Joshua nodded, but his expression remained the same as he watched Eddie closely. Eventually Joshua tilted his head toward the television set. “I’ve always liked that movie, too.”
Eddie rotated his chair slightly and saw that the set had come on to a channel that was playing some old western he didn’t recognize. A man dressed all in black was galloping on a sleek white horse through the dusty streets of a small western town while its awestruck residents gazed at him with a mixture of respect and admiration.
“I wasn’t watching—”
“You know, Eddie, I’ve always thought that’s what America is really all about,” Joshua interrupted, pointing his forefinger at the television set.
“About riding horses and shooting people?”
Joshua hardly even noticed Eddie’s smirky ripostes any longer, at least not that he let on.
“It’s about people who are willing to go out over the next horizon. Men who aren’t afraid to step right off into the future, to make something good happen. Those are the real American heroes.”
Eddie smiled slightly. So that was what Joshua’s sudden interest in western movies was all about.
“I don’t want to be an American hero, Joshua.”
Joshua slowly smiled in such a sweetly melancholy way that Eddie felt the goose bumps start to rise on his forearms.
“Oh yes you do,” Joshua murmured in a voice that was like the wind rattling dead leaves high up in an oak tree. “Yes, you do.”
Then he slipped out the door, closing it behind him without a sound, and was gone.
Nine
WHEN Eddie walked into the bookstore the next morning and told Winnebago about Marinus Rupert’s proposition, Winnebago looked exactly like someone who didn’t want to hear a word of it.
“Forget it, man.” He rapped his open hand on the counter next to the cash register for emphasis. “Just forget it.”
“I can trade this in for two business class seats,” Eddie said, holding up the red folder with the first class ticket. “We’re covered on the hotel and have a thousand bucks in cash. What have you got to lose?”
Winnebago looked at Eddie in amazement.
“You’re kidding, right?” He took off his glasses and leaned forward until his face was just inches from Eddie’s. “What have I got to lose? My fucking life is what it looks to me I’ve got to lose.”
“Don’t worry so much, Winnebago. Everything will be fine.”
“Oh, sure it will. We’ll just fly 10,000 miles around the world; I’ll get the trots from the food, emphysema from the air, the clap from the girls, and my ass handed to me in a bag by somebody who thinks I know where $400,000,000 is. Oh yeah. It’ll be fucking fantastic, it will.”
Winnebago folded his arms.
“No goddamned way,” he said.
Eddie exhaled slowly and studied a tall bookcase labeled with a neat sign tacked to the top shelf. It was hand-printed in black ink and read FETISHES—HARDBACK.
“Why do you really want to do this, Eddie?”
“A lot of people think we know something about what happened to the money from the Bank of Vietnam.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, we were there, somewhere. If I take this guy’s money and we use it to poke around a little, maybe we’ll remember things; start to put it all together.” Eddie waited, but Winnebago didn’t say anything, so he spelled it out. “Maybe we can find out where that money is.”
“Did it ever occur to you that someone probably doesn’t want anyone to find out; that maybe they’re getting rid of anyone they think knows anything?” Winnebago’s eyes had shifted away from Eddie, but now they shifted back. “That’s probably why Captain Austin ended up with his head busted open, and you can bet your sweet ass that’s what those big red circles around us on those pictures are supposed to mean.”
“I don’t think so,” Eddie said. “If someone wanted to kill us, why put us on guard like that? The photographs have to mean something else. We just haven’t figured it out yet.”
Winnebago didn’t have an answer for that, but his skeptical expression remained unchanged. “You haven’t been to Bangkok in twenty years,” he said. “You’ve got no chance screwing around out there, man. No fucking chance.”
“I’ve been to Bangkok since we were there.” Eddie’s voice sounded a little defensive, even to him. “A couple of times.”
Eddie had loved Bangkok in the seventies when he and Winnebago had taken their R&R there. He had been back twice since: once on a banking case when he was still an uptown lawyer, and again about a year ago getting an unlucky druggie whose father owned half of Santa Cruz out of jail. He had to admit that Bangkok had changed a lot over twenty years and he was less certain what he thought about it now.
“Look, Winnebago, I’ve never asked you for anything before, but I don’t want to go out there without someone watching my back.”
“Then don’t go, Eddie.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Bullshit. Don’t risk your life in some fucking crazy treasure hunt, man.”
“It’s not the money.”
“Not the money?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you can explain to me what I’m missing here.”
Eddie looked down at his feet, inhaled deeply, and made little popping sounds with his lips. The question was more than fair. He knew Winnebago would ask it, he had asked it of himself over and over since last night when he decided what he was going to do, and he had been thinking all the way over to the bookshop about how to explain his answer sensibly.
Everyone he knew daydreamed about trading in their old life for a new one. Everyone said that someday they would really do it. Now Eddie’s someday had walked right up to the door and knocked. He was staring straight into a gaping exit hole from the scattered debris of his life and an unshakable conviction had taken control of him. He had to crawl through that hole.
Maybe Winnebago had nailed it. Maybe it was a treasure hunt. But what would the treasure turn out to be? The money from Operation Voltaire? Maybe. But perhaps it would be something else entirely; something completely unexpected. The more Eddie thought about it, the less he figured there was any real difference. The truth was he just wanted to hunt for treasure before he got too old to know what it looked like when he found it.
That was it really. That was what mattered.
Here lies Eddie Dare. He was okay.
Fuck that shit.
Eddie tried to explain that to Winnebago, but the more he talked the more ridiculous he thought it sounded. Finally he just trailed off.
“I’m going to Bangkok, Winnebago,” Eddie finished. “Maybe I can’t make you understand why, but I’m going, and I’m asking you right now to come with me.”
Winnebago tapped a Camel out of a nearly empty pack and took his time about lighting it. “You don’t have the first damned idea what you’re going to do when you get there, do you?”
He was still shaking his head, but Eddie got the feeling that he was coming around.
“Sure I do.”
“And that is… “ Winnebago made a little gesture with his hand.
“If we can find out what Captain Austin was doing in Bangkok, who he knew there and what he did before he died, we can put that together with what we already know and I’ll bet we’ll have something.”
“And how are you going to do all that?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Eddie admitted, “but I got a place to start. I know a guy in Bangkok.”
“Oh well, you know a guy in Bangkok. The population there is…what? Six, eight million?”
“About ten, I think. Give or take.”
“And you know one guy. That’s just great. I can certainly see how that solves everything.”
Eddie was sure now he had Winnebago. He could see it in his eyes. “Yeah, but you’re going to come with me anyway, aren’t you?” he said.
Winnebago leaned back as far as he could without falling off his stool, put
his hands over his eyes, and sighed deeply. “Man, I know I’m going to regret this.”
Eddie knew that might well be true, so he kept his mouth shut.
“When are we leaving?” Winnebago dropped his hands and shook his head a little more, still not quite believing what he was doing.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I can’t take off like that, Eddie! I’ve got to find someone to watch the store.”
“No one’s bought a damned thing here in six months. Just lock the door.”
“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Winnebago grumbled, but he opened the drawer beneath the cash register and began scraping around anyway, trying to find his keys.
***
EDDIE walked over to Mason to catch a cable car back to his office. The morning fog had turned to rain while he was inside the bookstore and a few big drops were splattering Columbus as he headed down a block and turned west on Vallejo. There was an odor in the rain that he had never noticed before, the smell of salt from the Pacific and something else, something that he couldn’t put a name to.
He had spent half his life in San Francisco and he always thought of it as like living inside a huge amusement park. From outside the wall, somewhere over in the real world, he could hear the thuds and crashes and the sounds of smashing furniture, but he had made his life there inside, tucked safely away from all that. He had let the stars spin past and the planet whirl inexorably under him for almost twenty years, and he had never worried all that much about what things might be like out there beyond the wall.
Yet now here he was, about to hurl himself across the Pacific Ocean and fly halfway around the world onboard his personal red-eye. Something was waiting for him in Bangkok, he knew that it was, and he was ready to trade his present for whatever the future might offer him.
Just like that.
Eddie didn’t blame Winnebago for being skeptical. It all must have sounded unbelievably stupid when he tried to explain it, but he knew he could do it. He could make the trade, and he could make it stick. He did know a guy in Bangkok and, what’s more, the guy he knew was quite a guy.
Eddie could feel the bargain being sealed as he trotted toward a green and yellow cable car rattling up Mason. He reached for a brass pole, pulled himself up onto the car’s worn steps, and paused a moment to breathe in the sweetness of the San Francisco breeze. The high-pitched singing of the cable in its metal groove beneath the street had never sounded quite so distinct to him, or so lyrical.
Glancing back over his shoulder at North Beach, he saw it as if he was peering through a great distance, watching as it receded further and further into his past. He was edging across an unmarked border, creeping into a new world. One that was unknown to him certainly, maybe even unknowable.
It was wonderful.
Ten
BAR Phillips was a New York boy who headed west in the fifties searching for the golden life like everybody else. But somehow he just slid right on through California without grabbing hold of anything solid, skidded all the way across the Pacific, and didn’t stop until he ended up in Bangkok.
From the Big Apple to the Big Orange to the Big Mango. It still had a kind of nutty logic to it, even when he thought about it now, almost forty years later. He had headed west, hadn’t he? and Bangkok was about as far west as he could get without falling completely off the edge of the world.
On the other hand, sometimes Bar figured that was exactly what he had done. What was it about Bangkok that held him there? The place was so polluted you couldn’t breathe; it was grid-locked with cars and crazies; hardly anyone spoke English; it was hotter than hell; half the year the streets were flooded, and the other half they were full of rabid dogs. No, he couldn’t see for the life of him what kept him there. He could only see that he would never leave.
Bar had tried going back to New York once in the late seventies just to see if he was missing out on anything. He quickly discovered the whole place had turned fat, ugly, mean, and crazy. It scared the hell out of him.
He ended up in some tourist hotel on 47th Street down almost to 10th Avenue, just sitting in his room day after day, eating pizzas he got delivered from Ray’s, and flipping slowly back and forth through two hundred channels of cable television. He was too bewildered and terrorized by the city even to go outside much and after a week of that he decided he was done. He took a cab straight to Kennedy and sat in the terminal until somebody got him into a seat on a flight back to Bangkok. That was that. From then on he knew there was nothing else left for him. He was a Bangkok lifer.
***
BAR slurped down the last of his tomato soup, ran some water into the bowl, and dumped it in the sink. As he walked past the only real window in his tiny condo, he stopped and contemplated the streaky orange twilight that he thought was the nicest thing about Bangkok.
Some people said there was so much crud in Bangkok’s air that you should walk on it instead of trying to breathe it, but Bar loved the way it made the sky glow just after sunset with a luminescent, mango-colored haze. Maybe that wasn’t the reason why some of Bangkok’s foreign residents called the place the Big Mango, but Bar always thought it should have been. Bangkok’s twilight radiance was what kept him believing there was magic in the world. If the only price he had to pay for that was sucking up a little crap with his air, he’d pay it, gladly.
From the window he could see all the way across the city to the Chao Phraya River, its dusky surface turning to pewter in the fading light. A long train of broad-beamed teak rice barges was drifting slowly downriver toward the Gulf of Thailand. They looked like a child’s wooden toys embedded forever in a river of tin.
Part Oriental alchemy, part Western jazz, John Coltrane played on instruments from another planet, there was something about Bangkok that defied time and disdained reality. That might be a romantic way to look at a city that hardly anyone else ever thought of as romantic, either before or after sunset, but that was the way Bar Phillips wanted to look at Bangkok, and that was the way he had looked at it for most of his almost forty years there.
***
AN hour later, Bar got out of a taxi on Silom Road just across the street from the Dusit Thani Hotel, a cavernous old barn favored by airline crews and Taiwanese tourists. He gave the driver a 100 baht note and ignored him when he demanded 200. Ducking down a narrow alley, Bar bypassed the long rows of carts where street vendors were setting up the night market. Slipping past the first wave of grazing tourists, he made for the Crown Royal.
Izzie Schultz had opened the Crown Royal in the early seventies following a couple of years as an observer with the Canadian Army in Vietnam, although Izzie doubted that what he had spent his time observing was exactly what the Canadian Army had in mind when it sent him there. He had declined to re-enlist when he found out he was about to be sent back to Canada. With all the warm, sticky delights of Saigon and Bangkok beckoning, he couldn’t think of even one good reason to go back to freezing his ass off in some God-forsaken, crappy little Canadian town.
Izzie hadn’t been much interested in politics back then, but he had observed enough on his rounds among the massage parlors to know that Saigon wasn’t much of a bet for long-term retirement. That left Bangkok, so he had used all of his savings to buy into a bar there with some friends and, in a parting salute to his heritage, he had convinced his partners to name the place the Crown Royal.
Good-bye Canada, you ice cold freezing bitch. Hel-looo Bangkok.
The Crown Royal was dark and woody, comfortably smoky. No loud music, no go-go girls, just a place where a serious man went for a serious drink. Over twenty odd years it had become a Bangkok institution. Although Izzie had long ago bought out his partners, everything else was pretty much the same as it had always been.
Bar settled into his usual seat in the last booth at the back, facing forward. A local never sat with his back to the door in Bangkok. Those were the seats the tourists got. They didn’t know any better.
“Hi, baby.”
A dark girl wearing a short red dress and pretty good counterfeit Gucci pumps put a sweating Carlsberg in front of Bar and squeezed onto the seat next to him. She began to massage the back of his neck with more energy than skill and he reached around and gently removed her hands without looking at her.
The girl affected a hurt pout. “You no love Noi no more. You treat Noi bad.”
A large man wearing a T-shirt and khaki shorts flopped into the booth opposite Bar and banged down a bottle of Singha. He was balding and fleshy, his long jowls hanging down over his collar, and he twisted his body around on the seat until he was in a position to flick his eyes comfortably back and forth between Bar and the front door.
Bar had some long ago night christened the man Sydney Sidney since he claimed to be an Australian named Sidney and no one seemed to know what his last name really was. Sidney said he was an undercover agent for ASIS, the Australian foreign intelligence service, but no one really believed him and Bar had stopped trying to catch him out years ago.
Frankly, Bar didn’t even think Sidney was Australian, but what the hell difference did it make? Bangkok was the kind of place where, if you were foolish enough to ask anyone who they were and what they did, the only thing you could be certain of was that they would lie to you. Even if it didn’t matter, and it almost never did, they would still lie to you. Bangkok just did that to people.
“You seen Flippo around tonight, mate?” Sidney asked.
“Nope. Just got here.”
Flippo Kurtz had worked diligently for seventeen years on the assembly line of a Mercedes plant in Stuttgart until he won a package tour to Bangkok in a union raffle. After three days, he decided he would be out of his mind to go back to Germany and he started a business in Bangkok making T-shirts for tourists. Discovering a previously unknown genius for devising smutty epigrams, he had prospered hugely.
“He come and he go,” Noi offered.
Sidney nodded slowly and finished his beer with a thoughtful expression, contemplating the philosophical nuances in Noi’s observation.
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