“Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
He tossed his cellphone to her. She caught it and flipped it open. “I’m going to call the Guyana number you gave me,” she said. “I’m also going to put the phone in speaker mode.” She checked her watch. “It isn’t too late there. Hopefully he’ll answer. If he doesn’t, then what? Voicemail?”
“Yeah.”
“Either way, just tell him you’re going away for a long weekend and that you’ll be out of touch until the middle of next week. Is that plausible? Would you do that under normal circumstances?”
“I have.”
She hit the numbers, put the phone in speaker mode, and placed it on the table between them. It rang four times before a muffled voice answered, “What the hell do you want, George?”
“Jack, just wanted you to know I’m heading down to Phuket for some R and R. I’m not taking my laptop, so you won’t hear from me till next week.”
“Whatever. Have fun.” The phone went dead.
She was surprised to hear that Seto still had a trace of Chinese accent. His brother spoke flawless English and she had expected the same of him.
“Okay, you happy?” Antonelli said.
“One last thing,” she said slowly. “Money. Do you have access to the money?”
“No,” he said. “That’s all Jackson.”
“Has he sent you money?”
“He sends me money every month, but just enough to cover my overheads, my expenses.”
“You don’t profit-share?”
“We have a seventy-thirty split, and you don’t have to guess who gets the seventy. Normally we wait till year-end, around Christmas, before we dip into it. By then we know how much we actually have. You know, there are a lot of fucking ups and downs in our business.”
“So it seems.”
“And you could be one big fucking down.”
“Let’s hope,” she said, standing. She put the notebook and the envelope back in her purse. “Thanks for your help.”
“What I hope is that I never hear your fucking voice again,” he said.
“The feeling is mutual.”
(14)
Antonelli’s description of Guyana began to fade the moment Ava went online to find a flight to Georgetown. The most obvious carrier, she thought, would be a national airline. Every country has one. Except Guyana — theirs had gone bankrupt in 2001. And then there had been another, quasi-national one that went broke as well.
The predominant carrier that flew to Guyana was Caribbean Airlines, and all its inbound flights originated in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The best way to get to Port of Spain was through New York or Miami. She knew that Thai Air had a direct flight from Bangkok to New York. It left at midnight and got into New York in the late afternoon. There was a flight to Port of Spain at 7 p.m. She would have to overnight in Port of Spain and catch a morning flight to Guyana.
She checked the seating availability in business class; all the flights were wide open. She emailed her travel agent to arrange the flights and book her into the best hotels she could find.
Checkout time at the Hyatt was noon. She called downstairs and negotiated a late checkout for half the normal daily rack rate.
Ava had missed two phone calls while working online, one from Arthon and the other from Uncle. She phoned Arthon. He was pleased, if a bit surprised, that things had gone so well. She told him to keep a set of the photos in case they were needed. He said he had been going to anyway, and she wondered what that implied for Antonelli.
When she called Uncle, he asked her how it had gone with Antonelli. That was his way of letting her know he was always in the loop, and that indeed it was his loop.
She described her meeting in detail.
“Where is this Guyana?” he asked.
“What, you don’t have friends there?”
“I won’t know that until I know where the place is.”
“It’s in South America. On the northeast coast, surrounded by Suriname, Brazil, and Venezuela, and a stone’s throw from Trinidad. And I know that only because I looked it up.”
“This is encouraging,” he said, meaning that she had located Seto. Geography was lost on him.
“Do you want to say anything to Tam’s uncle?”
“No, not until you have the money,” Uncle said. “Ava, where you are at the Hyatt, the Erawan Shrine is right next to you.”
“It is.”
“Go there, will you? Light some incense, leave some flowers, make a donation, and pray for us all.”
“I didn’t know you were a Buddhist.”
“I’m not, but neither is the shrine. It is actually Hindu, and it is devoted to the Thai version of Brahma — I can never remember his Thai name — and his elephant, whose name I do remember, but only because of the hotel. It’s Erawan.”
“I’ll go.”
“Good. It’s a lucky shrine. I’ve been there twice, and both times the results were more than I could have hoped for.”
The shrine was on the corner of Ratchadamri Road, one of the busiest corners in one of the busiest cities in the world. The area was large, about twenty metres square, and was fenced, so Ava had to squeeze in through a gate. Even at one in the afternoon, with the sun at its peak, the shrine was filled almost to overflowing with concentric circles of worshippers standing around the statues of the six-armed Brahma and his elephant.
Ava bought a garland of flowers, an orange, and three incense sticks. She placed the flowers and the orange at Brahma’s feet, where hundreds of gifts already lay. She lit the incense, held it in between her palms in the wai position, and began to pray, rocking gently back and forth, her lips moving, her words gentle.
It was mainly Thais who were praying. The tourists stood on the outskirts, taking photos of the worshippers and the troupe of Thai dancers who performed there every day, dancing to please Brahma so that he in turn would be kind to the supplicants.
Ava prayed for more than five minutes, naming all the members of her family and her closest friends. She asked for health and happiness, repeating the words like a mantra. When she had finished, she felt at peace. She put a hundred-baht note in the dancers’ collection urn and returned to the hotel.
Since it was a Saturday the hotel had a couple of weddings booked. She couldn’t move through the lobby without bumping into someone wearing a uniform or a gown. She figured that only people affiliated with the police or the military could afford to get married at the Hyatt. Their base pay was meagre, but the perks and kickbacks made up for it. Uncle said he had never met a retired police officer who wasn’t a millionaire. She assumed that the same applied to the military.
If she had been feeling more sociable she could have quizzed Arthon about how it all worked. He had been pretty blase about picking up contributions from casinos that weren’t supposed to exist. She had heard that the street beggars worked like franchises, being assigned a specific spot to work their pathos and kicking back half their proceeds to the police. There wasn’t a bar in the city that didn’t contribute to the police pension fund. Every stolen car ended up being either sold or cannibalized by a special cop squad. The money moved upstream in an established and fully controlled pattern.
Still, she loved Thailand. Organized corruption was always superior to corruption with no rules. Uncle avoided doing business in places such as the Philippines and India and parts of China for that very reason.
Back in her room Ava switched on her computer and began a search on Guyana. This was new territory: a place in the world where Uncle’s extensive network did not reach. Very quickly she deduced that George Antonelli hadn’t been exaggerating all that much, if at all. The country — officially the Cooperative Republic of Guyana — had a population of about 800,000 people, most of them huddled along a sixty-kilometre strip of coastline, and a per capita income of less than $1,200. That ranked it 155th in the world, and she hadn’t even heard of many of the countries that came in lower.