Last but not least, a police general, with credentials approved by the Junta, had made inquiries about the girl. It all added up to the same thing—let the three of them go and keep an eye on them. If they were genuine troublemakers, they’d slip up again soon enough. Meanwhile, the big bosses had bigger fish to fry. “Send them home,” was the order the military officer from Isan delivered in person. The three students had signed on the dotted line.
Palm thought about what his signature meant—submission without consent, form over substance, lies over truth.
Once they were outside the military camp, Fah broke the silence.
“We have three days to rewrite our paper and submit it.”
“If we don’t?” asked Oak.
“We’ll be ‘invited’ back.”
Palm shook his head.
“They’ve given us a standing invitation.”
“Let’s give them what they want,” said Oak.
“On that day, we are no longer human beings,” Fah said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.”—Graham Greene, The Quiet American
WHEN CALVINO ARRIVED on Soi Cowboy, the first farang he came across was Jerry, a regular from the Lonesome Hawk back in the day. Just emerged from the hospital after a hip replacement operation, he hobbled alongside Calvino for a while.
“The place always reminded me of a field hospital in Vietnam,” he said. “I’m sending that one to Glover. It should win his weekly contest,” he said, shaking his head.
Glover ran a popular website read around the world, and punters sent him hundreds of emails a week to win a five hundred baht monthly prize. The latest prize entries were for metaphors to describe the coup.
Jerry patted his hip.
“You don’t waltz through airport security with all these metal screws holding you together, so I guess I’m stuck here for a while,” he said. “I wish the Lonesome Hawk hadn’t closed. I could sit there for hours and talk to people. Now I can’t sit for long anywhere, and there’s no one to talk to anyway.”
In its own way, the old Lonesome Hawk in Washington Square had been the last Vietnam War field hospital. Calvino watched Jerry’s face twist as he slipped into a seat at an outside bar, laid his cane on the table and started scanning the foot traffic for a familiar face.
An hour later McPhail sat on the stool next to Calvino’s, nursing his third gin and tonic and smoking a cigarette. Another customer nearby sat entranced with peeling off the paper label from a bottle of Singha beer. The customer made no eye contact with the girls. He was a peeler, lost inside his own head. His thoughts were in some other place and time, where the beer flowed freely, the army stayed in the barracks, and the girls were scented, sweaty and sensual.
“You think that guy will order another beer?” said McPhail, blowing smoke. “A hundred baht says he’s just spinning his wheels. He’s not drinking any more, and he won’t take a girl either.”
Calvino slapped a hundred baht note on the table. McPhail looked at it.
“He’ll buy one more beer,” said Calvino.
McPhail put down his bet.
“I say he’s a cheap Charlie and will eat that bottle after he peels it like an orange.”
They watched the female performers go through the motions, pretending there was an audience.
“We’ve been here before—2006,” said McPhail. “Coups are bad for the bar business. How can you seriously think about getting laid when there’s a curfew? It destroys the mood. Everyone asks, where are the tourists? Well, I know where they are.”
“Where are they, McPhail?”
McPhail raised his glass.
“In their rooms, wanking.”
Patterson Roy, owner of Mama, Don’t Call, came out with another bottle of Singha and a fresh gin and tonic.
“This round is on the house,” he said. “And don’t ask how business is.”
A waitress in high heels and fishnet stockings, wearing enough lipstick to paint a half-kilometer of road divider, had spotted the money on the table and whispered to Patterson that their only two outside customers were about to pay up and bolt. Like most rumors, it wasn’t true. And like most rumors, truth was never the point, and rarely mattered. Patterson was taking no chances. He needed a couple of loyal regulars like Calvino and McPhail as front men to draw in other long-time expats, who were drawn to their own kind.
“Patterson, Calvino would like to buy you a drink,” said McPhail.
“Thanks, Ed. I should say, thanks, Vinny.”
“We’re waiting for Glover.”
“I heard that after the coup he left the country,” said Patterson.
“Rumors, Patterson. You live and die inside them.”
“Tell me about it, Ed,” said Patterson.
Calvino raised an eyebrow as Patterson ordered the waitress to bring him a Belgian beer in a frosty mug, the one he kept in the back of the fridge for special occasions. Friendship and business blurred on the Soi. Patterson had supplied Calvino with information in the past. He knew that an informant feels a bond to his handler not unlike what a bargirl feels toward a regular customer. They convinced themselves they shared more than just a business connection. Money flowed like electricity down the lines of that lie.
Patterson made a big show of pouring his Belgian beer slowly, tilting the frosted mug just right and letting the foam slowly rise on the inside.
“You’re a little quiet tonight, Vinny,” said Patterson. “You’ve got a lot on your mind. I can see that. It’s the same for everyone. I was thinking the other day, whatever happened to that little Rohingya who sold nuts, watches and cigarettes on the Soi? Now’s my chance to ask the man who’d know.”
“You mean Akash,” said Calvino.
He hadn’t thought of him for months, and he remembered him as a bamboo-reed face blinking back tears in prison, asking only for the right to peddle his tray of nuts on Soi Cowboy.
With a film of Belgian beer on his upper lip, Patterson nodded.
“He’s working the front desk of a hotel in Oslo,” said Calvino.
“No shit?”
“He’s been to England twice on his new Norwegian passport.”
“Now you’re fucking with me.”
“Okay, maybe it’s not a Norwegian passport. But he went to England. He’s given testimony to the British parliament on human trafficking.”
Calvino left out that this activity had been arranged and financed by Marley.
“I’m glad to hear he came out of it okay. Most don’t,” said Patterson. “You remember Nui. You know she married a guy in Berlin. Six months later she shows up here asking for her old job back. She lasted a week. The good life had made her lazy. She wouldn’t dance. Came in late to work. Mouthed off to customers. Got into fights with the other girls.”
“Is she working tonight?” asked Calvino.
Patterson shook his head.
“I had to fire her. She was doing drugs.”
“Too bad,” said McPhail. “I remember Calvino bought her out a couple of times.”
“She claimed her wreck of a life was Vinny’s fault.”
“Yeah? How so?” said Calvino.
“She said you destroyed her confidence. Kept buying her out, taking her home, and instead of ripping off her clothes and charging out of the gate in the bedroom rodeo, you paid her without taking a bull ride and sent her home. So she married the German on the rebound, but her self-esteem never recovered.”
“Nui’s slippery slide into the gutter was my fault?” asked Calvino.
“You know how women are, Vinny. It’s always your fault.”
McPhail butted out his cigarette. “I remember her sister, Nok.”
“What do you remember about Nok?”Patterson asked.
“I’d had a lot to drink. And the oral sex, if my memory serves me, was like one of those aborted mid-air refueling missions in high turbulence.”
They drank is silence and watched
as three girls grabbed a farang in his sixties. He was slow to break free and the girls wouldn’t let go. He dragged them as he took short, wobbly steps on his sandaled feet, sweating in baggy shorts and a T-shirt with the slogan “Same Same But Different” printed in Times New Roman. The action on the Soi was like an alien version of the Discovery Channel where a pride of gazelles jumped on an old, weak lion.
“He’s a goner,” said McPhail.
“It’s my kind of euthanasia,” said Patterson.
“It’s more like amnesia,” said Calvino. “We’ve been here before. But we keep on thinking it’s the first time.”
“It’s the coup—part euthanasia, part amnesia. Drink it down slow,” said McPhail.
The Singha beer bottle peeler called over the waitress with the big lipstick. Calvino nudged McPhail as they waited for the moment of truth. She removed the chit out of the cup and waltzed into the bar with a smile on her face. A moment later she came out with another bottle of Singha and put it down in front of the customer, slipping the chit back into the cup. Calvino picked up the two hundred baht notes and called the waitress over.
“This is for you,” he said.
After she left, Calvino said, “Patterson, the business is changing—for the bar owners, the girls and the customers. It’s never going to be like the old days. That time has come and gone, like Washington Square.”
“The Square was a slum filled with rats and drunks.”
“Hey, Patterson, don’t say that,” said McPhail. “Vinny and me had lunch there for years.”
“Not many guys from those days who are still alive,” said Patterson.
“Did I tell you that I saw Jerry coming into the soi?” asked Calvino.
“He’s still alive?” said Patterson.
“He had a hip replacement. Certain parts are alive, others replaced,” said Calvino. “At some stage it’s hard to tell if a person is alive.”
“There’s a limit to what can be replaced,” said Patterson.
“That’s the point,” said Calvino.
McPhail wrapped an arm around Patterson’s shoulder and quoted Ecclesiastes 3: “The Bible says, ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to get and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to rend and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace.’ ”
Calvino exchanged a glance with Patterson.
“You memorized the Bible?” said Calvino.
“Not the whole thing,” said McPhail. “In ninth grade, we had an assignment to memorize a poem or a page from a book. My daddy said this was the only part of the Bible that ever made any sense to him, and I should memorize it. So I did. I’ve forgotten almost everything else I ever learned. But I remember Ecclesiastes 3, yes, sir. I’ll remember it until I draw my last breath.”
He drank the rest of his gin and tonic and held up the empty glass for another round.
“ ‘A time to get and a time to lose’ pretty much describes Bangkok,” said Patterson.
The quote had sobered them up. Calvino stared at his glass. The thought slipped back into his mind that he’d been mapping the distance between Bangkok in the old days when they were all young and Bangkok now.
“When I think of the old gang at Washington Square, I think of that passage,” said McPhail.
“A time to check your timeline and a time to sleep,” said Calvino.
“Have you been to our website?” asked Patterson. “I just paid a guy from Denmark for a makeover. Everyone says you need a platform.”
In 2014 websites were like 1970s flared trousers. Yesterday’s fashions and yesterday’s technology were equivalent sources of embarrassment, pinning a man in time like a beetle on a display board.
“I’ve seen it,” said Calvino, “but...”
“But what? Give me some feedback.”
“No one is talking about the amount of traffic on websites, Patterson.”
“What are they talking about?”
“Big changes.”
“Like what?”
“Start with the slide in the quality of the girls coming through the bars. Ask yourself why that’s happening. There are reasons.”
“If you read Glover, he says they’re working in factories now.”
“Some,” said Calvino. “But there’s more available pay for play than ever. So how do you figure that’s happening?”
Where was Glover? He was more than forty minutes late for their meeting.
Patterson sipped his Belgian beer, thinking for a moment, as bar owners prided themselves on having an answer ready for any question.
“More nightclubs, after-hour places, more money for the high end. More choice than the old days.”
Patterson was in denial, thought Calvino. But who wasn’t?
“The choice is much wider and deeper than new joints opening,” said Calvino. “Commercial sex is online. You’re running something like a bookstore, and readers want e-books, cheap instant experiences. Guys like Alan Osborne saw the hand-writing on the wall and sold out.”
“What does Osborne know about social media?”
“Not much, but what he does know saved him,” said Calvino. “He saw that big change coming and bailed.”
“So where are they?”
McPhail wasn’t talking about alien life forms.
“Online,” said Calvino.
The owners and punters on Soi Cowboy had laughed at the news that Washington Square was to be bulldozed. They weren’t laughing anymore. They blamed the coup and the curfew, and those hadn’t helped anyone in their business, but they were just a distraction from a fundamental change in the nature of the game. They had once owned the night game, but that world had changed while they were waiting for the bar-fined girl to get out of the shower, towel off and return to the bar. The quick turnaround of girls had been the name of the profitable game. Now the girls were realizing that the bar wasn’t their friend; it was a middleman that could be cut out. Online commercial sex teemed with angel investors. When the Soi Cowboy girls gossiped about their colleagues, their envy focused on the one who had punched her digital ticket to freedom and left behind dancing, boredom, cat fights with the other girls over a customer, mamasans, drunks and waiting for a bar fine. The change was all upside and just a Skype screen away.
“My girls can’t figure out how to read a clock. Forget about a computer,” said Patterson.
“It’s the new generation that’s making the move,” said Calvino.
Fah’s generation, he thought, Christina Tangier’s inspired rebels.
“That’s years away, Calvino.”
“The future is already here, Patterson. Online you’ve got amateurs, semi-pros and professionals working out of their apartments. Mothers, aunties, grandmothers, students, office workers, civil servants—women in just about all lines of work have figured out that this money makes a good supplement. No need to ask you for a job.”
“Vinny’s right,” said McPhail. “Going to the bars for women is like buying a copy of Playboy or Penthouse. When is the last time you bought a dirty magazine or a porno DVD?”
“Sex and politics have moved online. There’s no going back.”
Patterson yawned and sighed.
“You’re saying I’m fucked?”
Calvino grinned.
“It looks like the old business model is busted. Think of the hot women. Where are they? I don’t see them on Soi Cowboy. They aren’t looking for jobs here or Patpong or Nana. Not now. How long will the bars last, once their supply of women is cut off? Once they’re online, you can�
�t control them. That’s what you and the coup makers have in common. People only submit when they have no choice.”
“Gun to the head.”
McPhail pressed two fingers to his own temple.
“This is why I support the coup,” said Patterson. “We need to slow things down.”
“Let’s see if those brakes work,” said Calvino.
No middleman ever thought his head was on the chopping block until the cold blade struck home.
Patterson rubbed his neck and moved his jaw. He didn’t look well. Maybe he’d seen the ax for the first time. It wouldn’t fall tonight or tomorrow night, but his fate was sealed.
TWENTY-NINE
“There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying.”—José Saramago, The Cave
IN LATE MAY, following the coup, Glover had voluntarily shut down his website. Farang_Lost_in_Thailand had become famous for featured letters from foreigners whose relationships with Thai bargirls had exploded like Chinese fireworks on New Year’s Eve, or who had suffered a visa, financial or job loss. The list of problems was endless—police, immigration, cable connection, girlfriend, wife, job, money, children, friends or apartments. Mainly, though, the broken-hearted limped into the letter room, sharing stories of failure, despair and desperation. Glover posted their cries from the heart along with brief recommendations and advice. Some of the posters came back with updates, and these exchanges between the heartbroken and Glover were followed by hundreds of thousands of readers who emailed their comments from around the world. Glover created an interactive Hunger Games column for expat men, stragglers from the rebellion against a world of servitude.
Repeat letters came in from the yo-yo farangs, the men caught in the cycle of leaving and returning over and over again. Each change was different from the previous one. This time they’d adjust to reality. Only it rarely happened. Glover concluded that people were wired one way and that rewiring them was beyond the current knowledge of science.
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