Tuttle came over to the booth, and Ross looked up and smiled at him, trying to place him. “I remember you. You’re my client. And I left important files for your consideration.”
“They were destroyed in a fire,” said Tuttle.
Ross’s jaw opened. “Destroyed? A fire?”
“An unfortunate accident. But you will be glad to know there were no injuries.”
Ross rocked back in the booth. “How can we nail this asshole if all the evidence has been destroyed? This is a major setback.”
“Send me a bill, Ross,” said Tuttle. “The case is closed.”
“You haven’t seen Purcell around?” asked Tuttle.
“He and Kleist took some girls out last night and no one has seen them since. Maybe they dropped acid in the bunker,” said Snow. “I’m not that impressed with Purcell’s knowledge on weapons. He knows almost nothing about guns.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” said Crosby, coming to Purcell’s defense. “His family invented guns. He specializes in Main Battle Tanks. Not your average handgun.”
“Maybe Purcell’s part of a conspiracy,” said Ross. “Maybe he burnt the files on Addison. HQ attracts some people who have these strange ideas.”
“Or some pretty strange people changed by the chemicals they use,” said Snow, looking over at Ross and then arching an eyebrow at Tuttle.
“Yes, yes,” shouted Ross. “I may be paranoid and thus you may wish to discount my views. One more thing I think you should know. I distrust non-paranoids. In my experience they are living in a cartoon world.”
“Why are you looking for Purcell?” asked Crosby.
“To ask him if he established contact with Montezuma,” said Snow.
As Tuttle left the booth, Simply Irresistible started up on the jukebox. This was the paranoids’ theme song. It was the only song which appeared twice on the jukebox—numbers 239 and 249. At the double numbering—the shadow and the substance—the corkscrew of green vapor spun out of the jukebox and slipped through a ceiling vent just as Ross tilted his head to finish his drink.
8
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before the Hell’s Angel had crashed into Snow’s Winnebago and Jennifer the high-miler had flipped pancakes in the skillet with no intention of sharing them, Snow sat inside the shopping mall beneath a potted palm tree and read a letter from Richard Breach.
April 1992
London
Dear Snow,
Many people who have been held hostage experience grave difficulty in getting their life back on track. You may well suffer from what is called the Stockholm Syndrome. A person held hostage feels an enormous bonding with his captors. The basis of the relationship alters in subtle emotional ways until the hostage no longer feels he is a hostage but that he belongs to the cause for which he has been kept. Sometimes the captors remove his chains and give him a gun and they go out hunting for cash or new hostages. The reason it is called a syndrome has to do less with the initial abnormality of shifting loyalties than with the later period, after the hostage has been “released” or “rescued,” when the hostage misses his prison and wardens. The hostage ends up fearing his rescuers.
In your case, it is more complicated. You were your own hostage and Thailand was your captor. George, you harbored delusions—how else can one describe the desire to become a Lahu Godman? Freud might have called this displacement. I anticipate that you will argue Freud never lived in Bangkok. Like most deluded thoughts, your thoughts, in the story, started as a practical joke. You had an instinctive insight that with magic tricks—and of course you knew the limitations of tricks—you could reshape the loyalties and relationships in the Lahu village. They would worship you, George Snow, and hand over their virgins, best food, and present you with the remote control panel to their TVs. Your mistake was not realizing that religion and magic are the same coin turning over and over in the air. It is arbitrary which side the coin comes down on: heads is religion and tails is magic. Flip the coin in the air again a century and a half later and the reverse occurs. When you walked into the Lahu village with your backpack filled with store-bought magic tricks, a coin was flipped. You convinced yourself that you had conned them into thinking that you were a god. And as a Lahu Godman you were not performing magic but religious rituals. In any other century but ours you might have gotten away with the act for years; no other century had the village headman and shaman getting ripped on Mekong and watching American TV. In the end, you were nearly killed because it was a false flip of the coin: you could not claim religion or magic. You made a fool of people who had lived their entire lives together, and how can you feel a strong sense of belonging to people you view as foolish?
You are back in California and have become involved in what from the outside is a “normal” relationship with a woman of your own age, education, and class. She is a female mirror in which you are examining your life since leaving Thailand last year. She wants children; and you say that for the first time in your life you consider that a real possibility. It no longer sends fear through your soul. Children are the ultimate relationship which always belongs to us.
To what you belong, and to where you belong are questions beyond the scope of a letter, a conversation, a dream, and maybe a lifetime. I wish you luck in finding an answer which you find satisfactory.
Yours,
Richard Breach
9
SNOW SLAMMED THE door of the Winnebago—a whoof of air waves flying back at Jennifer. He slipped his American passport into his back pocket where he had stashed his turkey money—a wallet containing $145 non-disclosed dollars which still called his name in the middle of the night, and five credit cards. Otherwise, he decamped with the clothes on his back. After stabbing the biker, Snow calmly walked through the shopping mall, out the other end, across the vast paved lot to the street, changed his clothes inside the Winnebago, then took a taxi to the airport where he booked a cheap one-way flight on Korean Air to Bangkok via Seoul. Snow had left LA before the Hell’s Angel and his friends could find him.
Somewhere over the Pacific, the cabin lights were switched off, and Snow swore that he heard turkeys back in Montana calling his name. An echo of a thousand bird voices. Snow. Snow. Snow. He curled up in his seat with the airline paper-thin blanket and the pillow shaped like a bloated water bug. He patted his wallet. The turkey money was untouched. The high point of his life had been the three days that the Lahu had held him as their “guest” until Harry Purcell’s friend, Richard Breach, had arrived with a letter from Harry, enclosing five hundred dollars to secure his release.
The headman remembered Harry Purcell—a farang with much white hair and black, black bushy eyebrows—as did the maw pii—the shaman—from those days when Purcell had researched his book Magic Hilltribe Rituals. He had returned years later when doing work on Cortez’s Temple. Snow sometimes wondered if Purcell had been perverse enough to bleach his hair white. They talked about Purcell with affection and fear. They believed he possessed magic. He had arrived up the mountain in a pick-up carrying a hundred kilos of rice, several pigs, and chickens. He turned the entire lot over as a gift to the Lahu village. The villagers fell on their knees. They loved Harry after that; and confirmed that much had changed. The girls had gone to Bangkok; their young men dreamed of Reebok racing shoes and fresh white shoe laces. Harry had made them laugh and sing and remember how it had been before the development plans. Before money had discovered Thailand, and all the girls had fled to Bangkok. A time when there had been a vast jungle canopy and a culture which rarely touched a foreign presence. He told them of ghosts, of ancient massacres in Latin America, and how his family had armed entire continents.
Harry had arrived in the village with more than sleight of hand magic; Harry Purcell’s charm was based on more than the wonder of conviction, language, history, and taking pleasure in the details of their life. He had stripped to the waist and helped them dig a new well. Three days until nightfall, Harry had stood shoulder to shoulder digging w
ith them. Four feet down they discovered human remains. Bones. Harry emerged with a skull perched in his upright hand. The right side, just below the eye socket had been smashed in from the blow of a blunt instrument. The villagers had been sinking a well straight through the ancient remains of some ancestor. But Harry knew better. He kept the bones and carried them back to Bangkok. There were people waiting for the bones, who wrapped them, and sent them to America for tests. One fragment he had held back and later gave to Tuttle who sent it to Richard Breach in England. He knew what Tuttle would do, and he planned for it. And he understood the consequence of handing a bone from that part of the world to Tuttle. When the test came back establishing that the bone was four hundred fifty years old, the sting of green vapor filled his nose. What kind of magic had Purcell performed on that bone? What kind of magic had those bones performed on Harry?
Snow raised the plastic shade on the window. The plane was flying from the past to the future. The sun never set on the flight from LA to Bangkok. So many men had taken that journey; some had never returned, some tried to return and couldn’t; still others heard in the dead quiet of the night over the Pacific, some inner voice calling their name.
10
SHE WORE A tiny blue hat and a red jumpsuit. Her tiny hands were bunched at the knuckles, leaving dimples. She slept with her mouth slightly open, Dow rocking her gently. Tuttle came down the stairs to his living room dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He stopped halfway down as he saw Dow with the baby. Her eyes rose to meet his.
“I thought I would never see you again,” said Tuttle.
She rocked the baby, adjusting its jumpsuit.
A glass of water had been laid out by his maid. She was nowhere in sight. The Thais had an instinct for when to disappear, melt into the background without a sound.
“How long have you been down here?”
“Twenty minutes,” said Dow. “Not long.”
“My maid should’ve . . .”
“I told her not to disturb you. I wait. No problem. Jai yen. Cool heart,” said Dow.
He came down the stairs and sat opposite Dow. He never took his eyes off the sleeping child.
“Your baby?”
Dow shook her head as the baby’s eyes opened. Emerald green eyes, the shade of Asanee’s eyes. The baby had a farang father who had fled the scene or was unaware of the child with gemstones for eyes he had left behind in Bangkok.
“After I left your house, I go to Soi Cowboy. I found the Crazy Eight bar, and talked to Daeng’s friends. They had heard nothing from her. They were worried. I said that was normal. Who the fuck wasn’t worried with all the killing and people who disappeared? Then one of the girls told me about Daeng’s baby. A luk kreung. Her name’s Oon. That means ‘warm’ in English. But, of course, you speak some Thai, so maybe you know this. And I said where is this baby? Daeng had left her with a friend in Klong Toey. No one knows who the farang father is. So I took a taxi and found the shack. Six people and one baby inside. I told the woman there that the baby’s father had sent me to get the baby. What are they going to say? No? I gave the woman five hundred baht. And she gave me the baby. I said to myself, ‘Why am I such a crazy girl to do this thing?’ Then I have my own answer. You are the man who came out looking for this girl. The couvade who had gone into labor. So here’s the baby. I think maybe you had a reason for looking. Maybe Oon, Daeng’s baby, is the reason and you didn’t want to say. I can understand that. So I ask myself, ‘What can I do?’ I will come and show you the baby. It is up to you. If you want to throw her away to the slum, wash your hands, why not? It happens all the time. You wouldn’t be the first farang to walk away, and certainly not the last. Then I’m confused about what you want. Who you are really looking to find, and I wonder if you know.”
Oon was sucking her thumb and drooling down her hand.
“She won’t bite you,” said Dow.
Tuttle reached forward and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and immediately the baby’s face clouded up in a storm about to break.
“Are you sure this is Daeng’s baby?”
Dow sighed, reached for her water and drank slowly. “How can anyone be sure of that? The bar girls who worked with Daeng said so. But I suppose in their profession they learn to lie. But why would they lie to me? What money could they make from lying about the mother of this baby?”
“You think I’m the father?” asked Tuttle.
“There are many kinds of fathers.”
She sat on the couch with her legs curled underneath a cushion, her eyes watching him closely. It was early morning and she was shaky from the sleepless night with Oon in her room, the confrontation with people in the slum who were suspicious of her taking the baby away, and the uncertainty of what to do, where to go if it turned out she had made a mistake. There was a basic decency about Tuttle which had eased her feeling of terror. Given the turmoil in her life, she had stopped trusting. She had forced herself to make this effort; this last-ditch chance to reclaim something she couldn’t put a name to which they had fought for in the streets. In every life there was a moment of truth. This was her moment, the baby’s and that of Tuttle. It had been one thing to search for Daeng—but what he had been found was altogether different from what he had gone looking for. A decision was required. A delay of days or weeks was not an option; it had to be agreed upon. Dow’s impulsive, reckless act in showing her hand had resulted in making Tuttle show his own. He felt that he had every right to reject what was being offered. It was a high stakes game, and he had to read his hand and know that many lives would be changed no matter what he decided. He could not deliver them from the world; but he could seek deliverance for himself in a household formed by accident, in the shadow of death, in the midst of a rescue operation for a dead girl.
“Oon’s grandmother lives alone in a village. I remember her face as she stood on the bank of the Nan River,” said Tuttle. “ ‘Find my daughter, Daeng,’ she called after me.”
“You will send Oon to live with her?” asked Dow.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t,” said Dow.
“It’s not that easy. What if Daeng never turns up?”
“You’re afraid of that?” she asked.
“You don’t know what you are asking,” said Tuttle.
A wave of terror crept through Dow, making her throat tighten as if hands had suddenly been clasped around her neck.
“What were you looking for, Khun Robert? A story? A documentary? Material? This is a real flesh and blood fucking child and you started something. Are you able to see it to the finish?” asked Dow.
“That’s crazy,” said Tuttle. “The Thais would never let me keep this child.”
“Is that why you are afraid?”
“Can I hold her?” asked Tuttle.
“I didn’t think you were ever gonna ask.” She handed Oon to Tuttle, who sat back in the chair, cupping the baby in his arms.
“How old is she?”
“Seven months,” said Dow.
“Her mother never mentioned a baby,” said Tuttle.
“Because she didn’t want her to know. A baby with green eyes in a small village—what is different can cause a problem.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Tuttle.
“So do whatever you want.”
The baby began to cry. Tuttle bent his head down, looking at the baby in his arms. He gently rocked her back and forth as he wished he had the chance to do when Asanee had been a child.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. As the baby stopped crying, he said, “You’re exhausted, Dow. It’s hard for you to think straight in your shape. Let me handle this.”
“Not good enough,” she said.
She nodded at the baby.
“You can come and visit Oon whenever you want,” said Tuttle.
“I guess I can go now, Tuttle” she said, rising from the sofa. No other Thai woman had ever called him by his last name. She walked to the door and slipped on h
er sandals.
“See you around,” said Tuttle.
She nodded and left the house.
Tuttle closed his eyes, thinking about caring for Daeng’s child; wondering when Daeng would come to reclaim what was hers, and what he would say at that time. No sooner had he decided to keep the baby than he began to worry that he would lose her. He wondered if Dow had been right, more right about him than he had been about himself—he had been delivered what he had been searching the streets of Bangkok to find. When the baby shifted her head he saw in her left earlobe a tiny half moon of gold earring. He smiled and he knew he had found what he had been looking for.
11
A COUPLE OF months later Tuttle leaned his elbow against the wooden gate and pushed the buzzer on the wall between the gate and the entry door. Harry shouted from inside the complex for Tuttle to let himself in; the key was under a potted plant to the left of the door. He found Harry Purcell rocking himself slowly in a hammock strung between two wooden posts on his porch. Below in the garden, a small fire crackled, tongues of flame and ash rose into the heavy, hot Bangkok air.
“Rumor is you have accumulated a large number of women in your small house,” said Harry Purcell, lazily rolling his head to the side.
Tuttle held up three fingers. “Dow, Asanee, and Oon. Oon’s nine months old.”
“Very domestic,” said Purcell.
Tuttle watched the fire and shrugged off the comment.
“Where you headed?” Tuttle asked
“The Gulf. Not to golf, as Snow said.”
“Snow is a funny kind of guy,” said Tuttle.
Purcell sighed, flashed a big grin. “And he’s as bright as hell. You know what he said the other night? ‘There are two ways for a journalist to become a legend. He either gains access to those who are inaccessible and tells their story or he becomes inaccessible to those who enjoy the absolute power of access.’ ”
A Haunting Smile Page 30