“Wine puts a woman in the mood to tell the truth.”
“And for a man?”
“His lies become easier for him to believe.”
She drank again. Calvino refilled the glass and put the bottle back in the ice bucket.
“What kind of lies do you tell in Bangkok?”
“Mine are small-change deceptions. It’s the ultra-rich who swindle and lie in a class of their own. In Bangkok, when a powerful man builds his big house, he has the builders draw blueprints for secret underground rooms. You see these mansions upcountry or in Bangkok, and you think, these people have some serious money. And that’s right, but where is it? Stashed in underground rooms. The generals, the big-shot politicians and the cops use bank accounts only for depositing their salaries. You look at their bankbook and it doesn’t look like this is someone hogging a huge piece of the pie. But what you’re seeing there is the crumbs. The real wealth is inside Mother Earth. You win wars by tunneling underground. You hide your wealth there. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle because everyone is looking above the surface. That’s the kind of lie that wine speaks about.”
They lay side by side, listening to John Coltrane’s Psalm album.
“How do you know I’m not after you for your room?”
Calvino finished the glass of wine.
“I hope that’s the case.”
“What do you mean?”
“As long as I have a room with a view, it means you’ll keep coming back.”
She kissed him long and hard and wet on the lips.
NINE
When a Facebook Friend Goes Rogue
ACCROSS THE TERRACE a Korean couple stood in the shallow end of the pool on either side of their two-year-old, teaching him how to swim. The kid looked tired, cranky as he kicked his legs. His mother shouted encouragement in Korean, while the father held a hand under his child’s belly, guiding him slowly forward. Calvino and Pratt had been sitting on the terrace, at a table littered with papers, for nearly an hour. They knew the family were Korean because, passing their table, the father had held up a piece of paper and said, “The MOU has been approved in Seoul by m
y boss.”
As Calvino watched the businessman in the pool with his wife and kid, he said to Colonel Pratt, “The old hands don’t call a memorandum of understanding an MOU anymore.”
“What do they call it?” asked the Colonel.
“MOM.”
“You want me to ask what that means?”
“Memorandum of mis-understanding. The script for the later drama. They call that drama ‘MOM.’ It’s like when you were a kid, and you’d run to your mom and tell her you’d been cheated, and she’d say, ‘Didn’t I tell to stay out of that neighborhood and not to trust that boy?’”
Hotel guests wandered out from the dining room, balancing large white plates heaped with eggs, beans, bacon and hash browns. Stopping, they scanned the terrace for a place to sit. None of them approached the table where Calvino and Pratt sat. The two men gave off a serious “Don’t interrupt” vibe.
At that early hour, only diehard businessmen, soldiers of fortune and fanatics had emerged for breakfast, heads bent over a cell phone or an iPad. They had the same crook of the neck and hunched shoulders as the women at the bar the previous night. No one took much notice of the private investigator and the police colonel from Bangkok. The one notable detail was that neither of them held anything with a screen on it. Two middle-aged men slipping between conversation and silence with no electronic device at hand suggested a social situation that was somehow unsettling.
“You think that kid will ever learn to swim?” asked Calvino.
The Colonel had continued to watch the determined Korean couple.
“Sink or swim. What choice does he have?”
Thai parents would have taken their kid out of the pool after a few splashes and laughs.
“I need to know something, Pratt.”
The Colonel set down his coffee cup as the waiter arrived to refill it.