Killing Rain

“For what I do, I need to be able to blend in a lot of different strata of society. To do that, you need to know the little things, the tells. Could be wine, could be the right fork to use. Could be the right clothes to wear. Or the right words. I don’t know. I just watch and try to learn. I’m a good imitator.” I took a sip of the Emilio’s Terrace. “But also, I just like wine.”
    “So you can just . . . put these things on, then take them off, like they’re a disguise?”
    “I guess so. You do it, too, although a little differently. You’ve got a way of disappearing when you want to, I’ve seen that.”
    “Yeah, that’s from sniper school. You just . . . draw in all your energy, like. It’s a Zen thing. Kind of hard to explain. A buddy of mine once told me it’s like what that creature did in Predator, or a Klingon warship with a cloaking device. I think that’s about right. I wouldn’t mind being able to move comfortably in all those different societies like you do, though. Still, it must be strange, to be able to move in them but not really belong in any of them, you know what I mean?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
    The meal turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. The food and wine were first-rate, and the feeling of being in the heart of, and yet above and isolated from, the dense metropolis around us was invigorating, almost heady. The weather was Bangkok’s finest: cool and relatively dry, and a few stars were even visible through the polluted pall above. We talked a lot about Afghanistan, which was the conflict we had in common: the men we had known there; the crazy things we had done; the unintended consequences of an armed and well-trained cadre of Islamic fanatics that had followed in the wake of the departing Soviet army we had helped to drive out.
    We talked, too, of Asia. I was surprised at his knowledge of and affection for the region, and his inquiries about Japanese culture, in particular, were intelligent and insightful. He told me about his love for Thailand, where he had been “sojourning,” as he liked to put it, for years, staying longer and longer with each visit, and how he hoped to retire here. How he no longer felt at ease in the States.
    I understood his feelings. There’s something accepting about Thai culture, and there are species of farang, foreigners, who find themselves drawn to it. On the dark side of the phenomenon are pedophiles and other deviants who come to indulge their secret sicknesses. And there are the aging middle-management types, who anesthetize regrets about failed ambitions and the implacable, day-by-day approach of death by renting women with whom they are in any event too old and too far gone to function, and by reassuring themselves of their worth by living in a neocolonial style that the locals can’t afford. But there are many who stay for more benign reasons. Some, in a sense, are
    Easterners trapped in Western bodies, who find their truer natures liberated in Thailand’s “foreign” climes. Some are simply adventurers, addicts to the exotic. Some are refugees from a misguided affair, or divorce, or bankruptcy, or other such personal trauma. And some, like Dox and me, are soldiers who found themselves too altered by the things they did in war to return to the lands of their youth. For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes that you want so badly to forget.
    When we were finished with the meal, and lingering over enormous mugs of cappuccino, I told him, “I need your help with something.”
    He looked at me. “Sure, man, anything, you know that. Just name it.”
    “My Israeli contact. The one who brokered the meeting with Boaz and Gil. She just contacted me. She wants a meeting.”
    “Maybe this is the break we’ve been waiting for, then. Some new info on Manny.”
    I shook my head. “She didn’t say anything about Manny. She says she just wants to see me.”
    He cocked his head and looked at me. “I don’t get it. Why would she want to see you, if it’s not about Manny?”
    “Before she set things up with Boaz and Gil, I spent some time with her.” I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of how Delilah and I had met in Macau, of what had happened between us there and then in Rio after.
    He listened quietly, his expression uncharacteristically grave. When I was done, he said,