COLONEL PRATT had once told Calvino that he reminded him of the kind of guy who walked into a dynamite warehouse and lit a match to see where he was going. After he lit the first match and looked around at the stacks of dynamite, he’d wait until the match burned down to fingernail-igniting length, and then he’d strike another match. Pratt thought about that conversation as he drove to Pattaya.
Entering Pattaya, he used the siren to clear a path through the traffic. He pulled into a hotel guest spot and then spent half an hour talking with two senior police officers in the hotel. They’d gone over the paperwork for the suite, looking at handwritten notes setting out the arrangements for payment of the room. The suite upgrade had been paid in cash. Then he rode in the elevator with the concierge, the manager, the two senior police officers, and a bellhop to the ninth floor. They stood in front of Calvino’s door, Pratt collecting his thoughts. He didn’t knock, letting the concierge slip a plastic card into the slot. The manager pulled out the card and opened the door.
Colonel Pratt asked to talk with Calvino alone. The others waited in the corridor as the Colonel stepped inside and looked around, leaving the door open behind him. Noriega slept in a stuffed chair, his head resting against the sliding glass door. An empty vodka bottle lay at his feet. Mao slumped over the glass table, snoring, his face a couple of inches away from a plate of pasta. The room looked like it had been raided and pillaged by a band of Vikings. Bones, scraps of food, clothes, plastic bags, and Styrofoam containers were scattered across chairs, tables, the bed, and the floor. Ants, geckos, and cockroaches feasted on the leftovers. The jungle had begun to reclaim the building, starting from the ninth floor.
Colonel Pratt cleared his throat as he stood at the end of the bed.
The men jerked, and Noriega instinctively reached for his holstered sidearm. He looked groggy-eyed at Colonel Pratt, who stood with his hands on his waist, his nine in a holster on his right hip. Noriega thought he might be dreaming until he realized a superior officer had entered the room. He shook Mao, who sat up too quickly, knocking the plate of pasta to the floor. The two cops snapped to attention. Noriega’s hair looked like a bad wig, and his skin, a slightly greenish color, looked ready to be harvested for high-end boots. He saluted Colonel Pratt while Mao, smoothing the wrinkles in his trousers, waited for the Colonel to say something. Calvino raised himself on one elbow in bed and stretched.
“What time is it?”
Pratt walked around the edge of the debris. “Time to find out what happened yesterday afternoon. And you might start by explaining about this room.”
“We had a small party. Then these two gentlemen decided to spend the night.”
“Vincent, the police have two witnesses who claim they saw you push her off your balcony,” said Colonel Pratt.
“They can get a dozen witnesses. It was getting dark. A woman fell from a hotel balcony. It happened in a couple of seconds. They saw nothing. But that doesn’t stop them thinking they saw what happened. Like I said on the phone, I was on my balcony and had just opened The Quiet American. I looked up and saw her falling. I leaned over the railing. A couple of seconds later she was on the ground.”
“There’s something you should know. The dead woman paid to have you upgraded to a suite below her own suite. Why would she do that?”
Calvino shook his head. “I heard about the upgrade from these two.” He nodded at the two cops. Then he stared at Colonel Pratt for a long moment, rolled off the bed, and walked over to the balcony. “Pratt, I have no fucking idea who she was. That’s the truth. The cops have been through my room and found nothing. Not a single print, hair, or fingernail clipping.”
“You didn’t know her?”
Calvino swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I have no idea who she was. Or why she’d do that. It’s gotta be Apichart.”
“On the phone, you said you’d seen her earlier in the day.”
“I know it looks bad.”
The other police and hotel staff had slowly filtered back into the sitting room area. Calvino now had a complete audience, just as on the previous evening. He paced in front of the balcony window, filling his cheeks with air, looking at his feet. He threw up his hands, resting forward with two hands on the back of a chair. “When I arrived at the hotel yesterday, I saw a woman at the hotel spirit house. A seagull flew up and startled her. She turned and saw me. We exchanged a smile. Does that amount to knowing someone? I saw her face for less than a minute. She didn’t say anything. If she’d said, ‘I just upgraded your room to a suite, big guy. This is your lucky day,’ I’d have remembered. The woman who went over the side looked like the woman in front of the spirit house. I only had a second to see the woman who fell. I’m trying to match a stranger I saw for less than a minute with another stranger I saw for a second.”
“It was the same woman who paid for the upgrade, Vincent.”
“I’m not denying it was. I’m saying I didn’t know who she was.”
It was a defining moment, one of those flashes that make a man ask whether he really knows another person. Colonel Pratt had known Calvino for years, fought for him, defended him, and sent him work. He looked at Vincent as if trying to read something inside his own mind at the same time.
Noriega and Mao gave up pretending to follow the conversation in English. Mao lit a cigarette and went out on the balcony. Noriega joined him with two of the cops who had followed Colonel Pratt up in the elevator. One of the senior officers was on his radio reporting that a colonel from Bangkok was interrogating the suspect in English and he wasn’t certain what was being said.
“I’ve done it this time. I’m in big trouble,” said Calvino.
“I’ve got someone checking to see if there is a connection between the woman and Apichart.”
“And if there isn’t one?”
The Colonel’s mouth firmed. “Then you’re right.”
“I should have stayed in Bangkok,” said Calvino.
“We’re going to work this through, Vincent.”
Calvino nodded. “Thanks, Pratt.”
When they stepped back inside the room, Noriega asked if Calvino had told him anything useful. Colonel Pratt stared at the policeman.
“You can go now,” said Colonel Pratt.
That wasn’t much of an answer, and certainly not the one they’d expected. A colonel didn’t have to answer to patrolmen who had spent a night drinking and eating. As far as Pratt was concerned, the two cops had done nothing more than average greedy babysitters, and now that the parents had come home, it was time to dismiss them. The two junior officers exchanged nervous glances. The two senior officers stared at Calvino. They made no effort to intervene.
“Check in with Colonel Pin if you feel that is necessary,” said Colonel Pratt. He was the big boss who made the final decision.
It was the kind of invitation that neither Mao nor Noriega would ever accept. To do so would violate a basic premise of Thai culture: one’s senior is never questioned. And a superior’s polite invitation to check him out is nothing more than politeness.
“That won’t be necessary, sir,” said Noriega. They saluted and walked across the room toward Calvino. He shook hands with Noriega and Mao and promised to keep in touch. He gave each of them a bottle from General Yosaporn’s stash. Both men looked sheepish and waied Calvino. The gesture registered a hint of a smile on Colonel Pratt’s lips. What had happened that night was a reversal of the Stockholm syndrome. The captors identified with the hostage.
“They have nothing. They should have let me go last night,” said Calvino.
“The system doesn’t work perfectly, Vincent. It wasn’t until late last night that the police found that the dead woman had registered in a room on the fifteenth floor and that she’d paid for your upgrade. The eyewitnesses said they saw you at the railing. No one saw her going over your railing. The police just made an assumption, connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected, and that happens more than anyone would wish to admit.”
“Who was she?”
Pratt had the details from the Pattaya police. “She was an assistant manager at an insurance company in Bangkok. Khun Nongluck. They found her ID in her handbag inside her room. She’s from a good middle-class family. University-educated and single, but unhappy in her personal life.”
“So she killed herself?” She’d prayed at the spirit house, and people who were intent on killing themselves didn’t interrupt their plans to light candles and incense sticks. Suicide didn’t make sense.
“It looks that way.”
“I can go?”
Colonel Pratt nodded, took off his cap, and sat at the table. He looked around the room. “Stay until I’ve got things under control in Bangkok.”
Calvino glanced over at his new friends Mao and Noriega, who were still lingering, and who would have liked to hang out for a couple of more nights. “Things aren’t under control here.”
Colonel Pratt shrugged. “Up to you. But General Yosaporn went to the trouble to arranging a room for you.”
“And a dead woman went to the added trouble to get me upgraded to this suite. Pratt, I can’t stay here. And I’m not going to another hotel in Pattaya. I’m going home.”
Colonel Pratt had played the Thai social shame card. Only it was a card game that Calvino usually refused to play. What the Colonel was saying was that he’d lose face if his farang friend packed up and left after a long line of chits had been burned to get him the room. And Apichart’s failed hit hadn’t been resolved. He was still running around Bangkok pretending to be a victim.
“I came to Pattaya so I’d be out of the way until the General and you decided what to do with Apichart. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. But I did what you asked. I knew it was important to you and the General. Now things are changed. Apichart’s going to know I’m here. The newspapers will make certain of that. Besides, I’ve got another case waiting in Bangkok, a farang husband in love with someone other than his wife, and the wife says it’s an emergency. The client has paid the fee in advance. Ratana has told me she’s desperate. Would the General want me to lose business?”
The problem with a guilt card is that it can be trumped by another guilt card.
“The General will understand.”
Calvino started throwing clothes into his suitcase. He looked up as he held a Hawaiian shirt, black with vertical rows of yellow pig heads. “Before we go, can we have a look at Nongluck’s room?”
“Don’t get involved, Vincent. Let’s go back to Bangkok and let the local police finish their job.” Colonel Pratt knew that Calvino wasn’t likely to follow his advice.
“I am involved. The local cops still think I killed her.”
“They’ve changed their minds.”
“Maybe they’ll change them again.”
The Colonel said his goodbyes to the Pattaya police and watched them take the elevator down to the lobby. They’d seemed surprised when he hadn’t gotten into the elevator with them. He waied them and waited until the door closed, then pushed the up button and waited with the hotel manager, whom he’d asked to stay behind.
The manager let them into Nongluck’s suite. The first thing Calvino noticed inside room 1542 was the cloying smell: a mix of perfume, soap, and powder. The scent of a woman. On the table was a wine bottle. Beside it was a corkscrew with the cork screwed deep, the metal tip sticking out at the bottom. A glass with two fingers of wine was next to the bottle. Beside the French wine were some playing cards wrapped with a rubber band. “Doesn’t look like she was playing with a full deck,” said Calvino, reaching for the minideck on the table.
“Don’t touch them,” said Colonel Pratt. The cards looked fairly new. Calvino was right; it was only a few cards. Pratt pulled off the rubber band and turned over the first card: the ace of hearts. He worked through the eight of diamonds, the six of clubs and the six of spades. The last four cards were the queen of hearts, the six of hearts, the five of hearts, and the nine of spades. He slipped the rubber band back on the cards, looked away and palmed the cards, slipping them in his pocket. Calvino pretended not to see Pratt take the playing cards.
“Any idea what happened to the rest of the deck?” asked Calvino, looking around as if they might be elsewhere in the room. He walked over to the closet and pulled back the door.
“They didn’t evaporate,” said Pratt, kneeling down level to the wine glass on the table and examining the lipstick on the rim.
Calvino looked back from the closet. “Cards don’t evaporate, Pratt. That’s not the right English word.”
Pratt raised his hands covered by surgical gloves. “In Thailand many things can evaporate, Vincent. That includes money, reputation, and life. Subtracting a few cards from the list, I am certain you will agree, does no permanent harm to the English language.”
A suitcase had been slipped into the closet. A couple of dresses, some underwear, bras, T-shirts, jeans, and three pairs of shoes were also in the closet. Calvino remembered the blue dress. Nongluck had worn it when she’d made her offering at the spirit house.
“Looks like no one has tossed the room,” said Calvino as Colonel Pratt slid the balcony door open and stepped outside onto the tiled floor.
“That includes us. Housekeeping was told to not enter the room, but if they had to go in, then to not touch anything,” said Colonel Pratt, standing at the railing. It was the most Thai of instructions.
Calvino followed the Colonel outside, disappointed about the restrictions on inspecting the room. He looked straight ahead at the beach and sea, holding onto the railing. He glanced down at the street. Fifteen floors was a long way to fall. It was more likely an eighteen-story drop to the street by the time the lobby and mezzanine levels were factored in. She’d had a few final seconds of consciousness—what had gone through her mind, knowing that she was going to die, knowing that nothing she could do, say, or think could save her? His stomach churned, and he turned away. He hated heights and couldn’t understand why people spent huge sums of money to climb mountains only to fall into a crevice or die of frostbite. How anyone could sum the courage to jump off a balcony fell in the same category of wonderment. He pulled away from the railing, feeling shaken. Turning his back to the ocean view, he tried to clear his mind of the flood of disturbances racing through it. Then he walked from the balcony into the sitting room. The suite was cookie-cutter identical to his own.
The sheets of the bed had been neatly pulled back and the pillows bunched into a pile at the center with a book nearby. It was a self-help book on relationships with a smiling, confident woman on the cover who looked like a beauty-contest winner.
Colonel Pratt closed the balcony door and walked across the room. He took photographs of the table, the closet, and the bed. “Early this morning, I went to the house where Nongluck’s parents live. They were still asleep when I arrived. They invited me inside. I told them about their daughter’s death. The mother broke down and cried, but the father didn’t look surprised. He said she’d had problems in her personal life. Of course, what they meant was she had a problem with a boyfriend. The mother confirmed that a series of boyfriends had caused her nothing but anguish. She wailed that she’d killed herself over a man, but she didn’t say who he was. That can wait for later.”
“Was there any connection between the family and Apichart?”
Colonel Pratt shook his head. “They’d never heard of him.”
Calvino, frustrated by the answer, walked into the bathroom and examined, without touching, Nongluck’s shampoo, soap, and cosmetics, neatly arranged in rows along with the standard hotel toiletry items. A bottle of Opium perfume was open. That seemed strange. A woman as tidy as Nongluck wouldn’t be leaving her prized perfume open to the elements. He called to Colonel Pratt, who’d been taking more photographs.
When the Colonel stepped inside the bathroom, Calvino was on his knees looking at the bathtub. “You’ll need to get the hairs out of the drain. Hairs and skin from the sink, too. And check the lid on the toilet. It was up when I came in. Women always keep the lid down. They shouldn’t flush the toilet until lab guys have swabbed down the inside. And look at the perfume bottle. It’s open. She doesn’t strike me as someone who’d leave it like that.”
“Where did you come up with all of this?” asked Colonel Pratt.
Calvino smiled, looked over his shoulder. “I study investigative techniques.”
“Sounds like you saw that program on National Geographic about bathtub murders.”
Calvino’s cheeks flushed two shades short of a red light. “It was a good show. Mao and Noriega watched it with me last night.”
A couple of seconds passed before Pratt registered that Calvino was talking about the two policemen who had stayed overnight in the room. He’d been joking about the TV forensic show; Calvino apparently hadn’t taken it as such.
“You watched that bathtub murder investigation with the police?”
Calvino nodded as if it was the most natural way to spend time with two cops. “During a commercial break, Mao went into my bathroom and swabbed it down.”
“In this case, a woman died. The police want to know why. The local politicians may try to make something of it.”
The election campaign had made Pratt cautious about what was possible. The daily cycle of mudslinging, lies, rumors, and vilification had exhausted him. Everyone was treading water, waiting to see who won.
“I’d like to have talked to her,” said Calvino.
Pratt had already gathered from the parents the background of the dead woman: her name, age, occupation, marital status, hometown, history of mental problems, and conflicts with family, neighbors, or friends. The police lab report said there were small traces of alcohol in her blood. But her blood tested negative for drugs. There was no evidence of a struggle in the room. And so far there was no evidence that anyone other than Nongluck had been in the room. Hotel rooms were like working girls; they had many customers, people with no connection to each other, coming and going over a short period of time, making it more difficult for investigators than a room in a house or an office.
It was only after they left room 1542 that Calvino began to enjoy his release from house arrest. When he turned up at the reception desk with the Colonel, they had his invoice prepared. The concierge in the far corner stared at him without a smile. As he checked out, everyone behind the reception desk seemed relieved to see him, with his suitcase and case of whiskey at his feet. The bill for room service ran to two pages. Calvino studied it, clicking his tongue like a Bantu warrior on the eve of battle. Colonel Pratt asked to see it. He glanced through the steaks, the fries, the ice cream, the pasta, the vodka, the Russian food with names he couldn’t pronounce; he flipped the page and read through the various delivery charges and expenses. He did the sums in his head. Vincent had managed to run up about a week’s worth of room service charges in one night. The owner would be satisfied; General Yosaporn would not lose face. Colonel Pratt handed the invoice back to the clerk and told him that the owner’s friend, General Yosaporn, had arranged Calvino’s stay.
The clerk stared at the desk. A colonel in full dress uniform had spoken.
“No problem, sir,” he said.
The hotel staff shuffled and looked at their hands. None of them were willing to push for cash in the circumstance of a colonel supporting a farang. If anything, they were relieved to see Calvino leaving, and the manager who had been hovering behind the desk slipped away into his office. The matter was settled. With the invoice cleared, Colonel Pratt asked who had been on duty at the front desk the day before. After talking with a couple of hotel staff, he found the receptionist, who remembered checking in Nongluck. She had checked in, alone, at 2:10 p.m. the day before her death. They had made a photocopy of her Thai ID card. She had gone to her room and only later returned downstairs to pay for her room and Calvino’s upgrade. She had used fresh one-thousand-baht notes. She had said the upgrade was a gift, and no one should tell the farang. Let it be a surprise. There had been nothing out of the ordinary about her that afternoon. She had smiled and counted out the cash, slid it across the reception desk, and watched as the clerk counted it again.
On the day of Nongluck’s death, the receptionist recalled, she had worn a blue dress and carried a Prada handbag and a plastic Siam Paragon shopping bag with a bottle of wine inside. A bellhop remembered watching her walk out the front entrance an hour later and stop in front of the spirit house, where she’d lit incense sticks. A few minutes later, she had returned to the lobby, waited for the elevator, and returned to her suite. No member of the staff remembered seeing her leave the hotel after that. Could someone have gotten past security and slipped into her room without even passing another guest? No one at reception admitted that this could have happened.
Calvino suggested checking the security downstairs, on the way out of the hotel. The two of them found the garage security guy who’d been working the day shift on the day of the death. Lots of cars had come and gone during the day.
“Did you see anything unusual yesterday afternoon? Maybe a car that you remember?” asked Colonel Pratt.
The guard remembered a Thai arriving in a red sports car the previous afternoon. It had been a beauty, a European two-seater, polished, not a scratch on it, tinted windows. No, he didn’t remember the license plate number; he was too busy looking at his own face reflected in the high sheen of the car. But he thought it might have been a Bangkok plate.
“Why do you think that?” asked Colonel Pratt.
The guard told him that if it had been a local car, he’d have recognized it. He’d have known who owned it. A car like that wouldn’t be a secret for long in a small town like Pattaya. It was flashy like a car from the movies, a car built and sold to attract attention, the attention of women in particular. It wasn’t a family car the guard described. And it wasn’t the kind of car you’d drive to commit a murder, thought Calvino. A professional hit man would have driven a plain vanilla Honda.
Whomever the driver of the sports car was, Calvino had a good idea he hadn’t planned to kill anyone. But maybe things turned out in a way he hadn’t anticipated. Something unexpected might have come up—a surge of anger, the wrong word or look—and Nongluck could have found herself airborne.