ll run a check on the two dead punks, find the link, and then what?”

  “Not another empty coffin,” said Colonel Pratt.

  The General’s translucent paper-thin skin revealed hundreds of veins snaking up his wrists to his forearms and disappearing inside his shirt. Of medium height with slightly stooped shoulders, he was an unassuming white-haired man in his seventies who could have been someone’s grandfather. Years before, the General had been Pratt’s mentor in the police force; that was the personal connection that had brought the General into Calvino’s life.

  The General had recently had a problem with a tenant named Apichart, the owner of an advertising agency, who had an office on the ground floor of a building the General owned on Sathorn Road. The office was in an excellent location but Apichart had neglected to pay rent and refused to leave the premises. Colonel Pratt had sent General Yosaporn to Calvino’s office. That was, of course, not the usual way of handling things. Five minutes into the case, Calvino was convinced that Apichart was an asshole, and there were Thai ways of dealing with assholes. Going to a private eye wasn’t usually one of them. The General, given his rank and social status, was quite capable of taking all necessary measures to recover his rent. But at the same time, he was a good Buddhist who followed the five precepts, including the ban on cheating and lying. Of course, not killing was on that list, too. He’d spent twenty minutes talking about meditation that day and had even gotten Calvino to try out the technique, showing him how to sit, where to put his hands, how to breathe, and most importantly, how to clear the mind.

  Calvino had said he’d clear his mind properly after he’d collected the rent from the General’s tenant. Five days later, Apichart, a Chinese-Thai who always traveled with two bodyguards, had seen the light and did what he was forced to do. But seeing the light had given Apichart some dark thoughts. As a man who made a living hawking skin-whitening cream, instant noodles, cheap flights on a budget airline with a terrible safety record, and shampoo that promised every ying the attention of men, Apichart had no trouble creating a cruel, damaging campaign.

  Apichart could’ve learned something from Colonel Pratt’s drawing of the fish. But he’d gotten rich with easy money and thought he had nothing more to learn. It had come as no surprise when he opened his mouth and blew out one large bubble after another. Apichart had told everyone in the building that General Yosaporn owed him money and that he was withholding the rent to offset the debt. It was cheaper than taking the General to court, he’d told anyone who would listen. Sheepishly, the General had admitted to Calvino that he had once received money from Apichart but had assumed it was a donation to his meditation center. They had constructed a pavilion using Apichart’s money. Whether the money was a loan or a donation was a matter of who was telling the story. In any event, the General had no way to repay Apichart. And it wasn’t the debt but the interest that had been murderous. Apichart had pulled the figure of twenty percent a month out of the air, and at that rate it wouldn’t be long until Apichart owned the building.

  Calvino had told the old general he’d do what he could.

  On that morning a couple of months ago, Calvino had waited until the General had left and found a crawl space between the baby crib and the toys, diapers, formula, and baby bottles. Ratana sat behind her desk reading an online article about infant nutrition. There had been a lull in the baby’s crying, an expanse of time that threatened to exceed the previous record of twenty-eight minutes. It was like a cease-fire as both sides reloaded and cleaned up the wounded. Calvino cleared his throat and, getting no reaction, leaned over her desk and tapped Ratana on the shoulder. Jumping as if from a bolt of electricity, she looked up with startled eyes.

  “Order a Chinese coffin,” he whispered. “I want one that’s cheesy.”

  “Cheesy?” She tilted her head, trying to figure out how cheese could factor into coffin buying.

  He saw her confusion. “A tacky coffin that is butt ugly, a disgrace. One that no self-respecting Chinese family would buy. I want the coffin that the coffin maker’s wife predicted would
n’t sell until the late afternoon of his next life.”

  She understood “next life, late afternoon.” In Thailand, that meant something that would likely never occur. He’d caught her attention. It wasn’t every day her boss asked for a coffin. “Who died?”

  “No one died,” said Calvino. He handed her a slip of paper on which he had drawn the floor plan of General Yosaporn’s building.

  “Why do you want a coffin?”

  “For a deadbeat.”

  “You said no one died.”

  The conversation had turned into a cross-cultural nightmare.

  “Have the coffin delivered to this address. Tell them to put the coffin exactly where I’ve marked with an X. Then I want you to arrange for three monks to go to the building for the next three days. Tell them to chant beside the coffin.”

  Ratana’s eyes grew large as she looked at the paper and then up at her boss. Working for a farang was always a bundle of surprises. She had told her mother and her friends that after a few years, though, you became shockproof. Nothing ever surprises you about a farang. Now she told herself that she’d been wrong.

  “That’s the General’s building,” she said.

  Calvino nodded, thinking what a relief to actually get his message through.

  “I think this is a mistake. You shouldn’t do this.”

  “Better yet, see if we could just rent the coffin for a few days. Buying it isn’t necessary,” he said.

  She had never heard of anyone renting a coffin. “Khun Vinny, have you talked to the General about this?”

  “Okay, if they won’t rent a coffin, then order the cheapest, most stripped-down basic model. And I’d like it delivered tomorrow. Monks tomorrow would be good, too.”