Paying Back Jack (24 page)

“The same guy who's running for parliament,” said Calvino.

“Hey, murderers are entitled to representation,” said McPhail.

“It happens,” said Calvino.

“What's that mean?”

Calvino smiled. “A man silences someone who has the capacity to betray him.”

“In that case, it's no wonder there's blood in the streets.” Calvino had finished his beef curry and rice and had his wallet out. “Why are you wolfing down your chow at the speed of light?”

“I want to head over to Soi Cowboy,” said Calvino, getting up with his mouth still full. He paid the bill.

“Hold on.” McPhail rose from the table.

“You coming along?”

“Wouldn't miss it. I can see you're still thinking about that mem.” He shook his head, following Calvino to the street. “What is it with guys like Casey and you? I want to spend my time getting unfocused, and you get all tense and twisted up with all of that concentration. You sure you weren't in the army?”

“I'll buy you a drink and tell you how I once won fifty dollars off of a marine recruitment sergeant in Brooklyn.”

McPhail hadn't heard that story. “You were gonna join the marines?”

“I was running a backroom poker game for my uncle.” Calvino grinned. “And it was payday and the sergeant was flush, feeling lucky,
and thinking, ‘This dumb-ass fucking kid, what does he know about poker?'”

They'd already crossed the sky bridge to the other side of Sukhumvit. McPhail, following at a half-trot, cupped his cigarette and coughed. The light changed on Sukhumvit and they crossed, McPhail hacking out his guts and bending on the opposite side to catch his breath. “I hate this fucking street.”

“I didn't tell you what happened to the sergeant?”

“You still exchange Christmas cards, and he thanks you for rescuing him from a life of gambling.”

“He got killed in Vietnam the next year. They'd offered him a big bonus to go back. He'd taken it. He struck me as someone who overestimated his luck. You know what I mean?”

McPhail shrugged, lowered his chin to touch his neck. “Joel Casey's luck ran out. He made a fatal mistake. And he should've known better. His old man could have told him to keep his head down. Or maybe he did but he didn't listen to his old man. I never listened to mine.”

“Joel's father may be making some mistakes himself.” They were the kind of mistakes a man made when everything in his life was turning south on him.

McPhail looked surprised, smiled, and finished his beer. “Like what?”

“Like hiring me to follow Somporn's mia noi. Unless he thinks I'm stupid, he's gotta know what's going through my head as to why he wants that information.”

Calvino had tagged Casey as the careful-planning type, the guy looking to anticipate every thing that could wrong, the kind of man who knows his exit before he goes into a situation. He'd hired Calvino to find out when the ying was scheduled to see Somporn. And if the police started asking around, they'd find only one person who'd been snooping around the mia noi: the guy who'd been held in Pattaya when a woman—some eyewitnesses said—had been pushed from his balcony. It had the classic feeling of a breakaway by the Knicks' power forward, racing downcourt for the layup, a twist, a fake, slamming the ball into the net. Calvino understood
that
move; he'd used it to take down the recruitment sergeant in poker.

A FEELING OF NAUSEA swept over Marisa as she worked her way through the middle-aged farangs drifting between bars on Soi Cowboy. The heat of the day remained in the early evening like a blowtorch on her skin. The air was heavy, suffocating. Lining both sides of the narrow soi were rows of neon-lit go-go bars. Overhead, a sliver of moon looked like another neon sign. But it wasn't the heat or that a man hot with desire had tried to pick her up; she'd had one, then two false starts. Little girls who looked like Fon but turned out not to be her. Each of them had nodded with sad eyes, offering to sell her flowers or gum. She moved on. Standing in front of the bars, yings in short skirts and bare midriffs pulled, tugged, pleaded with farangs, grabbing them by the arms. “You handsome man, welcome inside please. Many girl inside. Look, look!”

In the muggy night air, the old hands among the crowd wormed their way out of the sweaty stranglehold; the newcomers allowed themselves to be reeled inside where the chilled air brought relief. Marisa repressed the urge to scream from the helplessness she felt. She stopped herself from throwing one of those out-of-desperation punches that made a person look like a complete fool. Though she thought of herself as a tough, experienced woman, Cowboy inevitably turned her stomach. It was degrading, base, the worst of animal instinct unhinged from reason. She was no prude, but the obvious loss of dignity among the women sickened her. It gave her all the more resolve to continue her search.

As she walked along, looking for the child, the same routine played out at bar after bar. The competition for customers was intense, and Marisa watched as one by one the farangs—including the old-timers—were picked off and disappeared into the bars.

Marisa had been at her condo when she'd received a phone call from Gung, a woman from a Thai NGO whom she thought of as a colleague. Gung understood the problem of dealing with a corrupt, self-serving, and compromised political and policing system; a system that consumed weeks and months before making a decision, only committees and memos, and then an attempt at consensus. In the vacuum, gangs that knew whose hands to grease distributed children to the red-light district along with a steady supply of trinkets, flowers, laser pens, and chewing gum for the tourists. Hundreds of children in dozens and dozens of red-light areas scattered around the city. Gung guessed the gang rotated about twenty kids in and out of Cowboy. Meetings had been held and reports filed, but on the ground nothing had changed other than that the kids would be off the streets for two weeks before they slowly filtered back.

Digital photos of kids as young as eight or nine had been attached to one of the reports. In one photo, a girl who sold flowers and chewing gum on Soi Cowboy haunted Marisa. The girl wasn't more than eleven years old. Gung had said she'd heard from the bamboo telegraph that the girl had been trafficked and was being watched as she made her rounds. Marisa had said she'd get the girl out. In a meeting with officials, Marisa had laid out the facts. Everyone had sympathized, but emotion hadn't carried the day. Too much money was involved; too many people upstream and downstream were feeding from the action. By the end of the meeting, Marisa had been told to back off. Her superior took her into the corridor and told her not to get personally involved. She reminded Marisa about the policy of noninterference in local affairs; going around the authorities would be counterproductive in the end.

When Marisa protested, she got the full Thai treatment: she was told point-blank that she was being selfish and stupid. Tackling the larger problem meant playing the local game. Sometimes sacrifices were unavoidable, but so long as the war was being won, casualties along the way had to be accepted. That was the nature of war: not
everyone got out alive. Bakhita, who was her supervisor at the UN, reminded Marisa that hundreds of new refugees were crossing the border from Burma every day. The organization needed local officials on their side to help with the refugees. These were compelling intellectual arguments—like those of field commanders who threw men into battle, knowing the mission was hopeless, because it distracted the enemy from the main front elsewhere.

War had a cruel and terrible face.

Marisa was being asked to accept the price of saving children and women swept across frontiers. She had to let go of her personal desire to save the kid on Cowboy. That was the deal.

She had done what she had been asked to do. She'd let go of the idea of any individual intervention. The police had been contacted, and they'd said they would handle the matter.

But Gung hadn't surrendered. She resolved to step up the pressure on the farang to do the job and take the heat. When she phoned Marisa, Gung had said, “Fon has only a couple of days. They have found a Chinese man who has paid for her virginity. He's coming in on a flight from Taiwan in two days. After that, everything will change for her.”

Then a child's voice was on the phone: “My name is Fon. Can you help me? I think Auntie sell me soon.”

Gung came back on the phone. “It's up to you.” Gung broke the connection.

The child's presence night after night on Soi Cowboy told Marisa that the girl was probably Tai Yai or, as it turned out, Shan, an ethnic minority from Burma. If she had been a Thai child, the police or social welfare might have taken her off the soi and put her in a shelter. That wasn't standard procedure for kids like Fon. She'd been better being a Karen, another ethnic minority from Burma that had been displaced by fifty years of civil war. Why a Karen? Because even after their villages were overrun and they ran out of food, the Karen rarely sold their daughters. But the fate of Shan and Tai girls wasn't the same; their villages had a long history of exchanging daughters for money or its equivalent.

Fon translated as “Rain.” Marisa thought it was a suitable name for a kid who never saw much daylight and whose future was clouded. Unless Fon at the end of the night had earned at least three-hundred
baht, her handlers would beat her and send her off to bed without a plate of rice and fish sauce. She had fallen between the cracks; she was another kid who had been purged from a normal life of school and play.

Marisa reminded Gung that her job prevented her from going out on rescue missions.

“I could be fired and kicked out of the country,” Marisa said.

“You have big
puuyai
to protect you. No one can touch Marisa.”

“You don't understand,” said Marisa. “It doesn't work that way.”

Gung paused for a moment, trying to figure out why Marisa, being a farang, didn't get the seriousness of the situation. Or was she just playing a mind game? She tested the waters with one name. “Khun Somporn.”

Marisa's brother wasn't even married into the family yet, but the word had already fanned out through the NGO community. At first she laughed when a Thai colleague said she was untouchable. Then she stopped laughing and felt disgust. Gung had made it clear that Marisa had entered the magic circle where people are protected, and that the locals would no longer view her as just another farang. She was now someone whose power and influence could prove useful at the street level. Gung had told her that this was the only way to deal with the police. They'd bend as soon as Somporn's name came up. Her first reaction had been that she'd never go to Somporn for any favors, knowing that the moment she crossed that line, he would own her. She thought of him on the phone with his mia noi in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel. He was a man who owned women.

“Helping this child has nothing to do with Somporn,” she said. “I would never ask him for anything.”

That was about as un-Thai a statement as anyone could have uttered to a Thai. Not using your power and influence to give help to someone who asked for it was a gross affront. And Gung took Marisa's words as a personal rebuff.

“It doesn't matter whether you ask him or not. You don't seem to understand. You aren't like us. Nothing can ever happen to you. You want another job? No problem. You want anything, no problem. Someone makes a problem for you, they have a big problem. So why don't you think about Fon? Who does she have? What other life
will she have? Maybe you don't care. I thought you were different,” said Gung. “Sorry.”

The line had gone dead. Marisa stared at her phone and thought of calling Gung back. She was about to say that Bakhita had ordered her not to get personally involved in any individual case. It was an argument that would have sounded hollow. Marisa was upset not because the call had been terminated before she could explain the policy—being cut off had saved her from that embarrassment—but because she realized that her brother's marriage was about to turn her own world upside down.

Marisa had paced the living room of the condo where Juan Carlos was working at the table, going over a thick file delivered by one of Lawman's assistants.

“What's wrong?” he asked, looking up.

“Nothing. But I need to get some fresh air,” she said.

“Good idea, why don't I come along? I could use a walk.”

That was the thing about Juan Carlos: he was joyful, trusting, upbeat, and in love with the world and life. She wished so much that she had inherited these qualities in equal share, but Juan Carlos got the full payload. He looked at her so openly, and she was not telling him the truth. She wasn't just going for a walk. But what point was there in getting her brother involved?

“I need some time to think, Juan.”

He tapped the end of his pen on a stack of documents and stretched. “Phone me after you've done your thinking, and I'll join you later.”

She nodded, grabbed her handbag, and went to the door.

“You seem upset. Are you sure you don't want company?”

“I'll be okay,” she said. “Really, I'm distracted, that's all.”

“It's your work. You shouldn't bring it home.”

She smiled and gave him a hug. “Of course, you're right.” She hated lying to her brother, but telling him the truth increased the risk that he'd want to help her. That was exactly what she didn't want to happen. She had to do this on her own terms.

As she rode the Skytrain, she'd thought about what she should do, what she
could
do—thought about the likely outcome, and how she had truly wanted to follow Bakhita's advice. But on the ground, things looked different; it was no place for policy wonks who focused
on the abstraction of children but rarely got down in the dirt to save an individual child. She didn't want to be like them. Gung hadn't fully understood what was at stake. She could lose her job and be thrown out of the country for breaking this rule. It hadn't carried any weight with Bakhita when she'd argued that the rule that barred intervention was wrong. She was simply told that, wrong or not, it was the rule and she was bound to follow it. If puuyais don't have to follow the rules, why do I? she'd asked herself. The meeting had ended in a stalemate, much like the call with Gung. Everyone had her own position to uphold, and squeezed in between was a little girl named Fon, who was about to be sold to a sex tourist.