Crackdown Page 4

  Osborne grinned and let out a long sigh.

  “Yes. You can be quite perceptive when you want to be. That’s exactly what I want you to find out. Let me know one way or another. In those first months after I became her sponsor, she was so grateful. She had good reason to be. Her father dead, her mother destitute—the usual family horror story—and there I was riding in on a white horse to save the day. The thing is, Sky was always polite, in that coy Thai way. Of course it’s an act, but it never lasts, does it? I’m not that big a fool. Did I tell you before that her maternal grandfather is younger than me?”

  He had told Calvino that. Up to now the age difference had been a source of pride for Osborne. The more years between him and his latest girlfriend, the happier it had made him.

  Calvino had met Fah once. She was a university student in Bangkok. A week into her new job at an upscale restaurant, Alan Osborne had dined there. Fah seated customers, checking off their names on the reservation list. With all the demonstrations and protests, business was bad. The owner told her that he might not be able to keep her for more than a month. Then Osborne drove up in his Rolls Royce with his usual entourage of two dogs: a Jack Russell and a Golden Lab. The restaurant owner, being French, allowed customers to bring their dogs in and thought nothing of Osborne feeding them buns from the breadbasket. By the time the second course arrived, Fah was sitting at Osborne’s corner table, petting the Jack Russell. When it jumped in her lap, she smiled and stroked its neck with her long, red fingernails. Osborne said that at that precise moment he fell in love with Fah.

  On the third date Osborne offered to build a three-bedroom house for her family, give her mother an allowance, buy her a BMW and deposit more money in her bank account than she could earn in a lifetime as a university graduate. On the fourth date she moved into his house. That had been six months earlier. Alan had found her price. He’d used the word “grateful” to describe her acceptance. He’d spoken about his “Sky” like a man obsessed with a woman he hoped might change her mind about him. Given the age gap, his anxiety on that score wasn’t entirely irrational.

  “Why is it that women are filled with gratitude when you choose them, and after a year or so they have a secret life and late-night meetings? Gratitude never lasts. It inevitably collapses into entitlement. What have you done for me today? The only solution is to make them pregnant. Did I tell you that Sky has agreed to be the mother of my child? In those circumstances, you can understand why I can’t have her out fucking around.”

  Before Calvino could reply, Osborne’s phone rang. He spoke in English. A moment later there was a knock on the door.

  “Could you get the door?” he asked Calvino.

  Osborne had mastered the art of turning everyone around him into service staff of one sort or another. There was no guile or meanness in his request, just a deeply embedded sense of noblesse. Calvino walked down the stairs and opened the door.

  Three men passed Calvino in the entranceway without so much as a hello and walked in as if they lived in the house. They gathered next to the stairs.

  “Where’s the body?”

  Calvino pointed up. The men climbed the staircase to the second floor and Calvino followed behind them. The crew had come prepared. One carried a quantity of large plastic garbage bags while dragging on rollers an oversized black piece of cargo luggage of the kind used by commercial enterprises to transport large items. One of the other men positioned himself behind the luggage to help steer it up the stairs. The third man carried duct tape, rope, box cutters and two handguns in holsters on his hips. He looked like the boss.

  Osborne remained seated on the sofa, sipping his whiskey, as the three men approached the body lying at the door to the room.

  “This doesn’t look like a FedEx,” Calvino announced from behind, “but these three men in dark glasses are here to pick up your shipment.”

  “He’s dead,” Osborne said to the men. “Step over him and get on with it.”

  Two of the men lifted the body out of the doorway and into the sitting room. Calvino followed them inside. In a moment Osborne was on his feet, gesturing to Calvino.

  “While they clean up, let me show you something.”

  THREE

  “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

  —Jorge Luis Borges

  OSBORNE’S SHOULDERS HUNCHED like an old man as he leaned over an electron microscope in a room he had converted into a makeshift lab.

  “I want to show you my sperm,” he said, with a mischievous smile.

  It was the first time anyone had ever made Calvino such an offer. He looked up from a printout Osborne had insisted that he read. Other printouts lay scattered across a table. They were all copies of scientific reports. The one Calvino held had the catchy title “Motile sperm organelle morphology examination (MSOME) and sperm head vacuoles: state of the art.”

  “Some of them are beautiful. I’m collecting the perfect ones to make them into babies. If only I could have chosen who would have become Rob. What a difference that would have made!”

  Rob, his son, had been killed in a Rangoon flophouse where Calvino had hidden him. Things had gone wrong, and the young man that Calvino had gone to Burma to find had been lost forever. Calvino was sure that if it hadn’t been for that history, he would have been somewhere other than Osborne’s lab just then, about to examine Osborne’s swimmers.

  Alan sat back from the microscope, rubbed his eyes and pointed at a chair a few feet away.

  “Pull that chair over here and have a look.”

  Calvino took a deep breath and fit his right eye snugly into the hard rubber eyepiece, still warm from Osborne’s body heat. Breathing slowly, he fixed his gaze on a mass of long-tailed sperm with massive heads, dancing in knots with no apparent purpose. The damaged spermatozoa, erratic freaks, had a fragile elegance as they struggled against the tide. The report he’d glanced at said the female genitalia were a hostile environment; sperm were likely to be picked off by scavengers or beheaded. The microscopic view revealed a battlefield where most of the wiggly combatants had suffered grave wounds and dismemberments. It looked like a defeated army with only a few healthy survivors swimming among the dead and dying.

  “What do you see?” said Osborne.

  “The way I see it, if you’d been the first alpha male, our species would have plateaued at around five thousand people,” said Calvino, without looking up.

  “Don’t be negative, Calvino. You only need one strong one to make a baby. The rest are cannon fodder. You must understand I love children. It’s when they grow up that everything can turn out wrong.”

  Calvino rose from the chair and ran his fingers through his hair, which had started to show grey. He worried if he’d end up like Osborne hunched over a microscope looking for one or two swimmers that could finish the course.

  “Alan, look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you should consider getting yourself a hobby. Maybe travel.”

  “I already travel.”

  “Then chess. Or learn to read Thai.”

  Calvino sat back in the chair, arms folded, thinking of Osborne’s son’s body, slumped in a chair in the shabby room. When a bullet had entered his head, Calvino, his protector, had been across town sleeping with a woman in a bookshop once frequented by Orwell.

  Osborne pulled an old man’s startled face, like he’d been stabbed.

  “I don’t need to read their lies. It’s enough to hear them.”

  “Collect art or coins or stamps.”

  “And wait to die?”

  Osborne moved his chair forward and pushed his eye back into the eye socket of the microscope.

  “You think I’m crazy. But I don’t care what you think or what anyone else thinks.”

  Calvino believed him. He had never known a man who stood apart from society as much as Alan Osborne. Calvino watched as Osborne lost himself in the microscopic plane, casually shutting out Calvino and the rest of the world. He was travelling, following a
flotilla of spermatozoa, deformed and directionless, as they coiled together in oblivion.

  Perhaps on another occasion a survivor could be found, isolated and sent on a journey of Osborne’s choosing, one where it would face the hostility within Fah’s uterus. Reproduction was still possible for an old man like Osborne, but it was an expensive science project that required outside reading and plenty of homework. He pressed on, determined to take charge. Reproduction was far too serious a task to leave to the whims of biological fate.

  “This time I will choose. I will decide who wins—”

  Osborne stopped mid-sentence as Calvino’s smile widened. Osborne hadn’t said anything amusing. On the contrary, he had been quite serious.

  “Vincent, what are you gawking at?”

  “Your hair. Shouldn’t you wash that shit out?”

  Osborne touched his head and his finger recoiled like a Springfield rifle.

  “I forgot about it in all of the excitement.”

  Osborne looked terrified, his eyes shifting wildly as if he were under attack by a swarm of hornets. He turned and quickly disappeared into the bathroom. Soon Calvino could hear the sound of a shower. A couple of minutes later, cursing and shouting erupted. Osborne emerged from the bathroom, toweling his hair with one hand and carrying the hair dye box in the other.

  “It says leave the dye in for up to thirty minutes. I put the dye on almost three hours ago. Tell me, what has it done to my hair?”

  Osborne drew air in until his cheeks puffed out, all the while slowly rotating his head side to side.

  “I wonder if it’s carcinogenic,” Osborne said.

  “I don’t have a clue,” said Calvino, “but ‘life-enhancing’ doesn’t come to mind.”

  “I almost got shot. That thug made me forget.”

  “He’s paid for it.”

  “If he hadn’t, I’d shoot him again.”

  A noise came from the three men working in the next room. Osborne saw Calvino glance at the door.

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re professionals,” said Osborne.

  Calvino turned back and found that he couldn’t stop staring at Osborne’s hair, which, like his sperm, seemed to have come from another dimension of reality. It had turned a cotton candy orange, a surreal color that would have been difficult to find on a color chart, no matter how extensive.

  Calvino blinked and sat on a chair. This whole night had been like a bad dream. Osborne had roused him out of a deep sleep. He’d stepped over a dead body in a doorway, and now the killer had dyed his hair a brilliant orange. He’d been a private eye for many years in Bangkok, but this was something of a first. “The Orange Haired Killer” had a certain ring to it and might have sold millions of copies of the Daily Mail in Osborne’s native England: “Ex-teenage bullfighter in flaming orange hair turns killer in Bangkok.”

  “Have you looked in the mirror?” asked Calvino.

  “When you’re my age, you avoid mirrors.”

  “I’d keep to that vow if I were you, Alan.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “No need.”

  Calvino wondered why the worst damage a man endured in life was usually self-inflicted through momentary inattention. Given what Osborne had survived that night, though, he might be forgiven.

  “You’re smirking. That makes me curious.”

  Osborne disappeared into the bedroom.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  He walked to the right side of the bed, opened a nightstand drawer and pulled out a mirror. To judge from the perfume bottles, cosmetics and tiny heart-shaped pillows braided with white ribbons, this was clearly Fah’s side of the bed. Osborne sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his reflection.

  “My hair’s orange.”

  “It’s called a bright punk orange. Fashionable. I think it suits you, Alan.”

  “Fah may leave me if she sees this.”

  “Increase her salary.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  Distraught, he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Calvino turned as if to leave the room and the house.

  “Wait,” Osborne said.

  He climbed from the bed, towel still wrapped around his waist like a Roman senator at the baths, and walked to the closet.

  “There’s something else I want to show you,” he said.

  He pulled a small suitcase from the top shelf. It was old, leather, worn, the kind of case that travelers had used a half-century before on long ship voyages. Calvino helped him carry it to the bed. Osborne worked the old release hinges with his fingers and dug through the contents.

  “Would you believe this is me?”

  He handed Calvino a small stack of photographs. He’d seen them before, but each time Osborne showed him the photos, he had to ask the same question.

  “That’s you?”

  “That’s what Fah said. She couldn’t believe it. Look at my hair. Wasn’t it a lovely color then? I was only fifteen.”

  Alan Osborne the teenager stood in a tight-fitting matador’s outfit, holding a cape and gazing into the lens as if the bull were snapping the picture. Calvino looked up. Almost sixty years had taken a man and fashioned him into someone wholly different from the boy in the picture.

  “I ran away to Spain to fight the bulls. I had twenty-three fights in sixteen months. My picture appeared in the English newspapers. It wasn’t every day an English public schoolboy ran off to Spain to become a bullfighter.”

  He pulled out a matador’s outfit and spread the faded pants, sequined vest and black matador’s hat across the bed.

  “I used to fit in that.”

  “It must seem like yesterday,” said Calvino.

  “Yes, it was just yesterday,” he said, finishing his whiskey. “And I remember you before you went crazy.”

  Calvino smiled.

  “I remember that me, too.”

  “You’re up to the job of finding out about Sky?”

  “If you have doubts, you can hire someone else.”

  “They might be crazier than you.”

  “That’s always a risk.”

  “I’m a risk taker, just like you. We feed on fear. It’s like this: if you haven’t mastered your fears by twenty, you’ll always be afraid and will die fearful, just like all the others paralyzed by the prospect of death, pretending they’re still alive.”

  Calvino tried to take in Osborne’s grand words about death and fear, but the sight of the speaker’s orange hair was a circus act rarely seen. Calvino thought Osborne should find another private investigator to handle the case. Then he remembered the answer to that suggestion: what would another investigator make of Osborne? Fire-bright orange hair, an old suitcase full of photographs of him as a boy matador and a microscope charting ships to be sent on a mission inside Fah.

  Osborne picked up the matador outfit and held it at arm’s length.

  “This is how I learnt about controlling fear.”

  FOUR

  “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  CALVINO HAD HEARD it before: Alan Osborne’s sixteen months as a bullfighter in Spain had shaped him for the rest of his life. As a novillero, he had faced death in the ring. He had found courage to stand his ground. When he was a young boy, his father had told him many stories of his safari adventures and how they had made him a man. They’d taught him valuable life lessons, ones that had allowed him to understand the world and other people.

  “My father said that in Africa, as he watched large herds of zebras, he wondered why no one had domesticated zebras, milked them, slaughtered them for meat or put harnesses on them and used them as beasts of burden. The Africans smiled and shook their heads at the white man’s desire to tame the zebra. They knew zebras were nasty creatures. No one had ever tamed one. Later he found that the same held true of the panda in China. They were unpredictable, vicious and wild. Walt Disney, who’d never been on safari, made
pandas and zebras look cuddly. He denied them their wildness.

  “My father said most people were more like cows, easily herded, corralled and fed, but that made them profitable to own, rent, use or sell. They would stand for hours chewing their cud and never challenge a barbed wire fence. Cows submitted. Wildness had been knocked out of them. And I said to my father, ‘What about bulls?’ ”

  Osborne could see his father smiling as he thought about a huge black bull kicking up dust with its hind legs, nostrils flaring, eyes wild.

  “The Spanish put the bull in a ring with forty thousand people in the stands, on their feet, cheering as the matador tests his courage against a beast that wishes to destroy him. The bulls test the resolve of a man who faces that which can’t be tamed. The bull will not submit. He challenges, and men learn from that confrontation. The wildness of the bull will not save him in the ring. His nature is the instrument of his destruction.

  “Every matador is a teacher for others who lack this courage. It is a rare man who can enter the ring knowing not only that his sword must be steady and true, but that the bull must be respected for his strength, brute force and determination to survive. Yet he must kill what we admire most in other creatures: the refusal to surrender.

  “But bullfighters grow old,” Osborne concluded.

  What he didn’t say, thought Calvino, was that you’ll find no old bullfighters active in the ring. Instead they color their hair orange.

  Calvino listened patiently to Osborne’s story of youth and bullfighting, though he’d heard it many times before. How the new generation of bulls had lost nothing of their speed, reflexes, anger and strength. How courage was for the young. It flowed best when the mind was still forming and believed in its indestructibility. Old men, Osborne said, were the clowns that distract the bull when the matador stumbled and fell. The matador has helpers. Only the bull is alone in the ring. No clowns, no friends, not an ally to rush to his defense. When he dies, it is with honor and dignity, and in freedom. The audience rise to their feet, shouting encouragement, the ring of applause echoing in the stadium, a standing ovation to courage and death. The matador has redeemed them. Audiences live through their proxies, funneling their collective courage into the tiny figure in the ring holding a red cape, ice running through his veins as the bull charges.