Crackdown Page 26

After the coup Glover had received a call saying his website was drawing anti-coup letters and that violated martial law. The caller said he should think long and hard about continuing to run a forum for lawbreakers. The warning was Thai-style: not a warning per se. It was up to him. The junta wanted people to be happy, and Glover’s crowd were spreading too many unhappiness stories. Did he understand? No more letters of hearts broken by lying, scheming, emotionally volatile girlfriends, hiding the existence of their boyfriends, husbands, addictions and the constant pump-handle action of relatives waiting for the cash flow. Letters from happy farangs were okay. Glover understood, only he rarely if ever received happy letters. It wasn’t that kind of website. Glover pulled the digital plug and wrapped the message board with a black funeral wreath and a message—publishing under censorship suffers the same limitation as a blind eunuch reporting from an orgy.

  Social media buzzed with rumors why he’d walked away from a row of slot machines that consistently produced a small weekly jackpot in advertising fees. But what good was the money if he was thrown in prison or booted out of the country? He tried to write some fake “happy” letters but ended up deleting each one. They didn’t pass the projectile vomit test, and he knew that his readers didn’t come to read testimonials from the so-called winners whose lives had been cleared of all obstacles. His readers demanded “agony” followed by mental collapse into a state of pure solipsism. With the coup, the agony business had been abolished, and solipsism nationalized.

  “Here comes our man,” said McPhail, spotting Glover strolling on the Soi, a string of bargirls tailing him like a superstar.

  He shook hands with Calvino and McPhail.

  “Sorry I’m late. Some men in green insisted on taking away my computer. If I objected, they said I could come along to keep my computer company. I declined.”

  “You had everything backed up?” asked Calvino.

  “In the cloud,” said Glover. “That means only people with top-secret clearance can read it.”

  Patterson blinked.

  “It’s a joke, Patterson. Surveillance, spying, NSA. Do any of those words ring a bell?”

  “Right... What are you drinking?” asked Patterson, who had advertised on Glover’s website.

  Glover ordered a vodka soda and sat down with McPhail and Calvino.

  “You brought it?” asked Calvino.

  “You aren’t big on foreplay, are you?” said Glover, pulling several A4 sheets out of his pocket and unfolding them on the counter. “Luckily for you, I printed these out before the army showed up and removed my hard drive.”

  Glover sipped his vodka soda as Calvino read through the emails.

  It wasn’t clear whether Howard and Davenport, the agents from the US embassy, had traced Ballard to Glover’s website. They’d promised to leave no stone unturned in their quest to narrow down Ballard’s death to one of two options—the murder would be unsolved, which would be a stain on their field operation capability, or they would catch or kill the killer, which would earn them a commendation, a promotion and a pay grade increase.

  What was missing from their binary world of options was a third option—that Ballard hadn’t been murdered, that he’d killed himself. Virginia Woolf might walk into a river with stones in her coat pockets, but Ballard, a seasoned field agent, even one who was fired, killing himself? That hadn’t computed for Calvino until McPhail had run into Glover and asked him if he’d heard about the farang they’d pulled out of the river. And Glover had said, “Yeah, I saw something on ThaiVisa. I thought that guy was one of my readers. In the back of my mind, I remember some emails from him.” “Can you check?” McPhail had asked.

  It turned out that Ballard had been a regular contributor to Farang_Lost_in_Thailand using the handle ShipGuruAdrift. On the terrace of Mama, Don’t Call, Calvino read through Ballard’s emails. His last one had been written a couple of weeks before his death. He must have been using a proxy-serve in Cambodia at the time, thought Calvino. If Howard and Davenport had read through Ballard’s emails to Glover, would they have showed up at Glover’s office? Or could the intelligence people have dismissed ShipGuruAdrift as another piece of driftwood floating on an endless sea of mainly useless information?

  Calvino reread one of Ballard’s last emails several times. Each time the message was as unambiguous as balls on a dog.

  “My ship deal collapsed.”

  That was the opening line. Ballard had lied about closing the ship deal with the Chinese billionaire.

  Ballard’s email continued: “I have no desire to stay in Phnom Penh. There’s nothing to keep me. Returning soon to my girlfriend in Bangkok, and I’ll have to tell her the bad news. The money is nearly gone. The deal didn’t happen. I have to face that.

  “I am sitting in my room reading The Quiet American, thinking I am too old to be Alden Pyle. Like him, I have a girlfriend who has her dreams. I’d be kidding myself to think she won’t return to her old boyfriend, just like Phuong did after Pyle died. For Phuong it had been a tragedy. Pyle had been her ticket out of the war, a safe passage to America, the ship she’d board that would take her to another place. Can you call that love or calculated opportunity? Does it matter in the end? Does any of it matter when you’ve seen up close the greed, sorrow, pain and disappointment? What happens when everything you’ve believed to be true turns out to be a lie. All the talking points seem like bullshit. I have a theory that Alden Pyle felt the same thing. He committed what we’d call ‘cop suicide,’ and Fowler and the others never figured out that angle.

  “If you’ve walked in Alden Pyle’s shoes, you know how his mind worked, how he planned things in advance and how he knew what was waiting for him that night in Saigon. The world is happy to co-operate in your murder. It doesn’t take much training to make the necessary arrangements. When you reach the end of the pier, you have a choice. Turn around and walk back, and join the parade of the lost, or go over the edge and end the search.

  “Graham Greene got inside Pyle’s head. He wandered among Pyle’s thoughts, ideals and dreams. He saw how the gravity of life compressed these elements into the fundamental particle of sadness. Fowler accepted that condition. Pyle refused, until one day it hit him that Fowler was already dead to the world; his acceptance was his tombstone. Every Pyle needs a Fowler to hear his confession before he goes to the pier for the last time. Don’t leave, don’t leave is what Pyle had wanted to say to Phuong. It’s what I want to say to Mai, my girlfriend, until I remember she, too, has her Fowler in a safe harbor. She’ll be okay, filling his opium pipe and watching him stretch out on his bed, and it will be as if I never existed.”

  After he finished, Calvino folded the papers and put them in his pocket. When he looked up, he found McPhail, Glover and Patterson waiting for his verdict.

  “Have you shown these emails to anyone else?” asked Calvino.

  Glover shook his head.

  “I have thousands of emails in the archives, though this guy stuck in my head. I thought at the time that he was thinking of killing himself. Over the last seven years, I’d guess that I’ve received about a dozen suicide notes emailed to my site. If my advertisers had found out, it’s not something they would have appreciated. There was little that I or anyone else could do. If you run a website like mine, you’re going to attract some unstable people. I’d like to think blowing off steam kept a fair number of them from killing themselves. Maybe I’m justifying myself for not talking about the suicide notes. In any event, you have these. I feel better someone else has them. Whether any of this helps, I don’t know.”

  “It helps,” said Calvino.

  “Got to run,” said Glover.

  “Hey, buddy, good luck, and stay in touch,” said McPhail.

  They watched Glover walk into Soi Cowboy. The night swallowed him like an angry, raging river as he disappeared down the Soi 23 entrance.

  “Thanks, McPhail,” said Calvino.

  McPhail touched the rim of his glass to Calvino’s Jack Daniel’s, w
hich had gone watery with melted ice.

  “What was in the letters?”

  “A map of the long goodbye.”

  THIRTY

  “When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

  —Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  MUNNY HAD MEMORIZED two phone numbers. The first was Fah’s, and the second belonged to Heng, a friend from his district who squatted in the southwest corner of the Aquarium’s sixth floor. Fah’s phone was dead and showed no sign of resurrection. As he listened to the recorded message, the female voice electronically modulated with dabs of honey and sugar on the vowels, telling him the phone wasn’t switched on. That fact led him to one explanation. She and her phone were in different places. Once they were in the same place, he was sure Fah would phone him and tell him what to do.

  He had promised to carry out the two assignments. He didn’t read any newspapers or followed the news in any other way, and that meant Munny had no idea about the success of the first operation and how the authorities had thrown a lot of resources into finding the mastermind. All that Munny told himself was that he had one more job, and once it was done, he would be free to go home. In between, though, he needed a place to bunk for a couple of nights.

  He phoned Heng at seven a.m. Munny had been wandering the streets near the Aquarium, trying to decide what to do. Heng was joyous to hear from him. He had been up since five, sitting in his corner, watching the sunrise. Heng had lost a leg to a landmine in Battambang. When the others in the Aquarium had left for the border, he had volunteered to stay behind, and no one had argued too much, knowing Heng’s missing leg would slow down everyone. They remembered from the Khmer Rouge days that getting out fast meant staying alive. The slow ones, the cripples, the old, the infirm had been the first taken to the killing fields—there hadn’t been just one; there were many—where they were slaughtered like livestock. Heng had smiled as his neighbors had left, telling them not to worry about him. He told them the Thais wouldn’t shoot a one-legged man.

  “You didn’t make it home?” Heng asked.

  “I had some business,” said Munny.

  “That means you’re making some money.”

  “Not sure about that,” said Munny. “My family’s gone back.”

  “You got two legs, Munny. I thought you’d be running as fast as you could. It’s dangerous for men like you. I’m a cripple. I got an excuse. Soldiers don’t see a man with one leg as a man or anything other than a useless man.”

  “I am going back, as soon as I’m finished here. I need a place to stay until then. It’s temporary.”

  Silence fell on the other end of the line as Heng was perplexed, wondering how someone like Munny hadn’t returned to his village, and what kind of unfinished business would keep him in Bangkok when it didn’t involve money. It was a mystery, like most things that had happened in Heng’s life. He accepted it.

  “The generator broke down again. I could hear them cursing from the eighth floor,” said Heng.

  “I’ll have a look at it,” said Munny.

  “Can I tell them that, Munny? It will make their day.”

  “How many Eight-Niners are left?”

  “Only two. Kiri and Nimol.”

  After Munny pocketed his cell phone, he couldn’t help but worry about meeting Kiri and Nimol again. He had to decide whether going back was worth the risk. Kiri was barrel-chested, tall for a Khmer, with a muscular neck and shoulders that fit the profile of a man who liked to throw his weight around. And then there was Nimol, whose brain ran circles around the others in the gang. He was always plotting, planning, figuring out intentions and the best angle to exploit. He decided who deserved a beating and who needed a warning. Kiri was his enforcer. The Eight-Niners’ little empire had greatly diminished over the last forty-eight hours. Munny wasn’t surprised those two had stuck it out when the other members of their club had packed up and left. Kiri and Nimol didn’t have anywhere to go; they had no family. The two of them had worked on construction sites, and Heng had explained that their troubles had got worse when they’d lost their jobs, followed by the disappearance of the other half-dozen members of their gang. Heng said they’d been living on a diet of fish and rice and had become even more mean-spirited and violent.

  Munny, hands in his pockets, came to a bus stop and sat on a bench. He watched the traffic pass. Looking directly ahead, spotting one luxury car after another, he asked himself, “How much did that BMW cost?” A showroom of expensive cars sped by close enough for him to reach out and touch them. But of course, he knew the rules: look but do not touch; envy but don’t covet. There was always the fear that such a god, talking into his phone behind tinted windows, could run a man like Munny down, and he’d dig into his pocket and pay what for him was small change to the victim’s family. Munny sat back, waiting for the bus to the Aquarium, closing his eyes. In the darkness he saw his wife, his son and the Aquarium, with Heng sitting in his corner on the sixth floor, waiting for him.

  Dread passed through his body like an electric current. He shivered as if a cold wind had caught him by surprise. He saw the bus coming that would take him to the Aquarium, and he got up, pulling a handful of change out of his pocket. As he climbed onto the bus, he squeezed into the crowded aisle, reaching for a strap from the ceiling. He could hardly breathe. He asked himself if he’d ever met anyone in his life who had made things easy for him? No name floated into his head. As the bus turned into the flow of traffic, Munny took his time thinking, telling himself he must have missed someone, starting back with his father and mother. The main lesson of his life so far had been a simple one—a man needed to surround himself with people who controlled their greed and violence. He looked around at the other people on the bus. He found dead, expressionless faces, lost in their cell phones. They were all searching for a connection to someone.

  Munny talked aloud to himself, whispering as if he were talking to someone else: “Be careful. See what’s happening around you. It’s not on a screen. Life’s an elbow about to break your ribs if you don’t watch out. ”

  An old woman with heavy shopping bags stared at him as if he were crazy or dangerous or both. He’d been talking in Khmer. He smiled, but she turned away. Munny got off the bus at the next light and walked fifty meters down Sukhumvit Road.

  He checked the time on his cell phone—it was almost nine-thirty a.m. when Munny turned into the sub-soi and saw a crowd of farangs lined up outside the Aquarium. He’d never seen such a large group of foreigners in the front entrance to the urban ruins. It spooked him, thinking something bad must have happened.

  Munny moved closer, stopping a few meters from the Thai-Chinese owner and two of his employees. The farangs handed money to one of the employees. A young blonde woman with a tattoo of a Chinese dragon on her right arm, the tail winding down to her wrist, held out a one hundred baht note. One of the foreigners grabbed Munny’s arm.

  “Hey, buddy. There’s a queue. Go to the back,” said the man with a Lincolnshire accent.

  “I live here,” said Munny.

  “Nice try, buddy. Go to the back of the queue.”

  Munny tried to catch the eye of the owner, but the old man with thinning hair and a turkey neck stared right through him as if he were a ghost. Munny went to the back of the line.

  “What’s going on?” Munny asked two strangers.

  “There are thousands of tropical fish inside,” said one of the teenaged girls. “It’s amazing.”

  Her companion, a redhead, nodded.

  “It’s brilliant. They’re in the basement of this derelict piece of shit. Can you believe it?”

  Munny took a fresh look at the crowd. They’d come to look at the fish? By the time Munny reached the head of the queue, one of the employees recognized him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He handed him a hundred baht.

  “I’ve come to see the fis
h.”

  “That’s another forty baht for the rice.”

  “I’ve already eaten,” said Munny.

  “It’s for the fish, stupid water buffalo.”

  He held up a five baht bag of rice and thrust it into Munny’s hands.

  “Give me forty baht.”

  Munny handed him two rumpled twenty baht notes and entered through the front. Another employee in the newly formed enterprise led the tourists to the basement. From the look of the customers, they averaged around twenty-two years old. They were a group of backpackers who’d taken a bus from Khao San Road.

  In twenty-four hours, the fish-in-the-basement story had taken off on the social media. The first photographs of huge, exotic tropical fish caught suspended midair as they jumped, breaking the surface of the brackish water, appeared on thousands of screens. Tourists dropped their bongs, plans and bottles and rushed to be among the first to locate and photograph the post-apocalyptic future. Selfies with exotic fish in the basement of an abandoned relic high-rise without walls—it was the must-have photo for the gap-year student of the day.

  Munny shook his head as he walked up the stairs away from the basement. Halfway up the flight, a young backpacker in jeans and a faded “I Am Awesome” T-shirt blocked his path. Behind him was another backpacker with blue eyes and long, unwashed black hair tied into a ponytail.

  “I know you,” said the guy in the T-shirt.

  Munny blinked, thinking that the man, who was a foot taller than him, had made a mistake.

  “Munny, remember me? I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

  He sounded a little hurt by Munny’s blank stare.

  Munny had no recollection of the farang until he rolled up his right sleeve and displayed a tattoo—a map of Vietnam. The Mekong Delta started at his right elbow and Hanoi rested near his shoulder. For the words, written in Cambria font—the customer had insisted it had to be that font—Saigon, Hanoi and Da Lat, he’d used a special neon blue ink.