Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  She thought about it. “I wrote down the book list, and some other things, here,” she passed Joe the papers. He placed them on the table and glanced at the list, Defoe, Conrad, and a writer named Patrick Hamilton. He finished his coffee. Hamilton?

  “Look, I have to act quickly and you need to rest. Get a taxi and leave the details to me, that’s why you’re paying me, remember?” Joe smiled. Carina mirrored it as they paid the waitress and then walked out onto the quiet sub soi. The road was home to two tailor shops, a handful of hotels, and a couple of restaurants. They stood in the road and as it began to rain, Joe asked, “How would you describe Monica, in one word, if you had to?”

  “I am wanting to say selfish, but I guess I am meaning independent. Lost maybe. It’s the same thing I suppose. The people in her life that were supposed to love her were either distant or abusing her. She was living and died on the streets. It was her home. She was often talking about an uncle that was abusing her as a child. He was at the beginning and at the end of her every problem. He was always there, haunting her like a ghost.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “We spoke. She was telling me about it while she drank wine, mostly red. We used to get to drinking and telling each other about our horrors. It seemed like therapy. We were both biologically designed for men, but they hurt us, broke us, made us what we became,” she shivered lightly in the rain. “I guess it was like therapy for both of us.”

  “You think I am one of those men?”

  “I think you are different.”

  “Thanks. I’m trying. Carina, I need to ask you a question. It will seem personal.”

  “Ask.”

  “Did you have any female lovers before Monica?”

  “No. Monica was the first.”

  “And before that?”

  “Men.”

  The rain became heavier. A look passed between a hooker and a John on the street. They were both in their thirties. Life had failed them both. Hopelessness, defeatism, tiredness. There might have been something else in there, but Joe didn’t see it. He walked her back out onto the main road and opened the door to a green and yellow taxi. Joe stood and watched the car drive away through the Bangkok rain. He noticed something in his hand. The book list. He read over it again, there was one other title that grabbed his attention, Venus in Furs, by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  JOE PICKED up the telephone and rang through the list of Monica’s contact numbers. Every number switched off.

  Engaged.

  Incorrect.

  Unimportant.

  Joe made a call to the hospital, posing as a newspaper reporter and got through to a mortician at the institute of forensic medicine at Wangmai. She curtly declined an appointment. He waited half an hour, phoned back, and spoke in English posing as a boyfriend who wanted answers, this time she agreed. The next phone call was to the police station on Udom Suk. He spoke in Thai and gave them the boyfriend line. He got an appointment. It was risky. They wanted a suicide verdict.

  He telephoned his Thai lawyer. Chalung was out of town. He could go in alone. Since missing his flight back to London, Joe had learned the language by listening to conversations on buses and in the street. Foreigners that spoke the language were difficult to bribe. They were clued up to the system. They didn’t panic at the sight of a brown uniform and a badge. The lack of the mark’s language skills was the biggest tool in the scam artist’s toolbox, when it came to removing the dough from the foreigner. As he put the hand-piece back in the cradle, the telephone rang. He picked it up. “Yes.”

  “Is this a Mr. Joseph Dylan?”

  “Yes, it is. The names Joe. J.O.E.”

  “Joe, my name is Francis. I am familiar with your work. I have a situation and I have a feeling that you are the man to solve it. Is that correct?” It’s a voice Joe didn’t know. English, very English. An English voice.

  “Maybe. Tell me about your concerns.”

  “Not over the telephone. We must meet in person. It is imperative that we meet.”

  “Okay, but first, I have two questions. Is the job legal and does it pay?”

  “Yes, of course.” His voice was public school, maybe some military thrown in. The job would probably pay.

  “Meet me at the Bus Stop restaurant, it’s on soi Nana at 9pm.”

  Joe put the old telephone receiver back in its cradle and glanced back at the screen on the desktop.

  A new message:

  Dear Mr. Dylan,

  The time and place is cool for me. 6pm at the Miami Hotel. Meet you in the lobby.

  Peace,

  Woody.

  Curses, Spells and Retributions

  The witchdoctor would play ball.

  Joe walked out of the room, down the steps, through the lobby, and out onto the street. The rain had stopped with the threat of restarting and the peddlers were going about, doing their thing. They were selling sunglasses, watches, wooden willies, and frogs that croaked when you scratched their back with a stick. Masseuses sat outside of massage shops and tried to drag passing tourists inside. Some of the touts were aggressive in their pitches. They pushed with automatic hawk reflex. There was no sense of audience. No market research, no concept of low-hanging fruits, no moderation, and no shame.

  They would try to sell a pair of rollerblades to a paraplegic in a wheelchair, and then they’d get upset by the perfectly sane declination.

  The human spirit.

  What was it?

  Perseverance over insurmountable odds. That was what it was.

  Inside the tourist’s wallet was a rainbow.

  The rainbow had many colours, banknotes from faraway lands.

  At the end of the rainbow was a gold bracelet, or a pick-up truck with assisted steering. At the end of the rainbow, was a leather sofa, a microwave oven, a silver spittoon, an iPad, a worn-out prostate and a minor wife with rainbow coloured dreams of her own.

  Joe made it to the edge of Sukhumvit and jumped onto a passing red number two, and disembarked opposite soi twenty-eight. He crossed the road and walked into Dasa Books. Joe handed the owner the list.

  The owner was a well-groomed, polite man, advanced years trapped within a youthful body, “That’s strange. A young Thai woman ordered these books two weeks ago. She never came to pick them up…”

  Joe told him about it.

  She was a friend.

  Died on the other side of town. The bookseller nodded sympathetically, smiled sadly, and placed the order on the counter. Joe gave the man the money and walked out of the shop.

  He caught the pink forty-eight. The driver lurched forward. Bangkok bus drivers battled with the traffic, yet they owned the roads. Joe figured they placed bets back at the depot. First back to base. The winner took the cash at the end of the shift. The bus slammed on the anchors at Asoke. The sky broke open.

  It began to rain.

  He alighted, crossed the road, and ducked into a bar that had a shocking pink mannequin perched out front. Her head had been removed to make way for a light fitting. A soul-dead man leaned on the counter. Joe figured he was the one that ran the joint into the ground. He’d been burnt more times than a second-hand Bunsen. Couldn’t hold his glass, let alone a conversation.

  He’d seen it all.

  There was a transsexual and there was a dog. It was happy hour, apparently, and Joe sat down and began to leaf through the books. A bargirl walked over and spoke English with an American accent.

  “What’s it gonna be then? Right now, it’s happy hour, you can get a beer for seventy-nine baht.”

  “How much for a coke?”

  “Fifty baht, but why you want to drink coke?”

  “It’s a long story, baby, and you don’t want to hear it. How about that soda?”

 
“Sure.” She disappeared for the time it took to read a page of fiction and then returned with his order and put it on the table in front of him. “I bet you’re one of those shy sensitive types and I bet you’re guessing where I’m from, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, you got me beat. I’m shy and sensitive. Your origin had crossed my mind, but only in an intellectual way. I’m thinking maybe a border country: Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia? Perhaps Vietnam?”

  “Wrong, wrong! I’m from China,” she said. She was proud of it. She crossed her getaway sticks beneath the table. She was the world’s credit card. Then he saw it in her eyes. Eyes that smiled at you most of the time and when they didn’t, watch out. Her hair was very short, and those eyes, almost closed, gave more than a hint of the machine ticking away behind them.

  “Tell me, why is it raining today?” Joe said.

  “You think I know everything? Buddy,” she said, “what you think I am, some sort of god?”

  “No, God is a masculine divinity, you are female, and I’m pretty sure you are a goddess of some sort. The kind that works in bars, takes money from strangers, and conjures up rainfall. The goddess of rain; Bianca.”

  “Screw you, mister,” she said, and she walked away and stayed away for enough time for Joe to dip back into the first novel. He was a smart ass. He liked it. He made it to the fifth page. It was a story about a London prostitute that some John fell in love with. The sucker was sap to the bone. The rain began to slow down and then stopped altogether. Joe closed the book.

  He waited around for a while, but she didn’t return. It bothered Joe more than it should have. He slipped a hundred into the bamboo box and got out of there.

  Took it to the Zone.

  Soi thirteen.

  The Miami Hotel stood on the side of the road like a scene from a low-grade horror movie. Above the hotel, the sun was setting like Constable Hay Wain. Joe used to be a guest back in the days when the bedbugs didn’t bother him and the freelancers were dripping like tap water. Dripping from the wayward faucet that called itself the Thermae coffee shop. It was a place and time he could never clearly remember. He was once a backpacker. He was once pure. He stepped over to the other side of the road. The dark side. His soul had been burned by mirrored hotel rooms and women from dusty fields. Joe wasn’t proud of his past, but most pasts weren’t proud of the present.

  The Miami Hotel.

  There she stood.

  Washed-out grandness like the old cocktail lounge singer marinating herself in gin in the corner of a hotel bar. Her past conquests and tragedies remained visible in every nook and cranny of her dilapidation. Like the bygone singer the hotel had large rooms, high ceilings, and low rates. Back in the day, the hotel was frequented by American GIs, and a few still remained trying to make sense of the conflict after all these years. Trying to separate the realities from the flashbacks, and wondering why and how they were still here after all the years. They slunk around silently, haunting the rooms and corridors like ravenous phantoms.

  The receptionist’s pinched face painfully smiled, as she handed Joe a room-key from a board behind her desk. Joe gave her the cash and told her to send the witchdoctor upstairs. The receptionist nodded casually as if witchdoctors arrived on a daily basis at the Miami Hotel.

  Maybe they did.

  Joe took the ancient lift upstairs. It jerked upwards and then rattled up to the third. The lift door stuttered open into a corridor that may have once been faded splendor; now it was just faded. Wallpaper hung from the walls and electrical fittings burst free from broken casings. The smell of dampness and decay rose from the rotten, musky carpets. Behind closed doors, whisperings, covert negotiations, the opening and clinking together of glass bottles, tumblers, nervous laughter, feminine pants and manly groans.

  Joe found the door, twisted the key, and opened it.

  He flicked on the light switch and the electric light flooded the room to reveal an old television sitting on top of an empty refrigerator. Joe figured that neither the fridge, nor the tube had functioned this side of the millennium. The bed was large and stole most of the show. It sagged in the middle and was covered by an off-white sheet and a brown fibrous blanket. The type of blanket that broke you out in a rash, if you dared to use it. The carpet was threadbare and was probably once orange, but now it was muted to yellow and stained so heavily, it reminded Joe of a prison sentence.

  Joe sat down on the bed and flicked through the newspaper he’d brought with him.

  The one with Monica’s picture.

  Then, there was a knock at the door.

  Joe stood up and opened it.

  Woody.

  He was a grifter somewhere between thirty and fifty. Stood with long Rastafarian dreads and a flat cap of red, green and yellow. He wore a dirty loose hemp shirt and cotton Thai fisherman’s trousers. Over his shoulder, hung a duffel bag laboring to contain its contents.

  “You must be Woody?”

  “Yeah, Joe, right, what’s up?” The witchdoctor sat on the old bed and opened his duffel bag. He pulled out a tobacco tin and began to roll a doobie, he lit it and a sweet intoxicating aroma filled the hotel room. He took a hit.

  “Ganja?” Joe asked.

  “Just to lighten the atmosphere,” Woody said inhaling deeply and noisily.

  “What do you know about this?” Joe handed him the newspaper. Woody put the paper flat on the bed and read the article. His eyes narrowed together as he sucked on the joint. He reached the end of the article and whistled slowly through broken teeth. Made a tut-tuting sound and offered Joe a hit.

  “No thanks. I’m good. Was she one of your customers, Woody?”

  “Not one of mine, man.”

  “Then who’s?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, man, cool it,” he looked at Joe and placed the joint out in the ashtray. “You making me paranoid.”

  “Tell me everything you know,” Joe said.

  “Look, I don’t practice real voodoo man, take a look inside.” Woody opened the duffel bag and poured the contents on the bed. A pack of tarot cards fanned out across the sheets, crystals of various colors, a large root vegetable that could have been a small pumpkin. Molding clay, cigarette lighters, a Bob Marley CD, a box of pins. Candle wax, a wooden frog that croaked when you scratched it’s back with a stick. “Look, man, I’m gonna level with you because you and me are the same, man. We’re the same, you ain’t no white buffalo. Dude you speak Thai better than me,” Woody said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re not a real customer, you’re some kind of undercover operator. Let me guess? The cops are quite happy that this a suicide, right? Some folks have hired you to find out the truth. You’re not the kind of farang who believes in this voodoo game. Me, well, I’m not what I say neither. I used to be a tuk-tuk driver until I lost my wheels to some fucking lizard playing cards. This city is full of reptiles, man. Reptiles and cockroaches. Before that, I rented jet-skis in Phuket, before that, I was a street kid selling plastic roses to tourists on the street. I used to sell my sparkle on Silom. I’ve been in the tourist industry all my life. It’s all I’m good at. Working the white buffalo is all I know, man. Have a cool heart, little brother.”

  “You make money doing this?”

  His eyes lit up. “White coconuts are my trade. You stick an advertisement in the paper or on the internet for black magic services. You see what happens, man. People spend money for all sorts of reasons. Revenge and personal growth, a weed grows up through the cracks of the sidewalk, reaches for the sun. Now that weed may be ugly, it may not smell good, but that weed is reaching for the sun. That’s all we can do, brother, reach.” He picked up the joint from the ashtray, lit it, and sucked on it. “You know that, man. When some dude buys a hot new set of wheels, he’s buying it to get revenge on his neighbor and make himself look like the man he wants to be. A flower from the g
utter. Reaching out. No one wants to beg for a hand, no one wants to be cheated.”

  Joe let the thought dance for a moment and said,

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Man, most of my clients are the rich stuck-up wives of expats posted out here with big businesses. Their husbands been playing around in the bars too often get caught, so I make a visit to the aggrieved women. I cast them a spell. I use my wand. You know what I’m saying? My magic wand. Usually, we spend the afternoon sticking pins into a miniature waxwork doll of the husband, burning his old work shirts, burning his books. Whatever makes them feel better. You know what the funny thing is?”

  “What?”

  “They always ask for a bit of action afterwards, you know? As if all Thai people will have sex for money.”

  “Perhaps it’s the revenge thing.”

  “Sure,” he laughed, a deep smoker’s laugh. “Plus, the old white women here got it bad with so many sisters on the streets. No wonder the white man switches over to the dark side. Dark meat don’t spoil so fast.”

  “The dark side?”

  “Yes, Isaan chicks. That’s the real black magic in this town. The women. Frog scratchers. So rich businessman likes a little brown sugar. Wifey wants to even the score. I don’t like to take clients above sixty years old, but the moneys real and that’s all that matters.”

  “Where could I find a real witchdoctor? The kind of person, Monica, in the article would have gone to see?”

  Woody was silent for the length of time it took a cockroach to cover the length of the room. They both watched it until it disappeared down the crack where the wall met the floor.

  “If I wanted the real deal, I would speak to somebody, preferably old, preferably female, and preferably from Surin or Burriram. The kind of woman that constantly chews betal-nut and swears a lot, little brother, you know? I’ve seen a spell once. Old witch woman blew and spat on some woman who thought her husband was cheating. The service I offer is better value, right, no?”

  “Where would I find one of these witches?” Joe asked.

  “Up north in the provinces, man.” Woody stubbed out the joint in the aluminum ashtray.