AFTER HE’D LEFT Marisa’s condo, Calvino had returned to his office. The neon One Hand Clapping sign over the massage parlor cast shadows from a thick clot of telephone and electric lines. The sign was on but there was no activity. No yings, no customers, no plastic stools outside. The translation service on the ground floor was dark. At three in the morning, it was quiet on the soi. In the distance a dog barked.
Calvino walked a couple more feet before he was jumped from behind. The attacker, a fireplug of a man, had moved out with a grunt from his hiding position behind a vendor’s cart covered in canvas. Calvino had heard the fall of a footstep and immediately turned, crouching down and reaching for his handgun. The attacker held a steel rod like a baseball bat and took a wild, loping swing at Calvino. Strike one, thought Calvino. He half lost his balance as he fanned the night air. A second attacker ran out of the shadows holding a long knife. Not long enough to be a sword, but long enough to close a man’s accounts in this life.
The man with the knife ran straight at him. Calvino held his .38 service revolver with both hands, counted to five, rose up, and swung, catching the attacker chin-high. The crack of bone echoed down the small soi, and the attacker fell head first onto the pavement. Home run, thought Calvino. The first attacker, having regained his balance, came back for a second round with the steel rod raised like a samurai sword. Calvino, holding the .38 service revolver with both hands, aimed at the spot between the man’s eyes.
“You probably don’t want to do that,” he said.
The Thai man froze, staring at the gun, and then glanced down at his fallen comrade. His hair was long and oily, like it hadn’t been washed for a few days. Nothing about him looked like a cop.
“Put it down,” Calvino said. “Now lean up against the car, hands stretched out.”
Calvino removed the attacker’s wallet and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Who sent you?”
“Don’t understand,” said the man, spitting on the pavement.
Calvino hit him a sharp, hard rabbit punch to the kidneys. “Try harder.”
The attacker, a man in his late twenties, cried out in pain. “Who sent you and your friend?” The friend who had been face-down managed to stagger to his feet. The man on the ground was shorter and fatter. Those extra pounds had made him one step too slow to get the job done. No one goes to work with a steel rod and a knife unless they’re intending to inflict some major damage. He moaned, holding his broken chin with both hands.
“You want more?”
He shook his head.
“Who sent you? Was it Apichart?”
“Big boss.”
“What’s his name?”
“Boss.”
Calvino hit him hard enough to draw blood.
“Apichart. His name Mr. Apichart.” In Thai the name translated as “the great one in this life,” a man of destiny.
Calvino backed away, thinking the man’s parents should have chosen a different name. The long-haired attacker eased away from the car, slowly turned, and made a cautious circle around where Calvino stood his ground, never taking his eye off the handgun. He helped his fallen friend to his feet, wrapping the fat man’s arm around his shoulder, and they walked down the dark soi.
“You and your friend did better than the last two he sent.”
“I not forget you,” said the man, brushing the long unwashed hair from his eyes.
“I not forget you, too,” said Calvino. “You tell Mr. Apichart, I remember him, too.”
“Fuck you,” shouted the attacker as they reached the top of the soi.
The world was riddled like a machine-gunned corpse with such insane hatred.
Watching them limp off, Calvino thought to himself, The thing about Thais not speaking English was once again exposed as a lie. Then it struck him. They hadn’t spoken that many words to him in any language. They hadn’t been sent to find out anything. The two thugs were the message. The messengers wanted to bust me up, and let that filter down. Maybe Apichart was holding Calvino responsible, coming after him.
He climbed the stairs to his office, turned on the lights, and sat down at his desk. Rotating in his chair, he looked out the window at the neon signs below. There was no point in calling the police. He thought about how Marisa had been repulsed not so much by his resort to violence as by his absence of any residue of introspection. He hadn’t broken into a sweat. He looked at his hands in the light, rotating them from knuckles to palms and back. Out in the night were the men who had attacked him. They’d been injured, broken up enough to communicate to their boss what he was up against. Predators underestimated their prey—overshot, undershot, missed altogether, then licked their wounds before circling him again. His message had been clear: he wasn’t one of the weak, vulnverable farangs who could be easily pulled down; if they wanted him, he was going to make it costly and difficult. There was always the chance that these predators would move on to a weaker target. But Calvino knew that he was kidding himself; that the attack had been the first wave, others would be sent to finish the job, and if they failed, they’d be replaced. Somewhere in the city would be a man determined to use whatever force was necessary to secure his objective.
He thought about calling Marisa and talking to her about how without the promise of violence such forces could never be contained. He had an idea of what he wanted to explain to her. The proper response was never a prayer, an extended hand, or a friendly smile; it was a fist, knife, iron pipe, gun, or any available weapon. There is no time to sweat, to argue, to plan, or to reason. You take him down on his own terms or he owns you. Marginalize the role of violence. That’s what you UN people talk about. But when it comes to the street, violence marginalizes people. There are rules for the playing field, rules for the killing field, and you stay alive by knowing which field you are on.
He looked at the phone, then at his watch. After three in the morning there was no way he’d phone her. It could wait until tomorrow. Or it could wait forever. He thought also about phoning Colonel Pratt. But there was nothing he could do, and that also covered going back to sleep. He wondered about the men who had run off. He had fed them Apichart’s name; they would have said anything to get out of the situation. It was like Casey and his torture buddies; inflicting pain meant the person on the receiving end would tell you whatever you wanted to hear. Gangsters on Cowboy might have sent them around. He wasn’t known on the street. Roughing him up would have sent a powerful message for him to give up the kid. Or they could have been muggers, drug addicts looking for some quick cash. The underbelly of the night in Bangkok produced many plausible explanations. Listing the possible motives of thugs attacking a private eye at three in the morning could fill a notebook the size of the Manhattan phone directory.
Reaching inside his jacket, Calvino pulled out his microrecorder and set it on the desk. He plugged in a set of earphones. Her voice, a honeyed, smoky tone etched from cigarettes and scotch, came through loud and clear as Marisa told the story about the killing on the beach in Spain. He’d taped her in stereo and her rich, accented sound, the one from her bedroom, filled his head. There wasn’t any background static. The recording conditions had been perfect. He fast-forwarded through the sound of their lovemaking.
The Colombian who’d been popped on the beach had met his destiny around the same time that Bakhita had been in another explosion a few thousand miles away in Baghdad. She had survived, but at a huge personal cost. She’d parted with her real leg that day at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad when a cement truck exploded at the front entrance. But when the dust settled, Bakhita realized she’d lost much more than a leg.
They’d first met in a therapy session, a UN-sponsored group session for those suffering from post-traumatic stress. Misery made for a friendship. Calvino rewound the tape and listened as Marisa talked about the importance of the anniversary of the day a UN official named Sergio had been killed in Baghdad. There was a moment when it seemed the talk would end as the mind fogged with the possibility of sex. But the moment passed and Marisa kept talking, and Calvino kept listening, encouraging her to reveal a scene from her past that played on an endless loop.
“Unless you’ve lost someone through violence, you don’t know how important the anniversary of a death is for the family,” Marisa had said.
Calvino flipped through Casey’s file. He had gone underground two days before the anniversary of his son’s death. Something Marisa had said that evening had stayed with him: “Either you remember or you let the memory die. Such a thing can fall so deep inside you that it bounces around in places where you can lose yourself. You may think what happened is gone, finished, buried in the past … but of course that’s impossible. It will always be there, waiting for you. That’s why every twentieth of August, Bakhita and I have dinner. We light a candle and we say a prayer.”
He turned off the recorder, leaned back in his chair, and rotated around to face the window. He dumped the contents of the thug’s wallet on his desk. Three crisp one-thousand baht notes; the man’s fee made Calvino reflect on how little it cost to have someone beaten-up or killed. He read the Thai ID card, looking at the picture of the man who’d attacked him. He stuffed the cash and the ID card back into the wallet and switched off his office lights. He looked out onto the soi. The neon light reflected off the windows across the way. Red, green, blue, and yellow, as the hand moved through the clapping-itself gesture.
In the mean streets people from another world moved through the night. Daytime people rarely saw them; if they did, they would know what it was these people did at night. Calvino considered whether he would have helped Fon if she hadn’t been with Marisa, or if he hadn’t bumped into Marisa at the Skytrain. The world moved that way, in a series of small interconnected gestures, events, and strivings that merged together. He wanted to think he would have helped the kid if Marisa hadn’t been part of the package. But he wasn’t all that sure about it. He’d been on Cowboy before and had likely walked right past Fon without seeing her. That was foresight looking in the mirror of hindsight, and neither one standing aside. He didn’t know at that moment if a man could ever know who he really was. Except maybe Casey, who was too sure, someone who had an ego gorged with self-importance until it had swollen like a tick’s belly bloated with the blood. Like most shallow men, Casey thought most people could be handled, broken, kicked into submission. Calvino asked himself if any truth could be pulled out of such a wreckage of man who lived in a world where truth was associated with primal screams of pain.