Crackdown Page 3

  “A gay New York investment banker paid Christina’s gallery in Soho about the same amount for the original signed, a painted photo of me in the style of Lucien Freud hugging a fucking Mr. Teddy Bear. Who knows what it’ll be worth in the future? But I got nothing out of it. After a losing deal like that, a businessman needs upbeat, positive people around him, who believe the future will be better than the past.”

  “How’s that going, finding that kind of person?”

  “Even after a coup people like that keep believing in the future. Someone who’s powerful will play a future wild card,” said Ballard. He shrugged. “A coup can be a good thing for someone like me. Chances are good that someone on the losing side with plenty of assets wants to liquidate and get out while he can. That’s where I come in. And that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “What’s this?”

  “People who might want to lighten up on their assets. After all, you got dumped. I got dumped. At least you have something to show for it. Sell the map. Forget her. Like you said in the taxi, famous women don’t need us. What I need from you is some help. Maybe an introduction or two.”

  He fished in his pants pocket and handed Calvino a list. Calvino glanced at the familiar family names of well-known businessmen, politicians, senior government officials and their wives and children. He folded up the list and handed it back to Ballard.

  “What do you think?”

  Calvino returned his gaze to the map.

  “I didn’t take you for a vulture.”

  “If it’s not me, it’ll be someone else. And I won’t cheat them.”

  “I can’t help,” said Calvino.

  Ballard saw a man he couldn’t buy.

  “No hard feelings,” he said. “Why don’t I take you to dinner while I’m here at a restaurant I like near the Oriental Hotel? And you can tell me the story of how a private eye in Bangkok helped a famous woman like Marley Solberg enough for her to give him a priceless map.

  “Often the backstory of a work of art is as important as the object itself, wouldn’t you agree? Works of art come from inspiration. It’s said that Edvard Munch was inspired to paint The Scream after witnessing blood-red clouds at sunset. And Grant Wood used his sister and his dentist in American Gothic to paint the farmer and his daughter. With your map, the story of the mapmaker may be lost in time, but the story of the famous mathematician buying it for a private investigator in Bangkok excites my curiosity.”

  That’s how the conversation ended, abruptly and without any clear demarcation of the boundary between Ballard’s business and personal life. As with most strangers, the parts of the story Calvino knew only made the unknown parts more intriguing. But life was too short to set off and cross every boundary line, and Calvino had a feeling that once Ballard left, he wouldn’t hear from him again. Ballard had wanted something and needed Calvino’s help to get it. Having failed, he would cut his losses and move on.

  Calvino lay back in his bed, gazing through the window at the curfew-darkened skyline of Bangkok. He hadn’t thought of Ballard as a man driven by obsessions. The way Ballard had focused on the framed map caused Calvino to wonder if his houseguest had an art connoisseur’s eye. A lover of jazz who brokered ship deals: such a man might have an eclectic range of interests. But Ballard’s interest in the map extended beyond the artifact to the person who had given it to Calvino. What story could Calvino possibility tell to someone like Ballard about Marley Solberg? They’d been mismatched. She was young, wealthy, a genius, and he was a middle-aged ex-lawyer, a private investigator who handled small-time expat cases that made him neither rich nor famous. He was another face in the Bangkok crowd; she was a mathematical superstar. Her photograph had appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Forbes, and her papers were published in the top journals. Ballard was right. He’d been out of his league with her.

  She’d come into his life as a client. But no one, especially Ballard, would buy a story that a mere client would give him a thank-you worth a small fortune. Ballard must have seen there had to be something else to it, and there was. As with all good stories, understanding the power and force of the tale wasn’t possible without knowing the pain behind it. The forced mass exodus of the Rohingya people from Burma had deeply affected Marley—the wanton cruelty and brutality at every step of their exodus, from their burnt-out villages to overcrowded boats and jungle detention camps, and the sale of many of them into slavery along the way. She’d created an underground network to smuggle some Rohingya out of Thailand. By the time she’d hired Calvino, Marley had experienced her own personal nightmare, one that lay beyond her control. Calvino knew that there is no grief to compare with that of a mother who loses her child. He had been beside her as she held on through that period of darkness. When a man and a woman share such a journey, they are fused together, bonded in the fire of human suffering.

  As Calvino had stood before the map with Ballard, his mind had been pulled back to his last night with Marley, on her yacht, how he’d felt her breath on his neck in the dark stateroom as she’d arched her spine, moaned, her nails in his back, then let her hands go limp and slide down his sides. Afterwards, they had lain curled together on the sofa. In those minutes Calvino had felt closer to her than he’d ever felt with another human being. They hadn’t spoken, nor could he have produced any words for the feelings that flooded through him.

  The memory of that night had much to do with its location, sobriety, mood, perfume and music, but above all the newness of a beautiful body that remained a largely unexplored terrain. In the stateroom of Marley’s yacht, all of those elements had lined up. The two had torn each other’s clothes off and soon extinguished the world outside, clinging to each other as if to brace for a headlong fall into the void. The world had vanished, as if magically forgotten, shed like a skin, and two warm-blooded animals had sealed themselves together inside a new skin. The sadness of knowing that the transition was only momentary had made them all the more desperate. Afterward, she had put a finger to his lips, knowing he wanted to protest the loss.

  “There’s so much you want to say, and so much more than you ever could say,” she had said. “More to say than would be possible in a hundred lifetimes.”

  She had paused a few seconds, letting the motion of the yacht fill the silence. When that moment had passed, she had re-emerged as her usual self, saying, “That was like discovering an unexpected, perfect and beautiful proof of P=NP. Thank you.” Marley had begun her descent back to the world of algorithms and mathematical proofs, her home base. Her touch was once again like a pen stroke on a whiteboard. They no longer shared a common skin, and the separation came as a shock to him.

  “What’s this beautiful proof you worked out?” he’d asked.

  “An entanglement between opposites.”

  “You mean the two of us?”

  He’d felt her kiss on his neck.

  “No, not about you and me. We aren’t opposites.”

  “And we’re still entangled,” Calvino had said, tightening his leg around her thigh.

  But the mood for playfulness had already passed. Marley had raised herself, leaned over and picked up her glass of wine.

  “Anger and violence occupy the same orbit as desire and pleasure. There’s an immense gravity that attracts them. Their orbits aren’t stable. It’s only a matter of time before they collide. And when they do, they annihilate each other.”

  “After they’re destroyed, then what?”

  “Peace. Silence. Like the moment we just had.”

  “But you’re not in that space now. You’re upset.”

  She had shaken her head.

  “I’ve never been more calm. Thank you for that.”

  “You’re still grieving the loss of your child. I can help you, but you have to want me to.”

  “A man gave an order to firebomb the refugee camp. I want him to experience my feeling of loss, not just for my child but for those who died in the camp. I know who it was. It would be so
easy to have him killed. But that would be stupid. He’d be given a hero’s funeral. He’d be remembered with honor, and not as the man who wiped out a refugee village in the North and trafficked Rohingya in the South. I want to take away what he treasures most—his reputation, his status, his identity. I want to strip him of his general’s uniform, his rank and medals, and his friends. Do you still want to help me?”

  True to her word, Marley had shared the General’s Twitter messages with his minor wife, his two giks and his wife. What had surprised Marley was that the exposure, while causing the wife a public humiliation, hadn’t ruined her life. She had been married not to the man but to his position and status, and that hadn’t changed. It had been a valuable lesson for Marley.

  A couple of months after that last night on the yacht, it was clear that Marley wasn’t coming back. Calvino stopped waiting to hear from her. She’d really gone and he started to come to terms with that fact. He’d returned to those neon lit casinos where love was for sale and pulled the lever but never hit a jackpot.

  This wasn’t a story to share with Ballard over dinner. Their love had become a story of loss, and neither Ballard nor anyone else wanted to hear such a tale. What Ballard wanted to hear was how Marley was another famous woman like Christina who had done him wrong. The map she’d given to Calvino had simply raised a question mark about the nature of the wrong.

  Ballard’s last words that night had challenged Calvino to explain what extraordinary help he’d extended to Marley. Ballard had started with the wrong assumption. It wasn’t about his private investigator services. The ancient map had another meaning for Marley. And if he studied the map long and hard enough, he might find a hidden passage that would take him back to their time together in the dark stateroom of her yacht.

  TWO

  “As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

  AUBURN-BROWN HAIR dye bubbled along the coils of Alan Osborne’s thinning white locks. In the dim light the effect was not unlike a healthy smear of African lion dung applied as a young man’s rite of passage, the final purification ceremony. Osborne wore thin plastic gloves, and the blue veins running along his wrists looked like the excited jellyfish innards on a screensaver. As he passed from the bathroom into the bedroom, his eye caught movement on the computer screen, which showed live shots from a number of CCTV cameras positioned outside his house.

  Osborne stopped, leaned forward and watched the image of a man outlined in the center of his computer screen. In his right hand was a gun. The gunman, dressed in black, pulled a balaclava over his face.

  It was two in the morning when the gunman slipped inside the house. He must have had a map of the interior because he made his way directly and silently to the second-floor sitting room off the master bedroom. Osborne, according to the script, would be asleep. The intruder would creep into the bedroom, finish his job and return the way he’d entered.

  Instead he saw Osborne dive to the floor from his desk chair at the end of the sitting room. The gunman fired a double shot from the 9mm that punched holes in the wall six inches above Osborne’s head, dusting his wet, matted hair with powdery plaster. The chemist who had invented the hair dye hadn’t considered that possibility when writing the warnings on the box.

  The gunman crouched inside the doorway, aiming the gun for a third shot. Osborne had crawled behind the couch on all fours. He reached up to open a hidden panel and removed an M16 rifle with a full clip and a round in the chamber. He returned a burst in a nice cluster over the left side of the gunman’s chest. Whatever heart had beaten inside suddenly had a series of new chambers leaking blood.

  Alan Osborne raised his head above the couch and stared, blinking at the crumpled body, motionless on the parquet floor. Still holding the M16, he moved away from the couch toward the doorway. He knelt beside the body and then sat, legs crossed, while he pulled out his cell phone and auto-dialed a number. The M16 now rested against the dead man’s shoulder.

  Osborne saw a flicker of gold. He reached down and found the source around the gunman’s neck. He held in his palm an amulet still warm from the dead man’s body heat. Thai gunmen for hire believed amulets protected them from bullets.

  “I trust this is still under warranty,” Osborne muttered, letting the amulet flop back against the body.

  He rose to his feet, picked up the M16 and walked back to his computer. Protection from death derived from mystical powers in Thailand, but when an amulet failed to protect the wearer, the true believers could always blame the dead man for failing to perform the empowerment rituals.

  Osborne wasn’t interested in amulets or blame. His concern was the body in the doorway. The only professional he wished to indulge in was not an astrologer but someone to help him clean up the mess. Osborne was a practical man.

  As Osborne waited for Calvino to pick up the phone, he caught a glimpse of himself in the hallway mirror. A thin coat of plaster had stuck to the dye in his hair. It made him look like a nineteenth-century English barrister on his way to the Old Bailey criminal court in London to argue why his client shouldn’t be hanged.

  Calvino reached for the phone. It was two a.m. He saw that it was Alan Osborne’s number. The thought crossed his mind to roll over and go back to sleep. He let the phone ring out.

  A moment later Calvino’s phone rang again. Osborne wasn’t giving up.

  “Are you okay?” asked Osborne.

  “You’re phoning at two in the morning to ask if I’m okay?”

  “I need you to come around. It’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “That’s a bargirl’s excuse. I thought better of you, Calvino.”

  Calvino sat up in bed, switched on a table light and checked his watch.

  “I have a houseguest.”

  “Give her some money and throw her out.”

  “There’s a curfew, Alan. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I see. You’re afraid. I rather overestimated you.”

  When Calvino arrived at Osborne’s private compound, Alan was watching from his computer screen and opened the automatic front gate. He went downstairs and waited at the door as Calvino parked his car. He stood in the open door as Calvino got out and walked up the stone path.

  “Calvino, I have a problem,” Alan said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “My ex-partner is trying to kill me.”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  “Because he thinks I’m trying to kill him.”

  “Are you?”

  “He deserves to die.”

  “You’re sure it’s your ex-partner?”

  “No. It could be the crook I sold my nightclub to. He’s out of cash and he’s in arrears for the last two installments. Or it could be one of several ex-wives, or an employee or a customer with a grudge. The man I killed tonight was hired by somebody.”

  Calvino followed Osborne up the staircase.

  “Was he a professional?”

  “A semi-professional. If he’d been a professional, I’d be dead.”

  He led Calvino to the sitting room. Osborne stepped over the body that lay in the doorway. Calvino stopped, rested on his haunches and felt for a pulse on the neck. There was none.

  “I don’t handle dead body removals,” said Calvino, looking up.

  “I’m aware of the limits of your expertise. Removals require specialists,” said Osborne. “They’ve been called.”

  Osborne poured Calvino a glass of whiskey and handed it to him.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have ice.”

  “You shot him?” Calvino said, nodding at the M16 on the sofa.

  “He didn’t shoot himself. I doubt he was competent enough.”

  “Why do you believe it was your ex-partner who sent him?”

  “He hates me. But they all do.”

  “Where’s Fah?”

 
; “Sky is spending the night at a friend’s. She couldn’t get back before curfew.”

  Osborne could never get the tone right for his wife’s Thai nickname and stubbornly insisted on calling her by its English translation: Sky.

  “It just so happens that Fah didn’t make it back on the very night a gunman slips into your compound?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, but no, Sky doesn’t hate me. She loves me, and I make certain she knows I’m worth far more alive to her than dead. With women that’s an essential precaution.”

  “Right,” said Calvino.

  “Don’t be cynical. It warps your judgment.”

  Calvino downed the whiskey, wondering if Osborne was being ironic. He looked over at the body and the gun lying beside it. Osborne picked up the whiskey bottle and refilled Calvino’s glass.

  “Is that why you got me out of bed to see a body, so you could impart some of your homespun wisdom about women? Or was there something else you wanted?”

  Osborne sighed.

  “Frankly, I’m worried about Sky. Not that she wants to kill me. That I could understand. There’s always someone who wants to kill you for your money. You can’t get too bothered about it. If you do, give away your money and no one will care whether you live or die, let alone try to kill you. No, Calvino, I’m worried about Sky’s state of mind since the coup.”

  “Any reason to worry?”

  “She’s been disappearing around two in the morning. Slips out of bed, thinks I’m asleep. I want to know if she’s having an affair.”

  Calvino sat on a sofa ten feet away from the body that blocked the entrance to Osborne’s sitting room. He wondered if Osborne knew the Thai saying that it was “Better to be a lover of an old man, than the slave of a youth.” Fah would have known it. She was living proof of it or so Osborne had assumed until a doubt entered his head. Calvino gestured at the corpse.

  “There’s a dead body in your doorway, and your concern is that your girlfriend has a boyfriend?”