Bangkok: The Living Room
IT WAS CLOSING night at the upscale nightclub, located in a five-star Sukhumvit Road hotel. Yadanar wore a newly tailored tan suit, a purple silk shirt and alligator shoes with shiny soles. He sat behind a grand piano, smiling at the audience, hands dancing across the keyboard as Colonel Pratt finished John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”—which he dedicated to Manee, his wife, who was sitting at a front row table. Two members of the 50th Street band, one on drums and the other on guitar, accompanied the Colonel. Mya perched on a stool to one side, holding a mike and tapping her booted foot to the beat.
As the Colonel finished, Calvino, Ratana and Manee all rose in unison, clapping. The rest of the audience followed. Alan Osborne, wearing sunglasses, sat in his chair, gimlet-eyed. He reached over and pulled Calvino’s sleeve.
“Sit down, Calvino. Being an unpaid shill is terribly demeaning. At least peasant farmers demand to be paid before they applaud some third-rate politician.”
Calvino couldn’t make up his mind whether Obsorne’s nasty, bitter streak, his lashing out, was connected to the grief from losing his son, or if it had always been there, part of his natural instinct, the way he lived in the world.
“He deserves it,” said Calvino, leaning down.
Osborne wrinkled his nose and waved Calvino away.
“Says the slave to the master.”
At the next table, Udom sat in the company of a politician, a general and an official from the health ministry. Udom rose and walked to the stage. He presented Pratt with a large bouquet of orchids. They exchanged wais. Two of the Chinese businessmen at Udom’s table stood and applauded as Udom took the mike from Mya.
“Khun Yadanar is like my son. His father, like my brother. We love and understand each other.”
He hugged Yadanar and then walked back to his table.
Calvino had watched over the past couple of weeks after returning to Bangkok as old alliances had fallen apart and new ones had emerged. Information drifted in from Jack Saxon, and the Colonel had his own pipeline—one that was made of glass, so he could see the faces as they passed through.
The Thai and Burmese cartel bosses had rushed to plan resorts in the newly developing country, and casino gambling interests had acquired a rim of land that swung along the Burmese coastline, a pristine jewel of a beach. Chinese money circled Udom and Yadanar’s families. Competitors tested weak points in their relationship and their networks. The new group had formed as the old business was abandoned. After all, it was only business. Nothing in business—not the concessions, the personalities or the families—was forever. There was no forever equation in illicit business any more than in the so-called licit ones. A man made as much profit as possible and moved on as political pressure to share the spoils became irresistible. Friends who helped the venture, the ones in power, always asked for larger and larger slices of the bu
siness.
Businessmen helping politicians was the right order of things. Udom and his partners easily made the transition from cold pills to saunas and slot machines. They knew that money, like a raging river, found its own pathways and was unstoppable, cutting through anything in its path.
The audience chanted for an encore. Mya came back on stage and sang, “When You’re by My Side,” with Yadanar accompanying her on the piano. She sang the words with soft, intense feeling that lit up the audience, leaving the women in tears and even the men with moist eyes. It was the rendition that would turn up for a lifetime within their dreams.
Since he’d returned, Calvino had had a recurring dream. He was next to Colonel Pratt when they were caught in a crossfire, ambushed by a group concealed in the vendor stalls of the covered market in Rangoon. They should have been dead. In the weird reality of the dream, a shootout had erupted. Pratt had taken cover behind a wheelchair, and Calvino had crawled behind a desk stacked with boxes of cold pills. All hell had broken loose as two of the gunman ran down a corridor firing. More had joined in the running gun battle, shooting anything that moved. Colonel Pratt and Calvino killed three, possibly four heavily armed men. They’d stumbled into the group, who’d arrived pushing trolley carts down one corridor. The carts were stacked high with boxes of Chinese cold pills. The gunmen wore strange rubber masks with large holes cut out for the nose and eyes. The rubbery faces were recognizable—famous gangsters like Al Capone, Marlon Brando as the Godfather, death masks of ancient kings, generals and warlords.
After the shooting ended, Calvino stripped the masks off each body as Pratt looked on. Underneath were more rubber masks—of Somchai, Rob and the men he’d shot in the Lexus. Then he saw another body. Kati’s limp, long fingers pressed into a wai, her bikini top pulled down exposing one breast, her unblinking eyes open, staring at a box of cold pills. The damp, sickly smell of decomposition filled the space.
When he’d woken up, he’d opened the blinds and stared out at Bangkok at dawn. He wouldn’t want a painting of that dream, he thought. When he thought of the hundreds of paintings in every room of Yadanar’s house, he doubted the wisdom of preserving such dreams. Forgetting dreams is what keeps us anchored to reality, keeps us human, he thought, watching the sunrise over Sukhumvit Road.
When he’d told Pratt about the dream, the Colonel had said that the point of the artwork in the mansion was the opposite of Calvino’s view. If the stories unfolding in dreams were inescapable in the waking world, the best defense was to surround yourself with a full index and plan for what fate had in store.
“Forgetting your dreams can’t change the fact that they were real in your mind or the future possibility that they will be real again,” said the Colonel.
“Not so,” Calvino had said. “Dreams are the brain’s one-stop Laundromat. They wash the dirt and grime out so our brains are clear and fresh the next day.”
“I don’t think so, Vincent,” Pratt had said.
They’d left it at the impasse, as Calvino saw no point in arguing the point. He was more interested in the deal Pratt had brokered with Yadanar Khin. The Colonel had straight-out told Yadanar that he couldn’t make anyone famous. No one had that power. No one but Lady Luck could touch someone with her magic wand. Over time the local papers had run fewer stories about the cold pill scandal until not even a slight vapor trail had been left. That jet airliner had long passed overhead and disappeared out of sight and out of mind. People had moved on to the latest object flying overhead, threatening to turn their lives upside down, and never stopped to look back and ask, “Whatever happened to those cold pill smugglers?” That question wasn’t asked.
Someone could have asked Yadanar, behind a piano, about the cold pills. No one did. No one would. He’d been on that plane. But no one can see who is inside a plane leaving the vapor trail overhead. As Mya finished, another round of applause followed. Yadanar rose from the piano and took a bow. Mya went to his side, and they took a bow together.
“With all this bowing,” said Alan Osborne, “You’d think they were bloody Japanese.”
Calvino had seen Osborne wiping away a tear. The old man, filled with bluff and bile, tried to hide a simple act that made him human because he never identified with the essence of humanity. It was found inside its tears.
“They’re on their way to Jakarta and then New York,” said Calvino.
“Hellholes, both places,” said Osborne.
On stage Yadanar looked the part of a professional entertainer. The Black Cat, with her killing smile and angelic voice, created an audience of captives who would have done anything she asked. His good looks and hers helped seal the deal. Pratt arranged for them to receive an invitation to the Java Jazz Festival. Calvino had a relative named Nero who had real estate on the Lower East Side of New York. Nero was connected. He was able to arrange a night at the Blue Note. Negotiations had been completed for a TEDx performance in Singapore. A week after leaving Myanmar, Yadanar had put a couple of light years’ distance between himself and the cold pill smuggling operation. The Americans had given him and Mya a visa. Everyone wanted to do business and play friendly.