Bangkok Noir

by Christopher G. Moore (Ed)

  “Nowhere here to go,” the leader said, picking up his pace and angling across the soi toward Wallace.

  “Give money, we take taxi, go. Okay, Papa?” He spread his hands to show they were empty. “Then no problem, yes?”

  Wallace felt a flare of young man’s anger. He said, “Fuck off. Get your own money and leave me alone.”

  “Oooooohhhhh, Papa,” the boy said. He called something in Thai, and the other two laughed. The one with the crimped head stuck out his chest and beat it, gorilla-style, and they all laughed again. The two who were farther away were closing in, and within a few seconds all three of them would be within striking distance.

  Always move toward trouble, Wallace thought, and he drifted toward the closest boy, saying, “What is it? What is it you want?” He cupped his ear and leaned toward the boy whose grin hardened as he came up directly beside Wallace...

  ...who put every ounce of strength he possessed into a much-practiced but very rusty side-kick that nevertheless hit the boy square on the outside of the knee, and as he went down, yelling in pain and shock, Wallace knew the cartilage was damaged, and by the time the boy hit the pavement with all his weight on the other knee and shouted at the new pain, Wallace was running.

  The soi juddered by as he strained, hoisting leaden legs—only thirty or forty feet along and already winded for Christ’s sake, but hearing no feet behind him. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw the two other boys lifting the leader to his feet, the leader screaming after him, pointing an outstretched hand like a rifle, hopping on one leg. The other leg, the one Wallace had damaged, was lifted and bent like a stork’s. Wallace faced forward again and found a burst of speed from somewhere, although he knew in the part of his mind that was keeping score that two of them could catch up to him in a minute or less if they abandoned the injured boy and ran full out.

  He came to a cross-street and slowed. From somewhere in the past, the information assembled itself: he was running on Soi Jarurat, maybe Petchburi 13. To his left, the cross-street went only a short way and hooked left again, back toward the big road. To the right, he had no idea.

  Thai Heaven had been nowhere near here.

  If he went left and then left again, trying to get back to the bright lights of New Petchburi Road, the boys might divide up, one staying behind him and the other two running back to the last crossstreet to meet him head-on—what he learned in the jungle to call a pincer movement. If I go right, he thought, they can’t cut me off.

  He was laboring now. His lungs felt like he’d inhaled fire, and the pulse at his throat was as forceful as a tapping thumb. There had to be something to the right.

  Right it was.

  And he heard flip-flops slapping pavement. Two pair at a run and a third pair much more irregular and farther back.

  It was what he needed. Some ancient, long-stored reserve of strength flamed into being, the soldier’s training overcoming, even if only for a few moments, the old man’s body. He stretched his stride, feeling like he could fly. Angling across the empty street, he leaped for the curb and snagged a foot on it, pitching forward, fighting to get his arms down to break the fall. He landed heavily on one elbow and one knee, knowing immediately that the elbow was a problem, and rolled over twice until he could push himself to his feet with the arm he could still bend, and then he began to move, as much at a limp as a run.

  Laughter floated from the boys behind him.

  The knee of his pants had torn on impact. There was blood on the cloth, making it stick to his leg. His left elbow was an independent sphere of pain, with a demonic halo of heat around it that seemed to have clamped itself to the middle of his arm and seized his nervous system by sheer force. It squeezed off a machine-gun tangle of agony every time his heart beat. Looking down at it, he saw for the first time that the stinging he’d been feeling in his left forearm was a neat slice, the sleeve of his shirt looking like it had been cut with scissors. The boy he kicked must have gotten to him with a blade as he went down.

  Not much farther. He didn’t have it in him to go much farther. They could—they could have him.

  But the young man inside flared up and said fuck that, and Wallace found himself running again, feeling as though he must be leaving red streaks of pain in the air behind him. Doorways and dark windows and occasional fences flowed by, and then, up ahead to the left on his side of the street, he saw light: yellowish, bright, as harsh as a snapped word, but light.

  A paved area, a parking lot, but not many cars. Instead, knotted wires, carrying stolen electricity direct from the high-voltage lines above, dangled a crop of clear, naked bulbs, spherical as oranges, strung over little stands. A few cars were parked along one edge as though they’d been shoved aside to make room for this little market, just a huddle of carts selling cooked food and produce. Many of them were shutting up, closing the glass doors that kept the flies away, sprinkling water on the charcoal beneath the cooking grates. Among the few remaining shoppers, Wallace saw some farang, solitary men as old as he.

  The vendors had come here as their last stop of the day, hoping to coax the farang from their apartments. Old, bent, balding. His age. Left behind when the Golden Mile disappeared.

  The business farthest from the street was a glasssided cart with a long piece of plywood laid across it, perhaps seven or eight feet long, beneath a signboard that said “NOT FAR BAR.” Hand-painted below that, in letters of many sizes, was “oNe Bar ComE to YOU!” Four stools had been pulled up to the plywood. Three of them were occupied: a bentspined man in a blindingly white shirt sitting beside a woman with hair too black even for Thailand, and on the third stool, a plump woman in her late fifties or early sixties, her body popping out of a black cocktail dress that might have fit her twenty years earlier. At one end of the plywood plank, a small boom box was playing “Hotel California.”

  A portable bar. Wallace had seen a few of these on the sidewalks following the overnight demolition of Sukhumvit Square, but here one was in front of him, as unexpected as an oasis with camels and palm trees. He looked behind him, saw the shoppers thinning and the merchants closing, and went to the empty stool and sat. He couldn’t have run another yard if there’d been wolves chasing him.

  “Beer Singha,” he said, trying to steady his breathing. Now that he was sitting, he felt his legs trembling violently. His left elbow sent up a neural yelp of pain, and the plump woman, who had gotten up to get his beer, took a second look at him and straightened. The powder on her face looked like chalk in the hard light.

  “Honey,” she said. Her hands indicated the cut shirt, the blood on the cloth. “What happen?”

  “Some kids,” he said, hearing the quaver in his voice. “It’s okay. I just need to sit a minute.”

  “Poor baby, poor baby,” she said. “Kid. Kid no good now. Not same before.” She reached into the glass case and pulled out a relatively clean hand towel, then scooped a handful of melting ice and wrapped the towel around it. She lifted the dripping mess, gave it a professional-looking squeeze and held it out. “Here,” she said. “For...” She flexed her own left elbow and pointed at it and her forearm with her right hand.

  He pressed the wet, cold cloth to his arm, and the fire of pain was banked slightly. A few of the vendors were stretching up, holding towels or potholders to unscrew the bulbs over their carts. The kids were nowhere in sight.

  “You say kid…” the woman in black said. She popped the cap off a Singha. At her end of the bar was a big Chinese cleaver on a circular wooden cutting board, piled with limes. She grabbed the cleaver and expertly sliced a lime, then remembered to ask, “Glass?”

  He shook his head.

  “Kid how old? How many?” She dropped the lime slice back onto the board, thunked the cleaver’s edge into the wood, wiped the bottle dry and put it in front of him. Then she hoisted herself onto the stool beside him and rested her hand on his thigh in the eternal gesture of bar girls everywhere.

  “Three. Not kids, really. In their
twenties. Smoking…” He mimed the little pipe with his left hand.

  “Yaa baa,” she said. She nodded. “I see before. Bangkok now no good.”

  A fat Thai with a Chinese face waddled out of the darkness. Behind him Wallace saw an aluminum lawn chaise with a blanket on it. “We close soon,” the man said. “Order last drink, please.”

  “Aaaaahhhhhh,” the man with the bent spine said. “I’ll quit now.” He put a couple of bills down and dropped some coins on top and pushed the stool back. Standing, he was no taller than he was sitting, his back as crooked as a question mark. “You,” he said to Wallace. “You oughta see a doctor. That arm’s busted.”

  “I think so, too,” Wallace said.

  “Little shits around here,” the other man said.

  “Know we’re old. Know what days the pension checks arrive. Little fuckers. Oughta carry a gun if you’re gonna come here.”

  “I won’t be back,” Wallace said.

  “Smart guy. Get that arm looked at, hear?” To the woman beside him, he said, “Coming?”

  “I go with you?” the woman said, doing her best to look surprised and pleased.

  “Sure, sure. We talk money later, okay?”

  “No problem.” She grabbed a tiny purse and darted a quick, victorious glance at the woman beside Wallace, then took the bent man’s arm, and the two of them headed for the street.

  “Why you come?” asked the woman in the tight dress.

  “Golden Mile,” Wallace said.

  “Ah,” she said, her face softening. “Golden Mile, yes. Very good.”

  “You know a girl named Jah?” Wallace asked.

  He got a moment of silence as she gnawed her lower lip. “I know many Jah.”

  “At Thai Heaven.”

  “No,” she said. “I no work Thai Heaven. Work Tidbit Bar.”

  “Mmmm,” Wallace said and knocked back half of the beer. With the bottle halfway down, he froze.

  She followed his gaze and saw the three of them in a loose triangle at the edge of the lot. She pointed at them with a tilt of her chin. “Them?”

  “Yes,” Wallace said.

  “You stay,” the plump woman said, and faster than he would have thought possible, she was at the end of the bar and had grabbed the cleaver. Raising it high in the air, she ran toward them, small steps because of the tight dress, but a run nevertheless. The boys stepped back, and when she showed no sign of slowing, they turned and retreated out of sight, back up the street. The woman with the cleaver followed.

  His hand trembled as he downed the rest of the beer.

  She trotted back into sight, hair slightly disarranged, but with a smile on her face. She sank the cleaver’s edge into the side of the cutting board and said, “They go, but maybe still close. You pay, you come with me. I take you home. We go.” She waited, not sitting, until he’d put the money on the plywood, and then laced her left arm through his uninjured right and led him toward the street, in the direction opposite the one the boys had taken.

  She wore a light floral perfume, something that made Wallace think of a place he and his friends had played each spring, in the hills above Carlsbad, California, slopes of blue lupine and the eye-ringing orange of California poppies tumbling down to the hard bright sun-wrinkles of the sea. Looking for the secret messages they had left there the previous fall, when the hills grew dry and prickly. Answers to questions they’d asked each other, maps to things they’d hidden.

  Maps.

  They were on the sidewalk now, the lights receding behind them as they moved parallel to New Petchburi Road. In the moments he’d been sitting, Wallace’s knee had stiffened, and he was limping.

  He said, “How can you take me home? You don’t know where I live.”

  “No problem,” she said. “I take you where you can get taxi, get tuk-tuk. Take you home.”

  The shophouse, he thought. No, no, that’s not right.

  “Have taxi up here,” she said. “Come little bit more.” They were beneath a street light, her face suddenly blossoming from the dark.

  “Jah?” Wallace said, and then she looked over her shoulder and he heard them.

  “In here.” She shoved him into a narrow space between two buildings, half-illuminated by the street light, with chunks of rubble underfoot. She pushed him in front of her, and then a blue flame ignited ahead of them—the boy with the crimp in his head—and the other two came into the space behind them, the woman backing away, looking from face to face.

  He’d turned to face the two who had just come in when he heard the grit of a step behind him and then something enormously hard slammed the side of his head. His vision flared orange as the thing hit him again, banging the other side of his head against the wall of the building. He was sliding, sliding somewhere, feeling a rough surface against his arm and shoulder, and then something rose up from below, very fast, and struck him on the underside of the chin, and his head snapped back so hard he thought he heard something break.

  The woman was screaming in Thai, sounding not frightened but furious, and one of the boys barked a string of syllables like rocks, and she fell silent. Someone kicked him in the ribs, but he barely felt it.

  There were stars up there at the top of the narrow canyon between the buildings. He hadn’t seen stars often in Bangkok.

  A hand under his head, lifting it up, putting it on something soft, her leg. The woman, looking down at him, fat and powdered, her face shining with sweat. He saw the eyes, the bones, the skin—and the fat and the years melted away, and the corners of her mouth curled up, and the lacquered hair fell loose and long, and he said, “Jah.”

  “I’m here, teerak,” she said. “You okay now, I’m here.”

  “I looked for you,” Wallace said. The world dipped sharply down for an instant, everything going sideways, but he forced it back the way it should have been.

  “You found me,” she said. “You found me.” She wiped his face gently with her hand. “Always I wait for you.”

  Someone had a hand in his pocket but when Wallace looked down the world tilted again, and this time it kept going and the street light went down like the sun. He was alone in an empty room, the walls rushing away from him, the space growing bigger and emptier and darker until the only light was him, whatever he was, a sharp point of white light, narrowing to a pinprick, and he said again, “Jah,” and the light blinked out.

  “Who’s Jah?” asked the boy with the crimped head, fanning the wad of bills.

  “How would I know?” the woman said. “Some teerak from a hundred years ago. Why’d you hit him so hard?”

  “He hurt Beer’s leg,” said the boy with the crimped head.

  “Pussy,” the woman said. “Hurt by an old man.”

  She eased Wallace’s head off her leg and lowered it softly to the pavement. His eyes were open, looking straight up. “Give me a hand.”

  The boy called Beer limped forward and helped her up. Instantly, she was slapping him, hard, and then she clawed his face and backed off. “All you had to do was take the money,” she said. “Make me look like a victim and take the money. You stupid boy.”

  She lowered her head to look again at Wallace. She said, “I liked him.”

  Thirty seconds passed in silence. No one even shuffled his feet. The woman extended her hand, and the boy with the crimped head passed her a tight crumple of bills. She tucked them into the front of her dress, brushed cement dust from the black fabric and leaned down to straighten Wallace’s shirt, which had been pulled up when he slid down the wall. Then she smoothed the long gray hair from his forehead. The boys filed out, leaving her there, her eyes on Wallace’s face.

  “Long time ago,” she said to no one, not even knowing she was speaking English. “Long time ago, I think you was hansum man.”

  Timothy Hallinan

  Timothy Hallinan is an American thriller writer, based in Southern California and Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, Hallinan created the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, who appeared in a to
tal of six novels, all set in Los Angeles. Since publication in 2007, his second series, set in Bangkok, has received critical acclaim.Tim has lived off and on in Thailand since the early 1980s. His Bangkok-based series features a rough-travel writer named Philip (“Poke”) Rafferty, who has settled in the Thai capital and is in the process of trying to cobble together a family comprising Rose, the former go-go dancer he loves, and a precocious street urchin named Miaow. His newest series, which begins with the 2010 novel Crashed, features a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.

  Daylight

  Alex Kerr

  All the witnesses agreed. The victim, an upcountry visitor to Bangkok of no particular importance, had died by stabbing on the BTS platform at three in the afternoon. He was thirty-eight years old, was named Kaew, had worked in a motorcycle repair shop in Khon Kaen and had died from stab wounds to his legs, abdomen and lungs. After a thorough autopsy had determined the cause of death, the family had collected the body and taken it back to Khon Kaen for cremation.

  Including Kaew’s brother Nop, there had been about thirty witnesses on the crowded platform that day, of whom six had come forward to the police. Two young office ladies had been quick enough to actually record the incident on their cell phone video cameras, and the images were crystal clear because it had been a bright, sunny afternoon. They had all pinpointed the same person as the murderer, who had been duly questioned by the police.

  At this point the rather thin file ended. An open and closed case, really. I put it down on the desk, looked out the window at Bangkok’s rows of white skyscrapers stretching off under the pale light of early morning and wondered why this would interest anyone. It must have been a very slow day in New York because my editor had somehow become aware of a murder on the Skytrain in Bangkok and asked me to look into it.