Calvino told the Colonel about Bianca’s Facebook posting. The Colonel remembered Bianca from the first day in the lobby where they’d waited for Saxon. She and her friend Anne had a heated argument with the assistant manager. Pratt never forgot a confrontation.
“Bianca went back to your room last night?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“She came in for a drink. How did you know it was a woman problem?”
“Wild guess. And Manee phoned me before we came down. She had just talked to Ratana.”
Calvino shook his head.
“You’ve known all morning and didn’t say anything?”
“I was thinking about saying something when Ratana phoned.”
“Last night I saw all these women working their iPhones, but did I connect that with me? No. I thought, look at those guys, what suckers. Idiots hanging around women checking them out online. And what do I do? I take one of them to my room. If we’d done it on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium, I’d have had an idea there was an audience watching.”
“There is no privacy anymore, Vincent.”
Calvino twisted the blade of the butter knife between his thumb and index finger.
“I can’t stay here. Not after this.”
“I’ve already looked into changing hotels. But it’s not possible,” Colonel Pratt said. “There are no vacant rooms.”
Every hotel room in the city was booked. Hundreds of business people, government officials and NGOs from around the world had come to the party. Changing hotels meant going to some place outside Rangoon. But the whole point of coming to Burma was to be in the city so they could get their jobs done. Calvino’s missing person was in Rangoon. The son of the general who headed the Ministry of Health played in a band in Rangoon. They had no choice but to hold tight, contain the damage.
“I’ll ask Jack to find me a room.”
“He might have a small guest room you can use. Also, talk to Bianca,” said the Colonel. “Let her know her messages are causing you complications.”
“She’s liable to tell her friends I’m threatening her.”
Pratt raised an eyebrow.
“Tell her you found Mya Kyaw Thein’s mother, thank her for her offer to help, and tell her you’re flying back to Bangkok this evening after your court case.”
“In other words, I go missing.”
Calvino fell into silence just as Bianca and Anne came out on the terrace and made straight for their table. She was all smiles, makeup on, extra lip gloss, hair on her shoulders, sparkling eyes.
“Hey, join us,” said Calvino. “I was just saying goodbye to my friend. I found my missing person. It was a stroke of luck. I’m taking him back to Bangkok on an evening flight. I wish I hadn’t found him, in a way. I was looking forward to spending time in Rangoon. But I have another case in Bangkok, and I need to get back there to put out a fire.”
Bianca’s face clouded. It looked like she was going to cry. Composing herself, she looked at Anne and then Calvino.
“I guess I’m happy it worked out.”
“Thanks.”
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to go to my room and pack.”
He left Colonel Pratt with the two women.
“In Bangkok,” the Colonel confided, “Vincent’s nickname is Heartbreaker. But he probably didn’t tell you that. He never does.”
“Bastard,” she said.
The Colonel had seen that face before. It was the one that had glowed with the white heat of anger in the hotel lobby as the staff kept her cooling her heels while trying to figure out who was going to tell her that her view room was occupied by a private eye named Vincent Calvino.
In the elevator ride up to his floor, Calvino thought about the old days, when a man and a woman simply exchanged first glances, their electrical circuits sparking, picked each other up, made passionate, unrestrained love, fell asleep and then parted to disappear back into their private lives.