Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  Tugging Winnebago behind him, Eddie jumped into the open elevator. When the door slid shut behind them, he hit the red button on the panel that turned it off; then he pulled his key ring out of his right-hand trouser pocket and flipped open the tiny blade of the nail clipper that he carried around attached to it. Slipping the point under the bottom edge of the control panel, Eddie twisted it in a little and then pushed down on it as hard as he could. Somewhat to his own surprise, his makeshift pry bar worked just fine and the panel popped out far enough for him to get his fingers under it and give it another tug. When he did, the whole thing came out in his hands. He pulled it toward him, turned it over, and examined the back.

  “I see what you’re doing!” Winnebago shouted so loudly that Eddie put a finger to his lips and gave him a hard look. “I saw this in a Disney movie once. Flipper or Son of Flipper or some fucking fish movie. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Eddie nodded without taking his eyes away from the back of the panel.

  “The good guy got into an elevator and shut it off,” Winnebago said, “then he turned the lights on and off on the little thing outside to make it look like he was going up. When the bad guy went up in the other elevator, Flipper—or whoever the Christ it was—turned the elevator back on and ran off.”

  “Flipper was a fish.”

  “Whatever. But that’s still what you’re going do, isn’t it, Eddie?”

  Eddie continued to examine the back of the control panel. “Do you think it will work?”

  “That was a movie for kids. This is a crappy office building in Bangkok. I think you’ve got no goddamned chance.”

  It had seemed simple enough in the movie, but maybe Winnebago was right. Perhaps he had been tired or drunk when he saw it because now that he had the plate out all he could see was a mass of wires. He didn’t have the first idea what to do with any of them. Eddie figured he had a couple of seconds at most to think of something smart because the man who had been following them would soon be standing in front of the elevators looking at the indicator lights, if he wasn’t already.

  He still had his nail clipper in his hand and, having no better idea what to do with it, he stuck it against the back of the bottom button just to see what would happen.

  Eddie was so delighted when the light clicked on that he almost dropped the panel, but he didn’t. He could only hope that the light outside had come on just the same way. He pulled the clipper out and stuck it against the back of the next button and it clicked on, too. After repeating the process all the way up to the top floor, Eddie held the clipper against the back of the last button for a long time to give their pursuer the best possible opportunity to take the bait and get himself well upstairs. Then he pocketed his nail clipper and pushed the panel back into place. Taking a deep breath, he turned the elevator on.

  The doors opened onto an empty lobby and they stepped out and looked up at the indicator lights blinking over the other elevator. When the light reached the top floor and stopped flashing, they both laughed out loud.

  “Well, son of a bitch.” Eddie grinned and punched Winnebago on the shoulder.

  “You are a god, Walt Disney,” Winnebago intoned respectfully as they walked briskly across the lobby and back out into the street. “You are a motherfucking god.”

  Eighteen

  THE rainy season in Bangkok begins in June and doesn’t end until at least November. During those six months everyone survives day to day, never knowing when the heavens will open and the city will slosh into chaos.

  Bar scratched at his cheek and watched the rain from the library on the fourth floor of the Bangkok Post Building. It was coming down so hard that the sound of water crashing into the windows hurt his ears and the salvos of thunder made Bangkok seem like a city under siege.

  The rain never bothered Thais as much as it did the foreign residents of Bangkok. Thais just took off their shoes, pulled pairs of rubber thongs from their bags, rolled up their pants, and went about their business as if having surf in the city’s streets was the most natural occurrence in the world.

  Bar firmly believed that it was the Buddhist thing that caused Thais to accept the annual monsoons so stoically. If Christianity could be summed up in one line, it would be, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ If Thai Buddhism could be summed up in one line, it would be, ‘Shit happens.’

  Bar had been paging through recent copies of local newspapers for almost three hours looking for any mention of the name Harry Austin, but so far he had nothing. He could always just ask around, of course, but Eddie Dare’s whole story had such an odor that he didn’t want to get close to it until he knew something, at least enough to guess what Dare was really up to. Right now he didn’t know anything.

  Ten grand was ten grand, but living in Bangkok had taught him to be cautious of foreigners who showed up touting grand schemes and dangling enticing propositions. He had seen a pretty good truckload of them over the years. These guys floated in and out again and resident farangs rash enough to get involved with them were usually left to clean up a mess with the locals, which frequently got a little touchy.

  Bar had to be careful, he knew, but still…

  He glanced out the windows again and saw that the rain had eased off, so he pushed the stack of newspapers away with a sigh. Gathering his things and taking the elevator down to the lobby, he headed out to the line of motorcycle taxis waiting in front of the Post Building. As he walked down the steps, he saw a slim woman in a yellow silk suit talking to two men. She saw him at the same time, gave a quick wave, and bounced toward him, high heels clicking on the pavement.

  Her name was Worawanna Subhasawasdikul, improbable though that might seem to anyone other than another Thai, and she had recently been assigned to Bar as his assistant. Wor had graduated from the University of Delaware only the year before and sometimes it bothered Bar a little that Wor’s English was not only better than his Thai, it might even be better than his English. In spite of that, Bar had quickly developed the same sort of easy relationship with Wor that he had with most women he wasn’t sleeping with, which included almost all of them.

  “Mr. Bar, did that messenger boy find you?”

  He loved that. Wor had called him Mr. Phillips at first, but he insisted she just call him Bar. She wasn’t comfortable with that, she said, so they finally settled on Mr. Bar.

  “What messenger boy?”

  “I told him you were in the library. He said he knew what you looked like.” Wor giggled. “You’re a very famous man, I think.”

  Bar waved away the compliment. “Nothing important, I’m sure. Probably just some press release.”

  The Thai postal service was so unreliable and motorcycle messengers were so cheap that everything, even junk mail, was sent around Bangkok by hand.

  “Okay, Mr. Bar. Anything else I can do before I go?”

  “Not unless you’ve heard of a guy named Harry Austin.”

  Wor made a thinking face and Bar watched, enjoying it.

  “Does he work here?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” She looked startled for second. “Then I don’t know him. I don’t know anybody who’s dead.”

  Yeah, that’d be right, Bar thought, briefly considering how indecently young this woman was. Sometimes he thought most of the people he knew were dead, or at least they looked pretty damn close to it.

  He watched Wor as she clicked off toward a bus stop wondering what she did when she wasn’t at the Post. She was Thai-Chinese, attractive, energetic, and well dressed. Other than that, he knew practically nothing about her, not if she was married, or had children, or spent her nights jerking off Japanese tourists in a massage parlor.

  Well, he doubted that.

  Bar sometimes rode buses himself, but the most efficient way to negotiate Bangkok’s clogged streets, sometimes the only way, was on the back of a motorcycle. A skilled rider could weave one of the whining little beasts between the vehicles tangled in the gridloc
ked streets and arrive at almost any destination long before any other vehicle. On the other hand, there was a downside. You still got stuck in the traffic sometimes anyway, and sitting on the back of a motorbike in 95-degree heat sucking on the exhaust pipe of a clapped-out Chinese bus was not everyone’s idea of a good time.

  Bar selected one of the motorcycle boys who didn’t look overly stoned on paint thinner that evening, gave directions, and swung onto the bike behind him. It coughed and sputtered the first couple of times the rider tried to start it, but on the third try it caught with a deep roar and the boy bumped them over the curb and wedged his way into the passing traffic. The rain was much lighter now, but the drops that were still falling were big and heavy. Occasionally one would splatter against Bar like a huge, well-aimed gob of spit.

  He enjoyed taking motorcycle taxis most of the time. Their seats carried a fair cross-section of the city. He had seen them occupied by chubby, red-faced farangs clutching their Wall Street Journals; by Thai mothers collecting their children from school, two or three stacked up like tiny packages between her and the rider; by deliverymen balancing improbable towers of boxes; and even by policemen, hats pulled low, and opaque, black glasses masking their eyes as they headed off to do whatever cops really did in Bangkok.

  Bar’s favorite sight by far, however, was the Thai office girls. They usually rode sidesaddle, balancing on the back of the weaving machines with breathtaking grace and perfect nonchalance. Bar had no doubt at all that Bangkok had the best looking office girls in the world,. Certainly the best dressed. They never seemed to wear anything but brightly colored, cheerful suits with straight, tight skirts that ended a few inches above their knees. Their well-cut jackets, always buttoned, emphasized small waists and perfect hips, and their smooth bare legs flowed down to tiny feet clad in business-like pumps.

  A pack of bikes had edged its way past the gridlocked cars and buses to the next intersection and, when the traffic light on Rama IX went green, they howled off in a ear-splitting roar. That was the moment that every motorcycle taxi rider lived for. After a traffic light changed, there was occasionally a couple of hundred yards of open road on the other side of the intersection. Allowing a motorcycle ridden by a Thai onto a road without traffic was suicidal. Even showing them a few hundred yards of it was pretty risky. Bar could never believe how fast they got the bikes going in so little space, nor how quickly they slowed down to squeeze back between the lanes of traffic stalled at the next light.

  But today Bar was paying less attention to the death race than he usually did. He was still thinking about Eddie Dare and his fanciful yarn. The whole thing worked at him, although it wasn’t his problem and he couldn’t see for the life of him why he was so caught up in it. This was just a little research job on the side, wasn’t it? Whoever was trying to intimidate those guys probably didn’t even know Bar existed. No reason to worry, he told himself again. None at all.

  Just take the ten grand and do the job, he told himself.

  Bar’s driver had managed to shoot clear of the pack back at Rama IX and make a pretty cool little move to slip between two lines of buses and get all the way up to the next light before he had to stop again. When the other bikes caught up, a big Yamaha with a passenger riding pillion pulled up alongside them. The passenger, his face invisible behind a greasy black visor, slowly turned his helmeted head and looked at Bar.

  When he didn’t turn away after a glance, Bar became a little wary; and when the passenger reached inside a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, still without turning his head away, Bar almost shit himself.

  The most popular method in Thailand for conducting a contract hit was to do business from the back of a motorcycle. It was a handy arrangement. The rider could get the gunman in close to the target without arousing his suspicion, and both the rider and the shooter wore helmets that rendered them completely unidentifiable. Motorcycle hitters usually favored .45 caliber automatics with soft point slugs rather than the much smaller .22 revolvers used by the real professionals who preferred to take you from behind at close quarters. The idea was to make sure the victim was messed up enough to kill him, even if the shooter wasn’t talented enough to get off a good shot from the back of a motorcycle, which he almost never was.

  Everything Bar had heard about contract shootings from motorbikes, and it was a great deal during his almost forty years in Bangkok, ran through his head in the moment he saw the passenger on the Yamaha push his hand deep into his bag. He had always wondered what he would do if he saw this coming, and now he knew.

  He froze.

  The passenger’s hand slowly emerged from the canvas bag, Bar’s eyes bolted to it. Bar pleaded with himself to move, but his body was locked rigidly in position. Only his eyes still seemed to be working. The hand continued its movement, and Bar began to resign himself to the inevitable.

  Maybe he’ll miss. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Maybe the little fucker will miss.

  The hand appeared and Bar clinched his eyes shut, bracing himself as it thrust toward him.

  Nothing happened.

  Bar cracked his eyes open, making tiny slits of them. He almost laughed out loud.

  The big Yamaha was still there, and the passenger still had his arm out stretched just as Bar had thought it would be, but his hand didn’t hold the .45 which had grown so large in Bar’s imagination that its muzzle had taken on the dimensions of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  It held an envelope.

  The passenger waved the envelope at Bar, gesturing for him to take it. When Bar hesitated, the waving became more frantic.

  Well, what the hell? Bar reached out and took it.

  All he had time to see before the light changed and the bikes roared away again was that it was an ordinary airmail envelope with his name neatly printed on it in black ink.

  Just that, and nothing more.

  Nineteen

  AFTER Eddie and Winnebago bolted out of the lobby of the office building, they turned left on Sukhumvit and melted into the sidewalk crowds, or at least they melted into the crowds as well as a tall white man and an American Indian could expect to melt into a crowd anywhere in Bangkok.

  “That was great, man!” Winnebago laughed as they sloshed through puddles left by the rain that had stopped falling as suddenly as it had begun. “That was fuckin’ great!”

  “Don’t get too excited. He won’t have any trouble finding us again whenever he wants.”

  “Any idea who—”

  “Not a clue,” Eddie cut him off. “None.”

  Eddie waved his hand toward a passing tuk-tuk. It veered immediately to the curb and heeled up unsteadily on two of its three tiny wheels as it stopped to pick them up.

  “Soi 31,” Eddie told the driver. He and Winnebago ducked under the fringed canopy that sheltered the small passenger compartment and scrambled onto the vehicle’s orange plastic bench.

  The young Thai piloting the battered vehicle twisted around and quickly sized up his prospects. “Hundred baht,” he announced, holding his index finger up to Eddie to emphasize the number. Eddie waved him on.

  The tuk-tuk lurched away from the curb with the deafening, high-pitched throb that gave the contraption its name. Winnebago wrapped both hands around the railing to keep himself from falling into the street, fixed his eyes straight ahead, and hung on. Paying scant attention to the road, the driver focused primarily on tuning the transistor radio that dangled from the rearview mirror. Cutting off a bus, the tuk-tuk driver couldn’t believe his luck when he looked up from the radio and found himself in a lane that was momentarily clear of traffic. He hunched forward and floored it. It was less than five minutes before he made a right turn off Sukhumvit into a small soi and suddenly slowed.

  “This soi 31.” The driver turned his head back toward Eddie. “Where you go?”

  “The Little Princess. Do you know where it is?”

  The driver grinned. He let the tuk-tuk coast as he racked the engine and weighed the opportunity that had suddenly
been presented to him.

  “No girl now. Close.”

  Eddie nodded, but said nothing.

  “I know good place. Many girl. Very nice. Very sexy. I take you. Okay?”

  “No girls. Just take us to the Little Princess.”

  “Close, boss. Little Princess close.”

  “Maybe.” Eddie pulled a red banknote from his pocket and held it up. “But we’re going there anyway.”

  The boy shrugged and turned away, gunning the tuk-tuk on down the soi. That’s another crazy farang story he’ll have for his friends, Eddie thought. When the tuk-tuk boys are drinking their beer together after work, I wonder what they will make of the two farangs who insisted on going to a closed massage parlor.

  A short distance off Sukhumvit the food vendors thinned out and the highrises became houses, largely invisible behind high concrete walls topped with broken glass. Sleepy looking security guards lounged in sling chairs in front of some of the gates and flies buzzed around packs of scabby dogs dozing in whatever shade they could find between the concrete trench of the road and the unbroken panorama of walls.

  The tuk-tuk swung out to pass a group of young girls in identical dark blue skirts, white blouses, white socks, and black Mary Janes. They were bunched up against a wall near one of the gates, smoking and gossiping, ducking out early from one of the expensive private schools in the neighborhood, Eddie guessed. As they whined by, the girls stared at the two big farangs and one of the bolder ones flashed a smile and waved. Eddie waved back, setting off a fit of giggles.

  The driver suddenly cut right into a narrow lane that was badly potholed. Water filled most of the holes and they splashed through a few before jerking to a stop. The tuk-tuk boy let the engine idle and pointed to his left without bothering to turn around.

  “What the fuck is that?” Winnebago leaned across Eddie to get a better look.