Calvino shot him a hard glance. “Police lingo, you mean? Spit and polish to keep the boots mirror-like?”
“As in snitch.”
Colonel Pratt removed several photographs from an envelope and laid them on Calvino’s desk.
“They look happy,” Calvino said.
Masterminds like these embodied well that joyful you-can’t-touch-or-mess-with-me look.
“Not for long,” Pratt said. “The thouy told us their story.”
The “spit” in this case referred to the collar left alone in the interrogation room with several cops. At some point, the Spit had decided that the time had come to drop the dime on another crook. The best Thai slang, it occurred to Calvino, often hinted at a deeper story about how powerful people got the job done.
No native English speaker would ever think of the full range of metaphorical possibilities of good old spit—like using it to suggest fear, the kind of fear that overcomes a man after he spits out his own teeth and clots of blood on an interrogation room floor. This spit had mass. It made a mess on the table and the floor, but there were always cleaners for that, whereas cleaning up a mystery often proved more difficult for everyone. It usually happened only when the Spit finally coughed up the name, the identity of the mastermind, and spat it out like a bluebottle fly that had flown into his mouth.
Although that would be very
important information anywhere in the world, in places like Thailand extracting the mastermind’s name is always the endgame. He is the pot of gold at the end of the investigator’s rainbow. Get that motherfucker, and the world will be a better place, lions will sleep with lambs, people will hug each other in the streets and sing “Kumbaya” around the campfire because the khaya sangkom—garbage of society—has been dumped in the gutter and flushed into the deep, dark sea.
However, before taking out the broom and shovel and getting their singing voices ready, the Thai cops always found it a good idea to run a background check on the piece of garbage. His family, where he came from, the name of his patron—the layers of insulation that might protect him from the heat when the gamma rays of the police investigation rained down. These specks of information were examined in the spit, and, like tea leaves or chicken gizzards, they told a story. The Thai variety of spit had brought Colonel Pratt to Calvino’s office to tell him and his secretary, Ratana, that the following week he’d be flying to Rangoon.
Pratt pulled out the photographs of the two yin-and-yang Thai men and a third man, dressed in white shirt and longyi—one of those wraparound half-kilt, half-skirts the Burmese wore. Whatever the three were up to, it was unlikely they’d been singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire. Pratt had a drawn a bead on the criminal enterprise they ran, but he hadn’t yet pulled the trigger.
The pictures the Colonel showed to Calvino told a story, one that had emerged during an interrogation. The showdown between the Spit and the cops had happened in a small room—a table and a couple of chairs and nothing else except the actual pain and fear of the interrogation, which gnawed away the Spit’s fear of what his boss would do to him and his family. Pain crosses a threshold in every man. Beyond that point is pure terror, a space that closes in on him as he’s caught between two tigers, one near and one far, and nowhere to jump free. The tiger in the room is always more frightening than the one outside.
The Spit fingered the three tigers in the photographs. These men carried on a business across an international border. When a man cracks, everything spills out at once—names, dates, places. The smallest details. He actually wants to talk, to cleanse himself by spitting out the bad taste along with the blood. Break the bonds that hold him together, and the man is reborn, and no one can shut him up.
“You’re going to Rangoon to look for these men?” Calvino asked.
Pratt smiled. “I am going to play the saxophone. See some people. Look around. If I run into these men, well, I might have a question or two.”
“Ratana said you have some kind of jazz festival.”
The Colonel shook his head. “Not a festival. There’s a band, and they asked if I might like to sit in with them.”
“Given that you’re a famous jazz saxophone player.”
The Colonel ignored the jab and changed the subject.
“You told me you had a client who wanted to send you to Rangoon.”
“And you thought we might go together,” Calvino said.
“It crossed my mind. It’s up to you.”
“I haven’t decided to take the case.”
Calvino studied the photograph of the Burmese man.
“You’ll need a few days to arrange a visa.”
Pratt had it all worked out. He pulled out the Burmese visa application form, which was completed except for Calvino’s signature, and put it on top of the photographs.
“Just in case you decide to go. The paperwork’s under control.”
“I’ll let you know.”
Calvino locked eyes with the Colonel, who smiled. One of those knowing silences expanded. They both knew that each time they’d traveled outside Thailand together, things had turned out in ways no one described in tourist brochures.