Crackdown Page 5

  “It’s because of the bull that we appreciate the docility of the cow. The cow is the gold standard. I’ve tried to explain this to Fah. But even though she’s in university, she knows almost nothing. Forget bullfighting, I said to her. Look at the stars. What do you know about the stars? She says Taurus is her favorite constellation. I defied her to find it in the sky. I offered her ten thousand baht if she could find it. She just smiled, took my hand and stroked it. Of course, I gave her the money even before we went out to look at the night sky. And what can you see in Bangkok anyway? You can hardly see the moon.”

  He seemed to be merely distracting himself by talking about the stars. He grinned then as if some random thought had returned him to his original complaint about Fah.

  “The stupid girl studies political science at university. How she ever thought science could be found in politics remains a mystery. She should know better. Her father was murdered. He was one of those stupid political activists leading a demonstration against a mining company. Of course, a local mafia boss hired a gunman. No one was ever arrested, and his murder is an unsolved crime. What did he expect? Where did he think he lived? Of course they were going to kill him. I could have told him that. There’s no science in the fact you don’t go around challenging the military or big corporations.

  “Afterwards, her mother fled with a boiler-room player to live in Stockholm. He threw her out after nine months, and she came back to Thailand broke. Now Fah supports her. I support Fah. You can see the chain reaction. Fah was stranded, working on a fucking worthless degree and no real job. Showing rich people to tables in a French restaurant was all she used to have to look forward to.”

  “That’s where you came in,” said Calvino.

  “I offered to rescue her. And to support her mother. I admit it. Six months ago she appreciated what I’d done for her. Not now. She doesn’t listen to me when I talk. She says things like, ‘When the army overthrows a government, they know the water buffalo will chew and stare, and wait.’

  “And I said, ‘A water buffalo doesn’t care who’s in charge so long as it’s fed. Its owners come and go. It’s the big bulls that the owners fear. The possibility of an alpha bull charging, now that’s serious business. That idea fuels the generals’ sleepless nights. In their dreams they’re in a ring with a dozen bulls charging, goring them with their horns. And as they lie there dying, not a single clown comes to their defense. She asked me, ‘Where is the honor in the generals’ martial law, curfew and guns?’ And I said, ‘You sound like what I imagine your father sounded like, and what happened to him?’ She suddenly got very quiet. I think it hit her. She’s her father’s daughter.”

  “You’ve figured her out. What do you need from me?” asked Calvino.

  “I can’t believe for a minute that these thoughts are hers. She must be seeing someone, a radical who may be a lover. Some young buck as suicidal as her father. But I need evidence. I want proof. I want you to find out who it is. I want you to follow her.”

  “Like in the movies?” asked Calvino.

  “Find out the truth.”

  Most of Calvino’s cases were about someone lying, and the client hired him to find the truth. Only he knew that truth is like light; the purity of the white light we see is just an illusion, an impure mixture of colors. Osborne had dragged him out of bed and over a body to instruct him to follow Fah and to report where Fah went, what she said and who she slept with. But modern technology had disrupted the old romantic methodology used since the PI heyday of the 1940s.

  “I’ll give you an iPhone,” said Calvino. “It’ll be in the box. And you can give it to her as a present.”

  Osborne stared at him, his brow furrowed.

  “How romantic.”

  “The phone will be loaded with software so I can see her, hear her and know where she is twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Trust and verify is the heart of romance.”

  Osborne lifted his weight to one side and removed a wad of cash from his pocket. It was hard to judge the thickness, but it looked like a couple hundred grand in thousand baht notes. He peeled off about a hundred notes and handed them to Calvino.

  “Go on, take it. Get me the phone, and keep the rest for bus fare just in case the software doesn’t work and you need to follow her in person.”

  He flexed his jaws and his eyes popped out as he stared straight into the distance, as if a bull had challenged him and was about to charge. Alan Osborne was a fifteen-year-old in an old man’s body. He didn’t care about anything other than putting a sword into the bull’s neck and watching it die.

  FIVE

  “There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.”—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  “THIS SUNDAY MORNING in Bangkok, the sun has risen, but its light does not clear the shadows falling on the path ahead of us.” Fah’s latest tweet reverberated in Calvino’s mind as he headed to Osborne’s house for the second time in forty-eight hours. This time the plan was to meet with the student who had agreed to enter the breeding program of a seventy-four-year-old, and to hand off to her husband the cell phone that would track her every movement and thought.

  Fingering her long hair, barefoot legs pulled up under her, Fah sat on the leather sofa in the same sitting room where a murder had taken place the night before, her iPad open on her lap. She wore her university student uniform—tight-fitting white blouse with buttons down the front, and a tight black skirt hiked to her thighs. Fah elegantly extended her forefinger to flick back and forth between her Twitter and Facebook feeds. How her brain processed the two data streams simultaneously was a question Osborne had once asked her. “It’s how we grew up,” she’d told him. “Not all of us ran off to fight bulls in Spain.”

  Fah showed no evidence of noticing Calvino as he walked in and sat on an overstuffed chair a few feet away.

  “Darling, remember Mr. Calvino?”

  Slowly she lifted her head and nodded at Calvino. He knew that the attention a woman pays to a strange man who suddenly appears in her life can reveal a library of information about her. Fah’s gaze reminded him of something his father had taught him: pay attention to crows, what they’re looking at, where they’re perched, how they move and how many of them have gathered in one place. Crows are incredibly smart, he had said. Watch them and they’ll teach you a lesson on how to balance suspicion with survival. Fah watched him with a crow’s leeriness, never letting him drift from her awareness even when she wasn’t looking at him directly.

  “Say ‘Hello, Mr. Calvino.’ ”

  “Hello, Mr. Calvino,” she said, parroting Osborne’s English accent.

  “I guess you don’t get a lot of visitors,” said Calvino.

  “You’re the first one,” he said, grinning.

  Except the assassin who tried to kill him two nights ago, thought Calvino.

  “Sky has her friends over, though, don’t you, darling? She calls them her study group. Did you have study groups when you went to university, Calvino?”

  “I don’t remember. If they existed, I wasn’t invited to join,” he said. “But they’re common in Thailand.”

  Fah glanced up, perhaps not expecting moral support from one of Osborne’s friends.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she said to Osborne.

  “It’s rubbish. Groups aren’t good for studying any more than they are for sex. Too many distractions from people doing too many things to each other.”

  “Who do you speak for? Me or you?” asked Fah. “Tell me.”

  “Me, of course. Whom else would I be speaking for?”

  After a couple of moments, Calvino noticed that the screensaver had popped up on Fah’s iPad. An image appeared of the fifteen-year-old Alan Osborne in a matador outfit, holding a red cape, eyes fixed on a large black bull with its head lowered and frozen in the bottom right part of the frame. He stared at the youthful photo of Osborne on her screen and tried to imagine that the man next to her
on the sofa was the same person. Age evidently had a terrifying ability to demolish a body and reconstruct it in grotesque ways that were only vaguely reminiscent of the earlier structure. It didn’t help matters that Osborne’s hair was now a deep orange. The boy in the long-ago photo, the teenaged Osborne wearing a matador hat, clearly once had naturally sandy hair.

  What was it with the photos women selected of the men in their lives? Calvino had noticed that when a woman used an image of her man as a screensaver, that spoke volumes about the nature of her affection. Gazing at Fah and Osborne on the sofa, Calvino wondered how deep her affection ran. Other women had other ideas about photographs of their men. Christina Tangier’s painted photo of Ballard had captured a private moment with the intention of displaying it to the world. That hadn’t been an act of affection. It had been a kind of theft that had left Ballard feeling a victim. She’d found a way of gaining ownership of a man: steal and publicly display his most private face, the one only he possessed, the one that only a handful of people, including his mother, had ever witnessed, and sell his nakedness as conceptual art.

  “Did Alan show you his lab?”

  Calvino liked her already.

  “I had the tour.”

  “Weird, right?”

  “As a clinical education?” asked Calvino. “It was eye opening.”

  She shifted her legs around.

  “ ‘Clinical.’ I know that word. What’s it mean?”

  “If you know the word, then you know what it means,” said Osborne.

  “Give me a hint.”

  “As in ‘clinic,’ where you get tested for STD.”

  She nodded.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to the iPad.

  The matador screensaver vanished as she began flicking through her contacts online.

  Not long ago there had been a dead man in the doorway. The killer had leaned over a microscope looking at his mostly dead sperm. Calvino tried to fit the pieces together and found that some puzzles resist solution. Calvino glanced toward the door. There was no evidence of what had happened there. Osborne’s team of cleaners had done a thoroughly professional job.

  “I told you Sky had spunk,” said Osborne.

  “You can call me Fah, Mr. Calvino.”

  So formal, yet she managed a smile.

  “It means Sky, but a hippie name never seems quite suitable for a Thai,” said Osborne. “She’s been naughty. Haven’t you, darling?”

  “I am always good, my husband.”

  She pursed her lips and blew him a kiss.

  “There, you see how polite she is? That’s why I want her to have my baby. And I’ve come to accept that she has a hippie name.”

  It seemed to be Calvino’s destiny, each time Fah came into the picture, to witness a tug of war over whether to use the Thai “Fah” or the English “Sky.”

  Fah’s phone rang with the chimes of Big Ben. She answered it. For a couple of minutes she spoke in Thai.

  “What’s she saying?” Osborne whispered to Calvino.

  “Making arrangements with her study group,” he said.

  “I want you to find out about this group. Who are they?”

  “I thought they came to study here.”

  “Once or twice. Two skinny Thai boys who looked no more than fourteen years old. I asked them if they were really old enough for university. One of them looked quite pissed off. He thought I’d insulted them, but it was a compliment. Doesn’t everyone want to look younger?”

  “Not when they are young,” said Calvino.

  Fah ended her call and rose from the sofa.

  “I have to go now, Mr. Calvino.”

  “There’s a curfew,” said Osborne.

  “Not at eleven in the morning, darling,” she answered.

  “What are the names of the boys in this study group?”

  “I told you a thousand times. Oak and Palm.”

  “Those aren’t actual names of people. They’re the names of trees.”

  She rolled her eyes, leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Nice hair.”

  She stood up and smoothed out her black skirt. Calvino could see how her narrow waist, long legs and long, black hair would attract the attention of men and cause anxiety in Osborne each time she walked out the door.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “We’re working on a group term paper, and yes, it is necessary if I’m going to graduate.”

  Fah’s electric smile dulled a little as if she’d rotated an internal dimmer switch. She appeared less sure of herself the more she tried to explain herself to Osborne. She packed up her iPad, tucked her phone into a Gucci bag and started to walk out. Her confidence gained altitude as she neared the door.

  “I won’t be late.”

  “Say hello to the Tree Brothers for me,” said Osborne.

  “They aren’t brothers and they aren’t trees,” she stopped to say, “but I will tell them hello.”

  “Liar.”

  Then she was gone, and Osborne let his head collapse against the back of the sofa.

  “Political science. There’s no science in it, only guns, tanks and soldiers. She’s young; she’ll learn. Meanwhile, at my age I’m finding that Sky can be a handful. One day you too will be old, Calvino.”

  Calvino didn’t need any reminders as he slipped a hand into his bag and retrieved Fah’s new iPhone 6.

  Seeing the sleek prize, Osborne nodded with approval, leaned to his side, stuck his hand into his side pocket, removing out the thick wedge of thousand baht notes once more. He licked his fingers, counted out several dozen notes and offered them to Calvino.

  “At least take some money for the phone.”

  Calvino made no move, leaving Osborne’s hand hanging midair.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t want money, Calvino.”

  Calvino was still working off the karmic debt left by Rob’s murder. Osborne was no fool; he was perfectly aware that guilt was a far more powerful currency than money. He folded the notes back into his wad and stuck it in his pocket again.

  “You think I’m too hard on her, right? And you think I was too hard on Rob, and if I’d been easier on him, he wouldn’t have run off to Rangoon to get murdered. You think I’m a bastard.”

  “It’s time I headed back to the office.”

  “I can see in your eyes you think I’m a bastard. At least you don’t lie, or your eyes don’t. And I am a bastard. So what?”

  He left Osborne seated on the sofa, his pants pocket stuffed with cash. The word “bastard” free-floated between them, seeking a response that wouldn’t come from Calvino.

  On the way back to Sukhumvit Road, Calvino thought of Osborne alone inside his mansion compound, not a stain of blood in the doorway or hint of violence anywhere on the premises. Osborne’s great skill was knowing how to clean up a mess, make it invisible, but he never thought to ask himself if treating his wives and children like employees made him just another boss who would accept nothing short of servitude. Like political science, Calvino thought, Osborne’s approach to personal relationships was less a science than an art. It required making a map of those close and those far as a guide for allocating the suffering, favoring those closest to him.

  On the way out, Calvino passed the pale yellow, freshly washed and polished vintage Rolls Royce, the sun reflecting off the windscreen.

  SIX

  “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”—George Orwell

  AT CALVINO’S CONDO that morning, Ballard had had a proposition. Calvino was only half-listening, his mind distracted by the image of Elite John Number 22 asleep beside a teddy bear, its top hat cocked to the right. Ballard repeated the offer—he’d found a buyer from the Middle East who would pay double the previous auction price for the 1154 map. Was Calvino interested?

  Ballard seemed to assume that finding a buyer in a cash deal was doing Calvino a favor, but he had only part
of the map’s story. If he’d had the full background, he wouldn’t have bothered.

  “It has sentimental value,” said Calvino.

  “She dumped you. How could it have sentimental value?”

  “I thought you tried to buy the original Elite John Number 22,” said Calvino.

  “That was different. Self-preservation isn’t sentimentality.”

  “I’d miss it,” said Calvino.

  “The money would help you forget.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Calvino noted Ballard’s frustration in failing to sell him on the deal. Why did Ballard care? The promise of a fat commission would be one good reason. Ballard was scrambling for money amid the wreckage left by Christina’s exhibition. He would have to find his financial salvation somewhere else. Ever since the day Yoshi gave Calvino the map, he knew that, whatever the resale value, this was one asset he would never sell.

  With most clients, after the case was finished, Calvino found there was little reason to maintain contact. The PI life was like life on a film set, where crew and cast bond during an intense six or eight-week period. They might vow to be best friends forever, but life usually intervenes, and a new set of best friends soon fills the space. Calvino knew that ad hoc clans focused on a common goal usually fall apart as soon as the goal is achieved. In the role of private investigator he was a bit actor in a client’s drama. The client may cast him as a kind of hero when the case was solved, then the drama ended. The cast always disbanded and moved on to other sets, new dramas and a new set of best friends.

  However, every ten years or so an exception to the rule came along. In the case of Dr. Yoshi Nagata—Japanese-Canadian mystic, mathematician, guru and yoga master—client and PI had by the end experienced what passed for real friendship. Still, in the days leading up to the coup, a year and a half had passed with no contact. He’d heard nothing from Dr. Marley Solberg either. He suspected that it wouldn’t be a permanent silence, though, and that once it was broken, there’d be a blinding light like a supernova.