ONE
The Definition of “Spit”
EVERY TIME ALAN Osborne telephoned Calvino’s office, Ratana imagined a dark, dense mass of bats, excited, purposeful in their hunger, flying like a solid black cloud from the mouth of an ancient cave. She lifted the handset, preparing herself to hear his voice as she placed a plastic lotus to mark her place in the detective novel on her desk. She hadn’t decided whether to get up and go around the partition to Vincent Calvino’s desk with the news. Or she could tell Osborne what he didn’t want to hear.
“I will tell Vincent that you phoned, Mr. Osborne.”
She waited half a beat.
“Did I ask you to tell Vincent that I phoned? I asked you to put him on the fucking phone.”
“I will take your message, Mr. Osborne.”
“Is he going to look for my son in Rangoon? Yes or no?”
“I will ask him to phone you.”
“Tell Calvino that I want a fucking answer.”
That was Osborne. Fucking phone. Fucking answer. Fucking this, fucking that—an auto-add adjective to every noun he wanted to emphasize. It was an error that Georgette Heyer would not allow in one of her detective novels, and certainly never in one of her regency romances.
Ratana hung up the phone and read a couple of pages from Death in the Stocks. There was something in the personality of Osborne that resembled the murder victim named Andrew Vereker. Solving the murder of a nasty, unsympathetic character required truly extraordinary writing ability.
Osborne hadn’t been murdered—yet—but she did wonder how he had escaped such a fate in Thailand with his temper, cursing, disrespect and disagreeable aggressiveness. In Thai culture, Ratana knew, any transgression is ranked as a possible capital offense, depending on who is offended.
Ratana hadn’t waited long before her boss summoned her.
“I need help with a Thai word!” Calvino shouted from his side of the office.
She sighed and walked around the partition.
“Osborne phoned again.”
“I don’t want to go to Burma,” he said. “Everyone’s piling in. It’ll be a zoo.”
“Phone him and tell him.”
Calvino shrugged and repeated, “I need help with a Thai word.”
“The same one?”
He nodded. She’d helped him earlier. He’d forgotten what he’d learnt.
Calvino focused on Ratana’s face as she slowly rounded her lips and tongue to pronounce the correct sound for the Thai word “thouy.” A foreign sound, he’d read, has to have lodged in a person’s brain by the age of five. Otherwise, even when hearing it in slow motion, the adult brain resists. As far as Calvino could tell, Thai tones happen inside a musical registry where every note sounds the same. He marveled at the capacity of a toddler to get the tones right while sucking on an ice cube. Thouy. Life isn’t fair, he thought. Brains age, tongues stiffen. Tonal ignorance, like all ignorance, expands over time, leaving adults in a shrinking world.
Vinny Calvino was not one to give up. He told himself he wouldn’t leave the office until he’d learnt how to say “thouy.”
Calvino’s mouth and jaws froze into the mask of a snakebite victim as he looked to his secretary for confirmation that he’d mastered the right combination of tongue, lips and jaw.
She shook her head and emitted a long sigh.
“Your lips…”
“What about my lips?”
Ratana stared at Calvino’s lips before moving to his eyes.
“Your lips end a little… I don’t know. Like a shuttle landing platform upside down on a space station.”
John John, her boy, had a particular affection for video games. Mothers borrow their metaphors from their children’s toys—or at least, this was Calvino’s theory, as he tried the Thai word once again. He had picked up the Thai habit of producing a proverb or some sort of saying for just about everything that happened in life. To him it seemed that the Thais fell back on old proverbs the way that Cockney gangsters used their own slang to talk to each other around the police.
On Calvino’s desk were a couple of photographs. One showed a Thai man in his mid-twenties with a puffy right eye and a swollen upper lip. Another showed a distinguished looking Thai in an official white ceremonial uniform with gold braiding and epaulets. Putting the photographs side by side, as Colonel Pratt had done, created a geometry that went by a number of non-mathematical names: yin and yang, chalk and cheese, insider and outsider.
The language difficulty that had stalled Calvino and kept him at his desk—and given Ratana, arms folded, her stern schoolteacher’s face—had come in the wake of Colonel Pratt’s unannounced visit. He’d burst into the office a couple of hours earlier, sat down across from Calvino and asked if he knew the Thai expression “thouy,” and Calvino had said with a smile, “It means to spit.”
Pratt rolled his eyes. “‘Thouy’ is also slang.”