Bangkok Noir

by Christopher G. Moore (Ed)

  Hansum Man

  Timothy Hallinan

  The room was dark when he opened his eyes. For a moment he was confused; the window was in the wrong place. Had he been sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep was thin these days, thinner than the worn sheet that covered him, but he didn’t usually move around that much. Or did he?

  Oh.

  The new apartment. The one he still couldn’t navigate in the dark without bumping into something. Unlike the shopfront he had lived above for all those years, the two rooms with the woodshuttered windows that you could prop open with a length of doweling. Cool cement floors.

  He sat up with a soft grunt and put his feet down. Carpet. Window on the right. Not the shophouse then, the apartment. What had happened to the shophouse?

  Now that he knew which room he was in, his hand could find the surprisingly heavy little brass lamp on the bed table. It put out just enough light to show him a heavily shadowed room, almost too small for the bed and the table, with a wide recessed closet yawning open in one corner, one of its sliding doors derailed and leaning at a seasick angle against the wall. His clothes, what remained of them, were hanging any old way, like a mixed crowd of birds pecking seed on a pavement before they lift off and sort themselves into flocks. The air conditioner sat aslant in the window and silent, since he had decided long ago to live with the heat. After all, he’d chosen the heat. The bathroom, over there, through that grimy door. He reminded himself again to take a sponge to the door.

  With his sight restored, the world tilted slightly and snapped into place with an almost audible click. The shophouse had been demolished long ago, along with the whole neighborhood, a cluster of two-and-three-story structures of inky, mildewed concrete, spiderwebbed with black electrical wires, built on either side of a soi almost too narrow for cars—paved over one of Bangkok’s lost canals. A neighborhood where people knew each other, talked to each other when they met, laughed good-naturedly at his occasional sallies into Thai. All the buildings gone now, knocked into dust and chunks of cement.

  How noisy it had been, the machines growling like big dogs at the buildings before taking bites out of them, some of the people staring dolefully from across the soi, looking like attendees at a cremation.

  He got up and launched himself toward the bathroom, feeling a light fizziness in his head. Had he drunk before going to bed? Stupid question. And what time was it, anyway? It had been weeks since he’d been able to find the heavy steel Rolex his father had given him to take to Nam. He’d promised his parents he’d keep it on California time so he’d be with them whenever he looked at it, but that hadn’t lasted. And neither, after all these years, had the Rolex. He’d bought a counterfeit at a sidewalk market, and as he turned on the bathroom light, the watch gleamed at him and informed him it was 10:21. So he’d slept through the day’s heat, and outside, the Bangkok he loved best had blinked into life.

  The bathroom mirror showed him the grandfather or great-grandfather of Wallace, never Wally, Palmer, shockingly old. His head of dark, curly hair had been replaced by a few long, iron-gray strands, inexplicably straight, that pasted themselves across his spotted scalp. He’d played a few times with the strands, trying to comb them lower on his forehead to simulate a real hairline, but the last time he’d done it the phrase “turban renewal” had flashed through his mind, and he’d laughed and abandoned the effort. At least his hair didn’t stand up on end and lasso the light, the silver-beech forest of frizziness that haloed the heads of so many old guys.

  Old guys.

  Wallace said, “Shit,” avoiding looking at the devastation that was his neck, and picked up his toothbrush.

  Someone knocked on the door in the living room.

  “It’s always something,” Wallace said, although he was aware that, lately, it hadn’t been. He leaned heavily against the sink and waited, hoping whoever it was would go away, but a moment later he heard three knocks, louder this time, and—muffled by the door—a basso profundo voice called, “Vallace? You are in zere, Vallace?”

  Leon, Wallace thought with a surge of despair. Leon Hofstedler, the most boring man in Bangkok. So boring, Leon’s friend Ernie had once said, that you’d avoid him if he was the first person you’d seen in a month. What had happened to Ernie? Ernie always made him laugh.

  The knocks sounded again, loud as kicks. “Vallace? I need to hear you talking. Everybody in ze bar asks, is Vallace okay?”

  Leon wasn’t going away. Leon had nothing better to do with his life than to stand in that hallway, kicking Wallace’s crappy door and singing German opera for everybody in the building to hear. One of Wallace’s life principles floated up toward him like a message in that magic eight-ball everyone used to have, Always move toward trouble, not away from it. In the jungle, don’t turn your back. On the city street, don’t turn your back.

  Don’t turn your back on Leon Hofstedler. The idea of Leon being dangerous made Wallace laugh as he went back into the bedroom, heading toward the living room. Wallace had lived with dangerous day and night for three tours of sweating, steaming, leech-ridden, blood-stinking duty. The only thing Leon had ever killed was time. Wallace thought he’d like to say that to Ernie. Ernie always looked surprised before he laughed, as though it startled him that other people were funny.

  “Coming, Ernie,” Wallace called. He remembered to look down at himself and was reassured to see that he’d gone to sleep fully dressed.

  “Ernie?” Hofstedler bellowed though the door. “Zis is not Ernie. Ernie—mein Gott!—Ernie is a zousand years ago. You should not be alone so much.”

  “I’m not alone,” Wallace said, undoing the door’s assortment of locks—a joke, given that the door itself was made of soda cracker. “I’ve got three Balinese girl scouts with me.” He opened the door on the mountain that was Leon Hofstedler.

  Hofstedler, his magisterial bulk draped in one of the many-pocketed safari shirts he had made for him a dozen at a time by a Thai seamstress, narrowed his eyes as if trying to see through Wallace to the wall behind him. He said, “Ernie?”

  “Been thinking about him,” Wallace said.

  Hofstedler continued to study Wallace’s face. After a moment he gave a grudging grunt. “I tell zem you look okay.”

  “Of course I’m okay,” Wallace said around the bloom of irritation in his chest. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  Hofstedler shrugged. “Zey worry. You not coming, night after night. You know, thinking maybe...” Whatever they were thinking, it was too dire for Hofstedler to voice it.

  “Just a little busy,” Wallace said, putting some weight on the door. “You tell them I’m fine and say hello for me, ’kay?” He pushed the door closed on Hofstedler, completing the sentence in his mind, ... whoever they are.

  A shower. That was what he needed, a shower and some clean clothes. Jah, it was Jah he wanted to see. Whip thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Muang Airport the first time he flew back home and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager, when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other passengers stared.

  He thought, Don Muang? Do international flights still go through Don Muang? It sounded wrong, but he shrugged it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and padded toward the shower. The girls may be professionals, he thought, but they’re still Thai. It shows respect when you come to them clean.

  The road was far too wide.

  He came out of the narrow corridor that led from the apartment house’s single clanking elevator, extravagantly scented with cat piss, feeling light on his feet, decisive and clear-headed, as though he were back walking point in Nam. But as the door closed behind him, he saw the road and took a stumble that forced him to step forward or fall on his face. It was six lanes wide, the road, a Mekong River of lights, the demon-red of tail-lights, the hard diamond-yellow of headlights. He stood there for a second, loose-
jointed and irresolute, as the narrow soi in front of the old shophouse thinned, shimmered and disappeared, giving way to the street he’d moved to.

  He said, “Sukhumvit,” identifying it, and the kernel of unease in his chest softened at the name. His own voice reassured him. “Sukhumvit.” Where was he going? Yes, Jah. Jah worked at... Thai... Thai something. Thai Paradise?

  Well, he knew where it was, even if the name eluded him. He stepped to the curb, one arm upraised, palm down, a gesture of long habit. A couple of taxis slowed, but he waved them by until he could flag a tuk-tuk, which almost ran over Wallace’s foot. The driver was a skinny, dark kid with a shadowy mustache and a long fall of black hair dipping over one eye. Wallace climbed in, sat back and said, “Golden Mile.”

  The tuk-tuk vibrated as its little two-stroke engine chugged and popped, but it didn’t move. The boy’s eyes found Wallace’s in the mirror. “You say where?”

  “Golden Mile, the Golden Mile,” Wallace said. He smiled so his impatience wouldn’t show but got no smile in return.

  “Hotel?” the boy asked.

  “No, no, no. Golden Mile. Bars. New Petchburi Road.”

  “Okay,” the boy said with a nod. “Golden Mile. Petchburi.”

  “Thai Heaven,” Wallace said as the cab pulled out.

  Jah worked at Thai Heaven.

  “Okay, boss,” the boy said, his eyes on the traffic behind. “Golden Mile.”

  He sat back and closed his eyes. The exhaust was perfume, the chuk-chuk of the engine, music. Oh, how he had fallen in love with Bangkok on his first R&R, after six months of duty, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with terror and revulsion, which the Americans occasionally earned. Three times, men he knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind, suddenly tiny on the floor, the crushed and sobbing remnant of a human being, and once even less than that.

  And then, after a copter out and a few hours in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who loved him. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “no problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole table full of food to himself, and then, as faces and names emerged, one by one. Jah, Noi, Lek, Tuum. Sometimes staying with one of them for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Safe.

  Hansum man, Jah called him. Teerak, Jah called him, Thai for sweetheart. Wallet, Jah called him, and he thought it was her joke until he realized that Thais couldn’t pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she thought she was saying his name, the same way she said “Santa Claut.” He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating the name’s appropriateness even if Jah didn’t understand it. He was lean and young and handsome, and the way Jah eyed the other girls when they were together made him think of someone driving into the old neighborhood at the wheel of a sports car.

  The first night that she stayed with him, just as he’d been about to drop off, she’d raised herself onto one elbow, the bedside lamp creating a circle of reflected light on the smooth skin of her shoulder, and said: “This room. How much?”

  He’d told her. Her eyes had gone round and her mouth had dropped open, and she’d emitted a sound like a puff of steam, and then she was up and pulling on her clothes, her shoulders high and rigid with determination. A moment later, the door closed behind her.

  He thought, I didn’t pay her. For a moment he panicked, thinking she might have taken the money from his pocket, but it was right there. He was refolding his pants when the phone rang and the desk clerk said, “Mr. Palmer? The young lady has renegotiated your room rate. You’ve been given a discount of thirty percent.” And then she’d knocked on the door, and she had whipped her T-shirt over her head and was hitting him on the back with it before he closed the door behind her.

  She’d cried at the airport.

  She’s going to be so happy, he thought. I’ll walk into Thai Heaven and she’ll scream, “Hansum man!” and abandon whoever she was sitting with and run across the club to him. With that smile, brighter than Liberty’s torch...

  “Okay,” the driver said. “Golden Mile.”

  The tuk-tuk stopped. Wallace had his hand in his pocket when the boy said, “One hundred twenty baht.”

  “One hundred twenty?” Wallace sat there, a wad of money in his hand. “Twenty, twenty baht.”

  “One-twenty,” the boy said. “Twenty baht, one hundred year ago, maybe.”

  “Forty,” Wallace snapped. “That’s it.” He dropped two twenties over the back of the seat, feeling the rudeness of the gesture, and climbed down onto the pavement, tuning out the boy’s yells. A narrow street, nowhere near as wide as New Petchburi. A couple of cars, each with a wheel up on the sidewalk, were almost too close together to allow him to pass, but he turned sideways to squeeze through and heard the tuk-tuk putter away, the boy still shouting angrily.

  Once up on the sidewalk, he stopped, looking up.

  It was a hotel. He was in front of a hotel. Huge letters on the side of the building said “ROYAL SUITES.” Up and down the street were business buildings, some new, some old. Nothing he recognized.

  A uniformed doorman came through the revolving door, eyebrows lifted in a question, and Wallace crossed the gritty red carpet laid down in front of the door. The man glanced at him and said, “Sir?” No more than mild politeness.

  Wallace said, “The Golden Mile?”

  The doorman lifted a hand, palm up, and brought it shoulder high to indicate the hotel behind him.

  “Hotel,” he said. “Hotel is owned by Golden Mile.”

  Wallace was already shaking his head. “No, no. No, not a hotel. The Golden Mile. Bars, restaurants...”

  He ran out of words. “Bars.”

  Backing toward the door, the doorman said, “Sorry, sorry. Don’t know. Maybe...” He pointed across the street and to his left, in the general direction of New Petchburi Road, gleaming a long, dark block away. The street the hotel was on was a soi, relatively narrow, with the hotel sprouting from a row of shorter, darker structures, and here and there a shrubbed chain-link fence. “Over there, maybe. Other side.”

  “No,” Wallace said, but he was already turning, already forgetting the doorman. “It’s this side. I’m sure it’s this side.”

  Although there was no oncoming traffic, he crossed the soi at an angle, as though carried by the same current that would bear the cars along. Once across, he lowered his head and struck out at a brisk walk with the lights of New Petchburi behind him, half-certain that in a hundred yards or so, there would be light and noise and the sound of English.

  But there wasn’t. Thinking about Jah, he passed a narrow cross-street, almost turning into it, but it was too dark. Bars are lighted. The tuk-tuk driver brought me to the wrong place and tried to cheat me. Bangkok is changing. He walked more briskly, leaving New Petchburi farther behind, moving in the certainty that sheer decisiveness would get him where he wanted to go.

  It wasn’t hard for him to imagine, in front of him, the strings of Christmas lights and the scattering of neon, the neon not as plentiful or as vulgar as at Patpong, that upstart street, but enough to lure him forward, enough to suggest the warmth and friendliness of a bar, the smell of the beer, the music of women’s voices. The softness of women’s faces. Jah’s face, the slightly overlong upper lip, the permanent upward curl at the corners of her mouth that made her look like she was always suppressing a laugh. He could almost smell her, the salt sea-smell of her secret places.

  Another cross-street approached, promising in its furtiveness, but he stopped, the street slipping from his mind as he registered the floating ribbon of
concrete suspended against the dark sky far, far in front of him: an elevated highway. That’s why I’m turned around, he thought. That wasn’t there before, and the moment he had articulated the thought, he saw the boys.

  Three of them, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, facing inward in a tight circle around a faint glow of light, as though they were warming themselves at a candle. Wallace felt his chest, which had begun to feel cramped, expand, felt his lungs fill with air as certainty coursed through him. Boys always knew where the action was. And he liked Thai teenagers, so open and friendly, unlike the sour, angry, overprivileged American kids with their long, dirty hair and thrift-store clothes, the ones who had sneered at him, shouted at him, when he went home. The pretty girl, her hair wild curls down her slender back, who spat at him. He felt a smile stake claim to his face.

  As he approached, he called out, “Sawatdee.”

  And time went wrong. The comfort and assurance and youth drained out of him as the boys turned and separated, and he saw their faces, despite his efforts to keep them young and friendly, turn old. He saw, in one blunt-force glance, the glittering eyes, the crumpled tinfoil pipe, the disposable lighter with something jammed into the jet to create a thin blue needle of flame. Smelled the sweet methamphetamine smoke curling from the sizzling pills at the bottom of the pipe.

  “Hey, Papa,” one of them said. Smoke snaked out of his mouth and he squinted against it.

  “Never mind,” Wallace said, shaking his head.

  “No problem.” He angled across the sidewalk to the road, intending to cross. The block was dark and quite deserted, no cars in sight. Nowhere to go.

  “Papa!” the man called, following. Maybe 23, 24, gaunt and dirty, with lank, greasy hair and a smile that looked stolen pasted to his face. “Papa, got money for friends? Got baht, got dollar?”

  “No.” Wallace saw the other two men floating along behind the leader, one of them with the foil pipe at his lips, a red glow lighting the upper half of a misshapen face, crimped on one side as though someone had pressed it in with the heel of a hand before the bones hardened. “Go away.”