Passport to Death

by Yigal Zur

  Even from a distance I could see the armed cops keeping an eye on all the adjacent corners and crossings. The building itself was surrounded by a high wall fitted with cameras and floodlights. You have to push a button on the gate to speak to the guard in the next layer of security. I leaned on the button, which always irritates them.

  “Good morning,” a voice answered. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m Dotan Naor. I’d like to talk to the head of security.”

  “Please stick your passport in the crack,” the metallic voice instructed.

  “You sure you don’t want me to stick something else in it?” I said.

  It was a long time before I got a response, but eventually I heard a voice I recognized immediately. “Same old Dotan, I see. Same old lame jokes.”

  The voice belonged to Shmulik. What the hell was he doing here? Head of embassy security? There was no doubt in my mind he was standing in front of the security camera laughing at me, very pleased with himself.

  “Don’t let that loser in,” his voice echoed through the speaker. But the chuckle that accompanied it was hesitant enough for me to identify the question in his head: How much does he—that is, me—know?

  I heard the buzzer, pushed open the gate, and entered the guard post. He was checking my passport. “Any weapons?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Second floor. You’ll find it. The entrance is at the end of the garden.”

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that Shmulik had become a common variety security chief. There may not be a guidebook like the ones you use to identify local flora or fauna, but security chiefs are just as easy to categorize. Those who used to work for the Security Agency are a little over the hill. The Foreign Ministry is happy to hire them at the first sign of a pot belly, but don’t let the extra weight in front deceive you. They may no longer solve problems with an elbow to the kidneys or a kick in the gut, but they haven’t gotten soft or complacent. Just smarter. They still keep things close to the chest and don’t hesitate to lie when necessary.

  Shmulik’s office was identical to that of every other security chief in the world, and I’ve seen a lot of them. A stark room with a telephone, thin-screen computer, and a few small Israeli flags. On the wall behind him were pictures of the President and Prime Minister, which were periodically switched out. Photos of his ex-wife and two girls, freckled smiling redheads, sat on his desk. The ex, by the way, wasn’t smiling. I wondered why. But I was more interested in the board with the details of missing persons on the wall.

  I knew I was raw meat for him. He could chop me up any way he wanted. This was his moment, and he was going to savor it. It wasn’t what he’d been looking forward to in the lazy afternoon hours. He would have preferred a cup of tasteless coffee, even cold coffee that had been sitting on his desk for a long time, to a ghost from the past. But now that I was here, he was going to make the most of it.

  Shmulik was a large man, a mountain you couldn’t ignore, especially given the bald egg-shaped head above a thick bullish neck. The strength of this human mass was apparent even when he was sitting behind a standard desk with his blue uniform jacket hanging over the back of the chair, his obligatory tie loosened, and his shirtsleeves rolled up far enough to show what was left of the bulging muscles he once had. His eyes were gray-blue, like a fish. They were eyes that had learned not only to see, but to scrutinize and probe. He was sipping coffee, none too quietly, I might add.

  He stood up and shook my hand across the desk. “The security camera at the gate didn’t do you justice,” he said. “It didn’t show how good-looking you are.”

  Despite the AC, his hand was damp and clammy, maybe because of all the coarse black hair that covered the back of it. You could polish shoes with it. When he stood, I could see that he was starting to get thick around the waist, like many muscle-bound men do when they reach middle age.

  He sat back down, or more accurately, dropped heavily back onto his chair, and pointed to the one on my side of the desk. “Have a seat,” he said.

  I sat. He examined me. There wasn’t a drop of friendliness in his eyes. “Okay, Dotan, what’re you doing here?”

  “Taking a little break,” I said.

  My answer neither interested nor irked him. You can’t evoke emotion from people like Shmulik. They couldn’t care less. “So what happened to your face on your little break?”

  His question made me realize that my jaw was sore. I passed my hand over it. My cheek was swollen. The midgets in the alley had done more damage than I thought. I hadn’t even taken the time to look in the mirror.

  “I drank too much last night. Fell on my face,” I said.

  “You still think everyone else fell off the cabbage truck?”

  “I hear there’re a lot of cabbages in Bangkok.” It wasn’t the wittiest comeback in the world, but that’s all I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I can usually do better.

  “So what’re you doing here?” he repeated.

  Getting up, he paced the room. I knew him well enough to know he was trying to figure out how to get me to sing. I waited. There was no hurry.

  “It was raining, so I popped in for a visit.” That was true, at least in part. The first part. It was drizzling outside, and I kept thinking of all the shit that would come floating up.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “So we’ll start at the beginning. I understand you’ve already been to Shaya’s Place.”

  “Who have you got there?” I asked. “Shaya himself?”

  Me and my big mouth. If I could only learn to keep it shut. Especially with guys like Shmulik, who was no less seasoned than me. If I hadn’t asked the question, I might have milked the answer out of him. It could just as well be Weiss, for instance.

  But whether deliberately or not, Shmuel diverted me from that line of enquiry. “If I don’t know what’s going on in my Israeli community, then who does? Every day I get another planeload of weirdos of every size and shape you can imagine. Every one of them is here to find their own pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and find it fast. And they’re all convinced they’ll be welcomed with open arms. One wants to invest in a whorehouse, another wants to open a club. One gets caught at the airport with a kilo of heroin and another with ten cobras and three little Burmese pythons in his bag. And that’s without even counting the twenty-thousand-plus backpackers a year who arrive loaded down with ganja from Goa, Manali, or Dharamsala. You wouldn’t believe what a jungle it is out there.”

  I nodded, although he was tiring me out with his list. But Shmulik wasn’t done. It wasn’t every day he got a visitor he could badger.

  “Just yesterday they bring me a certified goody two-shoes. On the plane from Delhi he went into the toilet, stuffed a rag in the smoke detector, and smoked joint after joint rolled in toilet paper. In the end, there was so much smoke that it set off the alarm. I ask him, ‘Tell me, what were you thinking? Don’t you know it’s against the law? You know what kind of fine you’re gonna pay?’ And what does he say? This kid with thirty earrings and dreadlocks down to his waist? He gives me a big smile and says, ‘I had some weed left. I didn’t want to throw it out, and I thought it would be cool to chill out during the flight.’ Cool. And every time I have to come up with some explanation for the local cops, one guy in the Tourist Police in particular, Major Somnuk. You don’t want to meet him. Every time I have to explain they’re good kids right out of the Army who’re just testing the limits of cool.”

  I didn’t give a shit about his problems. We all have our own burdens to bear, and right now mine was a woman named Sigal Bardon who seemed to have disappeared into thin air, and the clock was ticking. The only thing I knew for sure was that she was somewhere in Thailand without a passport and probably without any friends if she had to get help from a drughead like Micha Waxman.

  I went over to the board of missing persons. There were a few photos on it. I checked them out one by one, reading the notations below. Eyal P., last seen in
northern Laos. Three months later, someone tried to sell his passport and camera on Khao San. Idit S., went for a boat ride on Tonlé Sap Lake in Cambodia. By the looks of it, she fell in the water when her boat collided with another one. They searched for two weeks. Body not found. Micha A., went on a trek alone in northern Thailand. Might have accidentally crossed the border into Myanmar.

  There were more photos. All the faces were young, attractive, smiling. The info was gathered from every hole in Southeast Asia where Israelis go and for which the security chief in Bangkok is responsible. What happens to all these kids? How is it that they attract disaster and death like magnets?

  There was no sign of Sigal Bardon on the board.

  “Impressive list,” I said. “Is it up-to-date?”

  A few seconds of silence passed between us. Shmulik glanced at the papers on his desk and then raised his eyes to me. “I’m guessing you’re expecting me to offer you coffee,” he said, and called to the woman in the adjacent office, “Aliza.”

  A woman poked her head in the door before coming in. Young, late twenties maybe early thirties. As cute as a button. Bright face, almost glowing. A mass of blond hair wound into a bun on top of her head. She was dressed in a green blouse that looked casual but was undoubtedly from one of the top designers, and, of course, she wasn’t wearing a bra. In the light from the window on the opposite wall, her breasts were a sight to behold. Perfect pears. I wondered whether Shmulik had anything to say about them. Probably not, or maybe he was used to them because I didn’t see his eyes wandering. Inside her tight jeans, I could imagine a pair of legs it wouldn’t hurt to gaze at.

  The look in her black eyes seemed to imply I’d said a dirty word.

  “I didn’t know you had a friend,” she said, turning her attention to Shmulik.

  “Don’t worry, he doesn’t,” I said.

  We all laughed. Shmulik, not so heartily.

  “I bet you’re an academic,” Aliza said, “doing your PhD on Buddhist sculpture from the Khmer period. You’re here doing field work and chalking up expenses for tax purposes.”

  “How did you know? Woman’s intuition?”

  We laughed again, just the two of us this time. Progress. I thought how nice it would be to sit with her in the evening on the long bar of the Hyatt Hotel and check out the state of the bottle of whiskey I’d left there last time. They play good music in the bar in the evening.

  “Forgive me for breaking up this intimate moment,” Shmulik said. “Aliza, would you mind making coffee? Two?”

  Ignoring him, she said, “My shift is over at five. That’s when the uniform comes off.” With a laugh, she disappeared back into her office.

  “You’re still the same letch you always were,” Shmulik said. “Isn’t it time to settle down?”

  “Nowadays they call it appreciating women. Besides, you know relationships are always painful for me.”

  From beneath his accustomed cynicism, I’d managed to elicit a genuine laugh. That was my chance.

  “Tell me, Shmulik,” I said, changing the subject, “what do you know about Sigal Bardon?”

  “More trouble,” he answered.

  “We’ve always got trouble. It’s our existential state. We’re used to it. But I’m convinced this woman’s story is different.”

  “What’s your interest in her?”

  I rubbed my swollen face gently. “If there’s one thing I don’t like it’s when people mess with me.”

  “That’s not an answer.” Shmulik wasn’t going to let up.

  “Her family hired us,” I said.

  “You make money out of other people’s problems?”

  “In a way,” I said, not defending myself. “Who doesn’t?”

  There was an icy look in his gray-blue eyes. I could see the muscles in his arms twitching from the pressure on the nerves running through them. I knew I only had a few minutes left before he got fed up with the game and tossed me out of his office.

  He resumed his official manner. “Nothing new, not a single clue to go on. You know the local cops.”

  Know was one way to put it.

  “Who’s handling the case?” I asked.

  “Major Somnuk from the Tourist Police. He’s not the most good-tempered person around, to put it mildly.” Chuckling, he added, “I imagine you’ll run into him at some point.”

  Aliza came back with the coffee. The ass she flaunted was for my sake. This time we parted with a broad smile.

  “What do you know about Alex Weiss?” I asked Shmulik.

  His cold eyes flashed. He was about to say something when the telephone rang. He listened intently, throwing me a glance from time to time. Finally, he said into the phone, “I can’t leave now. I’ll decide what to do about it.” He hung up and turned to me. “That’s it, Dotan. Get outta here. Something just landed on me. You can’t say I didn’t try to be nice even though you’ve been fucking with me for an hour.”

  I finished the coffee. You learn to sip on your coffee slowly, knowing that the timing of the final sip is very important. You can never tell what’s going to happen just before you put your cup down. Like now, when Aliza came in again. It didn’t require any effort to read the name on the cover of the file she was holding: Sigal Bardon.

  “Can I have a look?” I asked Shmulik.

  “I’m putting it on my desk. I don’t owe you a thing, but I have to take a leak. You’re not here when I get back.”

  The file contained two sheets of paper and some old photos, mostly family pictures. I leafed through them. Scribbled on a small colored note, held on with a paper clip, were the words “Reut Bardon, Oriental Hotel, Room 339.”

  That was enough.

  I left the office. On my way out, I saw Aliza at her desk, talking on the phone. She waved to me, but the smile on her face didn’t match the cold look in her eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A DAY IN Bangkok is like a week anywhere else. In a lot of ways. So I wasn’t surprised when the cab was waiting for me outside the embassy.

  It’s nice to see that someone’s looking out for you. But it’s not so nice when you don’t know who it is. Like a leech, the ubiquitous driver was starting to feel attached to me. He wanted to know if I’d already had some fucky-fucky today. For my part, I just wanted to get rid of him. But cabbies think they know better than you where you’re going, and especially where you want to go. This one in particular. He seemed to know where to take me even before I opened my mouth.

  I kept up the cat and mouse game he’d begun. Obviously, I was bothered by the fact that he stuck to me like glue, but I could take care of him later if it became necessary.

  “You tell me when you get fucky-fucky,” he said, interrupting my train of thought. He threw me a lascivious grin. “How many time your sea cucumber go in and out before it squirt?”

  “I never counted.”

  My answer didn’t satisfy him. “How many hour it go?” he asked. “Thai man like Superman. Drink one, two bottle like this,” he said. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out one of the small square amber-colored bottles sold legally at every 7-Eleven. It was a steroid drink of one kind or another. “It call Lipo. Make it go all night. Three hundred bahts. You want?”

  He was going to be my supplier, too? It made me wonder. How far would he go?

  When I didn’t respond, he pulled out another bottle. “This call Krating Daeng. Only two hundred. Work good, too. You want?”

  I ignored him, but he didn’t give up. He suggested I rest up for a couple of hours and then he’d come and take me to some places he knew.

  “Mai-ow,” I said. Don’t want.

  He gave me a puzzled look. I’d finally managed to shut the shrimp’s mouth. Or at least I thought I had.

  A small gilt Buddha was hanging from the rearview mirror. Wound around it was a thin chain from which a triangular amulet dangled. The driver undid it and held it out to me.

  “Take,” he said. “It from Buddha of the West.”
/>   I raised a quizzical eyebrow. Who or what was he referring to?

  On the clay amulet was a crude relief of Buddha.

  “It have much power,” he explained. “It do anything, except stop bullet.”

  People in Thailand believe in countless superstitions. It’s rare to see one without some kind of amulet around their neck. Amulets, what they call phra krueng, have the magical power to protect, cure, and strengthen. Some people wear one, while others have a mass of chains hanging from their neck, each with a different amulet. The most popular one, of course, is Buddha. It doesn’t matter if it’s made of wood, stone, or clay, as long as some monk blessed it and it’s said to have strong power.

  “You should have,” the driver said. “I see dangerous aura around you. No good. No healthy.”

  I took a stack of bills out of my pocket. “How much?”

  He threw me a glance in the mirror. He didn’t seem offended, just surprised at my lack of manners. “No mine. You only borrow.”

  Amulets have sacred value. That’s why they’re not bought and sold, only borrowed from a stall or seller. Without giving it much thought, I slipped it around my neck. It felt pleasantly cool. As soon as I put it on, I forgot about it, and maybe that was the whole point. It was there without my being aware of it. And like my mother used to say, even if it doesn’t help, it can’t hurt.

  I told the driver to take me to the train station. Like cabbies all over the world, he started whining about how bad traffic was at this time of day and how it would be stop and go the whole way. I put another five hundred bahts on the seat beside him. This time he kept his mouth shut until we got there.

  I got out at the station and tried to imagine what a man and woman dragging a heavy bag, which I assumed was filled with drugs, would do. The station was deserted. The night trains had already left. The popular train to Surat Thani in the south had left at five thirty-three. I wondered how many stupid falangs were sitting on it right now, shaking in fear that someone might inspect their bag.