Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  Bar’s eyes drifted to a girl stacking glasses behind the bar. She was young, probably not more than twenty, and had huge brown eyes that played hide-and-seek with him from behind straight bangs that swung rhythmically from side to side as she moved her head. When the girl realized Bar was looking at her, she giggled and quickly raised an open hand to her mouth. It was a gesture of spontaneous innocence that Bar thought was so charming he briefly contemplated falling in love.

  “New?” he asked Sidney, nodding toward the girl.

  Sidney twisted around and looked where Bar’s eyes were pointing. When he turned back he was grinning. “Mine, mate.”

  “Really? That what she says?”

  “She’d better. Besides, you’re too fuckin’ old for her. What are you? Sixty?”

  Bar ignored Sidney as he studied the girl. In Bangkok a man’s age didn’t count for nearly as much as it did out in the real world.

  “What’s her name?”

  Sidney hesitated just an instant. “Meow.”

  “Bullshit,” Bar scoffed. “You never even saw her until I did.”

  “I fucking did, too.” Sidney seemed genuinely indignant. “I fucking did.”

  “Tell you what, Sidney. Don’t worry about it. She’s yours, old man. I’ll stay completely out of your way.”

  “Piss off,” Sidney snapped, but he was smiling. “Anyway, who you calling old, you fucking fossil?”

  Sidney rapped his empty Singha bottle against the table. Noi shifted her eyes slowly toward him and with another little pout snatched up the bottle and slid out of the booth to get him another beer.

  “Everything okay at the paper?” Sidney asked Bar as he followed Noi’s twitching rump with his eyes.

  “Yeah…” Bar searched for exactly the right word, but nothing came to mind so he settled for the only one that came readily to mind “…okay.”

  The paper was the Bangkok Post, the city’s primary English-language daily and the mouthpiece for the local establishment. The Post had been around for a long time, surviving coups and other lesser events remarkably intact. It wasn’t the New York Times, but Bar thought it was still a pretty good paper. On the other hand, he had to admit that it did publish some pretty strange things sometimes, and Bar himself was personally responsible for one of the strangest.

  His weekly column had been spread over a full page each Saturday for nearly thirty years. It was called Bar by Bar—a little cute maybe, but he liked it—and although few of them would admit it without making excuses, almost every expatriate and foreign visitor read it each week without fail. Bar was the ranking expert on Bangkok’s nightlife, and that was a subject in which almost every Westerner in town had far more than a passing interest.

  Bar by Bar was more than just a newspaper column. Over the years, it had become a kind of bulletin board for all the shipwrecked expats who had washed up on the great dirty beach of Bangkok, a flotsam and jetsam of lost souls who were happy as hell to be lost and only hoped no one would ever find them again.

  In some places a man’s past could foretell his future, but in Bangkok the rules were different. The world was all future. The past didn’t exist. All kinds of people regularly disappeared into Bangkok and emerged entirely recreated. The place was a sort of Bermuda Triangle for discarded lives. Growing old anywhere was shit, but drifting along Sukhumvit Road on a sticky Bangkok Saturday night with a graceful young Thai girl on their arm, a lot of middle-aged men suddenly saw life from an entirely new perspective. When they had been stuck back in Fresno spending their weekends at the Red Lobster, the future hadn’t looked nearly so promising.

  The door to the Crown Royal swung open and six Japanese wearing nearly identical gray suits tumbled in. They took seats around the one empty table, carefully organizing themselves in what Bar surmised was the appropriate order of rank. The bargirls moved quickly to stake out the newcomers, wary eyes flashing warnings at potential competitors.

  Noi glared resentfully at Sidney as she slammed his beer down. Since she had been behind the bar getting it, she had lost out on grabbing one of the Japanese for herself.

  “I stay with you. I no butterfly. I luv you,” she said to Bar as she slid back into the booth next to him, but she knew it didn’t matter what she said because Bar was never good for a touch. Not only had he heard all the bargirl stories before, he had helped make most of them up.

  “Look at that, Bar.” Sidney stared with hard eyes at the table of Japanese. “Fucking Nips think they own Asia.”

  “They do own Asia, Sidney.”

  “They don’t own my part of it, mate. Fuck ‘em.”

  Sidney shook his head, but his heart wasn’t in it. He and Bar had been having the same conversation for nearly twenty years, and it just wasn’t any fun crapping on the Japs, Sidney had noticed, unless he was totally shit-faced. Then he could really do a number on the little bastards. Somehow, stone cold sober, he found the whole subject way too depressing to get into.

  They sat in silence for a while, Sidney shooting hostile glances at the Japanese every time he heard anything that suggested one of them might be having a good time and Bar sipping slowly at his Carlsberg.

  Suddenly Sidney brightened. “I almost forgot, Bar. A guy was in here looking for you. Must have been about an hour ago.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I dunno. Just some guy. A Yank, I reckon.”

  “You didn’t know him?”

  Sidney looked disgusted. “If I knew him, Bar, I’d have fucking told you who he was, wouldn’t I?”

  “Did he know me?”

  “Seemed to.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Didn’t say. Just asked if you were coming in tonight.”

  “And you told him…” Bar prompted patiently.

  “I told him I didn’t know. Sometimes you did, sometimes you didn’t.” Sidney shrugged. “Probably just some fucking tourist wants you to autograph your column and tell him where to get laid cheap.”

  Maybe, Bar thought. And maybe not.

  When you worked the night scene in Bangkok, you always kept one ear open for footsteps. You never knew who you might have pissed off, and when you pissed off people in Bangkok they didn’t have their lawyer call your lawyer.

  The going rate for a hit in Bangkok was usually no more than five thousand baht, about a hundred and fifty American dollars. Sometimes, of course, farangs cost a little more to do since foreigners could be messy and conspicuous, but the price seldom went over ten thousand baht regardless, unless it was during an election and all the hit men were booked up.

  Bar couldn’t think of anything he had written recently that might cause anyone to want him popped, and he was even pretty sure he hadn’t been dinking the mistress of any Chinese drug peddler lately either, at least not that he knew of for sure. Maybe he was getting old, he reflected briefly. He really wasn’t much of a candidate anymore for a double tap behind the ear with one of those little .22 revolvers the local pros favored for close-in work. That thought left him with strangely mixed feelings.

  “Was the guy a Thai?” Bar asked Sidney.

  “No, a farang I already told you. Probably just some tourist looking for a bit of action.”

  Bar let it go. “Yeah, probably,” he said and took another pull from the Carlsberg.

  But he made a mental note of everything Sidney had said and filed it carefully away.

  When you had been around Bangkok for as long as Bar had, you lived by local rules. One of the most important of those was this: you were seldom interested in being found by anyone who was looking for you.

  Bar figured he had better watch his step for a few days, just to be on the safe side.

  Eleven

  THEY walked out of customs into the airport arrival hall and stood blinking in the harsh fluorescent lights trying to get their bearings. Winnebago nudged Eddie, pointing to the crowd waiting for arriving passengers behind a low chrome railing. A man wearing a crisp white uniform with brass buttons and dark
shoulder boards was holding up a large card on which was printed in block letters, WELCOME TO MR. RUPERT DARE, ESQ.

  Eddie dragged his luggage trolley over to the railing and gave the man a weary smile. “That’s me, admiral.”

  “Welcome to Bangkok, Mr. Dare. I am here to drive you to the Oriental Hotel.” The man slipped under the railing and collected Eddie’s suitcase from the luggage cart, bowing slightly as he did. “Please follow me, Mr. Dare.”

  “I got a bag, too,” Winnebago said. “You only work for certain races or what, little buddy?”

  The man stopped walking and turned around. He glanced quickly at Winnebago, then looked at Eddie, his face a question mark.

  “Winnebago is with me,” Eddie explained. “He’s an Indian, but it’s not his fault.”

  “Native American,” Winnebago corrected.

  “Are you still on that kick?”

  “I think I’ll just try it on for size while we’re here. See how it goes.”

  “I don’t know.” Eddie looked at the driver. He was still punchy from the 22-hour flight and knew he wasn’t making much sense, but it didn’t particularly matter to him. “What do you think?” he asked the man.

  The driver was starting to wonder what he’d gotten into. Who were these deranged morons? His wife always said that white guys were crazy. He put on the blandest expression he could manage and switched switched on his humble coolie routine.

  “I just driver, sir. I no understand.”

  Winnebago held out his suitcase. “Just take it away, man, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  The driver quickly grabbed Winnebago’s bag with his free hand and, giving a little bob with his head, scuttled away.

  ***

  THE dark blue Mercedes edged out of the airport and turned its three-pointed star toward central Bangkok. Within minutes it was grinding slowly through the worst traffic Eddie had ever seen.

  The road from the airport looked like a freeway inexplicably converted to a temporary parking lot. It was marked with four lanes, but no one seemed particularly impressed. Vehicles of every possible kind jostled for space and added up to at least six lanes, if not more. Calling this a traffic jam, Eddie thought, was like calling a lump of coal a dead plant.

  Even inside the big Mercedes chilled down to the temperature of a berserk Frigidaire, Eddie could smell Bangkok, a mix of automobile exhaust, jasmine blossoms, burned grease, drifting incense, and raw sewage that was like the smell of no other city he had ever known. It was something that the strongest rain would never wash away, an odor that even the hot, heavy Bangkok air could never smother.

  The massed assault on his senses was starting to kick-start Eddie into a second wind. He knew a place where Bar Phillips hung out most evenings and had thought during the flight about stopping there on the way in from the airport. He could always call The Bangkok Post and leave a message, of course, but Bar wasn’t a guy who put much effort into returning calls and Eddie thought the sooner he could find him the better. Maybe he would get lucky if they just dropped by the Crown Royal.

  “You feel like making a stop on the way in?” He glanced sideways at Winnebago.

  “Fuck.” Winnebago tilted his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “What I feel like is hammered sheep shit on a flat rock.”

  Visibility was terrible through the gathering darkness and the rancid air, but Eddie could just make out lines of shophouses along the roadside, street stalls with dented aluminum pots of food stacked on wooden tables, and junkyards piled with greasy automobile parts. In one place, a bunch of kids and dogs were just standing by the freeway watching the traffic not move. They looked to Eddie like fishermen gathered on a riverbank, waiting to cast a line out into the traffic and haul in an old tire or maybe a whole Toyota.

  The car’s windows were tinted so darkly that no one could see in. Eddie looked straight into the eyes of people outside without them knowing he was there. It was a creepy feeling, watching people that way as they crawled along, but there was something oddly familiar about it, too. It was like being on a ride at Disneyland, he decided, sitting with the other tourists in a car being towed slowly through Third World Land, a place of chaos and squalor, but boasting stunningly life-like animatronics.

  The Mercedes edged along until they came upon a pack of street kids wearing shorts without shirts and working the roadway selling garlands of flowers. Suddenly an old man leaned up against the window and Eddie jumped in spite of himself. The man was a skinny, shrunken fellow wearing a baggy Oakland Raiders T-shirt and he thrust out a rooster that looked even more skinny and shrunken than he did. Jesus, Eddie wondered, who would buy a rooster in the middle of a traffic jam? But then the car began to edge forward, the old man fell behind, and Eddie never found out.

  They didn’t have any trouble locating the Crown Royal, but Bar Phillips wasn’t around and no one seemed to know whether he was coming in any time soon. Eddie briefly considered waiting, but he was beaten up from the long flight and told the driver just to take them on to the hotel. Besides, there really wasn’t all that much of a rush, he told himself. He would get some sleep and see what the next day brought.

  An assistant manager dressed in a frock coat and gray striped trousers was waiting when their car finally pulled up to the Oriental and he gave Winnebago the same kind of look that the driver had. Followed by two uniformed porters, each carrying one suitcase, he escorted Eddie and Winnebago to a suite facing the river near the top of the hotel. After assuring them that the formalities of registration had already been taken care of and politely wishing them a pleasant stay, he bowed his way out of the suite.

  “That was real nice,” Winnebago said. “All except the part when he asked if you needed a small room for ‘your man’ here.”

  Eddie stood at the big windows and looked at the Chao Phraya River down below. It was a lazy looking bastard, wide and still, twisting aimlessly back and forth through the city. Here and there lights winked on small boats dodging through the darkness, darting like water bugs in shifting patterns that made no more sense to Eddie than the meandering of the big river itself.

  When he heard the two sharp taps, he walked over and opened the door. For a moment he wasn’t able to decide if the figure standing there was a small boy or a midget with weird dress sense. Decked out in a spotless white uniform with a pillbox hat tilted to the side and tied under his chin with a red ribbon, the caller wordlessly thrust out a silver tray containing nothing but a single white envelope. Eddie took the envelope and the apparition wheeled sharply and vanished through some almost invisible door in the hotel corridor. With a shrug, Eddie closed the door and tore open the envelope.

  “Who was that?” Winnebago asked.

  “I wouldn’t know how to tell you.”

  Eddie scanned the single sheet of paper.

  “According to this,” he told Winnebago, “we won’t be seeing our benefactor until noon tomorrow. Thank God. What I need is a shower and about twelve hours of sleep in a real bed.”

  Winnebago couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What? We’re in Bangkok, man! Sleep? Let’s get some action!”

  “I thought you were all done in, Sitting Bull. If that’s what you have in mind, you’re going to need more energy than either of us has left tonight. You’re a lot older than you were the last time you were here.”

  “Maybe you, white man,” Winnebago snapped, slapping an open palm against his chest, “but not this Native American.”

  Eddie responded with a sound that was appropriately ambiguous, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on the couch. There was a copy of the Bangkok Post on the coffee table and he picked it up, idly flipping the pages.

  Winnebago lit a Camel and examined the tray of crystal glasses on top of a large teak cabinet under the windows. “Nice glasses, but why so many?”

  “They go with the bar.” Eddie lowered the newspaper and pointed toward the cabinet’s double doors. “Probably in there.”

  Winn
ebago ditched his cigarette in an ashtray and opened the cabinet doors.

  “Wow! Look at this, Eddie! There’s even an ice box in here!” He pulled on the handle and the little refrigerator rattled open. “You want something?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Neither will you when you find out how much that stuff costs in a place like this.”

  “Isn’t our bill being paid by this guy who gave you the ticket?”

  Eddie reflected on that for a moment. “Sometimes, Winnebago, I fail to credit you for the simple wisdom you bring to life’s larger dilemmas.”

  Eddie walked over, cracked open a bottle of Tanqueray, and put a generous measure into one of the glasses along with a couple of ice cubes. Winnebago brought a can of Carlsberg and a bag of chips over to the coffee table. He popped the tab on the can and ripped open the bag, scooping out a handful of the chips and stuffing them into his mouth. Sinking back into the soft cushions of the couch and propping his feet up on the table, Eddie sloshed the gin around and watched the clear liquid bounce between the tiny blocks of ice, making little pools and curls as it collided with the crystal walls of the glass. Then he looked up and for the first time fully absorbed the elegance and refinement of their surroundings.

  Is some yo-yo really going to show up here tomorrow and hand me $100,000?

  It sounded too good to be true, and in Eddie’s experience it was axiomatic that anything that sounded too good to be true always was.

  What the hell? Just have fun while it all lasts.

  Eddie took a long hit of the Tanqueray and thought about how good it tasted, about how good everything tasted right then. He flipped a few more pages in the Bangkok Post while he sipped at his drink and then folded over a page and held the paper out to Winnebago.

  “Here’s the guy I’ve been telling you about.”

  Winnebago glanced at the tiny picture at the top of the column. “He looks kind of old.”

  “Well,” Eddie admitted, “he’s not young, but neither are we anymore, my friend. Bar’s been around Bangkok forever. He’s the guy to call if you want to know where they bury the bodies.”