Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  Like Vladmir, most of these sky-dwellers would be hopeless on the ground. But this was the kind of life that Monica was looking for. The kind of life that she had been denied. Private cars, drivers, restaurants and swimming pools. Sniff kisses and back stabs. Sports cars and white powder. The life that she deserved. The life that she died trying to make for herself. She swam in the deep end. She sank. The deep end was full of sharks, cheesecake, cocktails, body scrubs, cosmetic surgery and endless, endless brunches.

  Joe alighted the Sky-train at On Nut and waited for a public bus. The white and blue thirty-eight scooped him up and they travelled along Sukhumvit Road. Office-workers in crisp clean white linen shirts sat beside vagrants dressed in sooty rags. An ownerless, tailless dog wandered up and down the aisle, obliviously near to the automatic doors that were continually opening and closing, sucking in and spitting out passengers like a giant mechanical orifice. They slammed shut with a bang and then slid open again to swallow up another crowd. On the streets, noodle stalls, amulet sellers, florists, tailors, lottery touts, tarot readers, palm readers, blind singers, beggars, artists, swindlers, and sellers of exotic fruits. They all flashed past in a rainbow of colour.

  Joe hit the bell at Udom Suk.

  The driver put his brake foot to the boards. The bus coughed Joe out onto the street. He walked through the food market. Past lives hooked, killed, gutted, plucked, pulled, picked, cured, pickled and sun-dried. The seafood section: snapper, sea bass, crab, shrimp, lobster, mussels and squid. River fish, sun-dried fish, baskets, vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and spices. Feral cats and dogs sat, scratched, and sniffed. Frogs and toads perspired in plastic baskets. Men sat on raised bamboo platforms beside makeshift bars, drank white whiskey and played chequers, shouting Chanat! slammed down the bottle-tops on the chessboards. The market wound around a corner and then another and opened up out onto the sun-struck street.

  Beyond the market, futures were told in the street. There were Palm readers, tarot card readers, readers of magic stones. Women sat on plastic chairs expectantly behind a table, a deck of cards, one hundred baht and the universe. It could all be theirs for the taking. The prince of rods would save the queen of cups from death and the devil in the tower.

  Beggars exhibited ancient sores and closed wounds for a coin or two. Expectant cripples displayed stumps, burned, amputated. The gangs that controlled them drove around the city in Mercedes Benz.

  Beggary was good business.

  Opposite the market, the apartment building stood.

  The building where she died.

  Joe crossed the road. A gang of children played badminton in the street. An old lady hung washing out in the sun to dry. A pack of stray dogs barked in front of the building. Joe walked into a small office on the ground floor. A woman slept, snoring softly with her head laid on the desktop. Joe woke her by clicking his fingers. Her head sprung up like a jack-in-the-box. She mumbled a humble apology. Her dialect was of the central plains, vowels clipped by dusty roads, rice paddies, lost kingdoms, ancient battles, forgotten glory north of Bangkok.

  A story about a lost ring did the trick. That and a thousand baht won Joe the room key. He followed her up the three flights of stairs and stood in front of Monica’s apartment door.

  He walked inside. The door opened into a large two-room apartment with an attached bathroom and a tiny balcony looking back over Udom Suk. Nothing about the room spelled murder. It didn’t get suddenly cold. No flickering lights. No ghosts. There was a corner sofa and a coffee table in the middle of the room. The room had been recently painted. On the ceiling, a bracket, perhaps once used for a mosquito net before being used to fasten the leather belt where Monica hung. The room had been cleaned. No sign of blood. No personal items. Not even a cup, a magazine, nothing. Inside the bedroom, the same story. A bed, an empty wardrobe, and a cheap plastic chair. No clothes, not even a hairbrush. The attached bathroom had been scrubbed thoroughly. The tiled floor had been scrubbed clean, as had the walls. The faint alcoholic scent of cheap cleaning products mixed with the smell of new paint.

  Joe walked back downstairs and spoke with the woman. “Did you clean up the room? I mean it is the right room, the room where the lady died?”

  She nodded, “Yes, it was that room. After the police had looked at it, some more people came and said that they wanted to lease the room. They cleaned the room. They paid the lease for the rest of the year and I gave them the keys. My boss was happy that room was taken so quickly, seeing as it would be sure to be haunted.” The woman shivered. “They took everything away with them.”

  “What people? Can you describe them?”

  She looked at Joe distrustfully. He was used to it. Another five hundred did the trick “One was katoey,” she told him.

  Katoey meant transsexual. Some guys in Thailand wanted to be women. It was a cinch. The men had no body hair, sweet faces, long legs and waists that a man could put his hands around.

  “And the other?”

  “Short man with a strong body,” She told him. “They come here every day, about this time. I thought they were your friends?” She eyed Joe suspiciously. “There was another too. A thin man.”

  “Yes,” he lied, “they’re my friends. I know who you mean now. Thank you.” Joe thought about taking another look at the room before reasoning that they’d done a good professional job.

  Opposite the apartment block sat a restaurant that sold slow boiled pork, and chicken noodles over rice. Joe ordered the pork with a boiled egg and vegetables and waited. He had just about overstayed his welcome when it happened.

  It happened fast.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE BLACK Mercedes pulled up outside the apartment building. Joe noted the registration.

  666.

  Two figures got out.

  One a short male, stocky body in a business suit and the other a tall female shape in a beige trouser suit. She stood pointing here and there. She gave instructions to the former and entered the apartment block while the male waited outside smoking a butt. He had a briefcase in his mitt. The time, it took Joe to finish his second plate of cow car moo, was the amount of time it took the female form to appear again. The two of them spoke, the female form placed a hand on the others shoulder. She spoke loudly at him,

  he said nothing.

  Joe called a motorbike taxi over to the restaurant. The motorbike taxi driver wore an orange vest with his number and his rank printed on the back. Joe waved for him to dismount and walk over to where he sat in the restaurant. The rider wasn’t sure about it, then he moved over, asked Joe where he wanted to go. Joe spoke to him in his northeastern dialect and instructed him to wait for the Mercedes to pull away before they followed.

  He grinned as they waited for the black Benz to move. Two figures got inside the Mercedes and pulled away. Motorbike taxi rider jogged over to his Honda Wave. It started on the first kick. Joe jumped pillion. They slid into the traffic. The Mercedes drove along Udom Suk road past the market and then turned right onto Sukhumvit Road leading back towards the Red Night Zone.

  The Bangkok road system was a mess of clogged arteries and broken veins. Ban Jak, On Nut, Klong Prakanong, Ekami... The car’s windows blacked-out. Heat burned his shoulders.

  The Merc took a right onto the Street of Dead Artists and parked outside the joint. Joe’s driver stopped and he stepped off from the bike. Joe paid with a generous tip. Fifty metres away from the Mercedes. He shuffled in with the crowds and walked toward the establishment. It was a large building of three storeys set back from the road and dramatically converted with projecting wings. Its own grounds; lawns, an elaborate spirit-house surrounded the property, and a fishpond stocked with carp. Once, maybe the home of a rich landowner or Mafioso; a private residence now given over for sexual commerce. A knocking shop. Brothel. The windows on the ground floor were large and elegantly framed and blacked-out. The stonework was elaborate
ly painted in reds, blacks, and silvers, giving a tawdry impression of how it would have looked in its former glory. There was a sign with a small picture of a green demon and a red devil and the name of the establishment in large raised lettering.

  Demon Dreams.

  The female entered the property.

  Joe eased into a crowd of Korean tourists and lottery vendors. He noticed the Warhol bar and The Office bar further down the street. He kept tucked inside the crowd of Koreans who were deciding whether to go into one of the cathouses.

  Outside the Demon Dreams, another Thai man, this one tall and thin, joined the short Thai, the case exchanged hands, and Joe watched them disappear into the Demon Dreams. Joe found a spot in an opposite beer bar and walked inside, sat down near the front, and ordered a coke. A bargirl came and sat next to him. Joe bought her a drink. She made good cover. About twenty-five, curly hair, button nose and full of lip. Called herself Nam. One of her hands disappeared under the table and rested on Joe’s groin. Frog-scratcher to the bone.

  “What happens over there?” Joe asked her.

  “Bad things happen over there,” she said making a face like she’d just seen the devil in a pair of flip-flops. “Girls go in to work there and they never come out.”

  “You mean they never stop working there?”

  “No, I mean they never come out. Desmorai.”

  Desmorai. Thai slang for die. Rumour had it some dude called Desmond Ray once got himself killed in a car wreck and the name just stuck.

  “How many?”

  “Who knows? Five, six. They pay good money, but who wants to work in a place like that?”

  “You know anyone that ever worked there and got out?”

  “Maybe if you buy me a drink, I can remember.”

  Her hand tightened its grip and then loosened as he handed her some money. Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow. She gave Joe the name of a dancer and the name of a go-go-bar at the Nana Entertainment Plaza. Joe wrote down the details on an order slip.

  Across the road, something happened.

  The thin man walked out of the bar, briefcase in his hand, called over a motorbike taxi and climbed aboard. Joe ran to the edge of the sidewalk and then stopped and prepared for it. He figured to make it look like he was crossing the road, looking the wrong way he could engineer some kind of accident that resulted in grabbing hold of the case in the commotion. The motorbike drove closer, thirty metres, twenty, ten, five…

  …Joe made a lunge for the case. Side on. The thin man saw Joe and instinctively raised the case up to safety, caught Joe under the chin, knocked him back as the motorbike screamed off into the traffic. Joe watched the bike, the thin man, and the briefcase disappear in amongst the sea of vehicles.

  Backside.

  Middle of the road.

  A black BMW hit his brakes hard. Motorbikes swerved angrily around the car. A crowd of bargirls rapidly gathered around to see if the fallen Farang needed to recover in their bar. Perhaps have a drink? Spend a little sugar? Who knows?

  Those pro skirts really cared.

  Joe told them to worry somewhere else, got up, dusted off and crossed the road, jumped onto a tuk-tuk and sat in the bucket travelling towards Sukhumvit. The driver headed to the hotel direct. No massage, no gemstones, and no tailor-made suits.

  Joe wasn’t a tourist, but him, the driver, and Bangkok knew that was all he would ever be.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IT WAS just a couple of scratches.

  Joe cleaned out the grit and applied some iodine, no rubbing alcohol, and that was that.

  An email:

  Mr. Dylan,

  Dad’s address is on Petchburi Road. Soi 17. P.B Home, Room 62. It’s near the Pratunam market : )

  Janey.

  In the lobby, the receptionist sat eating a plate of fried grasshoppers. She asked Joe where he was going. Shoplifting he told her in English. She nodded her approval and stuffed another insect into her mouth.

  Joe took the westbound sky-train as far as Chitlom and crossed the shopping district by foot, using the huge hypodermic-syringe-shaped Baiyoke Sky Tower as a homing marker. This was rich shopping country. Where the urbane chic of Siam Square met the traditional markets of Pratunam and the computer geeks of Pantip merged with the offline reality of Petchburi Road.

  Soi seventeen led down to a tree-lined area in front of a large orange block with large metal letters:

  P.B Home.

  Opposite the apartment block, was a small raised wooden shack with a corrugated iron roof held aloft and nailed together with two-by-four timber. A frail old woman sat surrounded by her cats in deep consultation with a glass of hooch. Joe walked inside and took a can of coke from an old metal fridge that rumbled and shook in the corner. The shack smelled bad. He opened the can, gave her the two bits, and sat on a plastic chair next to the old woman. The dank animal smell owed itself to the feral cats that padded and rolled around inside her hut. The hut that shaded them from the intense sun. Joe figured she either must have been breeding them, or perhaps was just letting them breed in there. Maybe one had simply died some place that was hard to reach. Behind a stack of boxes or fallen through a crack in the wooden floor.

  But mostly the cats were multiplying.

  “Do you mind if I take a moment to rest here in your shop, Mother?” he asked her.

  “Go ahead. You speak Thai?”

  “Yes, I find it’s easier to live here if I can speak a little bit of your beautiful language.”

  “Yes, there are so many foreigners that don’t speak Thai,” she said pensively and then her arm moved in one fluid movement: up and down. It startled Joe for a moment before he realized that the hydraulic arm movement was one that allowed her to feed an addiction: She was drinking shots of rice whiskey. She had arrived at the terminal stage of alcoholism, where you hide your shots of giggle juice with sudden impulses and nervous gestures.

  She had by her side, three large canisters of moonshine spirit spiced with different herbs and flowers. Most roads in Bangkok had these white-whiskey women who sold the stuff by the glass to passing alcoholics.

  Joe decided the time was right to ask her. Just after she had taken a shot and just before she began to crave for the next one. “Do you know of a man, a foreigner who lives in the apartment building over there?”

  She thought about the question for some time before answering. “I think maybe I do. I am not too sure.”

  “Think harder, please,” Joe said, taking a purple five and laying it politely on the table in front of her.

  “Yes, there is only one foreigner who lives there. He lives alone, likes to take prostitutes back to his room.”

  “Prostitutes?”

  “Yes, you know people that sleep with strangers for money?”

  “Yes, I know what they are and what they do. Does he ever take any other people back there?”

  “No, only prostitutes. I saw one leave this morning.”

  “More than one?”

  “Just one. I saw a tall one this morning. A gatoey. Maybe he has more, how do I know? Don’t know why foreign men like gatoeys so much. Maybe they don’t have them where they come from?”

  “Well, they have them. But have you ever seen a foreign gatoey?” Joe said. She thought about it. She laughed for a long time, a deep guttural laughter and then the arm went down for the glass and hammered another shot. Joe looked over at the apartment and again her hand reached under the table and up again as she took herself another bite.

  “I think foreign gatoeys are very ugly and fat. More ugly than Thai ones,” she said, tickled by the concept of an overweight European squeezing into a size eight hookers dress, slapping on some war paint, and slipping on a pair of transparent heels.

  “Yeah. Thanks for the coke, old lady.” Joe left her to the moonshine and the cats and cro
ssed the road. The heat was in his pocket, but burning powder was the last thing on Joe’s mind. The apartment block looked as if it had been erected about thirty years ago and not been given a lick of love nor colour since. The corner rooms appeared to be of a fair size and each had their own balcony looking down on to the concrete below.

  A small empty office and a row of coin-operated washing machines next to a water dispenser, stained a mottled grey colour from the sun, stood next to a flight of stairs leading up into the apartment rooms. No guard nor officer to stop Joe, he walked up to the sixth floor and found number sixty-two where it should have been, on the sixth floor, second door along from the stairwell. The door was slightly ajar. Joe knocked and silence answered him. He knocked again, harder this time and got the same response.

  Joe walked inside with his hand on the Glock. He swung the door open. There was nobody home. He put the piece back in his pocket.

  The first thing Joe noticed was the books. Bookcases full of books, piles and piles and piles of books. Books covering every surface. Books on the hardwood floor, books on cabinets, books on every available surface. Books about travel and books about architecture. There were art books, coffee table books, books about collecting books. Books about books. Joe had never seen so many books in one place at one time. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out towards the river without actually enjoying it. There was a balcony looking down onto the road. Another apartment block and what looked like a school building obstructed the view. Inside the room, some tasteful acrylics on canvas, tribal symbols and a few English ninetieth-century prints hung on the walls. Two nautical scenes that Joe figured were reprints of Turner. The furnishings were contemporary reproductions of traditional western styles. A chesterfield in the tropics. A tasteful Tibetan rug over polished hardwood floor. Three tall oak bookcases that stood holding a range of first editions, hard-back non-fiction, history, religion and social studies. Fiction: A Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and A Thousand Streets under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton, Oliver Twist by Dickens. Non-fiction: The Bible, the Dammapada, the Karma Sutra, Science and Sanity, The Ramayana – the kind of books you read when you’re looking for answers. There was a large hardwood desk with a notebook computer sitting on top of a central green veneer. A word document was open with a manuscript in progress. The typeface was roman-fourteen and the lines double-spaced. Beside the computer was a photograph album. Joe opened it. Pictures of women, men, transsexuals, all naked or in a stage of undress posed for the camera. Joe flicked through with greater speed. Most of the subjects were Asian, but towards the end of the album, there were pictures of Europeans, Africans, and Arabians. The most recent was a picture of a Thai woman with a name captioned in a blue hand-written ink at the bottom centre of the photograph: