The man called to the waitress and handed her a grand. “Pay the bar fine. Number twenty-three.”
“But she’s our most popular dancer.”
He handed her enough money for a nice high-class weekend break on the seaside. A seafood dinner.
The deal is sealed with a wai.
Lek disappears and then returns in her street clothes. A leather jacket, expensive jeans, boots...
You watch the pair of them leave the bar.
THIRTY-ONE
LEK SAT opposite Joe in the nighthawk cafe.
The dive was open twenty-four hours, rather expensive, hygienic and impersonal like the whores that frequented it.
She appeared more vulnerable in her street clothes. Maybe she resented the loss of control that her nakedness commanded. That intangible control she left back on stage had been picked up and exploited by another dancer. Maybe it was a face thing. She wanted to return to the stage, to the bedroom, or some other place where the oldest game in the world could continue.
Joe had paid the bar.
She was his, for now.
She twitched in the booth and looked at her wristwatch. She stared at him intensely. Joe’s expression remained the same. Perhaps she was searching for Joe’s weak spot. The place where she could control him. That groove on the frogs back. The switch. All bargirls ever wanted was that pendulum to swing in their favour before the big hand reached the little one.
Joe’s indifference made her edgy.
She toyed with a strawberry milkshake. She stirred the contents of her glass with a drinking-straw.
This was the sort of place where lovers came.
The kind of place she couldn’t take her Thai boyfriend. They couldn’t drink here after the night-shift. They sat and ate noodles on the street on soi On Nut. He was always drunk. It could have been different. This joint was a reminder of how things could have been different. Had her lamps not turned green after the third trick, she would be looking at a whole new kettle of fish. Working in a bank or stamping immigration papers. She was educated. Joe could tell.
She wore a hair-band tying back her peroxide fringe, and a light-weight leather bomber jacket was slung over her shoulders with a tank top underneath. Her jeans were of an expensive label and her boots European. Top dancers got paid top dollar in the city and spent the scratch on threads, technology, and their real Thai lovers.
Drunk or no.
Joe got straight to the point the fastest way he could. “I’ve brought you out of the bar to ask you some questions, all I need is twenty minutes of your time and you can go back and dance and hook a new John and dance to another song.”
“That’s great, but you still have to pay me,” she glanced up from the milkshake with that killer smile. That still worked. Not so effectively as in the bar. But it worked. She spoke in Thai. “Look at it properly. I’m not an Isaan farm girl. I’m not some bar lizard, brother. I finished school in Chonburi, top of the class. I study at Ramkamhenang University. I don’t listen to buffalo bullshit. You want to speak in English or Thai?”
“Thai.”
“I’ll speak slowly for you then. Real slow.”
“Thanks, little sister. You can run back. Just after you’ve answered a few questions.”
“Okay, fire.” She sucked nosily on her drink. The pendulum had swung her way. A lone male customer sat on the opposite table and looked over like he had found his lost puppy dog. Joe caught his eye and the frog looked back down again and examined the tablecloth. The cold truth washing through his idiot face. Shit. He’ll have to find another scratcher. Plenty more fish in the klong and he knows it, and if he doesn’t, then he should.
Joe gave it to her. “You worked for a fetish gentleman’s club on soi thirty-three called Demon Dreams?”
“Maybe,” she surveyed the cafe perhaps looking for an easier more fun-loving John. Maybe looking out for danger. Perhaps just bored. Hard to tell what a bargirl’s thinking most of the time and that’s a good thing for the punters. “Who are you?” It sounded more like a statement than a question. She was unafraid. She was interested. She knew something. Joe guessed that she was protected by something real or imagined. Joe was just another weak-willed toy that she could use until the batteries ran out. If she pressed the right button, he shat his pants, and if she put him back in the box, he wouldn’t complain. Joe knew the score. There were two types of women that worked the Plaza. The poor abused farm girls trying to support their families and the rich daddy’s girls selling their bodies to spite their fathers. Lek belonged to the latter category whereas Monica belonged to the former.
“Look, I’m a friend of the girl they found dead, Monica. You know the one found dead in the apartment in Udom Suk,” Joe handed her the picture from the newspaper. Lek smiled at the image. The Thai Rath Newspapers published pictures of bodies sliced and chopped and cut into pieces every day. The Thais found it titillating. “Monica used to work for the Demon Dreams bar too. Now, I’ve been in there and there’s something not quite right with the place. And I’m not talking about the price of the drinks or the interior decoration. Do you know what I’m saying? The place is wrong, I know you used to work there and I’m asking you real friendly to tell me what goes on in that place. Word has it that women go in there to work and never come out. There’s a lot riding on this, honey. More than you can imagine.” Joe put a thousand baht on the table.
“Oh,” She responded sarcastically, “big money. It must be important.”
“Now I want you to think real hard about your time working in that place and tell me about that place in as much or as little detail as you can. But first, tell me, why did you leave there?”
“I’m a bargirl, we move bars a lot, that’s what we do. We move where the customers are. That place never had any customers. Not the sort of customers I was looking for anyway.”
“What sort of customers did it have?”
“Rich, very rich. Mostly Japanese and Arab, some British and American too.”
“Surely the rich customers are the sort of customers you want to have?”
“Look, sometimes a man pays money for pleasure or to give a lady pleasure. Sometimes a man pays to feel pain or to see a woman feel pain. I’ve known stupid Farangs who pay me five thousand baht so that they can lick my feet. You speak Thai so you understand how we view the feet. It’s the dirty part of the body. If somebody wants to pay to lick my dirt, then I’ll take that all day. Hell, it makes me feel good. And if that gives him pleasure, everybody’s happy. Then some guys take it too far. What do they call them? Sadists. How far do you go? If a man wants me to shit on him or to lock him in a box, then fine. Pass me the coffee and the keys. I like that. Feels good. When he turns the table, I ain’t interested anymore. Sometimes when a man has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it, he has to go further, break all the rules,” Lek sucked at the remains of the milkshake. “People like that sick in the head.”
“But you got out. Did you walk?”
“I walked,” she smiled.
“They didn’t try and stop you?”
“No, nobody stops me. I have friends.” Joe could feel the power across the table. If you could bottle her self-confidence, you could make millions with it on the street.
“What kind of friends?”
“Friends.”
By the way she shrugs, Joe knew what kind of friends she was talking about. Doesn’t matter if they hold a badge or a shotgun, they’re the boys that run this city. Any girl with contacts at the top doesn’t need to worry about some S&M bar that bumps off the staff for the pleasure of rich club members.
“Tell me, Lek, was Monica messing around with Black Magic?”
“Do you know what Sanja or quam lap means?”
“Yes, it’s a promise, a secret.”
“Then you know all you need to know.” Lek took the money from the table and stood up
. She raised her forefinger vertically to her lips, smiled, walked through the cafe doors back into the purple night, and towards the Plaza.
It happened as Joe was checking the bill. The bullet shattered the cafe window. The slug whizzed past his right shoulder and embedded itself in a framed black and white photograph of New York City. Joe hit the deck and crawled towards the door. Another shot. Coffee cups fell from the table. A cat hissed. A woman screamed. A man shouted something in Thai. Joe made it to the door and looked both ways. The streets were full of tourists. He ducked into the crowds, squeezed through the gaps of bodies, and jogged to the end of the soi with his heart hammering in his chest. He caught his breath and made it to the police box at the mouth of Nana. He looked both ways and ran across the street. Cars were backed up, he ran between them.
THIRTY-TWO
SUKHUMVIT ROAD.
The Red Night Zone.
The night market.
The hookers, the beggars, the transvestites, the transsexuals, touts, pimps, addicts, criminals, and sex-tourists thrown together like trash in a windy alley.
Every night.
Buyers and sellers of the soft machine. The gunman among them. The pile of dung that Joe desperately clung on to like it were solid gold. Lucky was bound to show hanging out at night working the white coconuts, hustling Johns, drinking whiskey, and selling the soft machine.
Stopped at a roadside Katoey bar, he asked about a sister named Lucky. A drink bought him her patch.
He kept walking.
At the mouth of a narrow alley, a blind and toothless beggar preached about the day.
The day of reckoning that was. He wore rags and shrieked like a prehistoric bird telling all who would listen, his nightmarish predictions. The demons will walk the earth and the good will be defeated in battles throughout the city. Tears streamed from his sightless eyes as he predicted the oncoming apocalypse. He spoke of lizards. Customers walked past and shook their heads. Some dropped coins in his alms bowl and some walked straight past. Not one stopped to listen. They weren’t buying what he was selling.
The urge to pick up the bottle was coming over him in waves of terror.
One drink.
Just one drink.
The muscles would relax. The fear disappear.
Joe remembered a late meeting on soi seven.
He made it there. Poured himself a coffee. Drank it down. The heat burned his throat.
Twelve dry drunks sitting in a circle spoke about the big book. Each and every one of them had survived some emotional train-wreck. A kid named Steve was holding on to life, sober with white knuckles after his girlfriend left him nothing but an empty bottle of Sangsom. Bill had found God, somehow, in the slums of Bangkok. A Swede named Hans had just come back from a relapse. A two-week bender in Pattaya. Woke up on the beach half-naked minus his wallet. Joe sat and listened. His turn to talk arrived. “I’ve been dry for a year and there is a gunman out there hunting me down, taking pot shots at me.”
Steve smiled. Bill smiled.
They had all been there.
Joe made the right sounds at the right moments and got himself out of there.
Maybe the drinkers had the right idea.
Joe carried on up past the tarot and palm readers that were camped out on street blankets, lain on the sidewalk predicating the fortunes of passing prostitutes and market vendors.
A strip of roadside bars served drinks from late in the evening until late the next morning. He asked around and then he found her at a small makeshift bar with a few plastic chairs scattered around a table and a blazing wok. A sound system played cheesy guitar pop. The place where factory girls, freelancers, bargirls, and go-go girls relaxed after they clocked off. The place where he had met the dental nurse. They unwound, gossiped, and eyeballed the herds of migrating tourists who walked past to drink at the many watering holes along the Red Night Zone. The girls picked off the weaker or injured ones, encouraging them to rest and drink to regain their strength before continuing on their intrepid explorations. Grifters dressed as Buddhist monks collected donations from men dressed as women and tourists on the lam.
Everyone and everything had a story. Each one of these marvelous creatures has a background of hope, fear, and expectation. A compost of creativity fertilized by way of cheap rum, expectant copulation, and bubblegum pop music in the tropical Bangkok night.
On the table, sat a bottle of cheap local rum and a bottle of water. One bottle of water and one glass for Joe, and one bottle of whiskey for information. Sitting opposite Joe was the woman named Lucky. Francis’ girl. Her face was heavily made up. Long arms led to large hands that wandered around the circumference of her proximity. She was jittery from amphetamines and crazed by alcohol. Both drugs. Taken together. One to go up. One to come down. They mixed well; like Danish blue and crackers. Lucky spoke with that theatrical exaggeration common to the third sex. The picture showed her covering herself. The old lady in the tin shack. Lucky spoke, “What’s the matter, you want some real lady, huh?” She squealed, flapping her arms about.
“Huh?”
“Lady! Lady! Lady! I know what you want!” She screamed.
“I just want to drink my drink, baby,” Joe had enough of the third sex for one day. But this was business.
“Lady! Lady! Lady! I’m not good enough for you, is that it, honey? What do you know about real ladies anyway? Huh, huh? I have many boyfriends, sweetie. German, American, Swedes. Norway. Zurich. That’s right, sugar, I got many boyfriends ... They all love me with a passion, honey, long time. They send money to me every month. You don’t believe me, mister? You better believe it, because you’re in a queue, but it just so happens tonight the queues quiet. So jump on in and get yourself a drink, lover. Lady Luck has a window and you’re in it.”
“Thanks,” Joe took a sip of water. It tasted terrible. He remembered James Hale had told that ‘you know when you’ve slept with a lady-boy because in the morning it smells like a man.’
“Why don’t you believe me, sugar? I have many, many man love me, but I want loving with you tonight. Okay?” She took a long, deliberate puff on her cigarette and snorted the smoke out through her cheap nose-job with a huffing sound. A pantomime of what she imagined to be a feminine sigh. Transvestites studied the golden age of Hollywood cinema to perfect their acts. Joe once knew a full-op in Nana who studied vaudeville to nail her routine.
“I believe you have what you say you have,” he told her, taking another drink of water. “But tell me, Luck, are you feeling…”
“No,” she exclaimed, suddenly staring Joe straight in the eye. “Lady Luck never has good luck. Think about it, honey. I was born a fucking man. I know you don’t like ladies who have a cock. I never liked Russian caviar until I tried it, honey.”
“I want some information.”
“What you want to know?”
“Everything,” he told her.
“Even my secrets?” she raised an eyebrow.
“Especially your secrets, baby. What can you tell me about Francis. Englishman about sixty, walks with a stick.” He handed her the photograph taken at the Bus Stop.
“Lady Luck never speaks about her boyfriends.”
“Francis is a boyfriend, not a customer?”
“Lucky never has customers. Only boyfriends.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Boyfriends pay more,” she smiled.
Joe handed her two hundred baht and she looked at as if he had handed her a Bangkok sewer rat. He dipped back in the wallet and handed her over a purple.
“What you want to know?”
“Where did you meet?”
She lit another cigarette. “Meet in the street. Same as me and you.” A throaty masculine laugh. She caught herself and carried on. “He’s a little bit drunk, but speak good. We eat noodle together and then go his apartment. He lik
ed to do strange things, some things I never try before.”
“Where’s the apartment?”
She leaned back and raised her eyebrows. He handed over another hundred.
“He stays at Pratunam, soi seventeen. Big orange building. But in the afternoons, he stays at the Oriental Hotel every day. I think he must have a lot of money to go there every day. The staff don’t let me go in and see him there. Fucking bullshit place. We went to his room in Pratunam and only watched TV, he likes to take photographs of me and then he says he wants to go to sleep. In the morning, we go out drinking together. Never saw him again. Funny guy and I think very lonely too. Who knows what men want?”
“Yes. Who knows. Did he take photographs of you?”
“Sometimes he liked to do that.” She filled her glass up to the brim and took a long drink. “He liked to be the queen, you know what I mean?”
“Why did he take the pictures?”
“He said they were for some book, a strange type of book if you ask me. Who wants to buy something like that?”
“You’ll be surprised.”
“He said he could help me.”
“Yeah?”
“He said he had a way of making more people love me.”
“How?”
“He said it was a secret.”
“A secret?”
”Yes,” she said.
She stood and noticed an old client, ran down the crowded streets disappearing into a blur of faces.
That word again.
THIRTY-THREE
THE TELEPHONE rang in the room as the walls were closing in. Joe’s mind was doing alcohol time. Every cell in his body craved for it.
Every cell.
He picked up the telephone.
The pathologist. “I think we should talk. There’s been another one,” she said.
“It’s late.”
“Come over,” she sounded pretty cool about it. She mentioned a condo. Tong Lor. She said the evening would be better.
He made it to the pathologist’s place as the moon slowly died behind the skyscrapers. He rode the elevator up to the twenty-third. Walked along a corridor.
Red Night Zone - Bangkok City Page 15