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Ratana returned with the file. Rob, the son, was still missing in Rangoon.
“I love Colonel Pratt’s saxophone,” she said. “He’s so talented.”
As with many reinventions, the original platform remained functional underneath. The Colonel was still a cop who played the saxophone and not a saxophonist who played at being a cop.
“He’s had some good audiences,” said Calvino. “Burma’s a tough one. Like New York, they’re edgy, streetwise, hard to impress, harder to fool.”
Colonel Pratt had his saxophone as shield and sword. It made going into Burma unofficially easier to pull off. And jazz and ice, like rum and coke, go together, Calvino thought. Siamese twins. Heading to Rangoon as a cop would look like an official investigation, and that would mean going through channels. There was no straight-ahead way to cold call into the hospital cold pills smuggling operation without some powerful sleeping giants sitting up, rubbing their eyes and gazing around to see who was causing all the commotion.
Pratt would play the saxophone and, between sets, sit back at a table as the flow of information—facts, names, ranks, connections and a timeline—washed through the late-night conversations. He had a back channel. That’s what Calvino heard him saying between the words. All the Colonel had to do was tune in. Locating a secure back channel sometimes came from a spit. Once it was found, law enforcement would drop a saxophone player, or the equivalent, into the action to report back whether the Spit had lied to them.
Burma had a history of men who stood immune to laws. The way to bypass such an immune system was to find where these men played and relaxed. Colonel Pratt knew their game—its rules, rituals, referees, players and audience. What the Thai history books failed to teach was that there were men on the Thai side of the border playing on the same operating system. Together, they were an audience of immunity brothers, and the Colonel had a mission to hack the system. He’d have to conquer them one jazz improvisation at a time.
When a saxophone player dies and an autopsy is performed, the pathologist won’t find any musical notes inside, just blood and bones and gore. But somehow these are all the things that once made the music, causing people to move their bodies and dance.
The time had come to go dancing
.
THREE
Sticking Chicken Shit on a Monkey’s Nose
OSBOME’S NUMBER FLASHED on Calvino’s cell phone. He stared at the screen. He’d made it a practice not to give his private number to potential clients.
He had a reason or two. Actually he had a long list of reasons to keep his number private in a place like Bangkok, where clients lost track of the hour and were often hit by a sudden surge of paranoia. Calvino had felt that surge himself.
“Somebody’s gonna die.” Vincent Calvino, private investigator, tried to remember ever hearing this declaration pour from the sweet lying lips of a prospective client as he explained how he was asking Calvino to handle a routine assignment. The pitch was always the same—a simple missing person case that any moron could solve.
Clients seemed never to understand that when a person goes missing, there are reasons for it, and that finding those reasons is as difficult as finding a silence in a drunk’s telling of his life story. Alan Osborne was no different.
When Osborne had walked through the door, pulled up a chair and asked him to take a case, Calvino remembered him looking him in the eyes and saying not, “The person I want you to get information on would as soon shoot you as look at you,” but something more like, “You’ll turn up my son in the first Rangoon bar you walk into.” Staring back as Osborne continued, Calvino heard less comforting words inside his head: “Your presence in Rangoon will unleash a psychological firestorm like a nuke blast, and you’ll feel the heat and radiation peel the skin from every square inch of your body.”
Paranoia could make a listener substitute one set of words for another. Osborne’s words had that effect on Calvino. Maybe Osborne’s visit had come too soon after Brad Morrisey’s leap from the hotel balcony. He’d been a missing person case, too.
When it came to missing-person clients, almost always a farang found Calvino through an Internet search (as Brad’s parents in Ontario had) or else through a buddy who’d said Calvino was the best private eye in Bangkok. This more flattering route was Osborne’s claim.
Calvino could remember the face of each client who’d leaned forward and with complete sincerity said, basically, “What I have in mind is so simple I’m embarrassed to ask you to take it on. Deliver a birthday card to an old flame of mine.” Or, “Go through this contract and let my Thai partner know if you have any problems.” Or, “My friend is coming to town and wants a bodyguard. It’s just a status thing. He doesn’t need protection; he needs someone who knows the ropes that he can pal around with.”
Yeah, sure. Not one of those cases ever came close to being simple.
Calvino had heard all the top ten client pitches. Any other pitch was just a variation of one of them. There were no new tunes, just new people singing old tunes, not knowing they’d been sung by other farangs in similar situations.
The way Calvino saw it, those tunes were the background music to a movie script that played inside the farang mind. They thought they had it all figured out—beginning, middle and end—like a butcher with a cleaver, starting at the head of the cow and working toward the tail. Whatever the client told him at their first meeting, he’d write it down, but when he looked at it after he’d wrapped up the case, that script never looked anything like the final cut of the movie. If he’d been a film producer, he could have reduced those first meetings and assignment pitches to one line: “People—some good, some not so good—are gonna get killed, and Plan B rolls over and dies in the same muddy, diseased ditch as Plan A.”
And pitch-makers always left something else out—some variation of, “Instead of seeing any money at the end of the case, you’ll get treated to coffee and donuts.”
Instinct whispered into Calvino’s ear to remember that there was a difference between what you could expect from an old hand, as opposed to the farang fresh off the boat. Old hands were the most dangerous clients, he found, because it was all too easy to let his guard down. They forgot they were client and investigator and fell into an easy conversation of friends, asking about people from the old days. Those who’d died. Those who’d had moved back to wherever they’d come from. The ones in hospital, in prison or on the run. Or disappeared in some upcountry village like Brad Morrisey, going native, living like a savage, held hostage by desire and fear, head buzzing with drugs or booze. Their names sounded from an old hand’s roll call of acquaintances from the past. An English writer once said the past is a foreign country. It’s something else, too: a foreign cemetery, with bodies and memories and secrets buried in a common grave.
The morning Colonel Pratt strolled into his office wearing civilian clothes, Calvino had spent close to a week avoiding a decision on taking the assignment to find Alan Osborne’s son, Rob.
Alan Osborne had built one of the most memorable wonders of Bangkok’s nighttime entertainment scene—the Mermaidium, a bar with a glass-walled swimming pool—and filled it with naked girls. On its opening night years ago, Sukhumvit Road had flooded with rain, which hadn’t stopped Calvino, his trousers rolled up to the knees, from sloshing into the bar. By ten o’clock a dozen yings were diving to the bottom of the pool to retrieve coins thrown by customers from the bar. Now, except for the old hands, most farangs hadn’t heard how the water world of the Mermaidium had revolutionized the bar scene in Nana Plaza by fashioning a Houdini, Flipper and Caligula trifecta. Osborne had gone on to commercialize the Garden of Eden as sexual fantasy into a highly successful business empire.
Osborne had been a stern, demanding father who had made his fortune in a tough business and a tough, corrupt neighborhood. Living up to such an example was never easy for a son, especially one who wanted to carve out his place in the music business. Rob played in a local jazz band, and no band was ever going to match the revenue of pimping on a mammoth scale.
“I am a pimp,” said Osborne. “It’s a good, solid business model with a long history of success. My son had me as a role model. I spent a small fortune on his education. I wanted him to join my business. And instead, what does he decide to do? Join a band. He’s nothing more than a glorified street entertainer. No better than a busker panhandling in someone else’s bar. He makes less than a bar girl during her period. People throw coins in a small box he passes around. How is it any different from throwing coins to the girls in the Mermaidium pool?”
Osborne didn’t expect an answer, and Calvino didn’t disappoint him.
