"Who"s the shooter?"
"I am."
"He knows your face. How are you going to get close?"
"He"ll never see me."
She almost laughed. "You don"t understand who you"re dealing with."
"He"s a f.u.c.kup. He"s going down."
She thought of the way Rain had dealt with that guy in the elevator on Macau. He had gone from calmly talking to her to breaking the man"s neck without anything in between.
"If he sees you," she said, "he"ll know I set him up."
"Do it yourself, then."
She didn"t answer.
"He won"t see me," Gil said. "Anyway, you know how to handle yourself."
There was a long silence. She was used to making hard decisions quickly and under pressure, and by the time the director spoke, she had already made up her mind.
"You"ll do this?" he asked, looking at her, his expression open, his tone affable.
"When have I ever refused?" she replied.
"Never," Gil said, and in those two syllables she heard an echo of wh.o.r.e.
She looked at him. When she spoke, her voice was frozen silk.
"Well, there was one time, Gil."
He flushed, and she smiled at him, twisting the knife.
The director, pretending to ignore what he fully understood, said, "It"s settled, then."
FIVE.
THE DAY AFTER the Manny debacle, I made my way to the Bangkok Baan Khanitha restaurant on Sukhumvit 23, the backup Dox and I had agreed upon in case things went sideways-as indeed they had.
I chose an indirect route to get to the restaurant, as much to indulge an incipient sense of nostalgia as for my usual security reasons. Sukhumvit, I saw, had changed enormously in the decades since the concentrated time I had spent here during the war, yet in its essential aspects it was still the same. There had been no high-rises back then, true, and certainly no glitzy shopping malls, and the traffic, although chaotic, had not yet reached today"s level of biblical-style calamity. But the smell of the place, the vibe, then and now, was all low-level commerce, much of it s.e.xual. In my mind, Sukhumvit has always been about lasts: the last party of the last evening that everyone wants to prolong because tomorrow it"s back to the war; the last chance for nocturnal behavior that will surely be the source of regret in the light of the oncoming day; the last desperate stop for those women whose charms, and therefore their prices, have fallen short even of the standards of nearby Patpong.
I walked along Sukhumvit Road, letting the crowds carry me and flow past me, then carry me along again. My G.o.d, the area had grown. I"d been back several times since the war, of course, and had even done a job here once, a j.a.panese expat, but somehow my frame of reference, which was over three decades out of date, seemed unwilling to oblige the area"s changing topography. There were vendors back then, yes, but not this many. Now they had overgrown the sidewalk and were selling every manner of bric-a-brac: ersatz luggage, knockoff watches, pirated DVDs, tee-shirts proclaiming "Same-Same" and "No Money, No Honey." Hawkers wheedled and cajoled, competing with the hum of the crowd, the roar of pa.s.sing bus engines, the distinctive, sine-wave growl of motor scooters and tuk-tuks weaving back and forth through the constipated traffic. I smelled diesel fumes and curry, and thought, Yes, same-same, it all really is, and was surprised at an overwhelming sense of sadness and loss I couldn"t name. Nothing looked the same here, but to me it smelled the same, and the dissonance was confusing.
I walked on. And then, with a burst of mixed pleasure and horror, I came upon an artifact: the Miami Hotel, which was still here at the top of Soi 13. Squalid and moldering from the moment it went up in the late sixties to house U.S. troops on R&R, the hotel now felt like an architectural middle finger extended to the rich, upscale Bangkok that was growing up around it. As I moved past, I caught a glimpse of a grizzled expat looking out from one of its windows onto the street below, his expression that of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he doesn"t understand, and I thought it possible that I had just seen one of the original inhabitants, as stubborn and anachronistic as the hotel itself. I walked. Arabs and Sikhs in turbans smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee under the corrugated eaves of collapsing storefronts. Prost.i.tutes lurked in the vestibules of ma.s.sage parlors, pa.s.sersby ignoring their sad eyes and desperate smiles. An amputee, filthy and in rags, rattled a cup at me from the sidewalk where he lay. I gave him some baht and moved on. Half a block later, the vendors" tables parted momentarily and I saw a sign for the Thermae Bar & Coffee House, the lowest of the low, which had once housed the women who serviced the Miami"s soldiers. I wondered if its patrons still called it, appropriately and inevitably, the Termite. The original building, it seemed, had been torn down, but the Termite had been reborn, demonstrating in its reincarnation that although the body might fade and die, the spirit, for better or worse, is eternal.
I pa.s.sed a vendor selling knives, and took the opportunity to arm myself with a knockoff Emerson folder with a wooden handle and a four-inch, partially serrated blade. For a long time I had gotten by without carrying a weapon, and I had liked it this way. For one thing, you tend to comport yourself differently when you"re armed, and there are people who can spot the signs. Also, my lawsey, lawsey civilian cover would have been compromised somewhat if I"d been picked up carrying, say, a folding karambit or other concealed cutlery. And then there"s the matter of blood, which can get all over you and severely compromise your attempts to blend with the crowd after a close encounter. But I sensed that the balance of costs and benefits was changing now. I wasn"t as fast as I once was, for one thing. Or as durable, for another. I wondered whether what had happened to me in that restroom with Manny, also, was in part the consequence of age. I had needed Dox to bail me out there, as he had at Kwai Chung a year earlier. On top of all this, being back in Sukhumvit was itself a reminder that I had aged in the intervening years, and that things I had once ably done with my hands might now be accomplished more effectively with tools.
I caught a tuk-tuk for the final leg over to Sukhumvit 23. Dox and I were supposed to meet at the restaurant at noon, but I arrived early to scope the area out, as I always do on those rare occasions when I agree to a face-to-face meeting. A sneak preview tends to prevent surprises. In this case, though, the surprise was already waiting for me, in the form of Dox. Resplendent in a cream-colored silk shirt, he was sitting in one of the cushioned teak chairs at the back corner of the main room sipping some tropical concoction from a tall gla.s.s through a long straw, and looking, I had to admit, utterly at ease and at home in his surroundings.
"I knew you"d get here early," he said, grinning. He put down the drink and got up from the table. "Didn"t want to be rude, keeping you waiting."
I walked over, looking around the restaurant as I moved. The clientele was about half local, half foreign, and all seemingly more interested in the Baan Khanitha"s excellent traditional Thai food than in whatever might be going on around them. I realized, though, that I was doing my security check out of habit, not because I thought Dox would have brought trouble. And then I was surprised, almost stunned, to realize that I trusted someone this way. I looked at him, and my discomfort must have showed, because he raised his eyebrows and said, "You all right, man?"
I gave him a nod that was half exasperation, half pleasure at seeing him after our sc.r.a.pe in Manila. "Fine. I"m fine."
I reached for his hand, but he ignored it, instead clapping his arms around me and pulling me in for a hug. Jesus, I thought. I patted his back awkwardly.
He stepped back from me, looked at my face, and laughed. "Hey, man, you"re blushing! You don"t have a crush on me or something, do you?"
I ignored him. "Any problems on the way over?"
He laughed again. "No problems. Hey, it"s good to see you, man, even if you"re starting to have unnatural feelings for me. You want to eat here, or should we go somewhere else? I recommend we stay. The poo nim pad gra pow is the best in the city."
I looked around again. Dox might have known his poo nim, whatever that was, but his tradecraft wasn"t always up to my standards. Although in fairness, I don"t know whose would be.
"You"re leaving your cell phone off, right?" I asked.
"Yeah, Mom, I"m leaving it off. Disappointing all the ladies who want to reach me."
"You sure you weren"t followed?"
He rolled his eyes. "C"mon now, you"ve got to get over this lone-wolf, international-man-of-mystery s.h.i.t. You can"t live like that twenty-four-seven. It"ll b.u.m you out, man, I"ve seen it happen."
"Does that mean you weren"t followed?"
He frowned. "Yeah, that"s what it means. You know, I might not be quite the urban ghost you can be, but I do know how to be careful. I"ve made my way doing this f.u.c.ked-up thing of ours for a long time on my lonesome, and I"m still breathing even though there are plenty of people who"d rather I wasn"t."
"Weren"t."
He clasped his hands to his head and said, "Somebody save me, my partner"s a schoolmarm!"
I raised my hands in surrender. "All right, all right."
" "John Rain, killer and grammarian." You ought to put it on a business card."
"All right," I said.
" "Use the subjunctive correctly or he"ll take your life." "
Jesus, I thought, looking around. "Look, let"s just eat here," I said.
"Well, thank G.o.d. I"m starving."
We sat down at his table. The waiter came over and Dox ordered the food. He knew what he was doing-even his Thai seemed pa.s.sable. We also asked for a couple of iced coffees. It had been a long few days.
"Okay, what"s the status?" Dox asked, when the waiter had departed. "I hope the Israelites aren"t p.i.s.sed."
I had told him who the client was. They, of course, didn"t know about Dox. They didn"t need to.
"I"m not entirely sure," I said.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning as soon as I was out of Manila, I contacted my friends Boaz and Gil. I told them what had happened. They seemed to take it in stride. They were disappointed that Manny got away, and concerned that he would harden his defenses now. But they were rea.s.sured that I had made it out of there without further incident."
"You mean without being caught and implicating them."
"Yes."
"They"re probably a little despondent that you weren"t just killed in the fracas."
"It"s just business."
"Wishing it is just business. Trying to bring it about is different."
"I don"t think we need to worry about that. It wouldn"t be worth it to them. It looks like I"m clear of it, so they are, too."
"Yeah? Whatever happened to the professional paranoid we all know and love?"
"I"m being careful. I told you what I think is likely, but I don"t a.s.sume anything."
"What did you tell them happened?"
"That two unknown players that I hadn"t managed to spot popped onto the scene and turned it into a shooting gallery. That said players were good and might have been CIA."
"What did they say to that?"
"Like I said, they were concerned. But they"ll verify the body count easily enough. It"s in all the English-language Philippine newspapers today."
"You checked?"
I nodded. "Spent the morning online."
"Well, what do the papers say?"
"One dead Filipino, two dead foreigners whose ident.i.ties are being checked. Witnesses seem to think there were two shooters. Both Asian."
He smiled. "Both Asian, huh?"
I nodded. "Even in the best of circ.u.mstances, people don"t see straight. Add adrenal stress, they don"t remember what the h.e.l.l they saw. They could be searching for Martians right now. Boaz and Gil are looking into the dead men"s ident.i.ties, too. When they learn more, they"ll tell us. In the meantime, we just have to monitor the situation and wait."
The waiter brought over our food and departed. Poo nim turned out to be sauteed soft-sh.e.l.led crab. Dox hadn"t been exaggerating. It was excellent, soft and fresh and redolent of basil.
"I think they were Agency," Dox said.
"They could have been, I don"t know. You didn"t see them before heading into the bathroom?"
"Sure, I saw them. They were sitting in the food court, just the two of them. But they didn"t look like hitters to me. Although I admit I might have been distracted by what was going on with Manny and the bodyguard, and not paying attention to the little signs like I might have otherwise. What about you?"
"The same. d.a.m.n, they were low-key, I"ll give them that." I dug into the crab. "My guess is they were hooked up with Manny in some way. They weren"t there to harm him, otherwise they would have looked to drop him as he exited the bathroom, like I did. They were trying to protect him."
"Yeah, I kind of picked up on that. More bodyguards?"
"Maybe. But we hadn"t seen them earlier. I think they were there for a meeting."
"With Manny?"
"Yeah. They didn"t look like locals, so figure they were staying at a hotel-maybe the Peninsula, the Mandarin Oriental, the Shangri-La. They"re all a stone"s throw from the Ayala Center, and that"s where Manny took his family for lunch, even though Greenhills shopping center would have been closer."
"So he has lunch with the family, says good-bye, the woman and the boy leave, and he gets down to business with the people who are waiting for him."
"Yes. And when they see a huge, goateed, dangerous-looking guy busting into the bathroom along with Manny"s bodyguard, they realize something"s going down. They go in, too."
He nodded. "Well, I"ll buy that. They were cool and their tactics were good. And like you said, they wore their cover well. I didn"t make them until it was too late. That"s my fault, man, and I"m sorry. I told you, you saved my life there, you really did."
I wanted to tell him the truth-that by bursting in as he had, Dox had saved my life, not the reverse.
Instead I said, "The thing is, we still don"t know for sure who they were. Who they were with. Why they were meeting Manny. If we knew those things, we might get a second chance."
"You think we could still get that close?"
"Depends. I hate to leave things unfinished, though."
He laughed. "You mean like an uncashed paycheck?"
I nodded. "That"s part of it. And letting Boaz and Gil know that I"m still after Manny gives me an excuse to be in touch with them, and an opportunity to continue to evaluate them."
"To make sure they haven"t changed their minds about just letting the whole thing go."
"Of course. And they"re also a potential channel of information."
"About who those shooters were."
"Etcetera."
We ate quietly for a few minutes. Then Dox said, "There"s one thing I want to ask you."
I raised my eyebrows and looked at him.