“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. Wai is the most basic form of respectful greeting among Thais, palms held together in prayer fashion and accompanied by a bow. The closer the hands are to the face and the lower the bow, the greater the respect being shown. As a woman in business attire, Ava seemed to generate a considerable amount of deference — from everyone except George Antonelli, she thought.
When she got to her room, she stripped down to bra and panties and hung up her clothes. Then she napped for a couple of hours. When she woke, she saw no reason to dress up, so she slipped on her track pants and a T-shirt. There weren’t any wai s this time when she left the hotel.
At Pantip she ordered all five seasons of The Wire — fifteen DVDs — for forty dollars, and then she bought three film-editing software programs for one of her friends. The software cost three dollars for each program; her friend would save a couple of thousand dollars. While she waited for the DVDs to be burned, she went across the street and had a bowl of tom yam kung.
After Chinese hot and sour soup, which ranked as her uncontested favourite, tom yam kung was at the head of the second-tier list. Like a good hot and sour seafood soup, it is made with a chicken stock base and a generous amount of shrimp. Cilantro, straw mushrooms, scallions, fish sauce, lime juice, lemongrass stalks, and kaffir lime leaves are added to produce a flavoursome broth, its surface dotted with a crimson oil slick from the final ingredient, red chili peppers. The soup had a clean, clear aroma, like pure oxygen with just a hint of citrus.
After lunch she went back to Pantip to collect her DVDs. As she was paying for them, Arthon called. He had had no luck with Antonelli’s phone, but they had compiled some information on Seto.
“Can I drop it off at the Hyatt?” he asked.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said.
“More like an hour,” he countered.
“I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
(12)
Ava waited for Arthon for close to two hours. She drank several glasses of fruit juice and read all the newspapers in the lobby: the two English-language papers — The Nation and the Bangkok Post — a Chinese paper, the International Herald Tribune, and the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. The news was all the same: the economy was in tatters. This usually made for good business for Ava. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
Arthon came through the front door, leaving his car running right outside. He had clout, no doubt about that. He was better dressed than he had been the night before, in tight blue slacks and a form-fitting red Lacoste golf shirt, with sunglasses perched on his head. If she hadn’t known him, she might have figured him for a dealer.