Paying Back Jack (23 page)

Calvino bumped into her, a glancing touch, brushing against her shoulder. “Sorry, I wasn't watching where I was going.”

“That's okay. It's very crowded,” she said, looking directly at him.

She's got an accent from somewhere in Europe, he told himself. And she had an exotic look that caught his eye. He told himself it was her dress, but then decided it was nothing special. Then he thought it was her hair, until he saw a hairclip that vendors sell on the street. Then he wondered if it was her seriousness of look, a quiet, forceful determination to be somewhere, an attitude that reminded him of someone from New York.

Casey's last visit to the office had got Calvino thinking about the world he'd left behind. When he was young, life had held promise. He'd been happy and free, and everyone around him assumed life moved forward, opening up unlimited possibilities.

What this woman in Bangkok brought back was the moment he'd met his future wife. It had been an accidental meeting on the subway. He'd picked her up and one thing had led to another—they'd moved in together, got married, had a kid, and inevitably divorced. He wondered if his ex-wife still rode the subway. Even after she'd found his replacement, she was the type who loved the attention of a stranger tossing her a look.

He had told himself it was a mistake to underestimate the role of some random event upending the course of one's life, one accident that destroyed a warehouse of carefully drawn-up plans. Chance could be good, bad, or neutral; a man never knew until it had overtaken him, bucked him up, pulled him down, and passed him by. Calvino's law said chance alone was an insufficient guide through life; another lesson kicked in, most of the time; chance, like a bus you waited for, sooner or later arrived a second time, and then a man had better be prepared to climb onboard and hold on for the ride. A small robotic voice, like the ones used in high-rise elevators, told him to move away from the mem-farang, walk to the nearest exit, and leave the scene before there was an accident. Everything he'd learned told
him to turn and walk away. But he ignored the alarm bells, the flashing warning lights, and the voice of past experience.

He felt himself drawn to her
presence—
something that made it difficult to turn and walk away. There should always be an escape hatch, but that wasn't really the case. The hatch was sometimes locked down. The Thais called it
saneh
—a black magic spell that people along the Cambodian border swore could capture the heart of any man. He stared at her like he was a stupid teenager.

One face, one person, had knocked out the scaffolding that held up his Bangkok. For a moment it was as if the city had vanished. He felt himself falling back to somewhere he hadn't visited in years.

“Can I buy you a drink? You know, make it up to you?”

She smiled. “That's not necessary. But thank you.”

She started to walk away, but he followed her, pushing through the crowd.

“Hey, what's your name? Mine's Vinny. Vinny Calvino.”

“Another time, Vinny.”

“Tomorrow for lunch.”

“I really have to go. But thanks.”

Then she turned and rushed down the stairs from the Skytrain to the Asoke and Sukhumvit intersection. He wanted to tell her about taking the underground passage beneath Sukhumvit Road. But she'd vanished before he could make his next move.

McPhail, who had been walking alongside Calvino and carrying on a conversation with him, had sailed ahead until he'd realized he was talking to himself. He turned around and saw Calvino scanning the crowd for the vanishing mem-farang.

He walked back and pulled Calvino's arm. “What's with you?”

Calvino shrugged, looking hard at McPhail, who was supposed to be his wingman. And a wingman didn't just go dancing off into the night talking to himself. He was supposed to be engaged enough to see what was happening when he stopped and talked with someone.

“Nothing's wrong. I just had a flashback.”

“I've had more flashbacks and flash-forwards than Timothy Leary. Wasn't that a mem-farang that had you stepping on your tongue?”

Calvino didn't deny it. “She was something.”

“She brushed you off.”

“She had an appointment.”

McPhail sighed. “Are you nuts? She didn't have an appointment. She blew you off. You'll get over it.”

They walked to Suda's outdoor restaurant and sat at one of the long tables under a ceiling fan. The tables were packed with tourists in shorts and T-shirts, backpacks stacked beside them. The restaurant was noted in many guidebooks for its cheap Thai food and good service. It was the kind of place with a roll of toilet paper on each table instead of napkins. McPhail had his eye on one of the waitresses. She would never go out with him, but that only made him go back. That and the fact she knew he always drank Singha.

McPhail ordered fried chicken with a side of roasted nuts, and Calvino ordered a beef curry and rice. The waitress smiled at McPhail. He tried a move but she only looked down at her notepad and repeated the order before walking back to the kitchen where she could stay out of sight as she always did when McPhail came to the restaurant.

McPhail lit a cigarette, turned his head, and blew out a lungful of smoke. The hit calmed his nerves. The Singha beer came before the food, and McPhail downed half his glass in one long elbow-levered tip-back. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and picked up his cigarette.

“That woman wants to go out with me,” McPhail said.

“Like she wants to get run over by a bus,” Calvino said.

“And look at you. What were you doing chasing after the mem? She couldn't get away from you fast enough. Anyone would have thought she had rockets attached to her shoes.”

“Okay, we're both losers. You feel better?”

McPhail sucked his breath in. He was annoyed. The waitress had snubbed him, and Calvino had rubbed salt into the wound. “Do you want to hear about Casey? Or do you want to sit and daydream about some mem-farang who looked at you like you were a telephone box covered in a sports jacket?”

Calvino drank his beer straight from the bottle. As he lowered it, he saw McPhail grinning at him. “What are you looking at?”

“Hey, bud, you're drinking from the bottle.”

“So what?”

“It's a habit you're gonna have to lose if you want to go over to the other side.” McPhail called the Western world the other side. Life in America had become like a Norse legend, where warriors coexisted with the undead who continued to breathe, eat, sleep, and
forgo lovemaking. And no one in their right mind with any choice in the matter would even think of visiting there.

“You're changing the subject because you're going to tell me you came up empty-handed with Casey. Nothing. Nada. And all this talk about mems is your way of distracting me. But it ain't working.”

McPhail glanced back toward the kitchen. His waitress was nowhere in sight. He shuddered, drank from his glass of beer, and belched. “About Casey. He's ex-special forces. A tough, mean motherfucker who did three tours in Vietnam. He couldn't get enough. He ended up in Florida at MacDill, and was stationed on base. Special-ops missions on one of those special tactics teams. Somalia, Bosnia, Colombia. Then he got a job with one of those private contractors out of Kuwait. They send him to jungles, cities—wherever Casey goes, he leaves bodies behind. But Casey always manages to walk away. His nickname is ‘the Ghost.' His medals have medals.”

“How'd you find this out?”

“The Pentagon hotline. The operator told me everything.”

“JUSMAG,” said Calvino. JUSMAG stood for “Joint US Military Advisory Group.” There was a JUSMAG in the Philippines, one in South Korea, and another in Thailand. It acted as a joint American and Thai military operation, with Thai military providing the security. The buildings had been erected in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War and had the feeling of something off the set of
M*A*S*H
. Except that all the modern electronic gear dotting the roofs indicated that the Americans had tuned their satellite dishes to the local chatter.

“Bingo,” said McPhail.

He meant the game. McPhail had hung around the JUSMAG restaurant on bingo night and found a couple of old Vietnam veterans who had known Casey from the war. Talking about Casey came naturally to them, as they'd grown tired of losing at bingo.

“And I won twenty-eight dollars that night,” said McPhail. “They hate it when an outsider wins the money.”

“You're the winner, my man.”

“After a dozen beers, this vet named Larry said, ‘This is borderline classified. I shouldn't be telling you this. But …'”

“But what?”

McPhail had fired up his vintage Zippo lighter for his bingo pals, leaning his new cigarette into the flame and snapping back the lid. That
always worked as a conversation stimulus at a bingo night. There were people whose eyes came alive when that lick of flame shot torch-like out of the silver wafer. This lighter had a map of Vietnam on one side and “81st Cal.” on the other side, with the insignia. McPhail pushed aside his glass and tipped back the rest of the Singha straight from the bottle, his mouth coming up red and wet. He didn't bother to wipe it this time as he stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“Casey worked in a prison in Baghdad.”

“Doing what?”

“Helping prisoners remember shit.”

“Thumbscrews, waterboarding, wiring to the balls—that kind of memory aid?”

McPhail shrugged. “Who knows? But Casey's private contractor liked his work well enough. He got results that let them charge zillions for their contracts. He got reassigned by his people to do the same kind of shit here.”

“Are you sure?”

“That's one theory,” said McPhail. “The other was some journalist was on his tail in Baghdad and he volunteered for the Bangkok assignment.”

“What do you think?”

McPhail rolled his head back and forth. “I think Casey likes his work, and he doesn't much care where it takes him.”

“He's working at a prison here? Which prison?”

McPhail shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn't get anyone to give the location. I don't think they knew. But it's some kind of interrogation facility buried in the outskirts of the city. No one wanted to talk about it. All I got was that his job is to question bad guys.” McPhail lit a cigarette and leaned forward, whispering over the table. “They didn't say who the bad guys were, and there weren't any other details.”

McPhail's sources had another beery theory or two. They said Casey had found his way to Thailand and settled down—or what approximated settling down for someone like Casey, who changed apartments every six months. He was calm under fire, a man who could wait for days with little water or rations. Once on a mission Casey didn't return to base until he had what he'd been sent for. A scalp, a map, troop or motorized-vehicle-movement intel, supply road activity, security around a camp or bridge—he'd done all
of them. No second best, nothing less than what the commanding officer had said was essential. Casey knew the difference between essential and nice-to-have. That had given him a huge head start in life, but the advantage largely had been erased by his easy anger as he tried living among civilians who changed their minds about what they wanted, when they wanted it, and what it meant once they got it.

“Casey got to the point on the airforce base at MacDill that his CO couldn't control him. He didn't listen. When he went to work for Logistic Risk Assessment Services, his bosses didn't bother to try to control him. The corporate deal is you can be a cowboy so long as it makes money and you don't fuck up. But it's just a matter of time before that happens. There's only so much luck. Each time you go into the field and come back alive, you use up some of that luck. That's what Larry said happened to Casey. He used up the last of his luck. One of his prisoners died during an interrogation. Ruptured spleen, his face bruised and bloated. Someone turned him in and threatened to take it further. Next thing, LRAS sends Casey to Bangkok. This kind of guy makes a good interrogator. He's an asset for them. But he's also a little too angry, he's a patriot who has no trouble inflicting pain. And his second career had always been his son. Casey's one of those guys who lived for his kid. You remember a few years back, the young American guy who got whacked upcountry?”

Calvino nodded. “Casey told me.”

“He went to audit the company books at some factories along the Burmese border. He couldn't help but sniff around. He found kids hiding under beds in bamboo huts. Casey's son was going to blow the whistle. You know how these big brand guys operate. They take out ads for millions of dollars during the Super Bowl. During the halftime show, right on TV, they promise the world that their shit isn't made by slaves or kids. Not that they really wanted to know. But he didn't play their game. That's where he fucked up.”

“Joel was his name,” said Calvino.

McPhail nodded. “That's it. Joel. He'd got a couple of warnings. You know how tolerant the Thais are. The kid didn't understand
chon taw
. Every Thai knows that when the big guy smiles and tells you politely to go away, you go away. He offers you cash, women, whiskey, wine—you back off. They're always smiling, which is what makes it so dangerous, because you see only the smile. Joel kept snooping
around and scribbling notes, taking photographs. The same guys came back. ‘You're still here,' they said. ‘Good idea you go to the airport. This is Thailand, you know.' Smiles all around. Next time Joel doesn't see the smile. Joel don't see nothing, because he's dead. That's what happened to Casey's kid. The fucked-up thing was the way they killed him. Not the bullet or two in the head. Looks like they killed him real slow. Like they were making some kind of a statement. The body was in pretty bad shape by the time Casey got to his son. The police had a lot of pressure from the press, the embassy, all down the line. A Thai big-shot named Somporn was questioned a couple of times. They were his factories that Joel had been auditing. He said he'd never met Joel Casey, that he didn't know anything about Casey's visits upcountry. He shrugged it off. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘I'm way too fucking important to deal with an ant like Joel Casey.'”