The Tigers were billeted at a dump of a resort high on one of the hills flanking Patong beach, far from the ocean. The hotel was strictly low-rent, attracting Thai working men and the poorer class of Asian sex tourist, drawn to the brothel that operated in sordid rooms on the lower floors. There was no way an American could believably check into the hotel, so Hook had struck up a mutually beneficial relationship with the brothel madam, a skull-faced refugee from the poverty-stricken rice paddies of the north east, and she had made it known that he was a farang whose tastes ran to the cheap and the nasty, that he liked quantity rather than quality, sometimes shelling out for half a dozen girls at one time.
In reality Hook had done nothing more than part with wads of dollars and sit in a moldy room, chain smoking to kill the smell of stale sex on the bedclothes, drinking Scotch and waiting to find a way to get close enough to one of the Tigers to weave his spell.
He’d been unable to make contact—the Tamils were as elusive as their feline namesakes—and was ready to admit defeat (a rarity for him) when the big wave had come and destroyed the low-lying areas of the island. Hook and a bevy of half-dressed harlots had stood on the hotel terrace watching the devastation far below.
Phuket was shut down and he couldn’t leave. The air was thick with death and raw sewage. There was no water or power. A hell hole. But his Tamils were marooned, too, and the straitened circumstances had thrown them together—Hook believably, now, seeking shelter at the resort. He had used the situation to his advantage and by the time the airport had reopened, he’d made one of the Tigers—codenamed, naturally, Tigger—his very own.
Standing close to Klein he caught the same sour smell of sweat that had filled his nose all those years ago when the madam of the brothel had come to Hook’s room to beg for his help. He’d been sitting drinking and reading Graham Greene by the light of a candle, dressed only in skivvies, the cramped room as hot as a sweat lodge. Pulling on a pair of shorts he’d followed the woman into another room where he was confronted with a sight that would have given Diane Arbus pause.
The bearded, ringleted, Haredi Jew, wearing his yarmulke and nothing else, stood over a naked, lifeless bargirl.
The girl wasn’t dead, just badly beaten, the Haredi panicking post-coitus and deciding that the way to expunge his sin was to kill the vessel that still held his seed.
Hook, acting purely on instinct, had shot photographs of the bizarre tableau on his cell phone and then extracted what little cash he could from the Israeli, supplementing it with some funds of his own (or rather his employer’s) and after he’d smoothed things over with the women the Haredi had been allowed to depart for home and hearth.
Benyamin Klein hadn’t crossed Hook’s mind in years until the night before, when he’d seen on the news that Israeli gymnasts were among the casualties on the plane, and it taken him two phone calls and one email to erstwhile connections in Jerusalem to establish that his old friend was heading to Thailand with the volunteer rescue team.
Hook, sitting in front of the TV in his wooden house, his cell phone still warm in his hand, watching the devastation in the jungle and listening to the light snores of his female guests, had felt a sense of inevitability at the almost occult way wheels had turned and components had clicked together and elements had aligned into a beautifully audacious plan.
He checked that the child was glued to the tube and leaned in close to the sweating Israeli. “Benyamin, I still have those photographs.”
“Yes,” the man said in his guttural accent, “but of course you do. What do you want?”
Hook removed the ziplock bag from his pocket, using his body to shield the severed finger from the girl as he showed it to Klein.
“You’re going to find this at the crash site. You’re going to make sure it gets identified. Yes?”
The man looked at him, closed his eyes, sweat tobogganing along the ridges and grooves of his weathered face.
He opened his eyes and said, “Yes, this I can do if I must. And in return?”
“When I am satisfied that you have done what I ask, I will destroy the photographs.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Believe me, I’ll have no further use for you after this.”
Klein said something in Yiddish and then he nodded and took Kate Swift’s finger and stashed it in the pocket of his black suit pants.
TWENTY-FOUR
What was it about trouble, Kate wondered, that it found her like a compass needle found true north?
Lying naked in the dark in the bedroom of the beach hut beside her sleeping child, she heard the creak of the hammock on the balcony and the scratch of a matchstick as Jean-Philippe fired up a joint.
JP was discreet. He never smoked grass in front of Suzie, always walked off down the beach and returned smiling a little wider, just the faintest whiff of weed hanging in his blondish curls.
A good man.
A man, who even though he must know who she was, had never asked any questions, just done as he’d promised, paying off some unspecified debt of honor (his words) to Harry Hook, or ’Arry ’Enderson as he called him.
And she’d humiliated the Frenchman.
Gone all soft, and dreamy and girlie. Stopped being tough and vigilant, even though her life and the life of her daughter depended on it.
Letting the heat and the balmy ocean lull her into a lazy stupor—her body drinking the sun like it was an elixir after all the months of snow—not even the dull ache in her hand ruining her mood.
The drunken old Dane had given her painkillers, but she’d refused to take them, not wanting to lose her edge and slow herself down. But the sun and the sea had done it anyway.
And so had the fallout from a kind of battle fatigue, the realization that too many years had been filled with stress and terror.
And grief and loss.
Jesus.
As loath as she was to admit it, there was something about being becalmed, with no volition, on this speck of an island, at the mercy of Harry Hook and his crazy plan, that was soothing, a balm to her.
Kate woke late each morning. She lay in the sun and swam and hung out with her kid, just talking silly, nothing girl talk while JP caught small silver fish—glinting like shards of broken mirror when he pulled them from the ocean—that he cooked on a fire on the beach while she made salad in the kitchen.
And if, as she chopped peppers and shallots, he brushed against her on his way to get a beer from the fridge and she caught the pleasant wash of his clean sweat and felt a hunger for more than food, what of it?
Earlier that night she’d stood out on the balcony just after sunset, letting a hot little breeze fool with her hair. The breeze carried snatches of reggae from the neighboring island that lay a mile or so south, a bigger, touristy place, with bars and restaurants on the beach, their bobbing red lanterns visible from where she stood, reflecting in the flat ocean.
A burst of distant laughter reached her on the wind and she felt happier than she had in years. Dangerously happy.
“Hey, JP,” she said.
The Frenchman came out of the house swigging a Heineken. “Yeah?”
“Let’s go over there.”
“To that beach?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his curls. “You know what ’Arry said.”
“’Arry, ’Arry, ’Arry.” She laughed. “He won’t know.”
JP shook his head again and she wondered what it was that he had done, that had made him beholden unto Harry Hook.
He’d told her he was a diver, taking tourists on day trips out to the reefs. What else had he done? Drugs? Contraband?
She didn’t know enough about what went on in these parts to string together an educated guess, but JP wasn’t a hard man, that much she knew. Not a fool either, but she had a sense of him diving headlong into something that’d gone way deeper than he’d thought it would go and when he’d started to sink it was Harry Hook who’d been there to rescue him.
Harry
Hook with his lazy smiles and his cool and his collection of IOUs.
“Please, JP,” Suzie said, putting her arm around his waist. “Just for a while.”
So, outgunned and maybe a little cabin fevered, JP took them down to the Zodiac inflatable, yanked at the outboard’s pull cord and puttered them across the placid ocean, the moon a fat orange fruit hanging low in the sky, the music and revelry getting louder and the smell of spicy food carrying to them as they neared the bigger island.
JP cut the motor and lifted the propeller free of the water and the inflatable coasted ashore, beaching itself.
They stepped off the boat onto powdery sand that was still warm to their bare feet and walked across to a place called Hippies Bar, a ramshackle structure of bamboo and wood built under an umbrella of palm fronds. A skinny Thai guy, wearing only torn shorts, dreadlocks hanging to his ribs, juggled burning torches while a trio of Thai Rastas played guitars and slapped bongos, a gaggle of farang girls watching them hungrily.
Thai men were different from Arabs and South Asians, who were all hungry eyes and grabbing hands when it came to foreign women. These guys were laid back and let the women do the running.
Suzie led them to a table and they ordered drinks and food and when Kate’s fingers touched JP’s as they were both reaching for a slice of papaya she left her hand on the top of his for long enough for him to understand and he grinned at her through the dancing flame of the candle.
The place was filling up with farang—Scandinavians, Australians and three beefy Russians dressed in bad beachwear hassling the small, pretty Thai waitresses who smiled and zenned their way through it all.
The fire show ended and some kind of fast-paced ragga fusion blared out of the speakers and Suzie was up and dancing. When she tried to pull her mother out of her seat to join her, Kate resisted at first, but Suzie was relentless. Kate, a couple of rums inside her, found herself on her feet and letting her body go, enjoying the way JP was eyeing her and she knew she looked good, better than she had in years.
Tan and chilled and, hell yes, sexy, even.
One of the Russians said something when she and Suzie swayed past their table and his friends laughed in a way that knocked the shine off things just a little and reminded Kate that she wasn’t on vacation, and she walked her daughter back to where JP sat and downed the last of her drink.
JP said, “Maybe we are going?”
“Yeah,” she said.
By the time they paid their tab the Russians were gone and as they walked down onto the sand toward the Zodiac Kate was happy again, expectant, knowing that something was going to happen when they got back to their hideout.
Or, at least, hoping that it would.
As they passed a row of palms she heard men’s voices. Two of the Russians were pissing against the trees, the one who had spoken standing so that he was exposed to them.
Kate took Suzie’s hand, aware that JP was standing straighter.
The Russian called out, “Hey, don’t go, baby, baby, baby.” Doodling piss onto the sand, his friends laughing.
JP stopped and said, “There’s a kid here, man.” A keed.
“They’re never too young,” the Russian said, slowly tucking himself away, adjusting the hang of his balls, getting in JPs face.
JP hit him a solid punch to the jaw and the Russian went down on one knee, putting a hand to his mouth.
“Come on, JP,” Kate said, touching his shoulder, and they started walking on, but the other two men came after them, one of them grabbing JP’s arms while the other slapped him.
The Russian kneeling in the sand stood and, smiling through a little trickle of blood from his lip, came over, leading with his heavy shoulders.
JP tried to fight himself loose but the two men held him.
Kate grabbed a length of driftwood from the sand and swung it at the one of the men holding JP and caught him in the temple and felled him. The other man turned toward her and she broke his jaw.
The biggest guy was on her and she didn’t have time to swing the wood and couldn’t block with her wounded left hand, so she took a punch to ribs that were still tender from her brawl on the train. When JP lunged at the Russian the big man hit him hard in the face and he went down.
Kate had lost the wood and had to work quickly to find the space to send a roundhouse kick to the man’s chin, dropping him. Instinct and adrenaline had her lining up a kick to his throat.
“Don’t kill him,” JP said and she checked the kick.
He was right. She couldn’t afford to leave a corpse lying on the sand.
JP stood and wiped his mouth, looked at the men and looked at her and he said nothing as they went back to the Zodiac and he powered up the outboard. They crossed to their beach in silence, Kate sitting with her arm around Suzie’s shoulders.
JP dragged the inflatable onto the shore beyond the tide line and went into the hut. Kate saw him in the bathroom washing his face.
She stood in the doorway and said, “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said and closed the door.
She took Suzie to bed and told her a story and calmed her and the child fell asleep.
Kate undressed and, lying beside Suzie in the dark, she heard JP smoking in the hammock and she knew she should stay where she was, she had done enough tonight.
But she wrapped a cloth around her nakedness and went out onto the balcony, leaning against the rail, watching the firefly of the joint moving under the mosquito net.
“You Frenchies know what Bogarting means?”
He said nothing, just held the spliff out to her. She took a hit. Just a small one, just as a way of finding purchase on the slippery slope that separated them.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have made you take us across there.”
“I’m sorry, also. I wasn’t much good at defending you and Suzie.”
“You did fine.”
“They would have kicked my ass if not for you.”
“I dunno.”
“I do.” He laughed. “You can fight.”
“For a girl?”
“For anybody. You are fucking fierce.”
“I’ve had some training.”
“That I can see.”
“So, you gonna lie out here and lick your wounds?”
He shrugged. “What else is there to do?”
“Maybe I can lick them?”
“What is this? Sympathy?”
She moved the net aside and said, “No.”
They kissed and it was the first time a man had touched her since Yusuf. And JP didn’t touch her the way Yusuf had. This was different, and that’s what she wanted.
She climbed up onto the hammock and straddled him and they kissed harder and she tasted his mouth and his skin and only when he went inside her did she know how much she had needed this for so very, very long.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Nadja Benway surfaced again a dusky woman in a nurse’s uniform sat at the foot of her bed watching a telenovella on the wall-mounted TV. Nadja, her hands still bound, tried to get up and the nurse muted the audio and gestured for her to lie down.
“I need to piss,” Nadja said.
The nurse produced a bedpan and slid its chilly metal surface beneath Nadja’s buttocks.
After Nadja released a long, noisy stream of urine, the impassive nurse covered the bedpan with a cloth and disappeared into the bathroom, where Nadja heard flushing and the sound of running water.
The woman returned, taking up her station again.
“How long have I been here?” Nadja asked.
“Three days,” the nurse said.
“God. And how did I get here?”
The nurse shrugged and consulted her watch before leaving without saying another word.
Nadja listlessly observed the antics of the swarthy cast of the telenovella, their lips moving soundlessly as they yelled, beseeched and sobbed their way through garish living rooms and bedrooms until her mind drifted and she could
n’t stop herself from thinking of the night she met Michael at a cocktail party.
They were the most beautiful people in the room, two suns around which the drab and the ordinary had orbited. They had smiled at one another and within an hour were fucking in a suite at the Fairfax Hotel.
The sex had been less than stellar. As accomplished as they were it was as if the one’s magnificence had nullified the other’s. They were used to feeding on blander food. It took a few days for them to find a rhythm and then it was good.
Great, even.
But after sex that first night something unprecedented had happened: she’d fallen asleep. Nadja, the queen of the speedy retreat, had drifted into a catlike slumber beside the softly snoring Michael, no overnighter himself.
And when they awoke and stared at each other and she saw some softness in his eyes she was ready to despise him, just as she’d despised the endless string of nothings who had fallen for her in the past, who had refused to understand the cold hard terms of the transaction: you can have my cunt for a few hours, but you will never, ever have my heart.
But Michael had blinked the vulnerability away, flashed his trademark ironic smile and dressed and they’d left.
They’d carried on seeing each other. Often. And he’d made a point of keeping things uncomplicated. Light. Amusing.
Until one day, as they sat in his bed eating the Szechuan take-out from the Pavilion on K Street that he’d sworn was proof of the existence of god, he’d looked at her over a forkful of moo shi pork and she saw something in his eyes and knew what was coming and reached out her fingers, fingers that still smelled of their sex, and placed them on his lips and said, “No, Michael. No.”
He’d laughed and said, “Hey, I just wanted to offer you some moo shi,” and they’d both known he was lying as he’d kissed her and they’d started fucking again.
The Truth Itself Page 9