Copyright
Red Night Zone - Bangkok City, 2nd edition 2013, ebook
Text by
James A. Newman
eISBN 978-616-222-221-4
Published by www.booksmango.com
E-mail: [email protected]
Text Copyright© James A. Newman
Cover design by Torrie Cooney.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, stored or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.
Quotes may be used for the purpose of reviews.
This is a work of fiction. No characters in this book are intended to have any resemblance to any person living or dead.
Visit the author at - www.jamesnewmanfiction.blogspot.com
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Reviews
“JUST WHEN the reader thinks that the carnage is over, you get another ten pages of pure violence, hatred and instinctual struggle for survival. For Newman’s Bangkok Express is exactly that, noir pulp fiction.”
Voicu Mihnea Simandan -The Bangkok Trader
“James Newman’s Bangkok Express is a wild and uneven ride through Thailand’s seedy underbelly - Mr. Newman abuses eternal truths, clichés and painful realities in equal measure and serves up a good beach read. He joins more established writers such as Christopher G. Moore and John Burdett in an exploration of Thailand’s garish netherworld of private eyes, prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, cops and dirty tricks.”
Tom Vater – Chiang Mai City News.
“AUTHOR NEWMAN has an eye for detail”
Lang Reid – Pattaya Mail.
AUTHORS NOTE
THIS IS the second edition of the novel BANGKOK CITY. I would like to thank the following authors, editors, reviewers, designers and friends for their help and support.
THANKS to Chris Coles who paints Bangkok like none other. Thanks to Christopher G. Moore for leading the way. Thanks to John Daysh for the early encouragement. Thanks to Ujjy at Freedom Fiction for being the first to publish me. Thanks to Kevin Cummings for his continual support, even during my lizard experimentations. Thanks to Steve Rosse for his honesty. Respect to Dean Barrett. Thanks to Mike for the stories, the beef sandwich, and the red wine. Thanks to Torrie and Frankie, my editor and designer. Thanks to the people of Bangkok.
ONE
3rd November 1994
SUNLIGHT POURED through the open window, and fell on the little girl who was sitting on the dirty mattress in the shack by the canal. An electric fan rattled.
Pops closed the wooden shutters and with his dirty fingers, he locked the shack door and approached her, a look of hunger was in his eyes.
The smell of raw sewage from the canal mixed with the chemical whiskey.
Pops, her uncle, had greasy, black hair hanging to the collar of his filthy yellow shirt. Magic tattoos, images that the monks promised would save his thick, dark, leathery skin from the evil of the town and the city were displayed on his body.
The monks were wrong, some of the time, or so she decided.
Monica wore a pair of threadbare orange cotton shorts and a sleeveless Donald Duck T-shirt. Her left eyebrow rose as she held the small wooden box in her tiny fingers. She opened the box.
A red felt cushioning, imitation velvet, and inside was a double-sided coin.
The five baht coin was dated, 2455.
He smiled, took it from her, flipped the coin and it landed head side up on the wooden floor.
Pops’ black eyes appeared darker than a politician’s heart.
It was time for their secret.
Each secret was bigger than the last.
One day the secret would change everything. The canal would spill her banks; the skies would open up, and occasion the red city to explode up into the oily night sky.
Monica could keep a secret. She had to. Her life depended on it.
He pushed her onto the bed. She shut her eyes tightly as the red sky opened up.
The canals overflowed.
The tears were ordinary. Secret tears.
TWO
3rd October 2010
THE HOTEL was guest-friendly with hourly rates, and had enough room to swing a cat if it were a small cat, and you wanted to swing it. The bed had seen more action than Arnold Schwarzenegger and the chair had seen more assholes than a retired proctologist.
Tour brochures labelled the room mid-range. Joe had forgotten most of the weeks and months that he’d been living in that mid-range hotel.
The Red Night Zone, a maze of neon reds, pinks and blues, knots of snakes, nests of rats, plagues of cockroaches, dishonest guides, backstabbing bargirls, temperamental taxi drivers, and murderous market traders. Monsters intent on steering the uninitiated into disasters and despair: funnelling the lost into their own dark disillusions.
Joe Dylan, lamp-boy, was trying to shepherd the weak and vulnerable away from the darkness.
That was the idea.
Ideas were like raindrops.
Cases fell from the sky and landed with a thud. He picked them up and looked at them. He dug about in vice and got a nose for it. He was a fraud investigator turned private asshole. How much lower could you get?
Fidelity, lack of, missing persons, balcony jumpers, piss artists, families of piss artists, and assholes looking for answers.
For some, the answer was a twenty-dollar hooker. For some, it was chicken fried rice, and for others it was a temple on top of a mountain, a prayer mat and a yoga routine.
Some liked the cockroaches, meat on a stick, cold cans of coffee, raw sewage, broken sidewalks, and tantric meditation. Sometimes the answer was a small hot room and four blank walls with a bottle of pills and a pint of tiger sweat. For some, the answer was simple.
Jump.
They were all looking for answers in a city where there weren’t any. Just a new stack of questions.
Questions like:
What was she doing in his bed?
Monica.
Naked.
In his bed.
One hand rubbing her mascara-smeared eyelids and the other hand stroking through her hair. Last night she lit up the city like a perfect disaster. She stole hearts, dug graves, and danced as if it was the last time.
The last time of all.
Skin smooth and brown like a copperhead. The kind of nose that girls bought in back alleys from unlicensed surgeons with shaky hands and shady degrees. A nose was cheap in the city, the same price as a good Italian meal or a return flight to one of the islands.
The kind of legs that couldn’t be bought.
Long, perfect.
Her hair was a beehive at night, but in the morning, it was a crime scene. “You know...,” she said.
“What do we know?” Joe said sitting up in the bed, “You’re one hell of a dancer and I’m a washed out investigator.”
He wished it wasn’t true.
They’d been cast in the wrong movie, just waiting for the director to wrap it up. They’d return to real life, happy together in some small town with air that you could breathe without choking, and traffic that flowed places where you could take your mother.<
br />
But who was he kidding?
She was a neon ballerina, a danseur. She didn’t have a mother. She needed paying. The money wasn’t his and that rather blurred the issue.
It wasn’t his money.
“You and me, we know more about this city than most guide-books or travel agents,” she said sitting up. “But I know one thing you don’t know, Mr. Detective, it’s a little secret that I heard about,” she smiled mischievously as Joe glanced over. His eyes drank in those well-behaved breasts and that Khmer tattoo; the one that looked like a tiger had gently scratched her right shoulder blade with ink-dipped claws. Buddhist monks designed them at the temples and branded the laypeople in return for donations. Supposed to warn away evil. She was a well-built woman and a tattoo could never change that.
“There’s many,” Joe told her, “secrets are like mosquitoes. They hover around and then they land on you and bite. Some make you mad like malaria and some just kinda irritate.”
“I met the devil. She has a secret.”
“Stephen King says you’re only as evil as your secrets.”
“Who is this Stephen King?”
“He has it all figured out. The rest of them are just scratching around in the dirt. Most of us can’t even separate the pepper from the mouse shit.”
“But there’s a big secret, Joe,” she raised that left eyebrow. The one that moved indecently. Men forgot about wives, jobs, families, bank balances when that eyebrow shifted. Men gave up promising careers, snubbed lifelong friends, and took up poetry and finger-painting.
Men made birdhouses and sang rock ballads in the street. Men skipped through fields of daisies and petted woodland animals.
Men did all of these things and more because of women like Monica.
She was a worker.
A showgirl.
Useless junk like houses, cars, and baseball-card collections disappeared backstage the moment that eyebrow began to budge northwards. She was the bringer of hope in a better world. She was an ice-cream cone melting in the hand of a little girl.
“Monica, you grew up an orphan in the city of sin. If you say there’s a secret, it’s probably worth hearing. Kwam Lap arai? What is this big secret?” Joe brushed away a strand of her hair from his arm. He eased himself up, reached over to the vanity next to the bed, and picked up a glass of water.
He drank it down.
Monica spoke: “There’s two ways to make people love you. One’s a secret and the other involves cash.”
“Isn’t there a third way?” Joe drank the rest of the water and put the empty glass back down on the vanity.
Tasted like hell.
“Yes, but that’s real love, and that only happens on TV, in the movies, maybe in Europe or America where the rich people live. Rich people don’t have to love for money, because they have enough of it already,” she said languidly, while scratching her right thigh with a painted fingernail.
“Rich people love for money, Monica. It’s just more money that’s all. There’s no such thing as enough money. Especially if you’re rich.”
Monica’s eyes narrowed and she playfully poked out her tongue. Joe listened to the muffled voice of a trader peddling fruit on the street just outside the window. Joe figured the fruit peddler had it all worked out.
The fruit peddler knew more about the street than the fruits that peddled it.
Joe spoke, “Monica, let me tell you a story. A story about money. There was this guy, a Russian client, not the coolest beer in the fridge and no oil painting neither. He wound up hooked by a professional that used to work the road. When I say hooked, I mean like a Marlin. He was a big fish you understand. Could have been a millionaire. Rich family rolling around in old oil money. This broad took him for the lot, including the shirt from his back. It was an expensive shirt, you understand - Italian. Shame what happened to him. He could have inherited a fortune. Instead, he ended up inheriting the streets of Bangkok, rolling around in the trash, the cockroaches, and the super-rats. The family cut him loose. He was an embarrassment. That’s why men hire me. To stop women like you from taking them for everything.” Joe paused for a moment and then continued, “Funny how woman’s nest-building tends to end up with men’s wing’s being neatly clipped. This Russian bird couldn’t fly away. Hopeless on the ground. The last anyone saw of Vladimir, he was begging on the streets for a ticket somewhere, anywhere, away from Bangkok City.”
“What happened to the lady?”
“There was no lady. The female beneficiary married a Swede and settled down on one of the islands. Started a pleasure boat business. Called it, From Russia with Love.”
“You don’t like your job, Joe?” Monica purred mockingly. She reached under the covers. “I think that lady have bigger brain than man from Russia. I like her.”
“Well, she who dies with the most toys wins, honey.” He touched her under the cover. Her body was cold. “She was a bitch, but she never said she wasn’t.”
“One day I want to have a boat and sail around the world,” she beamed like a Siamese eyeballing a tub of freshly clotted cream. She didn’t know much about the world.
She just knew she wanted to see, it.
That smile, it had so many rehearsals and so many deliveries that it looked almost natural. Maybe it was.
Most women were actors and the ones that weren’t, hadn’t gotten their lines oiled.
All cats were grey at night.
Amateurs found real love, or so they thought.
Pros bathed in deception.
It was the pro-amateur hook up that was the most dangerous.
Often the John never got that he was one. He thought it was love. Shit, they all played the game. Young. Old. Rich. Poor. They played the game. Monica’s script was written years ago and the film was already in the can. She was looking for the guy that could save her from all the demons in the city. All Joe had was an expired air-ticket and a bitch-load of hard-earned wisdom to offer her. She would play the game. She knew the rules. Joe didn’t have the ticket to ride. He could only deal with reality, and reality was a bitch, but it was the only bitch he had.
Monica lay down and stared at the ceiling. She wouldn’t get him.
Joe was on a roll:
“You see, Monica, Bangkok City is one big game of spider and the fly with neon lights, fake watches and wooden frogs that croak when you scratch their crooked backs with a stick. Bangkok’s a giant processing machine that sucks up innocence and generosity through a green and red seven-eleven straw, and spits out corruption and greed on the streets. Baby, you see all these fresh-faced teenagers arriving from upcountry with ideas of making it to the top through the bars. Forget it. Most end up working the streets where they stay until returning to rural destitution shaking their sorry heads. Some fluke it after scratching the backs of a few thousand frogs and hatching a dose of herpes. They end up rubbing the right ego at the right time. Cured like a Texas farmer hitting black gold while planting beets. Once they get the condo, the car, the house in the village and the iPhone, they go get a check-up. They got the big A. Was it worth it? Who knows? Why worry about something that may happen in ten years when you could be dead tomorrow. Only the very few ever make it. It’s a numbers game and the odds aren’t pretty. It’s like taking a shot at becoming a Hollywood star, booking singing lessons, or playing the state lottery. These things are probably predetermined by some bigwig up there calling the shots. If there’s a way to cheat the odds, I’d sure like to know about it.”
“Maybe there is, Joe?”
“Okay, kid. You got me beat. What’s this secret?” He asked her again. She climbed over him and stood by the bed naked. Joe looked at her. Heavenly. Twenty-four years old with a mouth made for kissing and legs made for dancing.
“It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you, would it?” She teased and then walked the four steps to the bathroom. She o
pened the door, walked through it, and closed it behind her. Joe listened to water splashing on her almond-colour skin for the length of time it took him to realize he had a weakness for a neon-ballerina, who could turn his whole mango-shaped world in a Bangkok City heartbeat.
THREE
THE TELEPHONE rang. It was one of those old rotary jobs with a curly cord that tied itself in knots. Joe stood and picked it up from its place on the vanity next to the bed while checking his reflection in the mirror. Sobriety vanished the beer belly and his features were sharper. There were times in his past he would prefer to forget. Bar-fights, crazy women, popping pills, rolling joints, licking toads, and shaky mornings, had all taken their toll. The years spent cleaning dirty money. The flights, the assignments, and the danger were behind him. It would take a gun to the head to convince Joe to return to the poison. A gun held by a woman or a man with enough juice inside to squeeze the trigger. The booze was history. He spoke, “Hello.”
“Hi, Joe, this is Michael. Were you receiving my e-mail?”
“Uh huh… yeah… I am working on the case as we speak,” Joe told the German truthfully. He didn’t tell Michael that the case was naked and was showering in his bathroom.
Michael sounded dissatisfied: “Look, Joe, marriage is ze big commitment. I cannot stop thinking about Monica. I worry, Joe, what if she really isn’t liking me? What if she is just for spending my money? She hasn’t spoken to me since my last payment to her. I need proof, Mr. Dylan. I need one photograph. Only one. You could tell me anything and take my Euro. I need proof! If I don’t have the proof, I will have to come and see for myself and prove it myself. Or I will do something– something very, very…”
“Okay… sir… try to relax, I’ll have the report to you in twenty-four hours… I’ll get those photographs you want…Let me wake up first, okay… Yes… Okay… Good day.” Click. Joe placed the hand-piece back on the cradle, reckoning he could either save the old man a container-load of money, or let him get hitched with the hottest pole-greaser in Fun City.
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