Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  “The first was a strand of hair, one of hers and one of his, and then a picture of each of them, and finally something personal from both of them, something they have touched.”

  “What kind of picture did they use, and what were the personal items?”

  “The pictures were photographs, but before we had photographs, the witchdoctors used drawings by local artists. For the personal things, as I remember for the man, they used an official letter he had written and signed. For the lady, they used one of the brushes she had made. Like this one.” The old lady showed Joe the brush that she had been using to clean the stairs with. “But clothing is often used. The more personal, the better.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “The ceremony took place on a full moon inside the witchdoctor’s hut. All the items were put together in a bag made from buffalo hide. A fire was lit and there was lots of chanting. The woman brush-maker repeated the spell and the witchdoctor went into a trance for several minutes. When he came back into the real world, he said that the spell had worked. He said that the spirits were strong and that she should be expecting to marry soon. The brush-maker and the witchdoctor then drank some rice whiskey until morning, and at that time, the witchdoctor said he had to sleep and the woman returned to her home.”

  “And what about the village headman?”

  “At first, he courted the brush-maker with what seemed like real desire. Word had spread like it does about the spell and some people wondered if he was just going along with the witchdoctor to gain support for the next election. But then, one day he just disappeared and eventually nobody talked about the headman anymore. We assumed he gone to one of the big cities. The big cities swallowed the best of the men and women. It was normal. We had no telephone back then, so how were we to know what had happened?”

  “And the brush-maker?”

  “Rumour had it that she was seen inside the witchdoctor’s hut on several occasions. Some said that she was trying to cook up another spell to win back the missing headman, but others had more interesting gossip, you understand?”

  “I see. Do you think a spell like this would work in the city?”

  “In the jungle, we have only the trees, fruit, cattle, there is only so much harm that can be done. You must understand that here in the city, there is so much money that a spell like this can cause much harm. It is dangerous to use our magic here. Here we have machines, cars, trucks, businesses. That’s why I spoke to the Southern man when I heard him talking about black magic. I told him to be careful. Our elders have told us not to bring these things to the city, we must listen to them, otherwise more stories like the one about Nong Mint and Nong Monica will unfold. It is foolish to play with these things in the city. Bangkok is only two hundred years old and black magic is thousands of years old. Three or four generations ago, there was very little money in the countryside. But there is always food. We lived from the land, happy with what we had. The rice grew and the fruit fell from the trees. Fish swam in the rivers, animals ran in the forest.

  “Then the money came. With the money came the greed, with the greed came the alcohol, with the alcohol came the bars, and with the bars came the buying and selling of young bodies, hearts and dreams. It’s like the headman said. Any man or woman that sustains his or herself with greed, money, alcohol and the dreams of others for pleasure, changes into a demon. These demons feed on the greed of money. Green money. In their heart, they change into an image of the way they really are. This city has little hope. The demons believe that they are as pure as the cool September rain. They justify their actions, or worse pretend, lie to themselves. Listen, the lies we tell ourselves are frequently the most dangerous of untruths. Secrets are deadly. The murderer kills his seventh victim because his mother never loved him. The rapist is who he is because a lover passed on a deadly disease. One day this city will be split into those that are clean from desire, and those that have secrets, resentments and desires. That is what makes us evil. A sense of wrongdoing in our pasts, an injustice never resolved. In the wrong hands, the black magic spells could swing the balance of evil. I wish they had never brought it here. This is all I have to say.”

  Joe thanked the old lady for her time. She told him to think nothing of it and walked him back down to the hotel lobby pointing out artefacts on the shelves. They made it to the entrance and they looked at each other. Joe waved to the old lady and walked back out onto Chareon Krung road. The purple and red sky traded for an oily blackness that hung over the city like Van Gogh’s Night over the Rhone. Joe hailed a tuk-tuk to Humlanphong and walked downstairs to the MRT subway station thinking about nothing but the pain and greed of,

  Bangkok city.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE SUBWAY train shuttled beneath sin city with the precision of a polished lug through the barrel of a high-class bean-shooter. The subway shone like a string of oyster fruit, an ankle of gold, the body, the leg, hip, the smile of some downtown forgotten lover.

  Joe had known a few.

  Where were they now?

  They had listened to him when he needed someone to talk to. They didn’t understand a word of what Joe said, but he needed to tell them about it all the same. Yet most of all, Joe craved silence and darkness.

  A dark room.

  A glass of something strong.

  A skirt to share it with,

  sometimes.

  Fear interested him. Skirts interested him. The booze was good but the women were better. If he had to give up one, it would be the bottle. The truth was, that after another ninety days of sobriety, he had been chipping at one or the other ever since. He was presently on a skirt kick. The bottle could return, but he had made a promise that it wouldn’t. He needed a glass of giggle juice the same way he needed a daylight hole through his noodle. A Bangkok overcoat was sobriety. Pro-skirt voices in the dark were worth twenty hits of cheap rum in a darkened six-dollar hotel room. After the Samui case, he spent a few weeks kicking the bottle alone. The TV didn’t work. The internet didn’t work. He hit the street sober and picked up a skirt sitting on a plastic chair in a street dive bar. She went back to the room. They spoke. She was a dental nurse who knew how to fill the hole in Joe’s life. She had seen more kicks than pricks and reacted to his advances like she was enjoying it all for the first time. He couldn’t even remember her name. It didn’t matter. Then there was the girl from the islands that took to the disco despite being married to a multi-millionaire. High-society with the morals of an alley cat. Then there was Monica. It all flashed back. Shit. There were skirts everywhere in the Zone.

  He took the escalators up to street level. He caught the twenty-five east and the bus spat him out at Prong Phom.

  He had a date with the Demon Dreams.

  Joe hit the Street of Dead Artists. Bars and clubs named after dead painters: Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, and Dali. It was known as millionaires row until the scratch wore out. Joe stopped outside the building and looked at it. Large door, black windows, Demon Dreams, written across the front in raised silver lettering. He noticed the black Benz parked outside. The fishpond surrounded by orchids. A dead palm leaned over to the edge of the road like it was dying to escape the joint and put its roots elsewhere.

  A stone path led to the entrance of the club. Joe walked along it to the large wooden door with a brass knocker and a spy-hatch like you might find on a medieval castle. Joe knocked on it and the small rectangular hatch opened. A pair of eyes observed from within and then the door opened.

  A tall attractive transsexual was standing before him. Her face was smooth, her skin pale. The nose was cosmetically perfect, having been broken and then set by professional hands no doubt in one of the top class plastic joints. Her hair had been colored a rich auburn to match either her eyes or perhaps colored contact lenses. It’s hard to figure out what’s real and what’s not. She was the most beautiful woman Joe had ever seen.

 
She was once a man.

  Unlikely the kind of man who drank beer and played football. A shy sensitive man, who read celebrity gossip, followed popular music, wrote with a neat hand, cooked clam spaghetti.

  “Please enter,” she spoke English like she meant it. This was no sing-song Asian English. She had the phonetics down. Maybe she had been trained by a lover who ate the classics. Perhaps she had lived inside television and theater. It wasn’t the kind of English that you picked up in the bars. It was the kind you picked up at country mansions and boarding schools. Her lips were a pale pink and her smile was the kind that woodland animals warmed to. Those critters jumped up into her arms and nuzzled her like she was the second coming. Her legs were long and she wore high heels.

  Joe stepped inside the joint and followed those legs. She half-turned:

  “My name is Carmen, pleased to meet you.”

  “Joe. The pleasure is all mine.”

  The hallway was dark stone flooring with blood red carpet. Walls were a wash of reds, blacks, and wall lights that glowed dull amber light. A horizontal funhouse mirror ran along one side of the hallway, reflecting obscure images. The faint smell of alcohol and spent cigarettes. The mirrors, the color schemes, the fear led Joe deeper, and deeper into that curious building.

  Carmen turned and placed her left hand on Joe’s shoulder. Her eyes stared into his. Her right hand rubbed his groin and then the hand rose up to his chest. She felt the piece. Gripped it.

  “Glock 26?”

  “I’m a collector,” Joe said.

  “Of course you are. Do you mind if I hold onto this? Security.”

  Joe nodded.

  They walked through into a large lounge. A tropical fish tank bubbled.

  A bar stocked with spirits and liqueurs.

  Dark corner niches for customers who wanted to see, but not be seen.

  Reproduction French and Dutch furniture. Paintings: water-colors of demons. Demons standing, sitting, copulating. Demons with giant phalluses penetrating female forms. Apocalyptic representations of the city and her inhabitants. Buildings on fire. Children crying… In the far corner, inside a hardwood cabinet hung a skeleton. The type used by medical students. A bookcase that Joe figured was a secret doorway. A doorway leading further into their decadent world of the woman that had once been a man. “I see you’ve put your own mark on the place,” Joe said, looking around at the curiosities. The theme continued. Beside the far wall, a cabinet with a number of small jars filled with an embalming liquid housing specimens. Centipedes, scorpions, snakes, lizards. The sort of thing you’d find in a London curiosity shop or a mad professors laboratory – anywhere but a bar in Bangkok. A tasteful sepia anatomical chart hung on the wall with lines in reds and blue.

  “This is the lobby and the bar. This is the place where our members relax before going upstairs, or sometimes, downstairs,” Carmen explained.

  “I see. I like it. What kind of services do you offer upstairs?”

  “Please, take one of these,” she handed Joe what looked like a menu. The cover was heavy leather with Demon Dreams branded onto the center. “And would you be so kind to have a drink with me? The heat, you understand?”

  “Soda water, no ice.” He glanced at the menu. It listed some sadomasochistic practices he’d heard of and some he hadn’t. The place seemed to cater for both the submissive and dominant type. Humiliation and shame were available along with the chance to cause pain to others. Sadists could burn the girls with lit cigarettes, urinate over them, and whip their bare ass with a leather cat of nine tails. “Seems quite comprehensive. Does the house offer anything outside what’s written here? Downstairs perhaps?”

  “We encourage members to order from the menu the first few times, to see how it suits, you know. We don’t like to rush things, I trust you understand?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Carmen clapped her hands three times. “Ben!’” she shouted.

  Ben was that huge hunk of dark meat who Joe recognized as the pig-killing machine on the long-tail boat. He appeared as if magically from thin air, crouching behind the bar, he rose and smiled. Up close, he was a short muscular man with a nose that looked like it had been on the receiving end of one or two non-verbal disputes. He wore a dark lightweight suit with a gold chain around his thick neck. Ben fussed around behind the bar and then he brought the drinks. Joe tasted it.

  Water.

  “Ben, let’s eat!” She clapped her hands again. Ben disappeared into the hallway and returned pushing a hospital bed on wheels. On the bed was a young naked woman. The woman’s body was wrapped in cellophane. On her body were rolls of sushi and sashimi. She was alive. Still, but alive. Joe watched the movement of her diaphragm. The sashimi rose and fell.

  “The Japanese simply adore it,” Carmen said by means of explanation.

  Ben rolled the naked woman in front of them. She was almost still. Only the steady movement of her chest as her heart beat. Her breasts were small. Arms and legs thin. Her eyes were closed. What did it take for a woman to seek employment as a dinner plate? Joe thought about it. There came a time in a person’s life when all the disillusions were blown away. Your mother and father didn’t care. Your kids didn’t care. The man in the street selling fruit couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you lived or died. Might as well lie down on a hospital trolley and use your body as a plate. That’s all we all were; a dinner plate. People, the ones that were interested, came over and took pieces away from us. They chewed over those pieces and then walked away to some place better, another dish, another bar, another piece of meat. The ones that stayed were the most dangerous. They took everything from the plate.

  Carmen handed Joe a pair of chopsticks. He picked at some salmon resting on her navel. Her skin was the color of ice coffee. “Do all of your guests receive this treatment?”

  “Of course.” Carmen gently stroked the woman’s breasts and sighed. “Such beauty… Makes one…Jealous…”

  “She is nothing compared to you,” Joe said.

  “Your mouth is sweet, yet it lies. I have something to show you.” In her hand, was a photograph album. A heavy leather-bound case. She passed it to Joe. “These are our staff. All these pictures are recent.” Joe rested the chopsticks on the woman’s thigh. Flicked through the pictures. Ben moved over and stood closer. Behind him stood the fish tank. His eyes stared at Joe with contempt, a cold dislike on the brink of turning into something violent. Joe looked at Carmen. She smiled. Joe sensed an evil that wasn’t there before. A wave of fear gripped him. Joe continued looking through the photos. Women in leather cat suits, uniforms, sultry, sexy, boots, whips, chains, and dog-collars. Racks, boxes, torture chambers, glass-topped tables. An isolation box. One woman was eating a plate of something Joe didn’t want to think about.

  He turned the next page and then he saw it.

  The photograph leaped up at Joe and hit him in the stomach like a physical assault.

  Monica.

  Monica’s head was decapitated, her eyes bulged outwards, her tongue hung out of her mouth. Her skin was the green color of the morgue. Like a fucking lizard. Joe’s stomach clenched. Her hair was matted with black blood. His testicles rose up as a new fear gripped him.

  He heard that laughter again.

  Monica’s laughter.

  Carmen spoke. “Some of our customers have, how do you say, peculiar tastes, we had to really push the boat out for this one. What do you think, Joe?” Carmen motioned to Ben to wheel away the naked woman, the meal, the trolley…

  “So she took the jump here? Quite a little set-up you got going. I guess clients pay top dollar to see a poor uneducated woman dance the last dance. A special treat for a rich client?”

  “Now come on, Joe. Who knows what happened to the poor girl? This is Bangkok, you know? A dangerous city. I got that picture from a friend, a doctor, many of our members are doctors, lawyers, politic
ians. Many powerful people use our, how shall I say, facilities. We have to keep up a reputation. Our reputation is not improved by investigations of any kind for any reasons. This is where you come in, Mr. Dylan. It does not do one any good to go around poking ones nose in other people’s business. Better to mind your own business and let other people mind theirs? Do you follow me? I say we forget about her for the time being. I don’t wish to lose business over this sort of thing. Especially when there is other, more pressing business at hand.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Whatever. Business is business, don’t you think? It is all a headache in the end. At least it was a headache for poor Monica. Look at the way it separated. The human body can be a delicate thing in the wrong, or perhaps in the right hands, don’t you think, Joe? Glance over some of our samples. Snapshots in time. Our clients are often impressed by our samples,” She said pointing a long finger over at the cabinet. “Body parts, disgusting to some, beautiful to others. The world would be such a boring place if we were all the same, with the same likes and dislikes, wants and needs, would it not?”

  “Not everybody likes a man dressed as a woman, lady, and not everybody likes to watch a beautiful woman murdered in exchange for a pile of scratch.” Joe shot her a glance. He turned his gaze towards the other one. Ben’s hands suddenly disappeared into his pockets; he fidgeted for a moment battling with the cloth of his jacket before something glimmered in his hand. The spotlights picked up the flash of silver and then the object disappeared again back into his pocket.

  “You see, Ben has a new toy!” She smiled seated now with her legs crossed on the sofa opposite Joe. Joe saw it. Ben was still standing a few feet away in front of the tropical fish tank. Ben had some kind of blade on him, not a large one, but any blade was alright in an accurate mitt.

  “I see it, baby. Some folks like to play chess and others like walks in the country. Your boy likes to shoot pigs with blow-darts and play with knives. It’s cute. I like it. Is he available for bar mitzvahs?”