Passport to Death

by Yigal Zur

  I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t convinced. Anyone who knows anything about the Bangkok police knows that the district commander has to keep himself informed of everything that happens in the city. If he takes his eye off the ball for a second, it can cost him dearly. Either in money or in power. And power is as valuable as money, sometimes more. The city doesn’t sleep for a minute, and anyone who doesn’t get on board on time misses the boat.

  “Who am I working with here? Who should I talk to?

  “Don’t know, bro,” he said. He used the Hebrew word achi, pronouncing it the way the Israeli kids on Khao San Road do, with the accent on the first syllable. “I wish I could give you a name, but you’re on your own.”

  The car stopped in front of the Fontaine Hotel. Tom hadn’t even asked. He knew I was staying there. It’s where I always stay. True, there are nicer hotels in the city. The Hilton and the Shangri-La and the Hyatt. I have nothing against them. Why should I? I’ve spent quite a few pleasant hours sitting at the long bar in the Hyatt, for instance. But there’s no other hotel in the whole city—let me say that again, no other—where you can open your window—if it opens at all and most of them don’t—and breathe in the odors of the flesh market of Patpong. You can actually smell the sex games played by the young girls selling their wares.

  What goes on outside your window isn’t for the sensitive stomach of an innocent tourist who has come to see the sites and do some shopping. Anything can happen out there. You’re all alone with only your instincts to rely on. Nighttime in Bangkok is not for the naïve.

  Best advice: go to bed at a reasonable hour and turn the air conditioner on high to keep out the heat, the humidity, and the reek of sweat. And don’t forget to lock the door and secure the safety chain.

  Just across the street from the Fontaine Hotel is one of the oldest establishments devoted to falang entrapment. It’s called Purple Octopus. For years it’s been run by a skilled hustler named Yair Shemesh, a former Israeli known universally as Barbu, French for “bearded.” I was probably the only one who still called him Yair. I found it hard to digest his current incarnation. I knew that sooner or later I’d have to cross the street, go up to the second floor, and see where things stood between us. We hadn’t settled accounts for a long time, not since we had still been calling each other “cuz.” I was hoping for later rather than sooner.

  Tom and I got out of the car in the hotel parking lot, embracing like two weeping pussies. I remembered the Jameson and the cigarettes I was carrying, but Tom only took the cigarettes. “I have a feeling you’re going to need the bottle more than me,” he said. Taking out a pen, he wrote down a number. “This is Gai’s cellphone,” he said, pointing to the gaunt driver. “If you get into trouble, you know, the familiar kind when suddenly nobody knows you and everyone turns their back on you, give him a call and tell him where you are. He’ll be there. You won’t have to worry about anything else.”

  The white Toyota started to pull out and then stopped and reversed. Tom stuck his big ugly head out the window. “There’re a lot of SOBs around,” he warned. “They’re young and ambitious, which makes them even worse bastards. Don’t trust anyone. Not even the people on your side. Especially not the people on your side. Be careful.”

  I stood there like a schmuck. That’s the only word for it. I waited until the roar of the engine faded and the Toyota disappeared among the hundreds of vehicles streaming down Silom Street. It wasn’t that I was all alone. I’m used to that. Actually, I’m very good at it. It was that the people I knew, the people I counted on, the people who understood where I was coming from, were slowly vanishing into the chaos of collective forgetting—Was I also a part of that? For a moment, I just stood there. What for? Did I want Tom to come back, to talk to me, to rescue me? I was enveloped in a black cloud, a sort of personal prophecy that said the story of Sigal Bardon wasn’t going to be just another case of an Israeli who went missing in a foreign city. I pulled myself together and went into the hotel, to the shadows awaiting me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I WOKE FROM a short nap. I had no reason to hurry, but since I was already awake, I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower. I’d developed the habit of taking a shower every chance I got in Thailand, where the degree of your whiteness—your falangness—was measured by the harshness of the smell from your armpits or the number of salt stains on your shirt. Besides, I thought, a tour of Patpong was always gratifying. Maybe not good for the health, but a feast for the eyes. What can I say? Human beings are a mass of contradictions.

  It was early afternoon. I decided to walk. I needed to stretch my legs after the irritating flight and lack of sleep. Walking helps me think, too. Some people think best at a desk or over coffee and a cigarette. I need to be on my feet. The more I walk, the more my brain empties out and then the answers come and things fall into place. Even the questions become clearer. For the moment, I only had questions with no answers, and a single fact—Sigal Bardon was missing.

  Questions:

  Was Sigal alive?

  If not, was she the victim of a random murder or was she targeted? Was she floating among the vegetation at the edge of one of the many canals that crossed Bangkok, or did someone take the trouble to hide the body?

  If someone hid the body, then who? And why?

  If she’s alive, where is she? Is she hiding? If so, where?

  And why?

  And most especially, from whom? That was the main question.

  A lot of questions. But something else was bothering me. It took me a while to put my finger on it. I stopped short. A young woman coming out of a shopping center loaded down with bags almost ran into me. I kicked myself for being an idiot. It was staring me in the face, and I didn’t see it. How did her family know that she was missing? Somehow, in the rush to get on a plane, I hadn’t asked Shai, and he hadn’t told me. An oversight on his part? I wasn’t sure. For the time being, all I had was a gut feeling. But for someone who lives on clues and intuition, what else is there?

  I texted Shai: Who contacted us?

  My phone vibrated with his reply. The family.

  Back to him: How did they find out?

  He texted back: Unknown source.

  That wasn’t enough, I thought, filing the answer away for further consideration.

  Expenses? I texted.

  His response: A hundred a day. No limit. But you need approval first.

  At least that gave me a certain degree of freedom. My legs kept carrying me up Silom Street, my mind calculating my next move.

  Darkness came quickly, as it always does in the East. The bus stops were crowded with people at the height of the rush hour. Motorbike taxis darted madly among the slow-moving cars. Smoking three-wheeled tuk-tuks struggled to navigate among the other vehicles on the road until they, too, were stuck in the ever-growing gridlock that poured even more soot into the heavy haze that hung over the city. The Skytrain sped along its single elevated track, leaving a neon wake on the line of cars below.

  I passed Lumpini Park, the green lung in the center of Bangkok, and began making my way back to the hotel, hoping my brain cells, deadened by the flight, would kick in. A cab pulled up beside me.

  If it hadn’t stopped, I probably would have kept walking. What changed my mind was the cold air that issued from the window when the driver rolled it down and called out “Taxi?”

  I got in the back with a sigh of relief. Bangkok is a city of breaking points that you inevitably pay for dearly. The minute you buy something stupid you’re never going to use; the fraction of a second when you smile at a girl in a bar, breaking rule number one: in the flesh market of the capital of sex games, always remain indifferent; the moment you get into a cab. Then it starts: “You want see pussy show? Pussy smoke cigarette? Pussy shoot ping-pong ball?”

  The best answer a sensible tourist can give to such offers is mai-ow, don’t want. That’s the first thing you should learn from a Thai phrase book, and not the polite nonsense li
ke khob khun, thank you, or mai kao-jai, I don’t understand. Mai-ow. That’s it.

  But what tourist remains sensible in Bangkok? And who ever opens a phrase book these days?

  I wasn’t a tourist. As I said, I’d been coming here for twenty years, and thought I’d seen everything there was to see in Bangkok: the heavenly city above and its dark underbelly below, the human sewer. But you never know. The cold air from the AC began to get my lethargic mental juices flowing again. The driver was the usual shrimp. Small and jittery, with a long hair growing out of a mole on his chin, he was no different from most of the cabbies in Bangkok.

  “Fontaine Hotel, Patpong,” I instructed.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, glancing at me in the mirror with an expression that said “another falang moron who thinks he discovered Patpong.”

  We drove down Silom Street, passing the regular sights: young guys racing from store to store with earbuds stuck in their ears and bags with designer names in their hands; an occasional Western tourist standing on a corner with a map in his hand, not knowing that maps are worthless in Bangkok. You can’t get anywhere on foot, and the moment you get into a cab, the driver will take you wherever he wants. It doesn’t matter where you tell him to go; he has his own plans for you.

  “First time in Bangkok?” the cabbie asked.

  Really? I thought. “No, I’ve been here a few times before.” Go ahead, tell him I’d been coming and going for twenty years.

  “Business?”

  Business. There is no word Bangkok cabbies like better. It has a universal meaning that immediately tells the driver how he can benefit from the innocent tourist in the back of his cab.

  “Not this time,” I said.

  He sat in silence for a moment, before saying, “Bangkok like orchid. You like orchid?”

  A poetic cab driver. He was starting to annoy me. That was a bad sign. If I’d been thinking straight, I might have realized how bad. But it’s hard to think straight after a walk in Bangkok when you’re dripping with sweat and your brain is at its boiling point—playing tricks on you.

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  We were getting close to Patpong. From a main road like Silom Street, where we were now making our way from one traffic jam to the next, Patpong looks like all the other crowded markets filled with what my friend Tom liked to call schmattes. But when you get closer, you can see the girls standing outside the bars. Someone once called them the “caregivers of Patpong,” but he didn’t mean it in the medical sense.

  “Many flowers in Bangkok,” the driver said with a chuckle, catching my eye in the mirror. “Our flowers have scent.”

  “Their scent is the sweet smell of rot and corruption,” I said.

  “I see you know Bangkok well, sir.”

  “All I know,” I answered, “is tha di rab di; mi di rab mi di—do good, get good; do bad, get bad.”

  He looked at me curiously. “You looking for boom-boom?”

  I kept silent. I hadn’t heard that expression in a long time. I guess we were from the same generation. Today they use different, more graphic, terms.

  He seemed to be reading my mind.

  “You not like our girls, no problem. You want fucky-fucky with white girl, I can arrange. Also, no problem. Look,” he said, reaching into the glove compartment. “I have two passports. One very pretty girl. No want passports, want only my money. You take passports, you give me six hundred bahts. She give you what you want. I know.”

  When he bent over, I got a whiff of tiger balm, the hideous ointment that’s a mixture of camphor and crushed tiger bones. It issued from his body, creating a lethal combination with the reek of Mekhong whiskey from his mouth. I was about to say something nasty when he held out two blue passports. Israeli passports.

  I’ve seen plenty of passports in my day. And quite a few forgeries have passed through my hands. These two were legit. The picture hadn’t been switched over a steaming electric kettle. They hadn’t been faked by any expert either, and those were a dime a dozen in Bangkok. Along Khao San Road, where the backpackers congregate, every fourth or fifth store has a sign offering original student cards. In the storeroom in the back, there are passports for sale as well. Including Israeli ones. Dirt cheap.

  The first passport bore the name Micha Waxman. And who looked out at me from the second one? Sigal Bardon herself. The young woman I’d been sent to find. The woman who went missing. The picture wasn’t very flattering, and much less distinct than the one in the file Shai gave me, but there was no mistaking her. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

  I let out a soft whistle.

  The clown thought it was a reaction to the exceptional beauty of the passport’s owner. “Pretty girl,” he said. “I take you?”

  That’s when I made the second mistake of the day. Breaking rule number two, I said, “Yes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I HANDED OVER the six hundred bahts, a bargain basement price for two genuine Israeli passports. Sixty shekels—just over seventeen dollars—about the cost of a blow job at the right bar, including a pint on the house. It was the least I’d ever paid for a passport. Even the fakes in Bangkok cost more.

  I just happened to stumble on Sigal’s passport? How implausible was that! The siren was going off in my head. I knew it wasn’t blind luck. Everything in Bangkok happens for a reason. Someone had made sure it would end up in my hands.

  I texted Shai from the cab: Check out Micha Waxman. Ashdod. October ’83.

  A couple of minutes later my phone vibrated. 17 hits. No criminal record.

  Micha Waxman, I thought, turning the name over in my head. Who was Micha Waxman? I knew nothing about him save for one thing: a Bangkok taxi driver had his passport, together with Sigal Bardon’s.

  “They get in my cab on Khao San,” the driver said in reply to my question. “They want go to Hua Lamphong train station. They not have money. First, I think they lie. I very angry. Then I see they tell truth. The man, skinny. He shake all the time. I know drugs. He sweating. I even more angry. He make my cab wet. I very angry. They give me passports. No money. Keep passports, they say. I not want. The man sweating, disgusting. He say I come to Khao San another week, they come back, he give me money. Much money. I only want money for ride. Six hundred bahts. No want passports. No good. Police find, they not like.”

  That was some story. There are a lot of stories like that bouncing around Bangkok. I was a little skeptical about this one. For the moment, however, I decided to follow where it led, true or not. The fact is that when Israelis go overseas, they do the most unexpected things. It’s sometimes hard to grasp the logic of their actions. It’s as if stepping outside the borders of their home country releases some tightly wound spring. Everything gets shaken up and falls apart.

  What were Sigal and Micha doing at the train station? Did they get on a train? Going where? On the face of it, it could be the usual story of Israeli backpackers taking the cheapest option: the night train to Surat Thani on the southern line to Hat Yai to save the cost of another night in a hotel, and from there a boat to Ko Pha-ngan, their favorite place to chill out and get high.

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  “Not know,” the driver answered. “They speak language like mynah bird squawking.” He made an attempt to imitate the guttural sound of the Hebrew letter het.

  “What were they carrying?” I cut in. “Suitcase? Backpack?”

  He thought for a minute. “Long bag. Big. Heavy. Sweating man not like carry. Want girl to help. She look angry. He shut mouth. Carry. Sweat.” The driver laughed. “You falang, woman give look, man like chicken.”

  I gave him a murderous look that shut him up, and made a mental note to check out Hua Lamphong. I was familiar with the large train station on the city’s main artery, Rama IV Road. Backpackers pass through it on their way south to the islands. Hopefully, Sigal and Micha had done something out of the ordinary enough for someone to remember them. The locals are used to the strange worl
d of the backpackers—their scruffy appearance, lack of hygiene, rowdiness—but they’d notice something unusual. They were especially good at picking up on fear, maybe because in their own culture feelings are suppressed and hidden, never expressed out loud. The complete opposite of the Western world.

  But from the file Shai prepared, Sigal Bardon didn’t seem to be your typical backpacker. The family told him she had a tidy sum of money with her, along with credit cards from here to eternity. I got the picture of a spoiled brat, not the type who was likely to subject herself to discomfort to save money. But, of course, parents see their kids in a certain way, and they’re inevitably surprised.

  Backpackers all begin in the same place, at the same point of departure—the sporting goods stores that supply equipment and information. After that they go their separate ways. India, China, South America. Some have had enough after a month or two; others spend a year in India finding themselves and only come home when they run out of money. Some volunteer at the orphanages in Kolkata, and others get caught at the Bangkok airport on their way to Europe with a suitcase full of drugs.

  I could put up flyers with Sigal’s picture on Khao San Road, I thought, but I wasn’t in love with the idea. For the time being, I preferred to work quietly, not send the message that someone was looking for her. Every message makes waves, and you never know where or who they’ll reach.

  What was in the heavy duffel bag? A duffel bag on a jaunt to the islands? It didn’t smell right. I hoped it wasn’t what I was starting to imagine. If Sigal got mixed up in drug running, it meant trouble.

  The cab turned off the main road into one of the small side streets of the Banglamphu district. In the distance I could see the large blue Star of David on the Israeli Connection guesthouse, a landmark for Israeli youngsters in Bangkok. I was sure that’s where the driver was taking me—it was the obvious place—but he stopped a block before at a guesthouse called Shaya’s Place. The name was so original it almost took my breath away, particularly since it was almost identical to the guesthouse on its right. And the one on its left. The restaurant, which opened onto the street, had blue plastic chairs and a sign in Hebrew that read: “Real Israeli shakshuka” and “Chopped green salad like your mama makes.”