“We’re gaining on 88.”
They walked through a large sinkhole of darkness and found a series of restaurants on the pavement, no-nonsense outdoor eateries with dozens of tables. The smell of whiskey and beer mingling with duck and steamed rice filled the air—but not for long, as they passed a rancid open sewer smell that made the bile back up in Calvino’s throat. He looked at the surroundings. A series of dark alleys ran off both sides of the main street. Further down the road, the traffic jammed bumper to bumper behind a small convoy of rickshaws. It was the kind of spot where anyone could watch people coming and going without being seen. The kind of place the Black Cat had chosen told Calvino that somewhere among the Chinese signs, businesses
and shophouses, Rob Osborne watched and waited. He’d be spitting distance away.
Calvino stopped a rickshaw driver and asked which restaurant was Cherry Mann. The rickshaw driver shook his head. He pointed in the opposite direction. They had walked the wrong way from the Latha Street intersection.
“Are you meeting someone?” asked Kati.
“Vincent’s friend,” said Colonel Pratt.
The last thing Calvino took the Black Cat for was his friend.
“We’ve gone the wrong way,” said Calvino, gesturing impatiently with his hands to the sky.
Neither Kati nor the Colonel seemed to mind. With a beautiful woman on his arm, a man is never lost. They stood in the road deciding what to do next.
“It’s this way,” said Calvino, leading the way down the road.
At night the area had the closed-down, shuttered look of a place under siege. People were holed up inside their rooms, hunkered down as if in bunkers, knowing in their gut that night was the most dangerous time for people squeezed into a ghetto. After dark, over the sound of the TV, that aching voice gnawed at them, wondering just when trouble was going to explode. Roundups start at night. Expulsions and beatings love the cover of darkness too. Living in a ghetto like this, people could hear the tick-tock of someone else’s clock beating in their heads.
They found it a few minutes later. The Cherry Mann restaurant extended over the pavement with rows of tables, all packed with locals, drinking and eating. Waiters ran back and forth with orders, wiped down tables to seat the next customers and disappeared into the kitchen facing the street. The clientele relaxed, smoked, joked and talked in that liquor-loosened way—loud, boozy, with a machine-gun kind of laughter rattling across the tables. Calvino walked ahead of Colonel Pratt and Titiporn—he liked to use her Thai name. It rolled off the tongue. He figured the Chinese at the tables would like it too.
He pushed through a knot of Chinese who had taken their party to the next step. They spilled into the street, joining others on foot, in cars and on motorbikes, and drinking whiskey in sidewalk restaurants celebrating the New Year. The smell of firecrackers and money drifted above this group of slavering drunks who laughed and spit chicken bones beside their tables, where rats timed their bone runs with precision. Colonel Pratt and Kati fell back, cut off by the crowd. Calvino ploughed ahead with shoulders and elbows.
Finally Calvino saw her. Mya Kyaw Thein, the Black Cat, sat alone at a small table, like the last man in an overrun platoon waiting for reinforcements to arrive. She’d worn vastly different outfits at the bar and the courthouse, so Calvino wasn’t surprised to find her dressed in Chinese polished red silk with a fire-breathing green dragon stitched over her heart. She was the kind of woman who had a costume for every stage. Seeing Calvino, she stood up and waved.
“I thought you’d never come,” she said.
“We got lost,” he said.
“A private investigator who tracks down missing people getting lost in Chinatown? That’s almost too funny,” she said.
She smiled as if genuinely amused.
“Being lost and going missing are two different problems,” Calvino said.
“Unless you’re like Rob and you are both,” she said.
Mya Kyaw Thein spotted Colonel Pratt and Kati as they emerged from inside the restaurant. They had gone inside Cherry Mann for an inspection. Kati said she never ate at a restaurant without first checking out the state of the kitchen. Kati in her high heels and short skirt had Chinese heads snapping hard enough to sever them at the spine. A waiter tripped and spilled a mutton curry down the back of an old man, who yelped as if someone had shot him.
“Who is that with Pratt?”
“Kati. She’s a big fan of his.”
“Are you crazy? What is she doing here? I told you to come alone.”
“I told you that Pratt was coming.”
Colonel Pratt made a point of hanging back. They stayed near the entrance of the restaurant, talking and gesturing at the glazed ducks in the window. The Colonel watched the area around the Black Cat’s table, waiting for a signal from Calvino.
“How many more people did you bring?”
Her good-natured humor about his getting lost had vanished. She became a different person. Tugging at her Chinese collar, she became all business, her nerves on edge.
“What kind of trouble’s Rob in? You just said he was lost and missing. What’s that supposed to mean?”
He’d asked this question before and never got a straight answer from her, no matter what costume she’d been wearing. Maybe there wasn’t one. Or maybe there was, but she thought—out of loyalty, perhaps?—that it was better to let Rob do the explaining.