Noble Lies

by Charles Benoit

  This is all I want. Mark leaned back and waited, wondering how many times he had heard that line.

  “Yes,” she said, shifting in her seat as she spoke. “This is all I want.”

  He waited, one arm draped over the back of the chair, the other stretched out onto the table, a finger tracing the condensation trails down the side of his iced tea. “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch?”

  “What are you going to tell me after you say but? As in this is all I want, but…”

  Her expression changed though her eyes never left his. “It is all I want. But it will not be easy.”

  “Why?”

  “It will be hard to leave Phuket.”

  “Because?”

  “They will not let me go.”

  Chin down, Mark looked up at her. “And they are…?”

  “Jarin’s men.”

  Mark nodded, flicking water droplets off the glass. “Tell me, Pim, how long does this church thing last?” He motioned toward the meeting room across the lobby.

  Pim shrugged her narrow shoulders. “One hour, sometimes more.”

  “Then we don’t have time for me to pull every answer out of you.”

  She looked at him, and for a moment Mark was sure she was going to storm out. Instead she hitched her chair forward and leaned in.

  “Jarin controls this part of Phuket,” she said, her voice so small Mark pulled his chair in to join her. “Drugs, gambling, prostitution, smuggling. He controls it all. The police do nothing—he pays them to do nothing—and everyone else is afraid of him. The bar you came to, the Horny Monkey, that is his, but all the bar owners on Patong Beach pay him something.”

  “All right, so why is he holding you?”

  She paused, her lip trembling as she drew in a deep breath, tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling, blinking to fight back the tears that came anyway. She wiped them off with the back of her hand. “I do not know.”

  “Some local hood is keeping you captive and you don’t know why?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Tears didn’t mean the truth. He had learned that more than once. And he knew nothing about this girl. Nothing she was saying made sense, but for now he was willing to assume that these tears were real. “How long has this been going on?”

  Pim sniffed and caught her breath. “Right after the tsunami. We were living on Koh Phi Phi.” She pointed out the hotel doors as if the small tourist island had just pulled up on the curb. “They came looking for Shawn. I thought he was dead and I told them. The next day they brought me here. They told me that I could never leave, that I had to pay them back.”

  “For what?”

  She shook her head. “I do not know. But last night at the bar,” she said, eyes still wet but looking deep into his, “you saw how I work for them.”

  Mark tapped the long spoon in his glass, kicking up a cloud of undiluted sugar and fruity spices that made the iced tea too sweet to drink. That’s what happens when you stir things up, he thought. Across the table, Pim added a packet of NutraSweet and an extra mint leaf before sucking her iced tea through a bent-neck straw.

  “Last night, when we met you,” Mark said. “You thought we were there to hook up with you.”

  “I thought Jarin had sent you. He sends men to have sex with me. At first it was men he was making a business deal with, foreigners mostly, but sometimes Thai men in the government. Some of the men were kind to me and a few even gave me presents, but Jarin’s men took them from me later. Sometimes there were women, too. Now the men are not as nice—men who work for Jarin. They are not supposed to hit me but some of them do, not where you can see.” Pim pushed the mint leaves down with her straw as she spoke, her casual tone adding an icy acceptance to her words.

  “When you and that pretty girl—Robin?—when you and Robin came to my table I thought that perhaps Jarin had changed. You both looked so kind. No one has been kind to me for a long time.”

  Watching her as she spoke, seeing the tiny spark in her dark eyes and the wistful smile that appeared as she remembered emotions half forgotten, Mark knew what he would do. Her story made no sense, but for some reason that made it easier.

  “When you go to the hotels with the men Jarin sends, do the guards come too?”

  Straw in her mouth, Pim shook her head. “No. Jarin’s men, they only follow me sometimes.”

  “Did they follow you here?”

  “No, they never do.”

  “So they’re not outside waiting for you?”

  She shook her head, her black ponytail bouncing from side to side.

  Mark dropped the spoon back into his iced tea. “Do they watch the bus lines, the port area?”

  “Perhaps. I do not know.”

  The wicker and wood chair creaked as he leaned back and wondered if she understood his question. “Have you ever tried to get away, just get on a bus and head out? There’s a bridge to the mainland you know.”

  “Yes, I know. I think it would be easy for me to go that way.”

  “Do you have family in Thailand, somewhere you can go?”

  “Most of my family was killed when the tsunami came.” Pim turned to look out the hotel’s glass doors. “My parents, my sisters and my brother, my auntie and my two uncles. My grandmother. They are all gone.”

  It had taken years for Mark to lose his family. It started with a divorce, then a brother running away, a sister moving to Utah to find God, then a gunshot to the head that the police called a self-inflicted hunting accident, a heart attack, an overdose, distant relatives he hardly knew fading away. Long before the war he was alone. Pim had lost them all in an instant. He wanted to tell her how lucky she was but he knew she wouldn’t believe him. Instead he said, “Who’s left?”

  “Ngern. He is my sister’s son. And my grandfather…my father’s father. They are my family now.” She set her iced tea down, folding her hands in front of her on the table. “And they are your catch.”

  “My catch? What does that mean?”

  “It means I will take you to my husband,” Pim said, smiling for the first time since they had sat down. “But you have to take my family, too.”

  Chapter Ten

  They were wrong.

  All ferangs? They didn’t look alike.

  You just had to know what to look for.

  You couldn’t go by the obvious things. He had seen lots of tall Japanese and short Americans, even short black Americans, so you couldn’t go by size. And you couldn’t tell them apart by color, either. He had seen French speaking Arabs and Chinese guys from Australia who couldn’t speak Chinese, and black Germans and white guys from Kenya.

  It was easy to tell them apart when they talked, anybody could do that, although he still got confused when it came to telling Canadians from Americans, but you couldn’t say that to a Canadian since they’d tell you they were from America, too. But everybody else knew what it meant.

  The real trick? Telling them apart from a distance.

  And you couldn’t know by looking at one thing either. You had to look at all the parts and put it together. Sometimes one part didn’t fit and you had to say okay and toss it out, take a look at all the parts that did fit instead. He had tried to tell them how to do it, how to read the ferangs, but they didn’t listen to him. They never listened to him.

  The first thing you look at is the clothes.

  Tight shirts—European.

  Tight silk shirt, unbuttoned—France or Italy.

  Socks with sandals—Germany.

  Striped rugby shirts—British or Australians.

  Striped rugby shirts with nut-hugging shorts—Australian.

  Baseball caps, the front bill curved up like a tube and turned sideways like they just walked into a wall—Americans.
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  Russians wore lots of jewelry. Canadians had the best sandals. Swedes went barefoot.

  Next you looked at hair.

  If it was a skinny guy with no shirt and his hair all matted together like a white Bob Marley, he was probably from Finland or Norway—someplace that was cold all the time so that when they came to Thailand they never wanted to go back.

  Australians and Americans wore it short on the sides and longer on the top, Brits wore it long all over. Russians parted it on the side and combed it over like James Bond.

  And you could tell a lot by how they sat. Europeans crossed their legs at the knees. Americans and Canadians put one foot up on the other leg, making a little triangle table out of their lap. Germans kept both feet on the ground.

  Just by looking, you could tell a lot about someone. It made them easy to spot, easy to trail. He could have told them this, too, if they had only listened.

  But they never listened. They just made fun of him, picked on him because of his size, because of the way he walked, which wasn’t that different, his one leg bending out a bit, that’s all. But that was enough. One guy had said he walked like a spider; which was stupid because he didn’t walk anything like a spider, but it stuck and that’s what they all called him now, Spider, nobody calling him by his real name, nobody knowing anything but Spider.

  And nobody knew what he was like growing up, none of them coming from his village. They didn’t know what he knew, about all the trouble he’d gotten into: the fights, the time he smashed a bottle on that guy’s face, the one that laughed at him when he tried to talk to the girl, how his lip never looked right after. How they made him leave when his mother went crazy and had to be taken away, how he was only fifteen when he ended up in Phuket City, and how he lived on the streets for three years, stealing tips off tables and pulling knives on fat drunk tourists who had paid ten bhat to put a hand down his pants. And they didn’t know anything about how he sold ganja to the tourists and sometimes some opium, too, and ya ba and other pills to the truck drivers to keep them awake for days.

  And none of them had any idea how good he was with a knife.

  He was certainly better than the two guys that were supposed to tail the American couple last night. He had heard that bitch behind the bar tell them to follow the big guy and the blonde, but he knew those two even though they didn’t know him, and he knew they’d screw it up, get spotted or lose the couple in the crowds, which should be impossible since the guy was so big. But they could do it. He knew he wouldn’t get spotted and he certainly wouldn’t lose them, but nobody ever sent him out on a job like that. Nobody sent him out on any job at all. But as he had watched from his dark corner at the bar, he had decided it was time to show them.

  The American couple wasn’t a minute out the door before those two started out after them. He had slipped out right behind them. Not that anybody noticed. The couple walked them all over Bang-la Road, to all the places the ferangs liked to go, with Jarin’s men so close behind that the American had to see them. And then how they sat there on the bench across from that hotel, the Inn by the Sea, with the guy coming out, drinking a beer—they never noticed the American, even though he followed them for an hour. And the American never noticed him.

  Just like now.

  He watched as the American strode out of the Holiday Inn and headed up Ruamjai Road. Best way to spot Americans? Look for the guy who thinks he owns the sidewalk.

  He’d stay on this guy, follow him and his girlfriend like those other two were supposed to do. He’d show them all that he belonged, that he was as good as any of them. And then Jarin would hear about it and he’d say what’s your name, and he’d tell him and Jarin would call him by his real name and say you want to work for me, and he’d say yes and then no one would dare call him Spider after that. All he had to do was keep an eye on this American and his blonde.

  And the best thing? He might get to use his knife again.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Right, so you’re going to give me twenty US to walk in that bar and pick up a hooker?” The big Australian smiled down at Robin before twisting the top off a cold Singha.

  The man wore a blue and maroon polo shirt with a fist-sized Brisbane Lions logo and a pair of khaki shorts that only made it halfway down his tree-trunk thighs. He towered over Robin, with shoulders that seemed as wide as she was tall and the bottle of beer disappeared in his calloused hand. His shaved head glowed red, either from the pulsing neon of bar-beers or too much time in the sun. It was coming up on two a.m. on a Sunday night, Bang-la Road still filled with stumbling male tourists and giddy Thai teens.

  “You’re going to pretend to pick her up,” Robin said, flicking the cap from her beer into the trashcan, ten feet away. “What you’re going to do is walk her out to the beach. I’ll be waiting there. I’ll see you, don’t worry about that. Then you go off and drink yourself stupid.”

  The Australian tilted the beer back, draining a third of the bottle in one swallow. “Why don’t you go in and get her?”

  “If I wanted to do it that way, I wouldn’t have asked you.”

  “And I just bring her back out here? To you?”

  “See? I knew you’d catch on.”

  The Australian nodded, a knowing smile crossing his face. “Right. I’ll do it, no charge and be happy as Larry…if I can stay and watch.”

  Robin rolled her eyes heavenward. “What is it with you men? You go in, escort her out of the bar, bring her here, I give you twenty bucks, then you go play with your little friends.” She nodded at a swarm of bar-beer girls that buzzed around under the lights of the Steady Tiger nightclub. “Got it?”

  “Thought you said you had a boyfriend hereabouts. Why not have him do it?”

  Robin reached out and took the man’s wrist, turning it to see the face of his watch. “Because right now he’s busy. And I’m late. So what’s it going to be?”

  “Cash up front?”

  “No.”

  The Australian stuck his chin out. “I won’t be duded.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” she said.

  “And if I say piss off?”

  “I find another freak of nature and give him the twenty.”

  The Australian finished his Singha and gave a beery belch. “Right. Let’s get started.”

  ***

  The first one was easy.

  Mark had stood in the shadows and watched the man roll a joint. He had long, thin fingers and extra-wide papers, but the man lacked the basic skills mastered by kids half his age and had ended up spilling more than he rolled. Between his cheap lighter and the spit-wet paper, it took him twenty tries to get it lit, but when he did he wandered out of the yellow pool of light on the porch and down into the small clearing that served as a yard, inhaling deep, choppy breaths in the warm, dark night, his back to the wall of palm trees and jungle vegetation.

  Mark timed his move, catching the man as he blew out the last of the smoke, one arm around his neck, the other hand clamping shut his nose and mouth. The state trooper who had taught him the move said it was too dangerous for law enforcement to use. Maybe, but it was a lot less lethal than anything he had picked up in the Marines. The man only jerked once before slumping, Mark guiding him down amid the flag-sized leaves and tangled roots. He took a roll of duct tape from the cargo pocket of his shorts and bound the man’s hands together, stooping down to check his breathing before positioning a short piece over the man’s mouth, making sure to leave his nose clear. He needed the guards out of the way but very much alive. It was bad enough as it was—killing someone would only make things a hell of a lot worse.

  In the fifty minutes that Mark had been watching the back of the small, Thai-style house—corrugated tin roof, cinderblock walls, and the whole thing propped up two feet off the ground on stubby cement columns—he had seen all three o
f the Thai guards that JJ had warned him about, and had watched the white-haired old man through the open kitchen window as he washed a stack of dirty dishes; and he had seen the boy, the top of his head anyway, as he crossed the living room to the small corner bedroom. And JJ was right, there were no guard dogs, although there were plenty on the dirt trail that had led to the hillside bungalow, set far off from the cluster of identical homes squeezed in at the intersection of two nameless dirt roads. It was secluded but not hidden. “Everybody knows Jarin’s places,” JJ had said over a late dinner of prawns and beer. “And everybody stays the hell away.”

  Mark spun the roll of tape around the man’s ankles, twisting each pass through a jumble of roots and vines. He was still out, but the look on his face seemed to suggest that he didn’t mind. Squatting low, Mark fought down the rush of adrenaline that was already making the hair on his neck rise, focusing on his breathing and listening to the sounds that came from the house. He could hear the tinny rattle of cheap flatware in the kitchen and the thumping bass and high-pitched whine of a Thai pop star in the main room. He crept through the darkness toward the back of the house, his eyes trained on the building, avoiding the glare of the dim-watt bulbs. Soon the others would notice their friend’s absence, and he would lose any slim advantage he might have had. If they hadn’t noticed already.

  The back porch, railing-less and dark, was littered with empty Singha bottles and Tiger beer cans. Crouching, Mark eased a leg onto the low porch and was shifting his weight up when the screen door swung up, scattering empties and clattering against the concrete wall.

  In a single move, Mark slid under the house, scuttling on hands and knees across the slimy ground and behind one of the narrow support posts. He waited for the man to jump down after him but no one came. Above him, he could hear the lazy shuffle of sandals across the wood boards of the porch, and through the uneven gaps he watched as the second guard shook a cigarette up in a pack, drawing it out with his lips. The man moved to the edge of the porch, his toes hanging just inches over Mark’s head, and pushed one hand into his pocket, pulling out a flip-top lighter, the other hand pulling down the fly of his jeans. The butane flame sparked to life, a yellow stream arched into the darkness and Mark sprang out, grabbing the man’s ankles, diving away from the porch, pulling the man out and down with him, rolling, spinning around in time to see the man’s head bounce off the porch, the unlit cigarette still clutched in his mouth. The man leaned up, shaking his head and blinking, reaching back to rub his neck when he saw Mark’s fist. It was the last thing he saw that night.