Killing Rain (12 page)

I had the cab let me off at Silom Road under the Sala Daeng
sky train station. The sky train had opened a few years earlier, and this was the first time I was back in Bangkok to witness its effect. I wasn’t sure I liked it. No doubt its presence made the city easier to traverse, bringing together points once rendered impractically distant by automotive gridlock. But there was a price. The overhead passage of steel tracks and concrete platforms smothered the streets below in shadow, and seemed somehow to compress and amplify the noise, the pollution, the pent-up weight of the whole metropolis. I smiled, without any mirth, because I had seen the same thing done to Tokyo with the elevated expressways, to the long-term regret of everyone bar the construction companies and their corrupt government cronies, who profited from the implementation of such schemes and who would no doubt profit again when the city planners determined that now it was time to banish those dark monstrosities they had once seen fit to invoke. By building a subway across the sky, the custodians of Bangkok had made the streets below effectively subterranean. I could imagine a time, not too distant, when the sky train would be so dramatically expanded and agglomerated with food courts and wireless shops and video outlets that life on the streets below, the pedestrians and the cars and the stores, would without conscious planning or the apportionment of blame become by default the city’s true subway, its final stop for those denizens who had fallen through the cracks and who would now lie unseen in a darkness from which they could fall no further.

I walked, zigzagging along the sois and sub-sois—the main streets and their arteries—between Silom and Surawong, passing several storefront places advertising Internet access and overseas phone calls. Most of these were tiny spaces in larger buildings that had probably gone unused until the Internet arrived and created the possibility of profit for places with a half-dozen tables and chairs and terminals. Soon enough, I found one whose looks I
liked. It occupied a ground-floor niche in a gleaming Bank of Bangkok building, and seemed almost to be hiding there. Inside there were ten terminals, several of which were occupied by women who looked to me like bar girls, who were perhaps now sending e-mails to those
farang
customers foolish enough to provide addresses, telling interchangeable stories of sick mothers and dying water buffalos and the other reasons for this one-time-only, embarrassed request for the
farang
’s dollars or pounds or yen. I chose a table that put my back to the wall. The girls, intent on their correspondence, gave me barely a glance.

Before getting started, I downloaded some commercial software from a storage site I keep and checked the terminal for keystroke monitors and other spyware. When I was sure it was clean, I went to the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, not with any more than the usual inchoate hope.

But there was a message waiting. My heart did a little giddyup.

I entered my password and went to the next screen. The message said,
I’ve got some time off. Do you?
Followed by a phone number starting with 331—the country code for France and city code for Paris.

Damn. I looked around for a second, a reflex in response to having my sense of aloneness unexpectedly disturbed. The girls typed determinedly away, their eyes filled with calculation and hope.

I looked at the screen again. The message had been left the day before. I wrote down the number, using my usual code, exited the bulletin board, and purged the browser to erase all records of where I’d just been.

I got up and walked back out onto Silom. My heart was racing, but my brain hadn’t shut itself off. It was hard to believe that the timing of her call was a coincidence. More likely it had something to do with the Manny op. Although I couldn’t be sure.

I stopped and thought,
You can’t be sure? What the hell is wrong with you?

I’ve never believed in coincidences, not for things like this. Sure, maybe they exist, but you act as though they don’t. Most times, the thing that might have been a coincidence wasn’t, and your doubt helps you survive it. And if you’re wrong, and the thing was a coincidence? Well, what’s the downside? There is none.

But now there was a downside, apparently, and it was as though my mind was trying to warp my worldview accordingly. What I wanted to believe wasn’t the point. What I needed to believe was everything.

Then ignore the message. Don’t call her. At least not until Manny is straightened out.

The thought was depressing. Even painful.

Dox hadn’t known, and I would never tell him, but his comment about the last time I “got laid” had hit home. Yeah, I pay for recreation from time to time. You have to take care of your physical needs. Something real, though, something worthwhile? Not since Delilah, and there hadn’t been many before her, either.

How could I know what this was about, what she had in mind, unless I saw her? She might have the information I would need to get close to Manny again. She might be able to give me insight into her people’s thinking about what had happened in Manila, about their related plans. Yes, there would be risks. But there always are. And I could control the risks. I always do.

My gut told me it was worth taking a chance. For a moment I was afraid that I couldn’t trust my gut, that maybe the instinct that has always served me well had somehow been distorted, the internal navigation instruments compromised. But then I thought,
If your gut’s no good anymore, you’re done anyway.

Which might itself have been a distortion. But the hell with it.

I found an international pay phone and called the number. As the call went through, I felt my heart beating harder and felt foolish for it. Dox would have ribbed me if he’d known, told me I was acting like a kid or something.

She answered after one ring.

“Allo,”
I heard her say.

“Hey,” I said, staring out at the street, afraid of my hopes.

“Hey,” she said back. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How have you been?”

Whatever I’d been expecting, I hadn’t expected it to be awkward. “Good. You?”

“The same. I’ve been working on a . . . project, but I can get away for a few days, if you can.”

No mention of business. Either this was a personal call, as I wanted to hope, or it was business disguised as personal, which among the current range of possibilities would probably mean the worst.

“Yeah, I can get away. I’m in the middle of something that’s quiet for the moment, but it might heat up suddenly.”

I wondered if she would react to that. She didn’t. She said, “I can come to you, if that’s better.”

I considered for a moment. I needed to stay in the area, in case Boaz and Gil turned up something that could put Dox and me back in the game with Manny. And I wanted to meet Delilah someplace that would pose difficulties for her if she was thinking of bringing company. Just in case.

“Can you make it to Bangkok?” I asked.

“Sure. I can probably get a nonstop from de Gaulle.”

“Put your itinerary on the bulletin board and I’ll meet you just outside customs.”

“All right. Are you sure you want to do Bangkok, though? They say taking a date there is like bringing a lunch box to a restaurant.”

I smiled. “I know the kind of food I like.”

She laughed, and the tension eased a little. “All right, then. I’ll make the flight arrangements, and leave the rest to you.”

I recognized the concession to what Dox might call my paranoia. She knew that letting me choose the final destination, without telling her in advance, would be more comfortable for me.

“I’ll need to know the name you’re traveling under,” I said. “To make reservations.”

“I’ll put it all on the bulletin board.”

“Okay, then.”

There was a pause. She said, “It’ll be good to see you.”

“Yeah. I’m glad you got in touch.”

“Jaa,”
she said, displaying a little knowledge of Japanese. Well then.

I smiled.
“À bientôt.”
And hung up.

I walked for a few minutes, then went into another Internet café. I did the usual spyware inspection, then checked on flights to Bangkok from Paris. The only nonstops were on Thai Air and Air France. The Thai flight left daily at 1:30
P
.
M
. Let’s see, it was already 1:15
P
.
M
. in Paris, so she’d missed that. The Air France flight left daily at 11:25
P
.
M
. and arrived at Bangkok International at 4:35 the following afternoon.

I thought for a minute. Either she had some sudden free time, as she’d said, in which case she would want to make the most of it, or, more likely, she was coming on business, which would entail its own form of urgency. Either way, I could expect her to move promptly, which would probably mean that evening’s Air France flight. All right, I’d bet on that.

I thought about where to take her, and how to go about it. It had to be someplace special. Partly, I had to admit, because I wanted to impress her. More important, because I wanted her to feel far away from whoever might have sent her. A sense of
distance, of disconnection, would increase the likelihood that she would talk openly, or at least that she would slip. The place also had to be secure. And we’d have to get there in a way that would give me the opportunity to satisfy myself that she was traveling alone.

I checked the bulletin board again and saw that she had already left me the name she would be traveling under. Good. I spent the next half hour making the appropriate reservations online. I thought it all through again when I was done, and was satisfied in all respects. The only problem was a sudden feeling of impatience. Everything was set, and I had nothing to do but wait. The next day would feel like nothing more than killing time.

Ordinarily, killing time in Bangkok would mean taking in a Thai boxing match at Lumpini or Ratchadamnoen, or jazz at Brown Sugar or in the Bamboo bar at the Oriental, maybe an evening with one of the girls from Spasso in the Grand Hyatt. But tonight, it seemed, I would simply go out with a friend.

The thought felt strange. Not unpleasant, by any means. But strange. It was like hearing a song I had enjoyed a long time ago, and had then somehow forgotten, a simple tune that at the time had been rich and fresh and full of promise and that now, by its unnoticed loss and unexpected reappearance, had been alchemized into something haunting, a reminder not only of what was but also of what had been lost in the accumulated years, the melody now tinged with hope that what was gone might be recovered and fear that its loss instead was irretrievable.

Dox and I met in the lobby as planned and, after the appropriate precautions, caught a taxi to Silom. I asked him where we were going on the way, but he refused to tell me. It was a measure of the degree to which I had come to trust him that I didn’t just stop the cab and leave. But the childishness of his demurral was irritating.

We got out in front of the State Tower Bangkok building and took the elevator to the sixty-third floor, the building’s highest. Emerging from the elevator, we walked through a pair of floor-to-ceiling glass doors and were greeted with what I had to admit was an impressive sight.

Stretching out along the open-air roof below us was a tableau of symmetrically arranged tables covered in white linen and, at one end of the arrangement, a circular bar on a promontory glowing in red, then blue, then yellow. To our left was a higher terrace, upon which a jazz quartet was making music for the diners below. The restaurant’s floor, stone and dark teak, stretched all the way to the edges of the building, beyond which in all directions twinkled the endless lights of the city, the Chao Phraya River, expressing itself only as a sinewy absence of light, winding its way silently through it. A glass sign at the bottom of the stairs announced discreetly that the place was called Sirocco.

“Well, what do you think?” Dox asked. “Do you like it?”

“I do,” I admitted, failing to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“What did you think, I was going to take you to a go-go bar or something?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

He frowned. “Sometimes you don’t give me enough credit, man.”

I was surprised by that. Dox played the buffoon so often and so well, it seemed odd to me that he would want to be acknowledged for occasionally possessing some good taste.

“How did you hear about it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I spend a fair amount of time out here, so I keep my ear to the ground. Just opened a few months ago, and it sounded like your kind of place. So I figured we could give it a try.”

I looked at him and said, “Thank you. I didn’t mean . . .”

He grinned. “Ah, forget it.”

“I was just going to say, I’ll order the wine.”

The grin started to fade, then came back at double voltage. “Whatever makes you happy, man,” he said.

The hostess brought us to our table. The menu, consisting of what Sirocco called “Inspired Mediterranean Dining,” was as good as the view. We ordered garlic-rosemary marinated grilled double lamb chops, grilled Phuket lobster with lemon and aromatic olive oil, confit of duck and pan-seared foie gras appetizers. I took care of the wine: a ’96 Emilio’s Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve. It would be a little young, but some air would bring it around.