Paying Back Jack (30 page)

“That should be a challenge,” said Calvino. “What about Khun Somporn? I see his posters up and down the street. Does he help the ordinary people?”

“He helps Meow,” she said with a sigh.

“Meow doesn't look all that ordinary to me.”

As he walked into the beauty salon, all eyes turned his way and stared. The two yings working to shape the hair on ancient heads stopped, their scissors frozen in midair. Four old women sat around a polished teak table playing mah-jongg, slapping the tiles. But the game had stopped too. The players looked up, a pile of bank notes on the table beside each one. There is an element of violence and spite inherent in that old Chinese game that seemed to perfectly fit the atmosphere of the place.

“Can I help you?” asked one of the yings.

“I'd like a haircut. And I'd like Khun Fah to cut my hair. That is, if she's available.” He sat down in the barber's chair and smiled.

“I am Fah,” said the ying with a T-shirt that read on the front
SAME SAME
and on the back
BUT DIFFERENT
. “How you know my shop? How you know my name?”

The ladies waited for Calvino to answer. The women's interrogation was more like a job interview than a haircut.

“Khun Dam across the road said you cut her hair. And there was another person who said you did good work.” He closed his eyes as if concentrating and then slowly reopened them. “Cat. I mean, Khun Meow, tells me that you cut her hair too. With those recommendations, I'd say you're good.” He finished with a broad smile

“How do you know Meow?” asked Fah. The other yings in the back strained to hear his answer.

Calvino raised an eyebrow. “We go way back in time. We both like the music scene.”

“She was just here,” said Fah.

Calvino raised an eyebrow. “Sorry I missed her.”

“You'll have to wait,” Fah said. “And I don't have air-conditioning.”

For someone without a lot of customers, you should try to be a bit more positive, he thought. Normally the Thais were friendly, happy, and playful. This group looked at him as if he had some intention of robbing the place. He hadn't worn his leather shoulder holster, so it wasn't because of any mysterious bulge under his jacket.

The beautician came back with a glass of water for Calvino. Twenty minutes later, after he'd flipped through several women's magazines—all in Thai, so he had just looked at the pictures like a three year old—Fah tied the apron around Calvino's neck. He'd settled in long enough that the ladies had gotten used to his presence and stopped staring at him. Slowly they resumed their gossip about neighbors, the price of chicken, the local Mafia, and the daughter of a friend who had married a rich farang who had delivered ten grand worth of gold for his mother-in-law's birthday. One of the old women threw a glance at Calvino after the story about the gold, wondering about him in the way Thais wondered about farangs. Was he married? Was he rich? She licked her old, parched lips before thinking of the possibilities represented by so much gold. It was tied in with some demand made by the Mafia and a three-year-old gambling debt.

“How would you like it?” Fah asked him, looking at Calvino in the mirror.

Through the mirror he looked at her, standing behind him with the scissors. “A light trim. Very light.”

She pulled the comb through his hair and, after reaching over to a side table for a plastic sprayer bottle, wet his hair down. The salon had a closed-in musty smell cut with cheap perfume and cat mange.

“Meow could go to any salon. But she comes here,” he said, watching her face in the mirror.

“She's very loyal to her friends,” said Fah.

Calvino thought about Cat going around Somporn's back with the Birdman. There was loyalty to men and then there was loyalty to the salon. The two would never be confused in the mind of a ying, he thought. The mah-jongg players pretended not to listen. He noted that Cat's suitcase rested beside one of the women at the table. On one corner of the mah-jongg table were several stacks of small campaign cards with the faces of Somporn and two other candidates. Next to the cards were a stapler and a box of staples.

“She's been coming here a long time,” said Calvino.

One of the old ladies whispered loud enough for everyone to hear that she was increasing her wager on the game. She then discarded a tile.

“Even after her sister died, she didn't forget us.”

Calvino raised an eyebrow. “When did that happen?”

“Two, three years ago,” said Fah.

One of the old ladies piped up. “She died three years ago last month. I remember the funeral. Her two young boys cried their eyes out. They had no father around to hold them.” The gambling hadn't kept any of them from absorbing the gossip flying around the salon like mah-jongg tiles.

“How old was the sister?”

“Jeab was twenty-four,” said another old lady.

“No, she wasn't. She was at least twenty-five,” said the first one.

“She wasn't quite twenty-five,” said Fah. That seemed to satisfy the two old women, as there was no clear winner in the age sweepstakes.

The subject had opened up the collective wisdom of the salon, and Calvino pushed ahead with his questions. “That's young to die.” He considered the possibility that the husband had passed along a dose of AIDS before he turned into a coil of smoke going up the temple chimney.

“Jeab worked here for two years before she died.”

“She was the best,” said one of the old ladies. “I still miss the way she cut my hair.”

Watching her face in the mirror, Calvino saw the remark had annoyed Fah. “What happened to the kids?”

“With no father, Meow supported them.”

Resting against the elbow of one of the ladies was a stack of thousand-baht notes with campaign cards stapled to each one.

“Saved their lives is more like it,” said the other hairstylist.

“Gave them hope,” said one old lady. She slipped the stack of banknotes off the table and out of sight.

“She put them in an international school, a school that is only for the very rich. But she pays for it.”

It turned out to be the old story of the husband running off with a younger woman. Jeab had it in her head that she'd been thrown overboard because she had a number-three nose, the kind of nose outside of Asia that takes a lot of punching before it gets that flat. And if she had a more beautiful nose, she thought, then she could reel her husband back in, or if that failed, she'd find another man who would appreciate her new beauty. A friend had recommended a clinic. The price was cheap and the doctor was, well, a doctor, and he had done a lot of nose jobs. Jeab had gone into the clinic at ten in the morning and lain back on the cot where the doctor administered the anesthesia. But he somehow used too much, or she just had a reaction. No one ever knew the reason for sure, but Jeab's heart stopped, and by the time they got her to the hospital, her brain had swelled up, and the emergency room doctors had to punch holes in her skull to relieve the pressure.

She'd lingered a while in ICU, hooked up to machines to keep her breathing. When her heart stopped again, no one attempted to revive her. Cat took in her nephews, something that had made it easier to accept Somporn's offer at the car show. Old-fashioned capitalism, supply and demand, had worked for both of them. In three years the two boys had prospered at the international school. Cat kept a rented house near the school with a full-time live-in maid. Twice a week she visited her nephews, and they adored her as if she were their mother.

“She goes to all the boys' school functions,” said one of the old ladies. “That's a fact.”

Cat the saint, thought Calvino. He also thought of Marisa and wondered what it was about women that made them rescue children while the men walked on past.

“Meow must be rich,” said Calvino.

Fah held the scissors an inch away from his cheek, finding his eyes in the mirror. “She has a rich husband.”

“Yeah? She married?”

“I thought you said she was your friend?”

“I've never met her husband.”

“She's a mia noi,” said one of the mahjong ladies. “But what is the harm in that? A man with that much money should spread it around with more than one wife. I've always said that.”

Another old woman shook her head. “Not always. Only since your husband died have you said that.”

“People change,” said the old woman, who had the kind of permanent smile that plastic surgery leaves. “And Meow has got herself a good man. He takes care of her.”

“And she takes care of him,” said her friend, winking. “If he's elected, it's because of her. But elections cost a lot of money. That is, if a candidate wants to get elected.”

They saw him looking at the money. “Friends help friends,” said one of the women at the table.

Calvino nodded, turned back, and looked in the mirror. He gave Cat full credit and an extra star to Somporn, who had found a way to get his money into the hands of the voters while staying far away from the money trail himself. Using the game of mah-jongg as a cover was a particularly nice touch.

Calvino scratched his head, sitting in the barber's chair and looking at the cash and the women at the table. “I thought Meow was single,” he said. “I saw her hanging out with a jazz musician. He plays with a band at Saxophone.”

“That's Nop,” said Fah. “That's not her husband. Ball teaches the boys guitar once a week. He works for Meow.”

“Everyone calls him Ball. He's a celebrity, you know. A lot of people work for Meow. Some of them are quite famous,” said one of the women at the table.

Not everyone, thought Calvino, who had grown accustomed to thinking of him as Birdman.

Fah held a mirror behind Calvino's head. He had a look at her work and nodded. “Ball's good on the guitar,” said Calvino as he started to rise.

“But I'm not finished,” said the beautician, clicking the scissors as if she had a nervous habit. Calvino removed the apron around his neck and handed it to her.

“Just a trim was all I wanted,” he said.

“I only did the back.”

“That's where it grows the fastest.” He pulled out his wallet and gave her a five-hundred-baht note.

“It's one-hundred baht. Do you have anything smaller?” asked Fah.

“Keep it,” he said. “Make certain you vote for Somporn.”

“Oh, we will,” said one of the mah-jongg players, slapping down a tile.

As he walked to the door, Calvino stopped and looked back at the women.

“I forgot something,” he said.

The women looked at him and then at each other, waiting to find out what he'd left behind. Only he hadn't left anything like keys, glasses, a wallet, or the other things geezers forget. “Meow had a friend. Her name was Nongluck. Did Meow ever talk about her?”

The women at the table looked down at the tiles. It was the first time they'd had to prepare for the passage of a freight-train-sized lie. “No, I don't think Meow said anything about a Nongluck,” said one of the women. The others agreed.

The thing about lies is that the truth is lying just out of reach, waiting. In most cases, it's waiting for money. He wondered how much the ladies might be siphoning off. Something, of course, but not enough to defeat the larger purpose. The Thais understood that crossing a line over into greed was a money handler's death warrant. None of these ladies looked like they wanted to get themselves killed. Calvino removed his wallet and took out a thousand-baht note—later he kicked himself for not taking out the five-hundred-baht note next to it—and walked back to the chair where he had got the haircut. He laid the note on the seat of the chair. “Tell you what, the first lady who can remember something, anything Meow might have mentioned about Khun Nongluck, gets the thousand-baht note.”

A group of women neck-deep into rigging an election could definitely be bought. It was just a matter of time. He waited a minute
and then paced between the chair and the door, staring down at the banknote. Making them believe that at any moment he was going to stick it back in his wallet.

Cat was a good customer, and she'd left behind a load of cash, but she was gone. That was the reality. Absence was a problem. There was no shield other than a physical one, and the temptation of a quick cash transaction was what determined elections, paid school fees, and smoothed the transmission of information. The ying who had cut Calvino's hair grabbed the thousand-baht note just a fraction of a second before the other stylist, who was at a distance disadvantage. “She didn't like Nongluck. She said Nongluck was no good, a cheap woman. And what did men see in a cheap woman?”

“Any reason for Meow to say Nongluck was a cheap woman?”

“A woman's thing,” said the winning stylist, having pocketed the money.

“Meaning the bad blood was over a man,” said Calvino.

Behind their faces, upon the recognition of truth being spoken and before a switch could be flipped, he saw a gnat-sized object of truth whip past at the speed of light.

Walking out of the beauty salon, Calvino felt he'd gotten far more than he'd bargained for when he'd followed the gray Camry to the moo baan. He'd walked into an old Bangkok sealed away in the past. It was in such places that some men found a way to secure their future. Casey, the private contractor with interrogation expertise, good street contacts, and a payload of anger over a dead son, was locked in a version of the past fueled by hatred. Then there was Somporn, the businessman and politician, with a ying salting cash around his election district.

But there were a couple of troubling things about Casey. He'd hired Calvino to follow Cat. But he claimed not to know about the dead ying in Pattaya. Maybe he was telling the truth, unless he had a reason to lie. That left open the possibility of Apichart, still the man who had a motive to frame him with a murder rap. It occurred to him that Casey might have a use for the information about Cat's movements and associations beyond the one he had disclosed. Was he going to use the information only to ruin Somporn's election chances? That seemed too subtle and indirect for Casey. Besides, the disclosure of a mia noi might help Somporn get votes. Eliot Spitzer,
the ex–New York governor, had been born in the wrong country, he thought. Calvino decided he'd leave out of his report the detail about Cat's role in acting as Somporn's bagman to the constituency. It was always good to hold something back from a client who was holding back his motives for hiring you in the first place.