“If you could give me your autograph, I’d treasure that. If you have a photo of yourself playing the sax, that would be something I’d keep forever.”
“Heaven” and “forever,” thought Calvino. Kati had a long-term vision of things connected with Colonel Pratt.
“Gin kow ru yung?” asked the Colonel.
“Have you eaten yet?” as Calvino knew well, is one of the most caring and friendly questions any Thai can ask another, framing a genuine concern.
She flashed a smile and touched his arm. “Yang kha. Hiew.” she said. “Not yet. I’m hungry.”
This from a woman who, like the man in the proverb Saxon had shared with Calvino, probably lived off the smell of food. Kati looked like someone with the money to buy a boatload of fish.
“And you?”
“Vincent and I are going out for dinner. Join us if you like,” said Pratt.
“That’s so kind. But I would be interfering with your business.”
“It’s okay. Isn’t it, Vincent?”
“Not a problem. We’re going to Chinatown.”
Her face brightened. “I love Chinese food.”
“To an Indian restaurant,” said Calvino, watching her smile dim.
In all the many years Calvino had known Colonel Pratt, this was the first time he’d ever witnessed him inviting a total stranger to join them for dinner. If there was going to be a first time, Kati was a good choice. Pratt already had that faraway look of an expat who’d taken an airport taxi to Soi Cowboy and bar-fined the first dancer who’d sat on his lap and provoked thoughts of marriage and children before the ink on his visa stamp had dried. Pratt had that struck-by-lightning look. Calvino saw the signs. When a woman like Kati walked into a man’s life, he discovered he’d been living no more than a zipper’s length away from the kingdom of mind-controlled morons ruled by women with improbable names. It was hard to watch Pratt dropping IQ points faster than a plane with stalled engines losing altitude.
“Pratt, there’s something here that doesn’t seem right,” Calvino, leaning in, said softly to Colonel Pratt, who suddenly no longer understood English.
“Right, wrong. We are talking dinner in Chinatown. Give Rob his plane ticket, and we go to 50th Street afterwards.”
“Okay,” Calvino said to both of them, “why not make a night of it?”
“Thank you. I’m so excited,” she said, giggling as she touched Colonel Pratt’s shoulder.
Kati looked like a woman who could keep a high level of excitement rolling right through the night, thought Calvino.
He watched as Kati’s hand lingered a moment too long on the Colonel. Pratt accepted the gesture like a celebrity accustomed to hands reaching out and pressing to confirm the idol was flesh and blood. Musicians on the road have a basic code of conduct: bring the sexy members of the audience to an emotional frenzy and then, after the show, reap the rewards by playing the game of not letting them go and pushing them away at the same time. Pratt had never fallen into that way of life. He was too much of a cop and a family man. At least that’s what Calvino had believed all of these years. The saxophone allowed him to vent, to release and let go. It had never been about the women. But men changed, lives changed, and women like Kati didn’t fly out of a famous temple at dusk every night of the week. She was a bird in the hand.
Calvino asked the bartender for the bill. He paid for the drinks, thinking of a laundry list of issues he had intended to discuss with Pratt about the Chinatown meeting. Sometimes it was better not to plan and to just let things work out on the fly. She’d also be at the 50th Street Bar later. That didn’t leave much opportunity for talking about the local private investigator. The chances were that everything would fall into place. Besides, Kati was a goddess, and all other business suddenly seemed much less pressing.
Cold pill smuggling and missing people had filtered out of Colonel Pratt’s consciousness as he sat at the Savoy Hotel bar beside the attentive Kati, her legs crossed on the stool, talking in Thai about jazz. Kati had mastered that fine art of watching a man with doe-like eyes, hanging on his every word as if everything he said was a riff on the secrets of the universe. She sighed like a schoolgirl when he signed his name in her notebook. Colonel Pratt had stumbled across a Thai name in her notebook that had disturbed him, but there was nothing like a beautiful woman to make a man to file away his suspicions for another day.
“We can go, Pratt,” said Calvino, standing up.
“I did mention it was Indian food, didn’t I? Do you like Indian food?” Colonel Pratt asked Kati.
“I love it.”
She lied with a grace that impressed even Calvino. He was pretty sure that Pratt could have said, “We’re going to eat fried rats and house lizards,” and she would have loved that too.
“Right,” said Calvino, “and we’ll be meeting another friend.”
Rob Osborne was hardly a friend. But this remark sounded better than, “We’ll be meeting a missing person whose father fronted $4,500 to spring his son’s girlfriend’s brother from prison.”
In the private investigations business there was always a chance that a meeting over a missing person could go pear-shaped. But he had no reason to expect it in this case. The Black Cat, in his mind, had been using Rob all along to get her brother out of prison. Mission accomplished, why wouldn’t she deliver him? It had been Colonel Pratt’s idea to go along as backup. They both carried concealed weapons. The Colonel had been shot a while back, and whenever that old scar started to itch, he said it was a warning. Meeting Rob Osborne in Chinatown had him scratching that old wound. Turning a missing-person meeting into a social occasion didn’t seem like the right way to scratch it. But sometimes one itch replaces another, and Kati had a barroom of men itching.
Mya Kyaw Thein had said Rob Osborne would meet him in Chinatown. She’d given Calvino the name of the Indian restaurant and told him which table to sit at. She kept her promises, she’d told him. Getting Rob to meet Calvino, she assured him, was nearly as difficult as springing her brother from Insein Prison. She refused to say how long the meeting would last or if Rob would return to Bangkok. He could deal with that. However the meeting ended, Calvino could report to his father that he’d met with Rob, and he was no longer being held against his will or in any serious trouble.