Noble Lies (3 page)

Chapter Four

   

The man behind the counter smiled at them and said, “Fuck it.”

Mark Rohr set his bag down on top of the registration desk. “Excuse me?”

“Fuck it,” the man said again, his big, toothy grin framed by the patchy strands of his blond beard. “That's what everybody says when they come in here. Fuck it.”

Mark hadn't planned on saying anything, deciding that since she was footing the bill Robin should handle the hotel registration, but when they had entered the lobby she had dropped back a step, allowing him to take the lead, shrugging now when he looked over his shoulder.

“Usually it comes out like, Fuck it?” the man said, changing his voice to indicate a hesitant question. “But it's not. It's the p h that messes people up.”

“The p h?”

“They see the p h and think phone,” the man said, punching numbers on an invisible mobile. “Or maybe photograph or physics, I don't know; I should ask. Anyway, they say fuck it.”

Mark was reaching down for his bag, ready to agree, when it clicked. “Phuket.”

“Yeah, that's it,” the man said, the loose curls of his dreadlocks bouncing as he nodded his head. “Poo-ket.”

“As in Phuket Inn by the Sea?” Mark pointed at the sign above the man's head.

“Exactly.”

“Except that it's not exactly by the sea…”

“True,” the man said, curls bobbing, “but we're not much of an inn either. Inns are homey places, with room service and afternoon teas and maybe a communal living room; you know what I mean? Us? Got a busted Coke machine in the stairwell and as far as communal space, you're in it, man.” He waved his hands around the cramped room, taking in the potted plant in the corner, the end table covered in dive shop brochures, and the condom machine next to the tourist map tacked up on the wall by the door.

“I'm sure it's wonderful,” Robin said, setting her bag down on the counter and pulling out her passport and wallet.

“No, it's a dump,” the man said, laughing as he said it.

Mark looked around the room. “Okay. But I wouldn't let the owner hear you say that.”

The man laughed as he reached his arm across the counter and held it there till Mark shook his hand. “John DiMarco. Or Jason DiMarco. Whatever. Just call me JJ. And I'm not about to fire my best employee.”

“And you're telling us that your hotel is a dump?”

“It's true,” JJ said. “I'm not going to lie to you. Half the plumbing don't work, when it rains the stairs are like little waterfalls, the mattresses are paper thin, and the rats, well they're not as bad as they used to be before we got the dogs but now you got to put up with the howling.”

“You're a hell of salesman, JJ.”

JJ waved off the compliment then pushed the rolled-up sleeves of his white cotton shirt higher on his arms. “You're not stupid. You can see what kind of place this is. We don't ask many questions and whatever you do up in your room is cool as long as nobody gets hurt and you don't get the police at my door. It's live free or die, am I right? Now I suppose you want a room…”

“Two rooms,” Robin said, pulling a pen from her backpack to fill out the form JJ slid across the counter.

JJ raised his eyebrows but didn't comment. “You want them adjoining, you know, with a door?”

Robin shook her head. “No thank you.”

“Right,” he said, turning to scan the row of keys that hung on nails on the back wall, a long, thin finger flicking each key in the line. “Third floor rooms are two-thousand bhat a night—fifty US—ground floor rooms are four hundred bhat. About ten bucks.”

“Is there a better view from the third floor?”

“Nope,” JJ said, still flicking the keys. “All the rooms look out to the side of the Patong Princess Resortel.”

“Why so much more for the third floor?”

“Because when the tsunami hit they were the only rooms above the water.”

Robin looked up. “Were you here that day?”

JJ laughed as he turned around to rest his bony elbows on the counter, his thin leather necklace dangling an Italian horn amulet like a tiny golden pepper. “I had a girl that worked here, Noi, older bar-beer girl looking to settle down a bit. She had hooked up with some Brit just before Christmas, wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, maybe get him to fall in love or something, I don't know. Anyway, it was the day after Christmas, what the Brits call Boxing Day, and Noi wants the day off in case this guy's feeling generous. Fine. So it's like the first thing in the morning, I haven't even had coffee yet.” He stood up and pulled his dreads behind his head, holding them in place a moment before letting them drop; Mark watching his eyes as memory came into focus.

“I'm just hanging out, you know? And I hear this boom, Boom, BOOM.” JJ's eyes widened, his shoulders jerking with the sound, each one louder than the last. “I'm thinking, ah shit, terrorists. I mean it's Christmas and this place is packed. Well not this place but the real resorts, you know? We had a lot of guests, maybe half full, Noi had a room on the first floor, some Aussie tour group took most of the top floor…”

“The boom,” Robin said, leaning forward. “What was it?”

“It was the wave, man,” JJ said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Smacking into the beachfront hotels. You could feel the walls shake. Then the screaming starts. The only thing I could make out is run, so like an idiot I run out into the street, I gotta see, right? Well I saw, all right.”

Mark rocked back on his heels and looked out the picture window. “Ocean that way?” he said, pointing down the side street, past the row of dumpsters behind the Patong Princess.

JJ nodded. “That's Sawatdirak Road at the corner. I see these people—not many, you know, it's Sunday morning—and they're running that way,” he said, his thumb jerking over his shoulder and up the surrounding hills, “everybody looking back. And then like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “the wave came, a big brown roller, fifteen feet tall easy, just pushing everything out of the way. Cars, trees, people—it's ripping down poles and wires, whole storefronts, just snapping off, tumbling.” JJ's hands moved as he spoke, the gestures growing in size and speed.

“And there was this…this roar. But you felt it as much as you heard it. They didn't get it in the news and you don't hear it in those videos people made, but ask anyone who was here, they remember.”

“So, did the water come down the street?” Robin said.

“Oh, it came,” JJ laughed a nervous laugh. “Like I said, I'm looking up at Sawatdirak Road and the wave, it's pushing all that shit in front of it, and there's these people climbing on top of car roofs and trying to hold on to street signs, and they're getting pulled under. I see this guy, Laang, did some painting work for me, he's floating on this freakin' deck chair from some resort, and I'm looking at him just as he falls off to the side into the water. Gone. Then I notice that the water is coming down the street at me. Not as much, sort of like a side wave, but it's knocking through storefronts and swallowing up cars, and I still got no idea what's going on. I mean, did you even know the word tsunami before then? So I hear the screams right behind me, and that roar. I look back, see the same thing happening on Bang-la Road. It was funny, it was like a wall of scooters—I mean everyone here's got one, right?—well the wave's just pushing all these scooters right at me, and I'm thinking, wow, that's a lot of scooters; and the next thing I'm hip deep in water and I can't stand up and it's half dragging me, half pushing me and I'm stepping on those scooters and all this wood ramming into me and it's like I'm getting gang tackled and I'm thinking, I'm dead.”

JJ stopped and, tight-lipped, drew a deep, whistling breath through his nose. Mark glanced at Robin, her eyes locked on JJ's tanned face, the pen shaking in her hand.

“But, as you can see,” JJ said, hands out to his side as he did a wobbly pirouette, “I lived to die another day. See that utility pole, the one that sunburnt guy's walking by? I grabbed a hold of that and started climbing, got up to that roof there. Me and about twenty others up on that little space—you can't see from here but it slopes a lot in the back. That's where I sat it out. Two hours later I'm ID-ing Noi's body over at the morgue they set up at the school. Sucked her right out of the hotel room. No idea what happened to her Brit.”

JJ stood looking out the window at the rooftop across the street and the memory that was as clear and as vivid as the afternoon sky. Mark recognized the silence that filled the room. It was the same silence that had hung in the air after he had told his friends back home what it was like to come up against a squad of Iraqi troops, the troops that were supposed to be poorly trained and too scared to fight.

“Anyway,” JJ said, clapping his hands together like he was closing a book, “let's get you a couple rooms. Third floor, right?”

 

Chapter Five

   

Straight rows of over-size umbrellas and rented lounge chairs lined the beach, filled with jet-setting university students on an early Spring Break; while beer-gutted retirees in Speedos and topless grandmothers strolled the shore looking for sea glass and shells. Standing off from the crowd, Mark stared over the low waves of the outgoing tide to a point just above the horizon, a million miles away.

Mark remembered the shaky videos of the hundred-foot wave hitting Patong Beach, the same beach where tanning tourists now dozed in the late-afternoon sun. It was all over in one day—the first wave, the unexpected waves that followed, the retreating water—a handful of hours the survivors would replay for the rest of their lives. A year later it was almost as if the wave never happened. Almost.

Above the wide open doors of the beachfront shops—shops that had been drowned under tons of debris-filled dark waves—deep gouges in the concrete showed where boats had been hurled inland, fifty feet off the ground. The marks had been painted over and some had been patched, but that only made them more obvious. Along the edge of the beach, guy-ropes held dozens of newly planted palm trees in place, filling in the gaps between fat-trunk giants, rare survivors with scars high among the palm fronds. The evidence was there, if you went looking for it; something neither the tourists nor the locals seemed eager to do.

Robin stepped down off the low wall that separated the narrow grass park from the beach and kicked off her sandals, slapping them together as she walked, knocking free the sand and letting him know he had company. She had changed into a light color tank top and khaki shorts, the bottoms rolled up to expose the top of her thighs to the sun. “You were right about the cold shower,” she said and flicked her still-wet hair behind her head. “That took care of the jet lag.”

“It'll take a few days. Tomorrow will be the toughest.” He looked at her bare shoulders as she sat down in the sand. “You got sun block on?”

“It's okay, I don't burn. I tan.” She smiled as she said it, closing her eyes as if willing herself bronze.

Mark pulled a plastic bottle out of one of his deep pockets, dropping it in her lap. “We're in Thailand, not Tampa. Put it on.”

Rolling her eyes, Robin flicked open the lid and squeezed a white dollop onto each knee. Mark watched as she rubbed the lotion into her legs. She had dancer's legs, muscular but with the right shape. She finished with her legs, wiping the excess off on her forearms. “Put some on my back.” She held up the plastic bottle and he squatted down behind her and squeezed some lotion between his sandy hands.

“So what's the plan?” she said, bunching her wet hair into a ponytail that she held out of the way.

“We start with the dive shops, see if any of them know anything. After that we work our way down the beach, hit the bigger hotels, then the shops, then the bars.”

“You think we'll find him here?”

“No.”

She turned her head to look at him, letting her hair fall to one side. “That's not very positive thinking.”

“It's realistic thinking,” he said. He wiped the last of the lotion on the base of her neck then stood up. “This place is connected. Phone, Internet…it's all here.”

“So why can't he be here too?” She reached out a hand and he helped her to her feet.

“He could be. It's just that if he is, we won't find him.”

“And that's realistic because…?”

“Because if he were here it would have been easy for him to contact you. But he didn't. So he's either someplace not as connected, or he doesn't want to be found. Or both. But if he is here, he'll know quick that we're looking for him and he'll make sure we don't find him.”

She looked at him as she brushed the sand off her shorts, her head nodding slightly as if noticing something she'd overlooked before. “Okay,” she said, the word coming out slow. “If he's not here then where do you think he is?”

“Anywhere. But just for fun, let's assume he's still in Thailand. He could have gone north, up to the mountains. Might not be as easy to get in touch from up there. He's a scuba diver, maybe he took a job on one of those live-aboard dive boats. Hell, he could have joined some Buddhist monastery.”

Robin laughed. “Shawn as a monk? I don't think so.”

“Fine. Then maybe he found himself a little bungalow somewhere, kicking back, spending his days on the beach, a sweet little Thai girl to keep him company, maybe one of those Norse goddess bathing beauties; there's certainly a lot of them around. Maybe he's been too busy to call, that kind of lifestyle can be exhausting for a guy.”

“Shawn's not like that,” she said, the anger rising in her voice.

“What? Human? I'm just trying to be realistic here. Now put some of this on your face,” he said, handing her back the sun block. “You're getting a bit red.”

She glared at him, and for a moment he thought he had pushed too hard, that she would storm off and he'd be fired twice in the same day. Not that he'd mind. But then she sighed and flicked open the cap. “You don't get it,” she said, squeezing the lotion onto her fingertips. “And the reason you don't get it is that you don't know Shawn.”

“Come on,” Mark said and started across the beach to the row of small hotels that lined the road, “I've got five thousand very good reasons to meet him.”