Thai Horse

by William Diehl

  Was the answer to the riddle of Murph Cody somewhere in that room?

  TOMBSTONE

  Hatcher knew he would have to proceed with caution. If Cody was alive and in Bangkok, he obviously did not want to be recognized, so it was reasonable to assume that anyone who knew him was protecting his identity. Did someone here know about Huie-Kui, the ghost camp? Or Wol Pot, Cody, ‘Thai Horse? He knew caution was called for — about what he said and to whom.

  ‘What’s your poison?’ the bartender asked in a deep cultured voice that was almost operatic.

  ‘Singha,’ Hatcher answered.

  ‘Draft, bottle or can?’

  ‘Draft.’

  The bartender filled a frosted mug with Thai beer, all the while keeping his eyes on Hatcher. ‘First drink’s on the house,’ he said, sliding it down the bar. Hatcher held out his hand and felt the cool, wet glass slap his palm.

  ‘Khawp khun,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  The black man’s face was friendly but his sparkling eyes were suspicious.

  ‘You don’t look like the average tourist we get in here,’ he said, casually running a rag over the highly polished bar. ‘You have the look of a man who did some time in-country.’

  ‘Military intelligence out of Cam Ranh,’ Hatcher answered.

  ‘Special Forces,’ said the bartender. ‘I was never sure where the hell I was. Where you from?’

  The man who was slouched over the bar sat up and leaned on his arms, staring at Hatcher through faraway gray eyes; eyes that were bloodshot and drowsy. Clean- shaven with his long, blond surfer’s hair tied back in a ponytail, he had on an unbuttoned khaki safari jacket with sweat stains half-mooning the armpits, no shirt, a pair of white tennis shorts and old-fashioned high-top Keds. Hatcher could not guess his age, which could have been thirty-five or fifty. The man said nothing. He just stared at Hatcher for a while, then turned back to his half-empty drink and stared into it.

  ‘I like to keep moving, never nest anywhere for too long,’ was Hatcher’s whispered answer.

  ‘What brings you to Bangkok?’

  ‘Vacation. My driver said this was the place to come. Who knows, I might bump into an old pal.’

  ‘Who knows?’ the bartender answered, noncommittally.

  Hatcher patted the bar, trying to keep the conversation alive, and said, ‘I’m guessing this bar didn’t come from anywhere near Thailand.’

  ‘You do know your bars,’ said the bartender. He stroked the worn top affectionately. This one and the mirror and old John Ford up there,’ he said, wiggling a thumb over his shoulder toward the one-eyed bison’s head, ‘came here from one of the finest saloons in the U.S.’

  ‘Is that a fact,’ said Hatcher.

  ‘Old Skoohanie was a Texas cowboy -· and one lucky Irishman. One night he wandered into a gambler’s tent in Abilene — when Abilene wasn’t much more than a passing thought — and runs forty bucks to six thousand. Ends up owning the tent, the tables, the bank, the whole megilah. That was the beginning of the Galway Roost.’ He stopped long enough to draw himself half a glass of beer.

  ‘Which doesn’t explain how it got here,’ said Hatcher.

  ‘There was this mealy-mouthed little sapenpaw name of Edgar Skoohanie in my outfit in Nam who was always bragging about this bar of his,’ the bartender went on. ‘So I told him if he ever wanted to sell out, let me know. Sure enough, one day I get a call and the voice on the other end of the hook says, “This is Edgar Skoohanie, remember me?” Like anybody with an IQ of more than ten would forget a name like Edgar Skoohanie, right, and I says sure and he says things aren’t going well for the oh Roost and he’s gonna change it into a disco! A fucking disco, for God’s sake. We kicked it back and forth and I end up with the bar and the mirror and Edgar throws in old one-eyed John Ford there and next thing you know, I’m in business. Twelve thousand purple for the lot and four thousand more to get it shipped over.’

  The bartender never spoke in terms of American money, he talked of bahts, one baht being about five cents American; of purples, which were five-hundred baht notes, or browns, which were ten bahts, or greens, which were twenty, or reds, which were a hundred. He paused again, this time to draw Hatcher another beer, then said, ‘What else was there to do but open up the Longhorn?’

  ‘Bet a good story goes with the bullet hole in that mirror,’ said Hatcher.

  ‘Not as interesting as the one that goes with that voice of yours,’ the bartender answered.

  ‘Talked when I should have listened,’ Hatcher growled.

  The barkeep responded with a barracks-room laugh. Two gold teeth gleamed from the side of his mouth. A full carat’s worth of diamond twinkled from the center of one of them.

  ‘I do like a man who can joke about his mistakes,’ he said, sticking out a hand big enough to crush a basketball. ‘Name’s Sweets Wilkie, I own the place.’

  ‘Hatch,’ Hatcher answered.

  As Wilkie and Hatcher talked, two Thai girls entered from a door at the rear. They were beautiful young girls with long black hair that cascaded down their backs almost to their waists. They were dressed in cowgirl miniskirts, cobra-skin cowboy boots and fake pinto pony vests, their budlike breasts holding the vests at bay. Neither of them could have been more than fifteen. They hit Sweets Wilkie from both sides, giggling and wrapping their arms around him and kissing him on both cheeks.

  ‘This is Jasmine, we call her Jazz, and this is Orchid,’ Wilkie said, obviously enjoying the attention. ‘We been married about a year now.’

  ‘You and Orchid?’ Hatcher asked. Wilkie looked surprised and said, ‘Hell, both of ‘em.’

  ‘Both of them!’

  ‘Been married and divorced six times since I been here and I’m yet to lay out one baht for alimony. I figure this time I’ll double up — maybe I’ll get a little luckier.’

  His glittering grin lit up the darkened bar. He swatted the girls on their ample derrières and they moved on down the bar.

  ‘Welcome to Tombstone,’ the blond man suddenly mumbled, nodding as though he were about to fall asleep, and continuing to stare into his drink.

  ‘Meet Johnny Prophett, the official poet laureate of Tombstone,’ Wilkie said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Hatcher.

  Prophett looked over his nose at Hatcher, smiled wanly, and held out in Hatcher’s general direction a hand that was cold and lifeless.

  ‘How many Americans live in Bangkok?’ Hatcher asked.

  Prophett stood up unsteadily hopping two or three steps on his right foot. His eyes were beginning to water and he shrugged his shoulders and scratched his arms, and Hatcher realized, seeing him on his feet, that Prophett was rail-thin, almost emaciated. Prophett held his arms out at his sides like an evangelist on a roll. ‘Four, maybe five hundred,’ he said. ‘In all shapes and sizes. Engineers, salesmen, tennis bums, stock racketeers, gamblers, walking wounded, cynics, miscreants, displaced persons, anti-socials. You name it, we are it.’

  Well, thought Hatcher, than narrows the odds on finding Cody from five million to one to four hundred to one.

  Wilkie said casually, ‘Just a bunch of relocated Yanks.’

  ‘God’s fucked up, man,’ Prophett meandered. ‘Supposed to be dead on the far side of the river. Bloody boatman hasn’t figured out what happened. Even a poet has a hard time making any sense outa that one.’

  ‘Right,’ Wilkie agreed and Hatcher nodded, although neither of them knew what Prophett was talking about. ‘Johnny’s doing a book,’ he said by way of explanation and winked.

  ‘Bombay and tonic,’ Hatcher said to Wilkie.

  Wilkie took the glass, put in a handful of ice cubes, and filled it with soda water.

  As Prophett rambled on, a man came from behind the beads, shaking his hands as though they were cramped. He was a bizarre sight a husky man pushing six feet, walking with a little strut, his shoulders rocking back and forth. He wore jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt. The skull imprinted
on the front had a rose in its bony teeth and Grateful Dead printed across the back. His arms were thick and muscular and his hands, although large, had slender, almost delicate fingers. Thick black hair curled around his shoulders and tumbled down over his forehead. What was bizarre was a thin, red line that ran from his forehead down across the bridge of his nose to the point of his chin. His face was painted black on one side of the line and white on the other.

  ‘That’s Wonderboy, our resident minstrel,’ Prophett said.

  Wonderboy walked to the bar and held his hand out toward Sweets Wilkie.

  ‘My luck’s on vacation,’ he said. ‘The box, Maestro.’ Wilkie handed him a four-string guitar, polished and well worn, an instrument obviously cared for with great affection. The strange-looking man walked over to the Wurlitzer, pulled the plug with a booted foot, and sat down next to it.

  He closed his eyes and laid his head back against the wall and started singing: “Hey Jude, don’t let her go. . .

  It was a beautiful voice. Clear, deep, a touch of whiskey in its high tones, and he gave the song such a plaintive plea that one wanted to grab Jude and shake some sense into his head.

  Prophett leaned over and whispered, ‘Five feet from a flame-thrower when it took a mortar. Nobody really wants to see what’s under that paint.’

  As the afternoon wore on, the bar began to ff1 up. Wilkie commandeered Benny Potter to help as the bar began to stack up two deep. His eyes watering, Prophett began hunching his shoulders and absently scratching his arms. A man entered the Longhorn walking with a funny little jump step, as if he had just fallen off a two-story building and landed flat on his feet. He had the trunk and arms of a weight lifter but skinny spindles for legs. He skipped straight to Earp and whispered something to him. Earp got up and went behind the bar and through a door into the rear of the building somewhere. The man with the funny walk went up the steps and through the beads into the small alcove.

  ‘That’s Gallagher,’ said Prophett. ‘Gerald Gallagher from Hobart, Indiana, owns a club called Langtry’s across the street. Naked girls. Not ladies, girls. Gallagher doesn’t hire them if they’re over twelve. In Gallagher’s book, any woman over twelve is menopausal. In the United States, he’d be stoned to death in the public square.’

  ‘How come he walks so funny?’ Hatcher asked.

  ‘His jeep hit a land mine. The floorboard almost put him in orbit,’ said Prophett. ‘His feet never woke up.’

  ‘I assume you were in Nam,’ Hatcher said to Prophett. Prophett stared back into his glass. ‘Hell, I was with Gallagher the day he blew up. I left a leg in that jeep.’

  He held out his right leg and tapped on it with a knuckle. It made a metallic sound, ping, like hitting an empty water pipe.

  Prophett, Hatcher said to himself, that name is vaguely familiar.

  Earp came back into the bar and went up through the beads into the Hole in the Wall. He sat down beside the Honorable, who was watching two men play eight ball.

  ‘That’s Hatcher down there talking to Johnny,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, you followed my advice, then.’

  ‘Sy didn’t steer him here, he turned upon his own.’

  ‘As I predicted.’

  ‘Don’t get smug on me. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea, playing along with this guy.’

  ‘I knew he would end up here sooner or later,’ the Honorable said, proud that his intuition had paid off. Earp took a long cheroot from his vest pocket and lit it, twisting it slowly between his fingers so it would burn evenly.

  ‘He’s flashing around a picture of Wol Pot. Also Cody. And he works for Sloan.’

  The Honorable made a temple of his fingers and rested his mouth against its peak.

  ‘He told Sweets he was here on vacation, but Sy connected with him after he had breakfast with Sloan,’ Earp went on. ‘He’s not here by accident.’

  ‘Chance perhaps. They both are here, they both —,

  ‘Let’s be serious. He’s tracking, and I say if he’s here this quickly, he’s too close.’

  ‘Don’t let your paranoia cloud good judgment.’

  ‘I say he’s on to something.’

  ‘A fair call. Maybe you can find out what.’

  ‘I say Thai Horse takes him out.’

  ‘Kill him?’

  ‘Don’t you understand, this is a very dangerous man. I know him by reputation. He was a sanctioned assassin in Nam. They sent him out with a list. When he scratched off the last name, he came in and got another list. He’s not some dumb gumshoe from San Francisco.’

  ‘All the more reason to be cautious. I gave you my suggestion. Get next to him. Befriend him. Find out what he’s doing here. You can’t go around just recklessly knocking people off, Mr Earp. Regardless of what we call it, this is not the O.K. Corral.’

  Earp glanced down at the bar. Hatcher and Prophett were chatting. The whispering man seemed to show no interest in what was going on behind the beads.

  ‘I will also remind you that Porter was killed here.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So even if you decide to do something rash, don’t do it in Bangkok. Lure him out in the countryside somewhere. Two in a row would attract a lot of attention from the Americans.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Earp said flatly. ‘I’ll just invite him on a picnic.’

  ‘You must be resourceful. You sound like you’re panicking. You still have the advantage, Wyatt. We know more about him than he knows about us. Now you must find out why he’s here.’

  ‘I don’t think you could torture that out of him.’

  ‘You know what they say about getting more with candy than sour cream.’

  ‘This man moves very fast. This is his kind of game.’

  ‘If he is connected to Sloan and you kill him, they’ll send somebody else.’

  ‘Not if it’s done right.’

  The Honorable leaned back and smiled. ‘That’s all I’m suggesting, dear friend,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘Whatever you do, do it properly. As you pointed out, it is a dangerous game and he’s very good at it.’

  ‘Very good doesn’t cut it. He’s an expert.’

  As Earp spoke a boxy man in tennis shorts and a white T-shirt got up from the poker table and approached a portly gentleman in white. He drew up a chair and sat down facing the white-haired gentleman, who put aside his book and took a sip from the wineglass as the dark-haired man leaned forward and spoke to him in whispered tones. The older man nodded sagely as the other spoke and pointed to the card game behind the glass-beaded curtain.

  Earp turned on his barstool, facing the main room, took out his .357 with the special barrel and laid it casually on the corner of the bar. Hatcher watched the ritual with more than mild interest.

  ‘That’s Eddie Riker, the ice cream parlor, remember? talking to the Honorable,’ Prophett rambled on to Hatcher, nodding toward the older man. ‘The Honorable is the official banker of Tombstone.’ His nose began to run and he sniffed, then began scratching his side. ‘Kind of sets his interest on what the loan’s for, a little less for eating money until payday than, say, to cover a turn of the cards at the poker game up there in the Hole in the Wall.’

  ‘And the guy with the cannon is the Brink’s man?’

  Prophett laughed. “Brink’s man,” that’s slick. The Brink’s man is Wyatt T. Earp, known to us as W.T. He kind of covers the money box, case somebody should take a notion to heist it. Him and that piece he calls his Buntline Special.’

  ‘Looks like he can handle the job.’

  ‘The Thai police leave us alone, they let old W.T. keep things quiet.’

  ‘That’s a helluva weapon,’ said Hatcher, nodding toward the Magnum. ‘You could walk to Milwaukee on the barrel.’

  Prophett started to laugh again. Up above, the Honorable opened the strongbox: and took out what appeared to be a loan note. He scribbled on it and slid it to Riker, who scribbled on it, and then the Honorable counted out five purples and slid them across the tab
le. Riker nodded his thanks and went back to the game.

  ‘Riker is have a bad day,’ said Prophett.

  Wilkie ambled back up the bar.

  ‘How we doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll have a beer,’ Hatcher said. ‘Wouldn’t mind turning a few cards, either.’

  Wilkie stared at him for a moment and then said, ‘They’re kind of funny about who plays in the game. But if you hang around long enough and they get to know you, they’ll invite you.’

  ‘Kind of a closed corporation,’ Hatcher suggested.

  ‘Kind of.’ Wilkie went back down the bar and started talking to a customer.

  ‘Was Sweets who started Tombstone,’ Prophett said, and his words began to run together. ‘Sweets and Wyatt. Sweets was an English professor at Tuskegee Institute, got his master’s with honors from Atlanta University, what’d they do? They drafted him. A teacher, a teacher, man, and they dumped him in Nam and the teacher became Sergeant ‘Wilkie and he looked around at what was happening and he never went home. Opened the Longhorn, then Eddie Riker started up Pike’s Peak —‘

  Wilkie’s eyes cut toward Prophett. He was smiling at his bar trade, but Hatcher could tell he was listening to Prophett ramble on about Tombstone and the Longhorn. Suddenly he turned and went to the end of the bar and said something to Corkscrew. The black man got up without looking down the bar and went behind the beads.

  ‘— and Corkscrew and Potter opened Yosemite Sam’s. Wonderboy opened the Stagecoach,’ Prophett mumbled on, staring down at the bar. ‘Max, he couldn’t stand anyplace dark, closed up, he went down south to do some farming. And Kilhanney, poor fuckin’ Kil — that goddamn Taisung.

  Hatcher, lulled by the low, rambling conversation, was suddenly jerked awake. He tried not to show his surprise when Prophett said the name. Taisung! Wol Pot’s real name.

  Before he could continue, Prophett was cut off. ‘Hey!’ Wilkie called from down the bar and Prophett looked up, startled. Wilkie moved quickly back up to them. ‘Easy, kid,’ he said, rather sternly. ‘Save it for the book.’