Paying Back Jack (2 page)

Calvino stopped beside a street vendor who was cooking a long, tight coil of dead-liver-colored sausages over a charcoal fire in a large clay pot. Closing his eyes, he told himself that he wanted to see the
soi
as if for the first time, as if looking through the eyes of someone straight off the plane. It had been Colonel Pratt who had warned him that, after so many years inside the country, he would forget what had startled him at first.

He considered the possibility. After thousands of days, Calvino didn't really see the street anymore. That had been Colonel Pratt's point, and the General had agreed. They'd suggested that he try looking at things as if they were fresh, new, and of another time and place.

I've just arrived, and this is the first street in Asia I've ever seen.
A smile crossed Calvino's face as he moved down the soi. Each step was a foot deeper into the freak show, starting with the huge banyan tree. Its large, twisted trunk wrapped with dozens of thin, colored nylon scarves, the tree had long, stringy veins that hung like gnarled tentacles over the soi. A dwarf stood on the broken sidewalk in front of a bar, dressed in a vest, a white shirt, and a bow tie. Holding up a sign for happy hour beer, he tagged along after each passing tourist for a few steps. Then, exhausted, he'd stop and retrace his steps to the bar and wait to strike again. “Come inside!” he shouted. “Many pretty girls!” The dwarf was right. There were dozens of girls in their late teens wearing too much makeup, decked out in short skirts, smoking, flirting, eyeing customers, throwing them smiles, then frowns, then another frown. It was early afternoon and there were few customers.

A
tuk-tuk,
the high pitch of its engine pushed to the limit, made Calvino step back on the sidewalk. A couple of drunken farang tourists sat in the back seat, laughing and screaming, rocking and rolling, as if their future had arrived and they liked what they saw. Calvino waved as they passed. He stopped in front of another street vendor's cart bearing fried grasshoppers, scorpions, and water bugs in separate trays, stacked high under a fluorescent light. The vendor was set up in the street in front of a Japanese karaoke place with a sign that said no non-Japanese allowed. The sign was in Thai. A couple of
yings
dressed like Japanese geisha called out to him. They liked his jacket. They smelled money.

“I'm not Japanese. I can't go inside,” he called back in Thai.

“No problem. You not come in. We go out. Sure.”

If he had just arrived in the country, he'd have gawked at the lifeless carcasses of the bug massacre, so he stopped now to take a look. The vendor asked, “You try. You like, buy. You no like, no problem.”

The bug vendor held out a water bug and Calvino took it. She made a point of showing the yings. They applauded. A bug-eating farang was about as close to heaven as they'd get on a rainy Tuesday afternoon on the soi with the dead artists bars. While the city was short on museums, Calvino's soi was rich with bars named Renoir, Degas, Monet, or Cézanne, filled with people who had no idea who those painters were.

There was an attitude in the thick, grayish air—of the vendor and of the yings—that Calvino liked. He looked at the water bug in the palm of his hand as though it was a multivitamin and popped it in his mouth. His teeth got traction on the soft outer shell. As he chewed, he saw the General's car approach on the wet pavement, slowing as it reached a space in front of Mona Lisa. Calvino stood beside the vendor's cart, watching the general park his car. He was a kind old man who'd been the perfect client: he'd paid for Calvino's services, and he'd used the payment for his new jacket. It was an awkward social moment, an old man holding out money. Calvino had asked the General to keep the money and to accept his services as a favor. That was the Thai way, but the General shook his head and insisted that he pay. When the General had phoned Calvino and asked to meet him mid-afternoon for a coffee, he'd decided to look presentable. The new jacket would send a message of proper respect to the General. The lunchtime trade had gone back to the offices, shops, and apartments until dinnertime. It was as quiet as it ever got on Soi 33 this side of mid-afternoon.

A short distance behind the General's black Camry a motorcycle had been tailing the car. It slowed as the General's car slowed, and the rider flashed a red laser penlight on the General's car. The General had come to a stop between Goya and Papa's. Calvino looked over his shoulder and saw a second motorcycle, a blue and silver Honda, with a driver and a passenger turn into the soi from Sukhumvit. Both riders on the Honda wore wraparound sunglasses and black clothes.
The rear passenger's face was covered with a ski mask. This wasn't the time to act like a newbie fresh from the airport, seeing things for the first time. The hand of the fast-approaching rider had reached inside a nylon jacket and emerged holding a handgun. The gun, the laser: it added up to a certainty that the motorcycle riders were working together. The laser beam pinpointed the man inside.

The time from the moment a gun is drawn to when it's used is calibrated in seconds. Glancing up and down the street, Calvino counted one, and before he got to two, pushed the deep-fried insect vendor to the side, and using his body, shoved her cart into the path of the oncoming motorcycle. Both driver and passenger had been concentrating on the target and hadn't seen the cart coming. When it hit the motorcycle's midsection, it knocked the driver off balance, and he had no chance to recover. Rider, passenger, and bike skidded hard, tipping over on the rain-slick road. The Thai driver had tried to brake at the last second but lost control. His machine spiraled, shooting out a trail of sparks as it struck from behind, engine still running, a parked motorbike that had four torpedo-shaped metal cylinders strapped to the back. Rider and passenger held on, thinking that against the odds they'd somehow come out of the spill, shoot the General, and escape down Soi 33. If they'd seen the soi the way a foreigner saw it for the first time, they wouldn't have made that mistake. The gas delivery boy, who did a nice business selling gas cylinder refills to the roadside vendors, stood in the street a few feet away, rolling away an empty and attaching a new one in its place. Wiping the sweat from his brow when he heard the crash, he looked up and saw the bike spinning toward his bike where it was parked in front of the banyan tree.

The impact of the two bikes occurred with maximum force. In the collision, the first cylinder exploded, setting off a chain reaction that burst the other three, each adding more fuel to the large orange ball of flame shooting up the banyan tree. The vendor looked at what remained of her cart, bugs strewed over the road, and then at the fire leaping up the banyan tree, catching the dry and brittle veins on fire until the umbrella of branches and veins ignited a virtual New Year's fireworks display. The wrecked bikes and riders were enveloped in the ball of flames. The helmeted head of the driver shattered, sending fragments of plastic and skull across the road, splattering the dwarf and the tree, and coated the legs of half a dozen girls.

The yings from the Japanese karaoke place backed away in horror and fear. The vendor stared, hands clutched into a ball. There were tears in her eyes. Her livelihood had just been destroyed. Calvino reached inside his new jacket, unholstered his .38 caliber police service revolver, and ran down the street. Sidestepping the flames, he came up level to the General's car. The General waved at him. But Calvino was looking past the General at the motorcycle rider who had tagged the old man using a laser light. He had managed to stop a short distance behind the General's car and remained a threat. With the point bike out of action, was the hit still in play? Calvino had no way of knowing. It was possible that the rider of the second bike was also armed, but he showed no sign of pulling a weapon. When the biker saw Calvino running at him then kneeling with a handgun pointed at his head, he wheeled his bike around and fled in the direction from which he had come. Calvino holstered his .38 and opened the General's door.

“Did you see that accident?” asked the General.

Half out of breath, Calvino nodded. “Yeah that was something.”

“Doesn't look like they survived. What a tragedy!”

“General, let me buy you a cup of tea.”

The General stood beside his car, looking out at the burning remains.

“We should phone the police.”

Calvino took out his cell phone and called Colonel Pratt.

“The General's had a problem,” he said. “He's parked on Soi 33 outside Goya.”

“Crazy driver,” said the General.

Calvino ended his call with Colonel Pratt. He knew that it would take Pratt a while to arrive at the scene in front of the dead artists bars. Meanwhile, it was just the two of them, the General and Calvino, standing downwind, waiting as they watched the smoke and flames shooting out of the wreckage. There was the pop of ammo exploding. Calvino figured it must have been spare rounds one of the men had squirreled away for a rainy day that would never come.

“Driver's training,” the General continued. “That's what we could use.”

The fire brigade drove up at about the same time as the police. They sprayed foam on the wreck, and the body snatchers (they were
one of the voluntary Chinese benevolent societies who raced to crash sites and collected the dead and injured) arrived to sort through the remains—bone in this container, metal in that container. “Colonel Pratt will be joining us,” Calvino said, walking the General toward a restaurant between the closed bars and nightclubs.

“I didn't want to bother him,” said the General.

“He's in the area.”

“Well, in that case, that's my good fortune.”

“‘Good fortune' is one way of putting it,” thought Calvino.

The General pointed his remote at his car and it automatically locked. He hadn't seen the second black motorcycle, or the guys with their heads covered coming at him at high speed.

Calvino walked back to the vendor and gave her five thousand baht. “Buy a new cart,” he said.

“You bad man, you kill those boys,” she said, taking the money.

A witness to the slaughter, he thought. Not the line he wanted her taking before the police, at least not until Colonel Pratt arrived. The ball of orange flame had climbed down the side of the banyan tree, burning through the dozens of old nylon ribbons. That should piss off the spirit, thought Calvino.

He found the General again, open-mouthed, standing beside his car. “We'll need to make a statement,” said the General.

Calvino's new jacket had a slight tear near the front pocket. He sighed, pissed off, as this meant a return trip to Venice Tailors and Tony shaking his head in disapproval over the damage to the masterpiece. Walking toward the burning bike, Calvino knelt down and picked up a nine-millimeter gun from the street and showed it to the General. “Driving and shooting should be against the law.” Calvino slipped the gun into his jacket pocket.

“I could use a cup of tea,” said the General.

Calvino had the feeling the General said that every time he saw something blow up.

Thais, in the presence of a stranger or someone with authority over them, fall into a default of stone silence. They clam up. What few words they muster fall into the category of nondescript pleasantries. Have you eaten? Where are you going? These two questions are the staples of a Thai inquiry. A stranger could be forgiven for thinking
that given the long silences in these official circumstances that words were exchanged with the same reluctance as a woman pawning her mother's gold necklace. But the reality is that they've figured out it's usually better to smile and say nothing of substance.

As the police, the body snatchers, and the fire brigade appeared at the scene of the wreck, Calvino reached down and picked up a piece of chrome. Colonel had arrived and circled the crash as General stood in the shade. It had been decided, after consultation with Colonel Pratt, the ranking officer at the scene, to rule what had happened a tragic accident. Only a miracle had prevented a larger loss of life. And no one said a word about an attempted hit on the General.

“That's it? What about the gun?” Calvino found himself asking awkward questions about evidence that didn't fit Colonel Pratt's report.

Colonel Pratt smiled at his American friend, nodding. Sometimes a farang friend could be amusing at the strangest of times. “It's been bagged and will go to the lab.”

Such a statement might have on the surface suggested that the police investigation would focus on the ownership of the gun and the identities of the two men who'd been burnt beyond recognition.

As the three of them walked to Calvino's office, Calvino asked the Colonel about the carefulness of Thais when drawn into a conversation. The Colonel thought long and hard and then simply smiled at the General.

Ratana, who hadn't expected Calvino to be back so soon from his appointment with the General, was at the park across the street with her baby. Calvino led the General and the Colonel upstairs to his office. Once inside, the three men sat down. It was the first chance they'd had to talk openly, without others around.

“I saw the guy riding pillion pull a gun. The rider on a second motorcycle coming from the opposite direction had pointed the laser beam at the General.”

The old man with his short bristle of white hair raised his hand.

“There's a Thai saying,
Pla moh taay praw pak,
” said the General, a veteran of the Department of Special Investigations.

“The fish is dead because of its own mouth,” said Calvino.

“He knows this one, General,” said Colonel Pratt.

A few months ago Calvino hadn't fully understood the proverb. On that occasion, the Colonel had sketched a sea bass for him with a
large mouth and bulging eyes. The mouth of the fish brushed against the surface of the water. Colonel Pratt, an artist at heart who had secretly studied art in New York, had taken pleasure in his drawing. It wasn't an elegant rendition, but that hadn't stopped Calvino from having it framed and hung on his office wall. But the line of bubbles that rose from the open mouth of the fish served now to illustrate the General's point.