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“Any calls while I was out?”
She shrugged.
He walked into his office, removed his jacket and sat at his desk. Ratana had placed his passport, two photos and the Burmese visa form beside the keyboard. The documents were surrounded by the mouse on the left and on the right, his favorite pen for signing documents.
It was up to him. Of course it was. He sat at his desk and woke up his screen from sleep mode. There was a note in Ratana’s handwriting on top of the passport: “Brad Morrisey, RIP.”
She’d smiled when he’d come in, and there are layers to a Thai smile. Stacked one upon another, with no instructions on how to unpack. The note, the papers, like a jazz solo, had been in Ratana’s smile. Calvino understood. She knew that he would.
Brad Morrisey had disappeared upcountry to a small village, retreating to a small room in a house on stilts, pigs and chickens and dogs running in the dirt pathways. But Brad had holed up there with a bar girl who bought him “ice,” lit his pipe, watched him smoke and then asked for more money. After three days without food or sleep in his self-imposed exile from reality, he found an ATM and withdrew more money. Brad, an ex-firefighter from London, Ontario, had once put out other people’s fires for a living, until he came to Thailand and used ice to torch his own life. Set the whole thing ablaze. His family had hired Calvino to bring him to Bangkok and send him back to Canada. Brad hadn’t wanted to leave the village, but Calvino persuaded him to return to Bangkok for a medical checkup.
The tragedy was, Brad didn’t want help. He told Calvino he wouldn’t be going home to Canada. The day of his flight, Brad jumped from a sixth floor hotel on Soi 22, Sukhumvit Road. It was his third morning in Bangkok. Calvino went to the scene of the suicide that morning and saw the man he’d coaxed back from the village in Surin Province lying dead on the sidewalk in that strangely awkward sprawl of broken limbs, blood pooling.
The death of his client had happened six months ago. The family hadn’t blamed Calvino. They didn’t have to; he blamed himself. There hadn’t been a day when he hadn’t asked himself what he could have done differently. He vetted the death like a pathologist trying to unravel the mystery of cause and effect in a corpse, only to find that for a private investigator, studying the death of a client was like watching life advance by staring into the rearview mirror. The scene behind never changed. It belonged to the past, and the road ahead never allowed for a U-turn.
“Ice,” Calvino learned, is a designer drug that alters the alpha waves of the mind, bringing supercharged delusions of power, confidence and strength of purpose. Brad hadn’t wanted to kill himself. He’d thought he could fly. The police found one last blue pill in his jeans.
Warp-speed mind travel, tearing through the fabric of time and space before the free fall—for Brad ice created an ache of hunger to stay forever inside that headspace. The visions there changed faster than sheets in a short-time hotel. Sooner or later someone had to pay the laundry bill.
Colonel Pratt beat him to the suicide scene by twenty minutes. Ratana had phoned the Colonel to tell him what had happened. When Calvino showed up, he found Pratt near the body, talking to a uniformed police officer.
“There were half a dozen witnesses,” said Colonel Pratt.
They all told the same story. Brad standing on the balcony, arms spread out, head to one side, saying he was flying home.
Six months later, there was Brad’s name again on Calvino’s desk, attached to his travel documents, the neatly prepared papers for a trip to Burma, in recent years officially known as Myanmar. All he had to do was sign the visa application form. When the Thais want something, Calvino thought, they are all efficiency. The Colonel clearly wanted something.
Calvino also understood that Colonel Pratt’s visit wasn’t an invitation to explore the psychological state of drug users. That was someone else’s business. Breaking a nationwide distribution network that stretched into Burma was the goal. And getting in the way of important people’s money had a high probability of blowback.
The Colonel hadn’t said so, but Calvino understood why the Colonel had come to his office with the travel forms already filled out. Colonel Pratt needed someone he trusted to watch his back, but being Thai, he couldn’t come out and ask directly. It was, as the Thais always say, up to him.
They had left the decision hanging in the air. The Colonel had left Calvino’s office, and neither man had mentioned the downside, or whether there even was a bridge from there to a possible upside. Cases like Brad’s come in pairs, Calvino thought. Rob Osborne, who had gone missing in Rangoon, was about the same age as Brad, and like Rob he was confused and fully mortgaged to ideas that owned him. People like Brad craved the experience of a rewired, hyper-stimulated brain. Brad’s girlfriend saw the benefit. Enablers always did.
When Calvino had returned to the shell of the Lonesome Hawk Bar, not far from where Brad had died, he’d realized with new certainty that life is about the living. The dead are to be remembered, but the living have a larger claim on our minds and hearts. He wouldn’t go to Burma because Brad had died on his watch; he’d go because the thing that had killed Brad was still circulating among the living.
It become public knowledge that, just as pseudoephedrine is embedded in ice, ice was embedded deep in underground rivers of commerce. The source of that river had become a big, ever-widening story in the Bangkok Post and the New York Times, and surfaced as dozens of blogs joined the discussion about how pillars of the establishment had networked to supply the essential ingredient found in remedies for the common cold to the hard men who ran the illegal cross-border drug cartel. Cold pills had a fleeting fifteen minutes of fame. Though the problem festered like an untreated wound, it had been one of those stories that quickly vanished from the collective mind. As quickly as the pavements dried after an afternoon monsoon rain, the news cycle returned to reporting political infighting and celebrity gossip.
This wasn’t the usual drug network case. Colonel Pratt had a roster of unusual suspects—doctors, hospital administrators, pharmacists and government officials. Pretty much everyone in the chain of the health profession had been implicated. Cold pills that had been delivered to the front door of a hospital or clinic went out the back door, loaded into pickups by the people who delivered the pills to those who had set up shop across the Thai-Burmese border.
With that number of players involved, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed a game was in progress. A secret game, with the players moving huge quantities of cold pills to an end zone that had nothing to do with treating a cold. They had a nice little business, turning over a large profit.
“On February 16th,” Calvino read on the screen, “a contingent of Burmese police discovered an estimated 8.7 million amphetamine tablets and guns when they raided some houses in Tachilek Township.” The writer even characterized the Burmese village as being “pointed like an arrow at Thailand.” Someone had missed a payment to the Burmese cops, he thought. The problem with greed, whatever the enterprise, was that it tended to show up once the accounting was done, the audit conducted, the traffic checked to see no one was cheating. Cheaters ruined things for illegal businesses as much as the legal ones. It was only a matter of time until someone noticed they’d been cheated, and if they wore a uniform and carried a gun, they had a way to do something about the cheater—as the events o
f February 16th had proved.
As the fallout over the cold pill scandal spread, a number of important people scrambled for shelter. The time had come to seek out a warlord for protection. The distribution network as reported had been confusing, opaque, complex, blurring the line between legal and illegal. Pseudoephedrine had left a trail through Thai hospitals, health agencies and clinics, like breadcrumbs leading to the nest of hawks. It was time to find out who had powerful friends and who didn’t. Calvino’s Law for operations like this: Get inside the pipeline to witness the flow of money; find out who runs the pumps and where the pipeline leads.
For years in Thailand, whenever he’d had a cold or sinus problem, Calvino had run down to the local drugstore and bought a packet of Actifed, popped out a couple of the pills, swallowed them with a glass of water, beer or whiskey, and soon he could breathe again. Then the authorities banned them from over-the-counter sales and the black market found a new money-maker.
Calvino picked up his passport and flipped through the pages filled with visa stamps. He thought of the Colonel sitting in front of him earlier that morning.
“You volunteered for the Burma assignment?” Calvino had asked.
Colonel Pratt had half-smiled. “The police department isn’t a volunteer organization, Vincent.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“With what happened to Morrisey a few months ago, I thought you might be interested.”
