THE BEQUEATHING
Cavalier didn’t see Ted for three days running. The wheel-chair had not been moved in that time. He made enquiries at the condo reception and was saddened to discover that Ted had died. The next day Cavalier found a brown box outside his apartment door, marked to his attention. He emptied the contents on a table, including ten thousand American dollars cash, another hundred thousand cash in Thai baht, Ted’s two passports and other older ones, bank account booklets and other personal items. There was also a note from Ted.
Dear Laurent,
I am writing this before I am unable to write anymore.
You now have my personal effects. Whatever you find in the box is yours. I have notified my Thai lawyers of this.
As the sandwich board says, ‘the end is nigh’—for me at least.
I have few regrets. I have been seeing out time since my beloved Rana died this time last year. I have never been one for much sentimentality.
I bored you with my travel stories but you can see from my passports that the locations were right. You’ll notice too that my real name was not Ted Baines but Edward Blenkiron. So, in an odd way the real name will live on, while “Ted Baines” will leave this mortal coil. I told you the reason I took another ID. I was ashamed but your comments helped me transcend the guilt, at just the right time before I meet my maker, if there is one. You also helped me overcome worrying about what my action will mean to my reincarnation. Although a Buddhist, I’ve had my doubts about reincarnation. If it’s real, I’ll be sent back as a rat, maybe? I’d like to be a black cat, if I have a choice!
My Thai lawyers will be in touch over my meagre Estate. Spend it wisely Laurent, because there is not much of it!
I wish to thank you for enriching my last few months with your intelligence, friendship, kindness and humour.
I believe the Thais have gotten it right about Karma.
Have a good life,
Ted.
Cavalier found the American a warm, sagacious figure. The sadness was compounded by the sight of Ted’s wheelchair, which he saw every day when he used the outside elevator that overlooked the condo’s bike parking area, or when he jumped on the Harley standing next to it.
There was a poignant reminder in the chair’s emptiness.
*
A week later, the two English-speaking Thai papers had stories about a gangland-style shoot-out in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slum. At first, Cavalier thought nothing of it, but the newspaper and Internet coverage made him curious. It emerged that Americans were part of the incident; then Mexicans were said to be involved. Next, a major story broke that the Mexican singer Talia Cruz had been a victim in the shoot-out, taking a bullet in one of her long legs, which fortunately were well insured. She was under care in a Bangkok hospital. The actor Tyrone Risk had received a superficial bullet wound to an arm.
That was more than Cavalier needed to know. The stories grew and it was soon disclosed that Cruz and Risk had made contact with Jose Cortez. He had given Risk an interview and later dined with the ‘stunning, quixotic’ Cruz, as one paper described her. Unattributed net items speculated that these two showbiz people had been part of a DEA/CIA sting to snare Cortez.
Fascinated, Cavalier contacted Gregory by text to obtain more details. Gregory replied:
We understand it was a botched scam.
Any casualties?
No details but DEA lost two agents, CIA one.
Not the lovely MS, I hope.
No, she is okay. In fact, she is back in a bigger saddle.
Meaning?
The CIA ran the show. Because it failed, she and the DEA have taken charge of nabbing JC. I hear you knocked her back, correct?
How could anyone refuse her?
Seriously, Vic, she will be coming after you with an offer you can’t refuse.
I’ve had them before. In any case, I’m retired.
This episode should please you on one level. All the key people—the thugs—from the cartel are certainly now all out of Chiang Mai. Still wise you stay incognito until the cousins can clean up the cartel mess.
Mess-up!
Yeah, but at least they’re working on it. When and if they nab Cortez, you can consider coming home.
*
Cavalier arranged Ted’s funeral in line with Buddhist traditions, on the seventh day after the death, at Wat Umong, a seven-hundred-year-old monastery located against the mountains of Doi Suthep, about a kilometre south of the main campus of Chiang Mai University. After the cremation, Cavalier watched monks chanting, wondering if he would be expected to join in the ritual of placing the small porcelain urn in the temple’s beautiful gardens. A whiff of incense drifted through the building as Cavalier waited.
When it became apparent that he would not be needed, he joined the handful of people from the Riverside Condo, who filtered out of the temple. He decided to walk the grounds where monks were on benches reading, in clearings meditating, or feeding deer who roamed the gardens.
Cavalier felt a real peace in a moment of solace for the first time on the trip. He reflected on a friendship cut all too short and then attempted meditation, which he’d promised himself to re-engage with on this stay but had so far failed to do. He had been taught a twenty-minute version of basic transcendentalism by the mother of a former Indian woman friend. He realised his mind was in a state of flux and he couldn’t keep certain thoughts from intruding. Ted, and his admission about having killed a man, was one. Cavalier reproached himself for not being more of a help by soothing the American’s mind about this deed of so long ago. Maybe, perhaps he could have helped his will to live, and to enjoy life without the nagging, slow-burning guilt that Ted had admitted at times consumed him with grief and regret. But Cavalier had held back from speaking to him further. It brought up his own killing experiences that did not bother him, but which he’d rather not dwell on. Thoughts too of Pon encroached. He imagined her lying in some shallow Mexican grave with a thousand other victims of the drug cartel’s inhumane activity, similar perhaps to the ones she had videoed herself in her proud declaration to him that she would become, like him, an investigative journalist. A third invasion of his meditative state were thoughts of Irina and Doug, the two possible Indonesian terrorists he’d spied on.
After a failed attempt to concentrate, he fell asleep.