Rob watched as Calvino phoned his old man.
“Alan, I got someone who wants to talk to you.”
Calvino held out the phone. Rob licked his lips, his hands trembling. He stared at the cell phone the same way he’d stared at the gun earlier that evening. It was hard to tell what part of him hadn’t been traumatized. He glanced over at Mya Kyaw Thein, who gestured at the phone and then back at Calvino. He could hear his old man’s voice coming out of the speaker.
“I don’t have all fucking day. Are you there?”
The kid sighed long and hard, took another puff of the cigarette and glanced at the door as if he was going to bolt. Calvino stepped in front of the door—though, really, what were the chances of the kid running out the door and disappearing in the street? About the same as Cherry Mann getting a Michelin star, a blind, barefoot Chinese lawyer appointed to the United States Supreme Court or Calvino winning a 10K race against two US embassy marines. Rob was bluffing. He stalled for time, praying his old man would hang up, staring at the phone as Alan’s voice spewed out a steady stream of threats and insults, tiny and distant as if from an echo chamber. Trapped. First into going to a meeting at Cherry Mann, then muscled inside a Lexus by thugs and now stranded in a run-down guesthouse with Calvino and the Black Cat waiting for him to take the phone. Rob saw with clarity that he had no place to run.
He took the phone from Calvino and raised it to his ear.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Just hanging out. Mya and me have some business to finish. When that’s done, I’ll give you a ring.”
Calvino finally broke into a smile, raised his glass.
“What’s the doctor say?” Rob continued. “They said you had a year over a year ago. Like you always said, what do those quacks know? Right. I gotta go.”
He handed the phone back to Calvino.
“He’s no longer missing, Alan. What I mean is my job’s done. If he goes to Bangkok, that’s up to him. You’ll have to work that out with Rob.”
He didn’t wait for Alan to react. He terminated the call and slipped the cell phone into his jacket pocket.
Calvino reached for the Johnnie Walker bottle as he perched on the edge of one of the twin beds. He listened to the tap leaking in the bathroom. The rhythm of the drops filled the void. They’d shifted down from an accelerated pounding of the heart to second gear, finding a speed slow enough to turn the corner and ponder what to do next, where to go and how to play out what had taken place.
“What happens when the police find those two men?” asked Rob.
“Will they come looking for you?” asked Calvino. “Not likely. Still if I were you, I’d think Bangkok might be a better place to be.”
“I didn’t kill them.”
“They planned to kill you.”
Rob pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek—one side, then the other—as he thought about what had happened in the Lexus.
Men like the two Calvino had killed always had stories—contradictory, sad, dangerous, punctured with the usual laughter and joy. The police would examine the bodies and write an ending for their stories, but in Calvino’s experience police write-ups usually left out the most important things about the dead person. Police reports everywhere, he thought, are pretty much variations of the same story: victim drove up the wrong side of the hill at night and slammed into a semitrailer with its lights off. Two gunshot deaths in Chinatown on New Year’s would offer the cops a laundry list of convenient theories to choose from: gambling debt, drugs, gangland dispute or robbery. In Thailand, the police always seemed to advance two theories in such deaths: personal conflict or business conflict.
The Black Cat rocked Rob’s head back and forth as she sat on the edge of one of the beds. She looked like a dragon dancer nurse’s aide.
“You sure you don’t want a drink?” asked Calvino, holding up the bottle.
She shook her head.
“I saw how you looked at Pratt’s groupie,” she said.
“And how did I look?”
“Interested. Jealous.”
“Kati is too high-maintenance.”
“Every man at the restaurant wanted her. You’re saying you didn’t?”
“As a woman, you’ll understand the difference between being wanted and being maintained.”
As he said it, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing over at Rob, who clung to her.
Calvino let it ride because it didn’t matter what she thought. He raised his