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“And he said you were looking for a missing person, Rob Osborne. Getting the girlfriend’s brother out of prison is going to help you find him?”
She asked better questions that the MI agent, thought Calvino.
“Finding Osborne will take time and legwork. I can find him. The problem is convincing him to return to Bangkok.”
Ohn Myint sucked her teeth.
“Getting the brother out of prison will persuade Osborne to return?”
“The deal is, I spring the brother, and Mya Kyaw Thein tells Osborne he has to go back and make his peace with his old man.”
“Four thousand, five hundred dollars,” she said.
“You’ll have it tomorrow morning,” said Calvino. “Let Mya know what the deal is—Rob goes back to Bangkok to see his father. After he sees him, it’s up to Rob whether he wants to stay there or come back.”
She surveyed the sky as if looking for an answer.
“I’ll let her know.”
It was the cost of one man’s freedom from prison, the number that would assure that another man, once found, would voluntarily return to Bangkok. Rob Osborne had unsuccessfully tried to borrow the money from his old man. Now the old man would have to pay the amount anyway, with Calvino’s fee added as interest.
Some numbers always return, like a swallow to the home roost. But an old saying has it that the presence of one swallow doesn’t make for a summer. There was a chance that Rob Osborne wouldn’t leave Rangoon without the Black Cat. The price to get her brother out of prison hadn’t included her promise to return.
“See you at the finish line,” said Ohn Myint.
Calvino watched her pick up speed on the path leading through the field, until her clean smooth stride kicked in. She disappeared around a bend as she entered a road. He sucked in a long breath and put one foot in front of the other, a kind of running that retreating soldiers would have recognized. By now Jack Saxon would be at the finish line drinking his second or third beer. Ohn Myint had taken the baton from Saxon and run with it. The handoff had been made. She would see that the money was delivered.
The way he figured it, Mya Kyaw Thein, or the Black Cat—whatever she wanted to call herself—would find a way to slip into her brother’s trial. After all, the Monkey Nose lead singer had left Bangkok to help her brother beat the illegal teak transport rap. It wasn’t as if he’d killed someone. Though Alf, the Texan sax player in the Monkey Nose band, had reminded Calvino that stealing a man’s horse in Texas was worse than killing a man. What a horse was to a Texan, teak was to the Burmese.
The natural course of events followed a pattern—find the woman, and you’ll find her man within fifty meters, lurking in the shadows. Men tend to stay within sniffing distance, Calvino had found, watching and guarding their women. DNA wired them to use their eyes, nose and ears, their senses fine-tuned to the task. When the woman had the agility of a black cat, trapping and caging her wasn’t going to end well. The deal Calvino had made with Ohn Myint was his best play. A four thousand and five hundred dollar chip was on the table. Tomorrow the roulette wheel would spin and he’d either win or lose. He was betting that Mya Kyaw Thein’s brother would get a tap on the shoulder and then find himself shown to a side door leading to freedom. It’s just the way people run after money, he thought. Freedom has a drop-down menu, and price is a central feature.
As he began to run again, he thought how lucky Pratt had been to have an embassy car whisk him away just in time. Had it been luck? Or had Pratt planned it that way? Questions were all he had to sustain him on the last kilometer. The marines would have crossed the finish line long ago. The fat NGOs would be on their second beer, and he’d appear just ahead of the walkers, his head filled with questions and a thirst in his belly.
SEVEN
Calvino’s Short Trigger Pull
LATE AFTERNOON, BACK at his hotel, Calvino stood under the shower, trying to wash away the afterburn from the 10K run. Slowly he opened his eyes. Someone was ringing the doorbell for his room. Or was his mind playing tricks? He turned off water. The bell rang again. He hardly felt his legs as he stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist to open the door.
Bianca Conti extended her hand. They stared at each other.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Water dripped from his body, pooling on the floor.
“Come in,” he said.
She walked into his room, her sleeveless blue dress hugging her waist and hips like a second skin.
“If it isn’t a good time, I can come back.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do Americans shower in the afternoon, too?”
“Only after a 10K run.”
“You are one of those fitness types?”
