Bangkok Noir

by Christopher G. Moore (Ed)

  Which brings me to the part that’s going to shock you. I feel strange saying all this to you; I suppose if would be easier to call. But if I could hear your voice, I don’t think I’d be able to say anything at all. And anyway, with you off in Bangalore, I’d probably hear someone else’s voice, or someone pretending to be you. And you’re not who you usually are either, I imagine, in that tropical setting, with all those streets around.

  Besides, there is something rather magical about coming into one of these little cafés at 1:00 a.m.—the young girl at the desk curtsies, the kids wait around in chairs, as if waiting to be claimed—and typing these words onto a screen, and then, that very minute, the same words appear on a screen in India, taken there by a genie with STD connections.

  So, back to the part where you’ve got to block your eyes (or ears, or both). I asked myself, as I went out for breakfast that second night, what I really wanted here. The streets around me were thronged; they have this night market thing here which is a kind of Oriental bazaar in the dark, so mad with flickering neon and shouted prices that you can hardly walk. People are shooting numbers back and forth, or offering one another calculators on which their bids are typed. Girls are drifting out of the bars in underwear, or even less. People are selling blacklight posters, lanterns, false perfumes and little vials of something strange, bras, luminous green rings to wear around your neck and spices that are said to be love potions. All around, on every corner. And I, walking through the midst of it, thought, “What is it that I could do here that I could never do at home?”

  What I’m going to tell you won’t make you very comfortable. But I suppose I was after something that’s the opposite of comfort; if it had been comfort I wanted, I’d have stayed in London. No, I thought; this is a chance—my best chance, maybe my last chance—to become someone different. To say abracadabra and whirl myself around so fast that the person who gets up again is someone other. You know how my reasoning works when there’s no real reason behind it.

  People were pushing me, scraping past me as I walked, picking up panties and Rolex watches that cost less than a drink, fingering X-rated videos and bottles of Chanel that looked like colored water, and at last, having fortified myself with a beer, I went up to two girls I’d seen the night before. One of them had short, spiky hair—she was less tall than I was—and a soft, young face, virginal in a way. The other was much taller than both of us, with long hair and a tiger’s face, predatory and strong.

  “What magic tricks do you offer?” I said, not meaning anything, I think.

  They looked at one another—though I’m sure they’re used to worse—and then the small one, the shy one, said, “What country you come from?”

  “England,” I said.

  “Same-same, America.”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Where you stay Bangkok?”

  “The Dream Palace. Over near the Golden Temple.”

  They looked at one another appraisingly.

  “You have ladee, Bangkok?”

  “No,” I told the shorter one. “No lady at all.”

  Here the taller one grabbed hold of my arm.

  “You come with me,” she said.

  “No,” said the other. “You come with me. Number one.”

  “Same-same,” said the first. “You take us both.”

  “I will,” I said, and the whole conversation stopped for a moment. Whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t what I was expecting, either. It was the moment speaking, taking me wherever it went.

  They looked at me and the tall one said, “You want me and my friend?”

  “Of course,” I said. I don’t know why, but I thought at that moment of what I’d read about the women in those poor African countries—São Tomé, the Central African Republic—who support their families by pretending to be other women at phone-sex centers. Purring down the international phone lines, as if they were in Croydon or Atlanta or somewhere, sighing and giving back false names, so they can go home and give their mothers enough money for food.

  It’s degrading, people will tell you. It’s just colonialism in another form. It’s a way of keeping the poor poor, and exploiting the fact they’re in need. Maybe it is, but that wasn’t how it seemed just then. The girls were eager; they didn’t want to spend any longer waiting for someone who might be even worse than me. And the next thing I knew, they were leading me, one by each arm, down the little lane, past the booths and the fortune tellers and the girls in briefs, who were running a finger down a man’s shirt or underneath it to his skin. It was like walking through a stranger’s imagination.

  We arrived a few minutes later at an unlit staircase and walked up into the dark. At the top we came to this musty aquarium of a place, with a string of lights along the walls. A man—a boy, really—was sitting at a cash register, eating something from a bowl and watching a television set that sat on the floor in a corner. With rabbit-ear antennae and a scratchy old black-and-white film on the small screen.

  I suppose the girls had been here before (I call them girls because I don’t know what else to call them). They collected a key from the boy, and then the three of us walked, or straggled, down the corridor. There were pink lights above every door, no windows at the end. One of them turned the old-fashioned key and we walked into this room of wonders, really; she turned on a light, and we saw a television set, a drinks cabinet, a video player, a karaoke mike. There was a deep bathtub in the middle of the room. The other girl, the smaller one, pushed another button and the room shone red, then blue.

  The taller girl went into the bathroom, and the small one began to unbutton her shirt.

  “No,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “Not now.”

  She sat on the bed—she looked puzzled, even rejected—and a few seconds later, the taller girl came out, freshly showered, with some exotic perfume newly applied. She’d changed into a bathrobe, but she hadn’t done it up, so she walked across the room like someone from a James Bond film, her robe waiting to fall open.

  “A thousand and one nights,” I said, rather foolishly, again, and they looked at one another, a little alarmed. I suppose they were wondering—worried—what would come next.

  “You crazy guy,” said the tall one, pushing me onto the bed.

  The other one, always more obliging, said, “No, shy. Same-same Japanese.”

  “No,” I said. “I know what I want.”

  They both looked at me, expectant. All three of us were on the bed now and the red light made us feel like X-rays or something not quite real.

  “We tell each other stories. The stories of our lives.”

  “You cheap Charlie!” said the tall one, guessing, I suppose, that this was some kind of trick. So I pulled out my red and purple notes and gave them a whole stash in advance.

  They relaxed a little, and the smaller one said, “You want, we do.”

  “My wish is your command,” I said emptily. The tall one—she was lying between us now, and her legs stretched almost to the end of the bed—said she’d always wanted to be a girl. She’d always felt incomplete somehow—a broken jug, she seemed to gesture—and when she’d been very young, she’d made a promise to herself that if she ever got the chance, she’d follow her dream right through. So she saved her money and came to the city, and made more money here, and—well, now she was what she’d always wanted to be. Her story had a happy ending.

  The other one, sweeter—I liked her more—said something about a “Mama” and a child, and her promise to keep them healthy by going to the big city. She’d come here and found that men weren’t very much in demand in the City of Angels. A month’s wages for a construction worker’s job would give her pennies to send home. And she’d thought of her mother waiting, her promise, and then she’d decided to take a gamble.

  There was a knock on the door then. I suppose our allotted time was up, and I called back, “We’ll pay for the whole night—tomorrow, too,” and there was the sound of receding fo
otsteps. And the girl said she’d taken her gamble. She’d passed through the mirror, and now her mother had a new house; her daughter was at school.

  Then they looked at me, and I told them everything. The things I couldn’t tell my friends, the things it had been hard for me to tell even you. About Sarah, I mean, and what I learned about her after she died. What I learned about myself. What I did in the house alone, what I thought of doing. All of it: everything that had been waiting to come out for nine months—263 days. I even told them how I’d said to you, that afternoon in the park, “What I really want is a genie,” and you’d said, “You’d better go abroad. They don’t do genies in central London.”

  They do, actually, now—they do everything, everywhere—but I thought that sisters know best. And then I told them about my saving my money and coming away from the city, and away from my family, towards what I knew nothing about. I suppose they were bored—it was almost light now, and we could see the colors changing through the little window, which looked out onto a wall—but they looked as if they were interested, and when I was finished, the small one leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. The other one—Jin, she told me her name was (the smaller one was Nit)—asked me if I had a handkerchief. I gave her mine, and she brushed at her eyes a little. Something in the night had moved her.

  We’d overstayed our deposit, of course, but I’m not sure that any of us wanted to go. It was cool in the room, and it was quiet; the lights made everything different. Finally the tall one said, “Go home now,” and we went down to where the street was empty, just overturned tables and rubbish in the thin grey light, and a sort of bulldozer machine that noisily went back and forth, back and forth, collecting all the relics of the night. It was like coming back to something real after a night in a very different country

  The girls took me to a tuk-tuk, one of these fourwheeled rickshaws they have here, and bargained on my behalf with the boy in the front seat; they were going to go home on the backs of motorcycle taxis across the street. “You good man,” said Jin. “You want meet again, you call.” And, taking a flyer from a McDonald’s nearby, she scribbled down her number on the back of an advert for a Happy Meal.

  “I see you tonight? Same place?” said Nit, and I said, “Who knows? Maybe you will.”

  I got into the back of the rickshaw then and sat under the red light, as the boy banged his horn and reeled into the traffic. In daytime the magic of the city was gone, except this time it wasn’t gone at all—only postponed, perhaps. The djiinn was beside me on the seat—the djinn was inside me—and this evening, or tomorrow night, or the evening after that, anything, everything seemed possible. Just telling your story, I thought: could any crime be so secret?

  Pico Iyer

  Pico Iyer is the author of several books about globalism and travel, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Open Road. Based in Asia since 1987, he first visited Thailand in 1983, and has since been back to Bangkok more than 50 times. Since 1992, he’s been living in rural Japan.

  Halfhead

  Colin Cotterill

  Samart Wichaiwong, a.k.a. Teacher Wong, awoke to find his legs off the mattress and flailing. It was as if his conscious self was fleeing his subconscious in panic. It wasn’t the first time Halfhead had chased him out of a dream. She was no man’s fantasy. She always reminded him of the he-’n-she act at the transvestite cabarets. The singer, tucked between the stage curtains, turns to the left and he’s a man, to the right and she’s a woman. Remarkable. Except Halfhead turns to the left and she’s a Gray’s Anatomy centerfold. One side of her skull is missing, sliced down the center like a severe homicidal parting. One red eye, half a nose, left-sided mouth with a sluggy-black tongue spilling out. But it was the drool that really repulsed him. The drool. Samart slapped away the memory of his nightmare and stumbled around his apartment in search of the remains of a bottle of Archa beer, a refugee from last night’s binge. He chugged it down. It didn’t taste any better than the scum in his mouth, but he needed nutrition. He changed out of his striped pajama bottom and into his white silks. His belly formed a third trimester mound inside the smock top. He swept back hair that hung like a hula skirt from his bald dome and tied it behind his neck with a rubber band. Finally, with all the artistry of a likay performer, he sat at the mirror and encircled his bulging eyes with a crimson bruise of lipstick. He checked the time, then took off his watch and placed it beside the DVD player. He walked untidily down to the ground floor, across the vacant lot, and unlocked the door to the humble bamboo hut in which he supposedly lived. He was early but he knew this could be a most significant day.

  The two latte-brown uniformed officers were seated in front of the stage on an itchy grass mat staring at Samart, who sat cross-legged and apparently comatose on a flat cushion facing them. He was surrounded by porcelain animals, pickled reptiles gazing drowsily from glass containers, coloured vials and bottles and skulls of all sizes, animal and human. The hut’s curtain was drawn, and a small fish tank lamp illuminated Samart from below, casting a campfire shadow that bent all his features upward. His red, up-all-night eyes stared dully into space. It was an image that had impressed many but obviously wasn’t having a positive effect on today’s audience.

  “How long are we supposed to sit here like mutton?” the Colonel asked. He was in his forties, sturdy, and his looks were as ugly as his manners.

  “He’ll come out of it soon, sir,” his captain told him. Captain Pairot was a skinny version of the Colonel but with skin as loose as lettuce. Given the common Thai propensity to subscribe heavily to police corruption, he’d no doubt fill it out soon enough.

  “His soul will become aware of our presence here on earth and leave the Otherworld to join us,” he said.

  “Is that right? Take long, will it?”

  “Could be half an hour.”

  “Hmm, sorry, I can’t wait that long.”

  The Colonel unholstered his pistol, aimed and shot the head off a plaster giraffe. The bullet passed through the bamboo wall and probably wounded one of the stray dogs that loitered in the lane outside. Teacher Wong didn’t appear to care, or flinch or blink. The Colonel leveled the weapon at Samart’s head and started counting down from five. The shaman was out of his trance at three-and-a-half.

  “Ah, officers,” he said. “Have I kept you waiting long?”

  “Yes,” grunted the Colonel, reholstering his gun.

  “Teacher Wong,” said the Captain respectfully. “This is Colonel Thongfa, head of the Chiang Mai crime suppression division. I mentioned to you he’d be dropping by to see you today. He read about your successes: the missing girl, the drug stash. If he’s impressed, perhaps—”

  “There’s no perhaps on the table here,” the Colonel cut in. “For some reason I can’t work out, we’ve been given a tub of money for mumbo jumbo psychic consultations. I want nothing to do with it, but I’m under orders. I’m not handing over a single baht unless I’m certain whoever we hire isn’t a crook. That could take some time, considering you’re all thieves and charlatans. Am I right?”

  Samart nodded. “So I hear,” he said.

  “So, it’s down to you to prove your worth.”

  Samart smiled and adjusted the large yellow chrysanthemum tucked behind his ear.

  “Then perhaps you’d be better looking elsewhere,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not in need of money.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” said the Colonel.

  “And what have you heard, sir?”

  “That you peck out a living selling lucky amulets. That you do the odd exorcism and purportedly put clients in touch with their departed loved ones in exchange for food. Doesn’t sound like much of a business to me. If you were any good, you’d be rolling in cash. Horse races. Casinos. You could take ’em all. Seems to me you’re small fry, Samart, and probably a fraud. You’ve managed to bamboozle Captain Pairot here and a couple of the other idiots at you
r local station, but I’m not that green. I’ll give you one shot. You’ve got five minutes to show me what you can do.”

  “Then I won’t waste your time, Colonel.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t have any party tricks for you. I use my gifts for good, not for personal gain. I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  The Colonel huffed, fingered his gun, got stiffly to his feet and walked to the door without another word. Captain Pairot shook his head and followed him. The policemen were outside the doorway, putting on their shoes, when Samart called out, “Oh, Pairot. I was sorry to hear about Constable Chalerm. He was a good man.”

  Pairot looked back briefly at Samart before both officers disappeared into the thick vegetation that surrounded the cabin, seperating it from the new 7-Eleven next door. It was clear from his expression that he didn’t know what the shaman was talking about. Samart smiled and stretched his aching spine. Cross-legged was never his favourite position. He preferred flat on his back on a mattress. He needed a beer, but he knew the cops would be back sooner or later.

  It was sooner.

  No more than five minutes had passed before the two officers reappeared in the doorway.

  “How did you know?” Colonel Thongfa asked.

  “What’s that, Colonel?”

  “The shooting.”

  “Somebody got shot?”

  Captain Pairot stepped into the room.

  “It just this minute came over the police radio in the car. Officer Chalerm stopped a pickup truck out on the Lampang road. Couple of witnesses saw the driver pull a gun, shoot him at point blank range and flee the scene.”