Ratana was ready with her answer when the lizard on the opposite side of the partition hit another two-chord melody. If someone had sworn to have heard the name “Alan” in that noise, Calvino wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow.
“If you don’t believe, you can’t say there wasn’t a warning,” she said.
He had long ago accepted that his business model as a private investigator in Bangkok needed to incorporate spirit house offerings, lizard and gecko yammering, fortune tellers’ predictions of auspicious days and times, and Chinese readings of faces and head shapes before any decision could be made. Adapting to crazy beliefs wasn’t that difficult, Calvino had found; the day soon came when they no longer seemed crazy. That was the day Calvino started worrying about how you could ever climb back up that cliff once you’d fallen over it.
At the bottom of that cliff was a house lizard. He talked to you. The Thais have an expression: Jingjok tak. The house lizard has a voice, and his advice is a factor not to be ignored. It comes from an old superstition that if a person comes to the house suggesting a plan or project, and the lizard talks, the wise man understands that the cosmos is using the lizard to tell him to avoid the plan. Like the chicken shit on the monkey’s nose routine, Calvino had found that house lizard yammering was a cultural message people took seriously. He’d learned that in Thailand, to survive, you needed to have a guidebook to animals and their shit.
Calvino had spent the better part of week avoiding a decision on taking Osborne’s case. Osborne had been in Thailand a long time, and that Thai lizard may have known something about him that was worth considering. But now that Colonel Pratt had come around with his plans for a trip to Rangoon, Ratana was singing a different tune.
“The jingjok changed its mind about Khun Alan,” she said. “He remained quiet after the Colonel left. It’s his way of saying you should take Alan’s case.”
The best thing about superstitions, Calvino thought, is their vast adaptability to the changing moods of the people who believe them.
“Let me get this straight. The jingjok barks. Don’t go to Rangoon. He doesn’t bark, it means go to Rangoon.”
A radiant smile crossed her face.
“That’s what I tell my
mother I love about you. Khun Winee understands Thai culture just like a Thai.”
He’d received worse insults but couldn’t think of one at that moment.
Later that afternoon a messenger arrived with a package from Alan Osborne. Calvino opened it. Inside were two books—a volume of collected essays by George Orwell and another volume containing the collected poetry of Rudyard Kipling—along with a handwritten note from Osborne. Calvino read the note: Forget about the guidebooks on Burma. Read Orwell and Kipling, and you’ll understand something about Burma. It was Osborne’s way of apologizing without ever saying he was sorry.
FOUR
Le Chat Noir
WITH A MISSING person case, the place to start is his friends. When someone goes off the grid, they often talk about it long before they act on it. Musicians in a band have a tight bond. It was as good a place as any to start.
Calvino stood at the entrance to a bar, studying a poster of the Monkey Nose band taped to the sliding glass door. Some design had gone into making it, drawing on Théophile Steinlen’s poster for Le Chat Noir circa 1896. Around a large black cat, five members of the band smiled into the camera: Rob Osborne, Mya Kyaw Thein, and three others—two Thais and a farang—whom he’d come to pump for information about the missing lead singer and electric bass guitar player. The portraits were all back lighting and attitude. Mya Kyaw Thein, lips parted a few inches from a handheld mike, wore a black vest over a white T-shirt and cargo pants, her long dark hair falling to her shoulders. The men members wore T-shirts and jeans. Frozen in that youthful posture where attitude mattered as much as music, they held their instruments in the play position.
Le Chat Noir was the place where drunks, drifters, the lost, crackheads, prostitutes, smugglers, bums, poets, musicians, singers and voyeurs from the straight world went out for a night of walking on the wild side. The non-voyeurs actually lived on the wild side and slept while the other world went to their offices, desks, factories and shops.
Calvino moved through the long room. The remaining members of Monkey Nose, between sets, were in relaxation mode except for an intense, wired-up farang named Alf, a blues alto sax player. Alf came from Texas and hated America with the passion that only an ex-lover could nurse and sustain in its full fury year after year after the relationship had died.
“Rob had enough shit from his old man. He split. And Mya, she had the brother problem. What Asian chick doesn’t have a brain-dead brother who drains the family resources?”
“What’s the problem with the brother?” asked Calvino.
“Got his ass arrested in Burma for smuggling teak.”
“Teak?”
“Stupid, yeah. Not opium or pills. He got caught with a truck of fucking wood. What kind of country throws people in jail for transporting wood? Burma. The whole world is clapping that the generals have seen the light. Not according to Mya and her brother. It’s a jungle. One with a few less teak trees. Go figure.”
“Is that why she went back to Rangoon?”
Alf nodded his head, took a long drag on his cigarette. Smoke poured out of his mouth as he answered.
“Family pressure. Rob said he tried to hit his old man up for money to pay whoever you have to pay to get out of a wood smuggling charge in Burma. But he got turned down. Rob and his old man don’t get along.”
“His father told me Rob wanted money to shoot a video of the band.”
“Whatever.”
“You’re saying that really it was Mya’s family problem?”