Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Read online

  “The official report from Fat Stuart’s autopsy listed ‘heart stopped’ as the cause of death. We’ve had to explain to French- Canadian parents that their thirty-two-year-old son died of a heart attack. That is a little difficult. Because it was murder. Do you have any idea who might have killed Mr. L’Blanc?”

  Calvino closed his eyes. He had figured from the moment that she walked into his office that this was the real question she had wanted to ask. Now she had to wait for him to reply. He let the silence grow—that kind of crazy, itchy silence, which gets under the skin of the person waiting for an answer.

  “I don’t know,” said Calvino. “But I would rule out food vendors. They will probably be the only people who will miss Fat Stuart, or even notice that he’s gone.”

  She lost her composure and tears bubbled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He handed her a tissue and watched her dry them. “His parents think it’s our fault their son died in Bangkok. I know it’s stupid. But they really think this. We have Canadian troops in Cambodia with UNTAC and we haven’t had a single loss. And their son dies in Bangkok. They want the Embassy to find the murderer. We are an embassy, not a police department. But they don’t understand that. Mr. L’Blanc’s father has influence in Ottawa and in Washington. So I’m getting all this pressure. Can you understand how I feel? I can’t find the killer.”

  He saw her in a nice embassy apartment furnished with all her things from one of those cake-box high-rise apartments overlooking English Bay in Vancouver, along with a couple of cats, some goldfish, potted flowering plants, a sleek phone/answering machine, neatly piled stacks of pirated videos bought on Patpong on a designer glass-topped table, a copy of Bret Ellis’ Less Than Zero open next to her bed. Wondering what she was doing with her life; wondering why a nice Canadian girl was living alone, spinning her wheels, no eligible men around, no hint of romance where all the men were preoccupied with the local women.

  He liked her once she took off the official embassy mask and talked as someone with a problem just like anyone else, someone looking for a little help, not all the answers but enough information so that she could get on with her career and life as if Fat Stuart had never died at the racetrack. He wanted to ask her why she couldn’t have exposed herself from the beginning, and why she had to play the game. But it was the wrong question at the wrong time so he left it.

  “Ms. Dugan, finding his killer isn’t gonna be easy. If you printed out the rap sheet on the several thousand punters at the racetrack, you’d need to log all of Burma for enough paper.”

  This made her smile and she made a note on her pad. “And what’s worse is they flatly refused to have the body cremated in Bangkok. They want us to ship the body back to Montreal.”

  “They might change their mind if you tell them that to charter a C-130 will set them back about fifty grand,” said Calvino, smiling to himself. This figure of fifty grand, which Patten said he owed to Mike Hatch, stuck in his mind.

  She bit her lip, trying not to laugh.

  “They’re rich. Jewelry business rich. They don’t care,” she said, getting the giggles.

  “Christ, why am I laughing? This is crazy. I’ve got to pull myself together.”

  “The black sheep of the family gets whacked in Bangkok and everyone is full of guilt. Where did we go wrong? What has happened to our son? The truth is he did time in prison. They exiled him to Thailand. Now they want to offload their guilt on someone else. Right?”

  It was more complicated than that. But Ms. Dugan wasn’t able to reveal exactly why the Canadian Embassy had taken an interest in this case. What she had come to find out was whether Calvino knew about that business. If he did, then he was a pretty good actor in not letting on that he knew what Fat Stuart had been doing in Cambodia.

  He lifted his carry-on case from the side of the file cabinet, looked around the office one last time. Ratana told him to be careful. “I tell Colonel Pratt, ‘Khun Winee shouldn’t be naked in Phnom Penh.’ And he say, ‘Ratana, you worry too much. He not have any problem, okay?’ ” Calvino didn’t say anything for a minute.

  Had she picked up the slang from Alice Dugan? Or had she talked with Lt.Col. Pratt? He wasn’t sure why the two women in his office had been using ‘naked’ as a metaphor for being unarmed half the morning. He wanted to believe it didn’t matter but he had this feeling that metaphors did matter. Especially metaphors which left the object without clothes.

  “Why do I get a feeling you and Colonel Pratt have private conversations about me and neither one of you lets on until I’m going out the door? You want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Farang think too much,” she said.

  Leave it, he told himself. Once he hit that wall of silence nothing would persuade Ratana to say another word.

  Alice Dugan followed him out of the office, down the stairs, through the Finn’s real estate office on the ground floor and onto the side soi, where a police car waited with the engine running and a driver at the wheel. In the back seat was an officer that she recognized as Lt.Col. Pratt. He nodded to her. There was an awkward moment when she looked like she wanted to say something, not anything connected with the investigation but something personal. Like thank you. Or good luck. But she didn’t know what to thank Calvino for, only that she felt grateful and much better having sat in his office than she would ever have thought was possible.

  “Watch yourself in Phnom Penh. It’s dangerous after dark,” she said. “Not a place to stay naked.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Dugan. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Alice,” she said. “You can call me by my first name.”

  “See you around, Alice.”

  She watched him climb into the back of the police car. Pratt leaned over and waved at her. She watched them talking as the car disappeared out of the soi.

  “Ms. Dugan of the Canadian Embassy,” said Pratt.

  “She’s in the Intelligence Section, Vincent.”

  “With the Cold War over, what’s an agent gonna do for a paycheck? She gets her ass assigned to burial duty,” said Calvino, as the driver turned onto Sukhumvit and headed for the expressway to Don Muang Airport. But he was thinking about the AK47 with diamonds that she had doodled on her legal note pad when he was pretending to work on his necktie.

  “She thinks you know who popped Fat Stuart,” said Pratt.

  “Anyone talk to Saddam’s jockey? He took enough time getting around the track to get off the horse, poison Fat Stuart, and still finish the race. Or maybe it was suicide. Someone that fat is trying to kill themselves. Why not just get it over with one last binge?”

  Pratt cracked a smile. “It was a professional hit.”

  “Alice Dugan is a professional,” said Calvino.

  “But why would the Canadian Embassy assign her to handle Fat Stuart’s case?” asked Pratt. He used the street name of farangs; it was more natural and comfortable to use a person’s nickname than the real one that was saved for formal occasions. Such as checking Fat Stuart’s body into the cargo section of the airport when, in death as at birth, he became Stuart L’Blanc.

  “Fat Stuart’s father has political connections. And thirty-two is kinda young to get the parents to swallow a heart attack story,” said Calvino, looking at a translation of the official report.

  “There was enough cyanide in that brownie to stop the heart of a herd of elephants,” said Pratt.

  “Cyanide? It smelled like toxic waste. But it was sufficient to do the job on Fat Stuart.”

  Fat Stuart had the brownie clutched in his hand when police and attendants loaded him into the ambulance at the racetrack. Ants were starting to crawl up his arm by the time the ambulance door had closed. In the tropics, even on the concrete stands at the racetrack, thousands of insects started eating the dead in a matter of minutes. Fat Stuart had ants crawling over his face, coming out of his nose—attracted by the brownie; he had all those bugs and was clutching four tickets in a fixed race in one hand and a brownie in the ot
her. His was an all-you-can-eat-buffet kind of death. All that was missing was the home-made ice cream.

  The expressway was jammed with traffic that inched along beneath the massive concrete belly of the unfinished elevated road, looming in the gray and rain like a prison ceiling. All that was missing were the bars. A steady rain fell as their unmarked police car pulled onto the ramp to Don Muang Airport. The driver slowed for the speed bumps, then double-parked beside a row of metered taxis. Guards in blue uniforms with whistles clenched between their teeth saluted as Pratt got out and walked to the boot. The driver unlocked it and handed him a small, brown suitcase. Calvino waited with his carry-on bag draped over one shoulder. He stood at the curb, watching as Pratt said something to his driver, who saluted and got back into the car and drove away. Pratt turned, looked over at Calvino, head cocked to one side. It was starting to make sense. He should have figured it out earlier, back at the office. Pratt wasn’t providing a courtesy ride to the airport; he was also making the run to Phnom Penh. For a couple of weeks Pratt had been dropping hints that some people in the department had taken an interest in a criminal case with a link to foreigners operating out of Phnom Penh. He never said more than a few words. Calvino figured that Ratana had known all the time that Pratt was going; that was what she had meant at the office, he thought. He wasn’t going naked. She couldn’t tell him straight; so she told him indirectly, only he wasn’t listening, he was thinking about Alice Dugan and how she had come into his office with one attitude and left with a very different one. What had she really wanted? It didn’t make sense that anyone at her level would be assigned to Fat Stuart’s case.

  By the time the plane had reached cruising altitude, Pratt had unfastened his seat belt. Calvino looked over at him.

  “I guess sooner or later you’re gonna tell me what this is about,” said Calvino.

  An air stewardess brought around the drinks trolley. Pratt ordered an orange juice, and Calvino looked hard at the liquor and settled for a cola. Pratt eased back in his seat, sipping the juice.

  “We’ve picked up some UNTAC soldiers coming into Bangkok with guns,” said Pratt casually, as if he were talking about the weather.

  “The usual war weapons?” asked Calvino.

  “AK47s. M16s. Bullet-proof vests. That kind of stuff,” said Pratt.

  “That meets the definition. What are they telling your people?” asked Calvino.

  Pratt toyed with the plastic cup. During the interrogation they had told the police everything they knew. Which wasn’t much. Later his people told him many things that the gunrunners had not known. Rumors ran through the pipeline, hitting one section, through one office after another, gathering speed, fragmenting into pieces, evolving as they sped along the path. The department was an information highway with various factions feeding rumors to distract others, put them on guard, warn them and, if needed, threaten someone crossing over onto someone else’s turf. Pratt decided it was enough to round things off to the gunrunning problem. The other thing was a private assignment from his superior, a general who had never taken a bribe in his life; someone who had made a lot of enemies by trying to clean up the department. Pratt signed on to help.

  “We interrogated an UNTAC officer from Mali,” said Pratt. “He was loaded down like a mule. He had about 400 rounds of ammo, a dozen AK47s. So we ask him, Mr. Sedah, what are you doing with all these weapons and ammo?”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Elephant hunting in Africa.”

  “There goes his Greenpeace membership,” said Calvino.

  “And later we asked him about Fat Stuart.”

  “And?”

  “Never heard of him,” said Pratt.

  Calvino swallowed hard. “How about Patten?” Pratt shook his head.

  “But he said something interesting,” said Pratt.

  “It seems that he knew an American named Mike Hatch. He said Hatch helped him buy a shipment of AK47s. He saw Hatch in Phnom Penh last Thursday. I thought I’d go and have a little talk with Mr. Hatch, ask him why he’s shipping guns through Thailand. We don’t want war weapons on Sukhumvit.”

  “It might solve the traffic problem.”

  “And I want to find out what other businesses he might be engaged in.”

  “What other business?” asked Calvino. The possibility of a wild card had made Calvino edgy since the first time he had talked with Patten.

  “Business which might make some important people nervous. Crime Suppression thought I should go and find Mr. Hatch. Shakespeare said, ‘Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.’”

  “What’s written in brass that I should know about?” asked Calvino.

  “Maybe your client hasn’t leveled with you, Vincent.”

  “Maybe there are other people who haven’t leveled with me either. How about you filling in the blanks?”

  “In Cambodia, men’s evil actions are written in water and the brass of virtue is smooth and empty,” said Pratt.

  “Meaning you aren’t filling in the blanks.”

  “Mike Hatch will be given the pleasure of performing that task,” said Pratt.

  Calvino wished he had ordered a drink, a real drink. He had that kind of gut-wrenching anger, and a huge thirst that stuck in the back of his throat. He was being set up and that made him one very unhappy tripper.

  “Guys like Hatch always have more than one line of grift and enough grifter friends to hold a party,” said Calvino but he didn’t sound convincing even to himself. At 30,000 feet it was a little late to get out and go back to the office. Chances were that Patten had planned some grift with Hatch and L’Blanc and everything was going wrong that could go wrong, including a Colonel from the Thai police department assigned to untangle the wreckage. Calvino was starting to wonder how much of a behind the scenes role Pratt had played in getting him the assignment from Patten. Or had Ratana passed on the information once Patten had become a client? He didn’t know what to think other than his case had fitted a little too neatly into Pratt’s own plans.

  Calvino listened to the smooth hum of the jet engines. When the pilot came on the intercom system, Calvino had dozed off and the voice blended into a dream. He was at the racetrack and he saw Fat Stuart riding Saddam. The horse’s legs looked about ready to give out—it looked like a giant brownie-eating bear had attacked the horse. Calvino struck up a conversation with Fat Stuart, who wasn’t all that surprised to see him. The fat man spoke to him in French, and Calvino didn’t understand a word. He backed away from L’Blanc, thinking that this had all the makings of another set-up. The fat farang punter had given him a tip on a horse in a fixed race, and then died. Who was the only white face on the scene when they discovered the body? He ran out of the racetrack and didn’t stop until he reached his office. A woman was waiting inside for him. She was a spook from the Canadian Embassy. Tall, blond, and good looking but with a hard-on. She started off tough and cool but before she had left his office, she made a hundred-eighty-degree turn. She shifted into the charm mode but she couldn’t mask a touch of sadness.

  Then she pointed at Fat Stuart’s body and blamed him for the murder. But it wasn’t that way, he told her. She sneered at him and laughed. She wasn’t buying his innocence plea for a moment. He had known who whacked that bloated frog and she wasn’t leaving until he told her. He played the scene back again, did a stop action, walked around the scene in his mind. He looked over the evidence for the ninety-fifth time inside his head. All he saw was a dead fat man. He opened his eyes and he was in the air and on the way to Phnom Penh. Pratt poked him in the ribs. Calvino’s eyes opened again as they were coming in to land.

  “How can anyone sleep on a fifty-five-minute flight?” asked Pratt.

  “I can sleep anywhere,” said Calvino. “You were talking in your sleep.”

  Calvino rubbed his eyes. “I do that sometimes.”

  “About Saddam. The dictator.”

  “Saddam the horse. I hate being set up.”


  “So do I,” said Pratt. But there was something that he wasn’t saying and Calvino could feel it; that slight holding back, a kind of small edge of doubt Pratt would come down with whenever something was troubling him and he had decided to leave it alone.

  “What is it, Pratt?”

  Pratt was looking out of the window as the wheels came down.

  “Why are you working for a scumbag like Patten? It’s not like you, Vincent.”

  Calvino was caught off guard. Like a lot of Thais, Pratt was careful to be indirect in criticism of others, which helped to avoid a loss of face, to keep distance from possible personal or business conflicts. Scumbag was a harsh word for him, and Calvino was wondering why he had been so direct.

  “He’s a fee-paying client,” said Calvino.

  “You’ve had better.”

  Calvino wanted to say he had had worse but he wasn’t so sure about that. “So what are you saying, Pratt?”

  “I don’t see you working for someone like Patten.”

  “I’m doing it for the money. Five grand.”

  “It’s been slow,” said Pratt. “But I never thought of you doing anything just for the money.”

  This hit Calvino harder than he wished to admit.

  “Fuck it, Pratt. You get a check every month. You never worry about whether you can cover your rent. The past half a dozen years everyone I know got themselves rich in Bangkok, and I’m no better off. I’m worse off. So I’m taking the case for the money. So what? I can damn well use it.”

  “Sensitive,” said Pratt. “It’s up to you.”

  Pratt had been called to the racetrack and had found Calvino handcuffed. “Can’t get a job. Can’t get a real job,” Calvino was singing from some song Pratt didn’t know. He had felt sorry for the guy, cuffed and a dead body no more than a plate of brownies away. As the public announcement repeated there was a seriously ill person, Calvino cracked a smile.

  “He’s seriously dead, Pratt.”

  “You don’t look so good yourself, Vincent.”

  They went back a lot of years together, to New York City when Pratt and Calvino had been students. There was no stronger friendship than one formed during those years. It made them like brothers, creating a history and an obligation to look out for one another. All those years ago, back in the early 70s, everyone wanted to be in America. That changed in the space of a couple of decades, or maybe it had been changing all along under the surface like a tumor and nobody bothered to notice what was happening until the condition became inoperable. America was a patient on a life-support system. America no longer had jobs; the overseas diaspora was well under way. Like the Jews and Chinese, the lost tribe of Americans wandered the globe, turning up in Southeast Asia looking for a job, meaning, dignity, and hoping for some luck in finding what America had once promised but no longer delivered—dreams of blue skies, abundance, the good life. Only those days were about over everywhere. There was nowhere left to catch this dream, there was only a treadmill creating the illusion of running and speed.