Noble Lies (12 page)

Here it comes, he thought. “She's wrong.”

“She said you got a Bronze Star.”

Mark took a fistful of nuts from the bag, avoiding the dried fruit.

“She showed me this thing she printed out from the Internet. Nice write-up. Not a lot of details—something about you and some Saudi troops coming up on a bunch of Republican Guards…” She waited, but the silence didn't bother him.

“There was a picture of you. Didn't print too well.” She looked at him, studying his face. “You really changed a lot in fifteen years.”

Mark bit down on a macadamia nut. Tell me about it, he thought.

“She told me about what you did in Mali.”

It was Malawi, but he didn't correct her.

“That guy, was it Mahmoud?” she asked, “Frankie says you saved his life.”

“Her memory's not so good,” Mark said.

“Anyway, I think what you did was amazing. But I have to ask you,” she said, holding up a shriveled yellow cube. “Is this pineapple?”

“Yeah. It's pretty good, so don't eat it all,” Mark said, bringing the other conversation to an end as a tall, thin man in his twenties—the tallest Thai Mark had seen—came and stood at end of the booth.

“Excuse me, where are you going?” the man said. He wore round, rose-tinted sunglasses that matched his shaggy Lennon-esque hairstyle, and a baggy white tee shirt that said something in Spanish. He was holding a thick three-ring binder under his arm.

“Is there a problem?” Mark said.

The man smiled and bobbed his head, pointing at the bench on Robin's side table. “May I?”

Robin swung her legs clear, sitting up. She pulled the trail mix toward her.

“My name is Ton.” He held out a long, bony hand until Mark shook it. “We are with the Koh Lanta tourist association. We are here to help you find the right resort for your stay on the island.” He motioned to a table of Thais who were busy pulling similar binders from their bags and heading topside. He slid the binder in front of Mark, opening the cover to reveal a high-gloss booklet for the Paradise Resortel tucked in a plastic page protector.

“Wow, those have gotta be expensive,” Robin said as Mark flipped the pages to look at other full-color brochures and preprinted rate sheets.

“We have many types of hotels at all different price ranges,” Ton said. “And if you book with us we can promise a special reduced rate not available anywhere else. There are hotels and…” he reached across and turned over a stack of plastic pages until He reached a cardboard divider. “There are also beach huts. Bungalows. Very inexpensive.”

Mark turned the pages, the back section all template brochures and tenth-generation photocopies. The names were different but each of them featuring the same bullet points; individual bamboo huts, café, a beach-side bar, shuttle into town and something called a fire dance, all of them noting that, whatever this fire dance thing was, theirs was the best on the island. He was nearing the back of the binder when he stopped at one brochure.

“It is still high season and it is difficult to get a room without a reservation,” Ton said, pushing his long hair behind his large ears. “We can book everything for you right here.”

“I'm sure you can,” Robin said, “but I think we'll find something ourselves, thanks.”

“Can you get us in here?” Mark said, tapping the brochure he had been reading.

Ton turned his head to see the name word-processed across the top of the brochure in seventy-two point, Comic Sans font. “Lanta Merry Huts? Yes, no problem.”

“What are you doing?” Robin said, looking over at Mark.

“I'm going to need three huts. They're traveling with us as well.” Mark pointed past Ton to Pim's table.

“Three? Yes, no problem, no problem. How many days?”

“Let's start with a week, take it from there,” Mark said as Ton tugged a blank registration form from the front of the binder.

“What the hell are you doing?” Robin said, staring at Mark. “I'm paying the bills, I pick where we stay. In case you've forgotten, this isn't some holiday for you and your little friends.”

Ton held his pen above the form and glanced up at Mark.

“Book it,” Mark said. He reached over and put his hand on top of Robin's balled up fist. “Trust me on this.” And then he smiled.

 

Chapter Twenty

   

There were no problems checking in at Lanta Merry Huts. The owner, an attractive woman nearing forty, insisted they have a glass of pineapple juice and something to eat before heading to their huts, three thatch-roofed, one-room bungalows straight out of Gilligan's Island. They ate on the covered patio that doubled as the lobby, the beach twenty steps from their table. The tide was out, revealing the rugged moonscape of rocks that lay just below the surface, the owner telling them that they could find crabs hidden in the rocks, that she could cook the crabs, mix them in with the breakfast meal, that it would be good. The old man and the boy were out there already, poking around the rocks with short sticks, Robin asking the owner if she had any Corn Flakes.

The owner pointed out the hotel bar, a dark clump of trees at the edge of the beach, a darker lean-to in the center ringed by high stools. There was a sign tacked to one of the trees, impossible to read in the twilight. She told them that it was closed for the night, that it would be open tomorrow, for sure maybe. She pointed to a speck of light a mile down the beach, telling them that it was the Monkey Bar and that it was open if they wanted a beer or a drink or maybe something else, bringing a pantomimed joint up to her lips so fast it was easy to miss. Robin said she could go for a beer, Mark saying that it sounded good. They agreed to meet back at the lobby in an hour, just relax a bit in their rooms, Mark saying he was going to lie down for a few minutes, waking up eight hours later, the call of some unseen tropical bird as cutting as an alarm clock.

He caught a ride into town in the back of a pickup truck and spent the morning showing Shawn's picture around the dive shops that lined Saladan Pier, all of them with the same looped Go Dive! videos, the posters showing the fishes of the Andaman Sea, the stack of current dive magazines, with glossy photos of lionfish, moray eels, whale sharks and corals tacked up next to nautical charts, the dive sites obliterated by thousands of sun-screened fingertips, the bigger shops flying the red flag with the white diagonal slash that meant there was a diver below. The dive boats had left for the morning before he had arrived, but the in-shop sales staff—usually a stunning Thai girl or golden-tanned European in a bikini—invited him in to their open-air offices, offering him a complimentary bottle of water before launching into their laidback sales pitches. With every shop offering the same thing at the same price, it came down to who told the better story. Or who looked better telling it. He tried to explain why he was there, that he wasn't looking to dive, just seeing if anyone knew this guy in the picture, but once they got rolling, started that slow, easy talk about the morays and the soft corals, about the beach over at Maya Bay or the currents at Hin Huang, they didn't know how to turn it off.

They'd ask if he was certified and he'd tell them that he was, Advanced Open Water with about two hundred dives, some in the Caribbean, some in South Africa, some in the Red Sea. Then they'd jump ahead in the script, ask him if he ever thought about getting his Divemaster certification, thinking about the hefty commission the three-week course would bring. When he said no, they'd retrace their way back to the break-even day trips, giving up when he showed them the picture for the fourth time. They'd look at the photo, the waist-up beach shot Robin had showed him that first day, and go on about how they would definitely remember having met this guy or how they wish they had seen him, a couple of women making the kind of comments that would get a guy's face slapped.

“You're gonna want to check with Fiona over at F and A,” one sleepy-eyed Swede said as she stared at Shawn's smiling, tanned face.

“She hire on many instructors?”

“Nope,” she said, handing him back the picture. “But she fucks a lot of hot guys.”

 

***

 

It was the little things that let Mark know that on a street of interchangeable dive shops, F&A Divers was a step below the rest. There was a TV and VCR but instead of running the same souvenir dive video, it showed a bootleg copy of a Hindi movie musical, the color all wrong, the sound turned off or not working at all. There were magazines on the homemade bamboo coffee table, year-old Cosmos and fashion glossies in French, and instead of Bob Marley, the stereo blared out Robbie Williams. Out front, in a wooden crate below a sign that said We Rent Equipment, frayed weight belt straps and taped-up snorkels were mixed in with cracked masks and ripped fins, the kind of gear other dive shops threw away. Competition was tough for good dive shops. Mark wondered what kept F&A in business. He kicked off his sandals and went inside. The floor was gritty and warm. He rang the bell on the counter, waited a few minutes and rang it again. He was looking at a faded poster listing the 1998 Premier League schedule when she stepped through the beaded curtain, and it was then that Mark knew why F&A was still open.

She wasn't the most beautiful woman he had seen that morning. She lacked Pim's dainty features, she didn't have Robin's flawless complexion, and compared to the girls in the other dive shops on the street, she was ten pounds too heavy and ten years too old. Her hair was short and choppy, like she did it herself with a pair of scissors and no mirror. It was road-sign yellow and gelled to give it that just out of bed look. There were several shades of dried paint on her tank top, the swooping armholes and low neckline revealing most of her breasts. She wore a pair of men's madras shorts, the plaid faded and bleached with a denim patch sewn on the ass. A ring of keys dangled from a leather lanyard tied around her wrist and an unfinished tattoo of a dolphin leapt up her calf. She looked at him and smiled, an uneven smirk. She had it. That look, that vibe, that unmistakable something. Women called it slutty and would ask their husbands if guys honestly thought that it looked sexy, the men pretending they didn't understand the question, busy fantasizing about things they'd never ask their wives to do. Convincing guys to sign up with F&A? Nothing to it.

“Sorry,” she said, her Canadian accent evident in one word. “I was smoking a bowl out back, didn't hear you ring. Been waiting long?” She opened a cooler behind the counter and held out a Singha.

“Just got here,” Mark said, taking the bottle, popping the top off with a coin in his palm, another trick he had picked up in the Marines. “Are you Fiona?”

She smiled again, a different smile but it had the same effect. “I'm Erin. Fiona,” she said, making air quotes around the word, “is the name that came with the job. F and A. That was Andy's idea. Yeah, real clever guy.”

“So it's not your shop?”

“Might as well be. I book the divers, I make all the arrangements for the boats, I schedule the instructors, I pay off the cops, I skim money from the till.” She looked up at him and winked. “But no, this is all Andy's. Till a shark gets him anyways.”

“There a problem with sharks here?”

“No, but a girl can dream. Speaking of dreams,” she said, climbing into the hammock that ran along the back wall of the shop, “how can I make your dreams come true?”

“Scuba diving dreams?”

“Those too, sure.”

“I'm afraid I lost my dive card,” Mark said.

“Cards? We don't need no stinking cards.” She laughed. “I love when I get to say that. No, if you want to dive, mister…”

“Mark. Mark Rohr.”

“Well if you want to dive, Mark Mark Rohr, you just let me know. Your word—and your cash, up front—is good enough for me.”

“Not afraid to lose your license?”

“If we had one, maybe. But you're not interested in diving, are you Mark Mark Rohr?”

He pulled the picture from his shirt pocket and stepped over to the hammock. “Ever see this guy before?”

Erin switched her beer to her other hand, wiping her fingers dry on her shorts. “Shawn Keller. What the fuck are you carrying around a picture of this asshole for?”

“His sister hired me to find him. He's been missing since the tsunami and his family thought he was dead.”

“And they want him back?” She looked back down at the picture. “He was a cutie, I'll give him that.”

“Was?”

“He used to come around a lot, him and Andy working some deal or something, I don't know. Anyway, we hook up one night, next morning…” She shrugged her shoulders.

“He's gone and you feel used.”

Erin looked up at him. “Please. I'm not that kind of girl. Anyway, the next morning I'm sneaking out of his place, trying not to wake him up. It's not easy getting dressed in the dark when you can't tell whose shorts are whose. All of a sudden he springs up out of bed, tackles me, slams my head into the floor a couple of times and sticks a gun in my face. Oh, he said he was sorry, that I startled him, but come on, how many people get that startled? And with a gun? I told him I had enough nut cases in my life already, that he'd better stay the hell away from me. Since then I haven't seen him, but I hear he's still around.”

“When was this?”

“Let's see, it was right after Andreas went back to Sweden, Fredrick was still here, but this was before Ola got his tattoo.” She smiled at the memories. “Oh yeah. Ola…”

“So this was…?

“Sorry. About four weeks back.”

“How'd he look?”

Erin handed back the picture. “Like this. Tanner, maybe.”

“Healthy?”

“Very.”

Mark put the picture back in his pocket and sat down on the edge of the coffee table. The beer was already warm but he drank it anyway. Swinging on the hammock, Erin bobbed her foot in time with the music. He waited for the song to end—something about a monkey with a gun—before saying, “I need to find him.”

“You need to talk to Andy,” she said, foot still bobbing. She leaned up to see the Tiger Beer clock on the wall. “The dive boat won't be in for another two hours. I was gonna close up till then.”

“Won't you be missing out on new business?”

Erin laughed. “There's only so many suckers out there.” She sipped her beer and looked at him. “So. Wanna come back to my place, grab a bite?”

“I'm not really hungry,” Mark said, finishing his Singha.

“That's funny,” she said, and downed the rest of her beer. “Neither am I.”

 

***

 

The dive shop boat revved its twin engines as it eased up against the row of tires that protected both the dock and the hull of the boat. On board, fifteen sun-whipped divers rocked unsteadily as they waited to get back on dry land. The captain kept the engines running as one of the dive instructors leapt onto the dock and tied off the boat at both ends. He gunned the engines one last time before shutting them down.

“Gear first, then divers,” the captain said, barking it out as if they were sandbagging crewmembers and not paying customers, his harsh British accent putting a sharper edge on his words. The trip over and now non-refundable, he could afford to drop the happy skipper role.

“God damn it, watch it with those tanks. And get those weight belts away from the edge unless you want to go in after them.” The captain was lean and hard, nut-brown with bleached out, scraggly hair and a hawk nose. True to type, there was a swirling tribal tattoo on his arm and a cigarette butt hanging on his lower lip, the uniform of the non-conformist beach bum turned entrepreneur.

“Bloody hell, watch the damn regulators.”

The divers, all guys, shuffled past, each lugging a pair of empty tanks to the waiting pickup truck, glancing worried looks back at their mesh bags of personal gear the captain was tossing onto the dock. Some of them still had the pink-red line of their dive masks running across their foreheads and circling down onto their cheeks. It was a rookie mistake, not clearing your mask at depth, one that Mark had made a few times himself. The second trip they carried their BCDs and regulators—the inflatable vests and tangle of breathing hoses that dive shops rented as if they had to buy new ones every week. It was a standard two-tank dive, with each dive shop offering identically priced excursions to the same dive sites, but Mark knew how these divers got lured into signing with F&A.

“Don't wave that dive book at me,” the captain said through his teeth, the nervous passenger stepping backward off the boat as if he expected to get hit. The captain watched as the passengers piled on the back of the mini-pickup for the short ride to the dive shop, glancing at each other but no one looking back at the boat. “And I don't sign off on a single one of you until all the gear is accounted for,” he shouted as the driver popped the clutch, kicking up dirt. It was just Mark on the dock now, the captain still in the boat, glaring at him, flicking his cigarette butt into the water. “What the fuck you looking at?”

Mark kept his hands in his pockets and didn't bother to smile. “A guy named Andy who knows Shawn Keller.”

He watched Andy's eyes, a split second of surprise then the same hard stare. “Don't know him.” He gathered his mask and snorkel and stuffed them in his dive bag along with his black split-tail fins and the rest of his gear.

Mark looked out to the horizon, the perfect blue water, the cloudless sky, the dark green shapes that someone had said were the Phi Phi Islands. “I need to find Shawn Keller.”