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The Black Cat in her red silk Chinese costume steered her Honda Dream through another group of dragon dancers. To Calvino the sound of their drums and gongs seemed to be a long way off, but the drummers were only a few feet away. They left the Lexus behind in the shadows and finally in the dark as the motorcycle gathered speed. The night air felt cool on their faces. The sounds of the traffic seemed indistinct against the ringing echo of gunfire that bounced off deep edges inside Calvino’s brain.
Something had gone sideways faster than the fingers of a katoey pickpocket on a crowded, dark street. But the kid was alive. He was alive. And the sweet scent of the night filled Calvino’s lungs with the freshness and renewal of a man who was glad to have survived himself. His ears started to clear. He had the giddy feeling of having walked out of a firefight alive. Nothing was ever sweeter than the moment of feeling the pulse of life when, by the law of averages, it should have stopped.
Rob had gone missing for a reason. That didn’t matter now. He had him on the bike.
In missing person cases, he knew, there is always a reason—money, mental illness, anger or hurt. Or someone has got into something way over his head and people with guns have called his hand. But there was plenty of time later for reasons, he decided, as the heady experience of sheer life amazed and conquered all else.
FOURTEEN
Dreaming of Electric Eels Hatched from Mooncakes
CALVINO HAD GONE up to his room first to pull a shirt from his suitcase. Returning downstairs, he used the shirt to cover up Rob, who leaned against the motorcycle in the driveway. Showing up covered in blood would have invited a police report.
Inside the lobby the old woman at the reception desk watched them come through the door.
“Motorcycle accident,” said Calvino.
The receptionist noticed the ghost-like whiteness of Rob’s face.
“Does he need a doctor?”
“He’s fine,” said Calvino.
Mya Kyaw Thein said something in Burmese about how someone had cut in front of the motorcycle, but his condition wasn’t serious. He’d only been shaken up. That seemed to satisfy the receptionist, who studied Rob over her glasses. She returned to reading a book, the Georgette Heyer novel Death in the Stocks.
“My secretary thought Andrew Vereker deserved to die,” said Calvino.
The old woman glanced up from the book.
“Lots of people deserve to die, but the ones who deserve it are rarely the victims,” she said, displaying a command of English found in Bangkok five star hotels.
Once they entered his room, Calvino switched on the light and pointed to the bathroom door, telling Mya Kyaw Thein to take him inside and clean him up. She started to say something but stopped herself. Taking orders from anyone wasn’t something she was used to. Whatever the emotions brewing inside, she let the moment pass and led Rob into the bathroom and washed his face, pushing his head down to the sink. She wiped his neck with a towel as they emerged. Most of the blood had been cleaned away. But his clothes still smelled of fresh blood and gunpowder. The bruises on one cheek and the busted nose looked bad. Rob sat on the room’s one chair.
“Cool,” he said as he looked around him, blinking, fidgeting with his hands and groaning from the kidney punches. “I’m basically okay.”
The room had twin beds with threadbare sheets and pillows, flattened and yellow, and old headboards that looked like teak. The room was a dump, but it pleased Rob, who’d been sleeping rough in the basement of an abandoned house—Rob’s last address in Rangoon. He’d been on the run, and it had been a good place to hide out.
“You sure you don’t want to take him home with you?”
Mya Kyaw Thein glanced at Rob and back at Calvino.
“I can’t. My mother and my brother and sister don’t know I have a boyfriend.”
“Probably not a good idea, then,” said Calvino.
Rob had taken off Calvino’s shirt and dropped it on the floor. His own, blood-splattered shirt certainly would
n’t have given the right impression to the Black Cat’s family.
Calvino flicked a switch, setting the blades of the overhead fan to rotate slowly.
“Make yourself at home.”
“I haven’t slept in a real bed for a week,” Rob said. “Ask Mya.”
He was one of those men with the habit of referring to his girlfriend or wife for confirmation, as if a simple fact could never otherwise be accepted as true.
“A week is a long time to be hiding out in a city you don’t know,” said Calvino.
