“Thanks. I have to work early tomorrow morning, so I’m going to head out,” Deborah said.
“The girls will still be there tomorrow night,” Ava said.
“Can I buy you a drink before I go?”
Ava shook her head. “No, I think I’m finally getting tired enough to go to bed. And besides, if I have to listen to another Filipino cover band murder Shania Twain, I think I’ll go crazy.”
(11)
Ava popped a couple of melatonin tablets before going to bed and slept through until 6 a.m. It was too early to call Arthon, so she phoned her mother. She would be at home, since it was still too early for dinner and mah- jong. Ava told Jennie about having dim sum with her father. As always, Jennie overreacted. Nothing pleased her mother more than her daughters’ contact with their father. She pretended that she was happy for their sakes, but Ava knew it was just as much about reaffirmation of her status as wife number two.
Ava boiled some water and made a cup of VIA instant coffee. She turned on BBC World, but after five minutes she gave up and reached for her running gear and a rubber band to tie her hair back. She was always of two minds about running in Bangkok. There was the safety, security, and clean air of the hotel gym, while her other option was to run outside and fight the smog, the smothering humidity, and the carnival of people. But she knew that the Hyatt was only about a kilo metre from Lumpini Park, and she loved running there. When she stayed at the Mandarin Hotel, sometimes she would even take a taxi there and back. Lumpini it would be.
At six thirty the sun was visible but not yet oppressive. The streets were already lined with traffic but the smog hadn’t had time to build to its midday thickness. She turned left from the hotel and headed to the park, dodging dogs and sidewalk cracks and rises.
In a city with virtually no greenery and few public recreational facilities, the park was a magnet for all kinds of athletes. Thousands of people were there, nearly all of them Thais. She joined the throng circling the park on a three-kilometre track, which was thoughtfully marked every two hundred metres in white paint. It was a catholic group, with no apparently dominant gender or age. The only people who stood out in the running group were the businessmen, who held their shirts and jackets in their hands so as not to get them sweaty.
The track was on the outer perimeter of the park. In the interior it was just as busy, with pockets of activities that made the place so interesting to her. There were tai chi practitioners, several groups of them, silently performing their rituals. Old men and women waving swords and fans in precise slow-motion patterns. Bird-lovers with their cages. People playing badminton, tennis, and a Thai form of lawn bowling or bocce. All this took her mind off the running. In the gym she was usually good for five kilometres; at Lumpini she did three full laps before heading back to the hotel.
She showered, dressed in her business suit, put her slacks and shirts in a laundry bag and requested same- day service, and then went down to the lobby with the Antonelli file and her notebook. She reread the file as she sipped some ice water. How to approach him? How to get him to open the door to Seto? She had Antonelli’s cellphone number. If Arthon could patch into his phone and trace calls to and from it, that could save her some time. She called Arthon and told him what she wanted.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. She could hear street noises in the background. “You can buy a SIM card anywhere here, and there are tons of pay-as-you-go phone-card companies. It isn’t like the U.K. or North America, where you have only a handful of carriers. It could take me a while to find his carrier, and then I have to see if we’ve penetrated them already.”
“Please try,” she said.
“What are your plans for today?” he asked.
“I’m heading over to the Water Hotel in a few minutes. I’ll see if I can engage Antonelli in conversation.”
“Using what pretext?”
“Feminine charm,” she said.
He didn’t respond, and for a moment she thought he was mocking her. Then he said slowly, “When you read the data on Antonelli, did you take note of the section that mentioned what he likes to do now on weekends?”
“I don’t remember it particularly, but I assume he hits the bars.”
“More precisely, he goes to Nana Plaza.”
“And how is that different from Soi Cowboy or Patpong?”
“On the first two floors it’s the same old bar-girl shit, but when you get to the third floor — that’s another thing altogether. When we were in the car, I didn’t get a chance to finish my story about him. Antonelli has graduated from women and boys and gotten into katoeys — ladyboys. The third floor at Nana Plaza is all katoey. The violence seems to have toned down since he switched. Maybe he’s found what he was looking for.”
“Oh.”
“Like I said, he’s a pig.”
It took longer than she had planned to walk to the hotel. Ava had to cross a couple of intersections, and the traffic lights were programmed to change about every five minutes. So you waited; if you tried to jaywalk you would meet inevitable death, because Bangkok traffic stopped for no one.
It was just after eight when she finally walked into the Water Hotel. It was supposed to be a five-star establishment, but she could tell from the lobby that it fell short. The furniture looked worn, and the staff uniforms showed frayed edges.
She spotted Antonelli right away. There was a lounge to the right of the lobby where they were serving coffee and tea. He sat on a sofa, his computer open on his lap, a cup and saucer and a plate of toast sitting on a small table beside him. He wore a barong, the loose Filipino shirt that is the fat man’s friend.
His head was virtually bald, apart from a few straggly strands of hair stretched from ear to ear. He was even bigger than he had looked in the picture. His jowls swallowed up his neck, and the barong was stretched so tightly across his gut that she could see his white T-shirt between the buttons, which were threatening to pull apart. When he sat back on the sofa, his feet barely touched the ground. But as he typed, Ava noticed that his pudgy fingers moved quite deftly.
The lounge was busy, which gave her an excuse to sit almost directly across from him. She ordered coffee and waited for a chance to attract his attention. But Antonelli was focused on his computer, lifting his head only to look at his watch. When her coffee came, she took a sip and said, “My God, is the coffee here always this bad?”
He took a quick glance at her but said nothing. Then he closed his computer, slipped it into a wheeled briefcase, stood up, and rolled out of the lounge. She watched him exit through the giant glass doors at the entrance. An elderly Thai man stood at the curb. He took the briefcase and put it in the back of a black Toyota SUV. Antonelli, with some difficulty, climbed into the back seat. Then the car drove off.
Well, wasn’t that successful, Ava thought.
She phoned Arthon and told him what had happened. She could almost hear him smile. “I’ll give it another go in the bar tonight,” she said. “In the meantime I’m going to go shopping, try to catch a nap, and wait for you to call me back with the cellphone information I need.”
“I told you that won’t be easy.”
“One other thing,” she said. “We asked you about Antonelli, but we are also trying to locate a guy named Jackson Seto. Antonelli is our primary source, but it would be useful to know what you can dig up on Seto and his movements both to and from and in and around Thailand. I’ve been assuming he’s still in the U.S., which is why we didn’t ask about him initially. That may have been a mistake on my part.”
“Jackson is an English name. Does he have a Chinese name — a proper name? Because if he does, his passport will likely be in that one.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll look under Jackson and see if anything comes up. Where will you be?”
“On this phone or at the Hyatt.”
It was too early to shop at Pantip Plaza, the techie mall almost directly across the street from the Water Hotel, so Ava walked back to the Hyatt. She got wai ’d at the door, wai ’d in the lobby, and wai ’d at the elevator.
