A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  A KILLING SMILE

  A NOVEL BY

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Heaven Lake Press

  Distributed in Thailand by:

  Asia Document Bureau Ltd.

  P.O. Box 1209

  Bangkok 10110, Thailand

  Fax: (662) 665-2587

  Web site: www.heavenlakepress.com

  E-mail: editorial@heavenlakepress.com

  First edition 1991 by White Lotus

  Second edition 1992 by White Lotus

  Third edition 1996 by bookSiam

  Fourth edition 2000 by Heaven Lake Press

  Kindle/MobiPocket Edition 2010

  Trade paperback edition: copyright © 2004, 2010 Christopher G. Moore

  Jacket design: Jae Song

  Author’s web site: www.cgmoore.com

  Author’s e-mail: chris@cgmoore.com

  Publisher’s note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 974-92335-7-3

  For Julie and Anne,

  and Smik

  INTRODUCTION

  I had moved from a Soho loft between Canal and Grand in New York City to a Bangkok slum dwelling within ghetto blast distance—if one really cranked it up—from Soi Cowboy. The apartment was in a Plan B mode. If no one rented the units, the owner was ready to convert the building into a toothbrush factory. Owen Wrigley posted a notice on the bulletin board at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand that cheap apartments could be rented. He lived in the house in front of the apartments and had a horror of toothbrush factories.

  I took a bus from Silom (I had rented a room along Covenant Road in a building which has long ago been knocked down and replaced with a swank office building) and walked the soi, stopping at the doorway of a small business with a sign advertising Siam Canadian. I read the sign as an invitation to provide advice and assistance to any wayward Canadian walking down the soi. I found a young Canadian named Jim sitting at an empty desk with a silent phone, a notepad, and pen. He was playing chess. Against himself and losing. I asked Jim if he knew anything about the toothbrush factory building farther down the soi. He nodded. Everyone in the neighborhood apparently knew about this place. He agreed to escort me to negotiate with the owner. It turned out to be the maid of the owner. Jim, the owner of Siam Canadian negotiated a repainting the premises, a rent of $150 a month. From his negotiation skills I knew one day he would be successful. I was set. I had a place within walking distance of the old Thermae.

  Old Thermae meaning the establishment called the Thermae Coffee Shop and Massage Parlor that opened in 1965 (plus/minus two years) and closed for demolition in 1996. Call it a thirty-year run. Agatha Christie’s play “The Mouse Trap” had much longer run. But the Thermae, in its unique way, was a vintage mousetrap and the mice (granted more than a fair number were rats) that were trapped were, eyes bulging, kicking and squealing farangs. If you had even a slight imagination, you could imagine hearing dozens of traps snapping, a virtual chorus of necks wretched, as you walked down the dark alleyway into the back entrance. The toilets were next to the kitchen (a Thermae tradition that continues at the new Thermae). Above the sink was a cracked mirror thick with a yellowish nicotine glaze where the girls took turns puffing on their cigarettes, putting on lipstick and makeup.

  This was early 1989 and the jukebox was in the center of the basement of this dive. After midnight the front door was locked and you could only get in by walking through the alley. There was a sign in Thai at the back entrance that said Private Members Only. There were about a dozen tables and the walls were lined with booths. Around the top of the booths were mirrors and the clever people knew how to use the mirrors with more skill than a driver of a ten-wheeler, changing lanes on the expressway.

  When you are young you never know that the territory you’ve staked out will turn out to be the crossroads of a thousand stories. The Thermae was for a writer what an open vein of gold in California must have been like in the 1840s. Characters spilled out of the alley diplomats, journalists, brokers, businessmen, schoolteachers, ex-military, pimps, grifters, and oil field men. The women came from Isan and Bangkok, the South, and the North. There wasn’t a point on the human desire compass that wasn’t represented. Hill tribes. Burmese. Chinese. They all had a story, a dream, and a nightmare. Some came every night. Others came when they were short of money. A Killing Smile is about being cut adrift into a world of the night, looking for redemption, seeking out a new life, a chance to make a deal that might lead somewhere other than a one-night stand in a short-time hotel.

  Over the years many people have come up and said that they recognized themselves in the novel. For a novelist, this is a compliment. Readers want to feel it is their story. They are vested in what happens next. They were there. I have no problem including them all, one after another, until A Killing Smile is a book a hundred miles wide. All books should aspire to such a goal.

  A Killing Smile has been called the expat bible. That assumes there is an expat religion. If religion is based on belief and faith in some higher being looking down and answering prayers, then A Killing Smile isn’t a bible. But as road map to the state of mind of farangs and the women they met in the old Thermae, it offers a glimpse, a small insight into the human condition. If that is religion, then A Killing Smile, can give some material background to blurry line between commercial sex, love, hatred, and desire. In the world of the Thermae, men and women from different cultures and backgrounds converge in a market exchange, speaking different languages, wanting different things, expecting what is often impossible, yet, in some strange way making themselves understood for a night that can end the next morning or last a life time.

  The place that once was destined for conversion into a toothbrush factory still stands as an apartment house. The place that was the Thermae is no more; though a new Thermae opened twenty meters down the road from the old site. Arguments over whether the new place is as good as the old one are as pointless as whether you were as good a dozen years as you are now. The Thermae has changed. So has Bangkok. So have I. Buddhism teaches that change is natural; and inevitable. Clinging to the past guarantees suffering in the present. But not everyone agrees. People from all walks of life passed through the doors of the old Thermae. That show has closed. A Killing Smile is a testament to the old mousetrap and to those who were caught, and those who broke away.

  Christopher G. Moore

  Bangkok

  August 2004

  1

  Sex became a serious, violent chase through the cupboards of Sarah’s memory. For Lawrence sex remained—as it had been in his youth—hall surface light, sound, and fury, and the next morning as memorable as a late-night talk show the night before. There was no middle ground in which husband and wife touched. At least, Sarah no longer fought for one. She was happy enough to be left alone as Lawrence penetrated her, and her chase through the shadows of memory could begin. Sex was the fuel for her speed chase. The place of action was the mind. The thought of speeding down the old gullies and narrow passages made her passionate, all claws and teeth. Lawrence was convinced of his skill as a lover. He told himself that he had satisfied his wife like no other man had ever done before, or could ever do again after him. He told himself that he was indispensable for Sarah’s sexual happiness. He was partially right. Without gas in the tank the car didn’t start. And he was partially deluded: there were thousands of service stations all selling the same product at roughly the same price.

  His thrusting gathered a steady push-pull action. Enough to launch Sarah and exclude Lawrence
; shut him out, and leave him behind where he was unable to track her through those old cupboards filled with old songs, old faces, places and smells.

  He was left outside a pinpoint of darkness as small as a needle mark: the place which had pulled Sarah inside. “Yes,” she moaned, rocking on him. “I want you to fuck me hard,” she said. What she was saying inside her head was different: “I’m hungry for it.” As she lifted up with a raging moan that caught in her throat, her body shook and then she slowly moved down on Lawrence. “Yes, baby, come. Come hard,” he whispered. She did not hear him. It had nothing to do with him, this rush of sound from her throat. She felt herself screaming through that point of darkness swallowed whole as if some larger hunger had been waiting. On her lips a word formed. A man’s name that came only as movement and never as sound. The name “Bobby” roiled over her lips like emotional lava blown out from deep within. He was waiting inside for her and she went straight to him and he took her standing against the wall. Lawrence moaned and pulled her hips, moving her back and forth, his face turned to the side, and his eyes squeezed close. “I’m coming,” said Lawrence, his death rattle sounds in his throat. And when he went limp and she stood above him, she was filled with enormous sadness. The cupboard door had been slammed and she was back in the dark bedroom more alone than she could possibly believe was possible.

  “Was it good for you? ” Lawrence asked, patting her ass.

  “Wonderful, darling,” she said.

  She could not look at his face. She could not open her eyes. Not yet, not for a moment. And when she did the void was the larger darkness of the bedroom. But even if the bathroom light had been left on, the door left ajar, they would not have looked at one another. Sex games had run the course during their marriage: the role-playing, porno films, wife swapping, and the occasional solo infidelity. All that had happened a long time ago, another lifetime, when there was a sharing of imagination, images, and the light offered each a glimpse of bodies locked in motion.

  Sometimes she wanted to tell him the places she flew to. But that was too dangerous. She always returned to the same place, night after night, year after year.

  “Do you ever think of anyone else when we make love,” he asked her, not able to see the laughter around her eyes in the dark.

  “Never,” she replied.

  “Only you, Lawrence.”

  “Some women do,” he said.

  “Not if their husband is a great lover “ she replied.

  * * *

  Lawrence leaned over a timesheet and ran the numbers on the keyboard of a solar-powered hand calculator. Sitting silently opposite, her legs crossed, Kelly Swan, a fifth year associate, brushed back a loose strand of blonde hair from her thin, angular face, her eyes watching Lawrence’s fingers dance over the keyboard. The billable hours for Pegasus House Press file read eighteen twice in a row. He double checked her time record. Slowly he looked up and found her smiling, her head cocked.

  “I’m throwing out a couple of these lunches, Kelly.”

  “But we discussed the publisher’s pension plan, and the one for Harris, the new editor, both times, Larry.”

  “And a lot of other things the client shouldn’t foot the bill for. Harris is an old colleague of Sarah’s. Last year she helped him land the job. He was grateful enough to give me the pension business, which, by the way, should have gone to a New York law firm. So we cut the bill, okay? ”

  “lt will make me look bad. I’m short on hours this month. It’s partnership this year. Or out. You do want me to make partner, Larry? ”

  The only other person who called him Larry was Sarah, his wife of twenty-two years—and then, only when they were alone in private. Kelly had taken the liberty, and he had not stopped her the first or second time. It had been a small forced intimacy he had allowed to happen; he had liked the bridge of that private word in his office. He was a man who loved control: the hours he billed, the names people used to call him, the clients he accepted, the clubs he joined, Sarah’s orgasms. In each case his hand was on the throttle. In the last year, as Kelly’s partnership became an issue she had taken extra pains to show her attention, devotion, and loyalty to Lawrence as if he were a feudal lord and she was a serf worthy of promotion.

  She called it “their” partnership; a kind of professional marriage. Sarah was his official, at-home wife; and Kelly was his official, work relationship wife. Both were essential for his well-being, and provided a kind of balance of affection and admiration. The unwritten rule between them had been no sex. Once or twice he had brushed his hand against her arm, and quickly withdrawn it. He had wanted to tell her what sexual bliss he could bestow on her; he wished Sarah could be his witness, provide a testimony. He sometimes wondered if having sex with Kelly might tame Kelly. Such thoughts never lingered. In his mind, he had achieved that balance of pain and pleasure that most people label as happiness. The private and public spheres rotated in a perfect harmonious orbit. Conflict arrived as a brief, sudden, narrow detail and quickly disappeared without a scar. For instance, a disagreement over a decision to pad a client’s bill. It was his call to make. Whatever he decided would be accepted.

  During the billing conference, Lawrence ordered his secretary to hold his calls. He liked most of all this control over the access other people sought for their claims, pleas, wishes, and requests. Important people denied access. Important people were accessible by appointment only. Kelly had asked for over a week for a meeting on her partnership. He kept her waiting for a time slot in his schedule. When she came to his office, she was already half-defeated, beaten down. She had come for hand-holding. Even though she was thirty-one, she had the temperament of a college student greedy for recognition. She was his submissive child and he offered her sanctuary from those who made her fearful. It was a role Lawrence enjoyed. Though forty-five years old, he occupied the position of father figure. Once she had stung him with a remark about another woman lawyer her own age who had moved in with a really old guy, a businessman who was forty-six. This candid, innocent observation caused Lawrence an extra ten minutes before the mirror the following morning examining his face for wrinkles.

  “A really old guy,” he had repeated to himself, tracing the grooves the size of hairline fractures that fanned out from the corners of both eyes.

  “What do you think? Am I going to make it? ” Kelly asked.

  Lawrence didn’t blink. “Make it? ” There was irony in his tone. “By which you mean, ‘what are my partnership prospects? ”

  Before Kelly answered, his phone rang. He grimaced, dropped his hand, with a look of mild irritation. His secretary informed him there was an emergency call from the hospital.

  “Will you take it, Mr. Baring? ”

  He looked over at Kelly Swan, noticing her perfect makeup. The eyeliner, lipstick, the makeup softening the lines of her jaw. He wondered how many billable hours it had taken her every morning to apply the potions and paints.

  “Your wife has been in a serious accident,” said a police officer. “She’s been seriously injured. You’d better come right away.”

  “What is it, Larry? ”

  He stood for a minute with the phone receiver held away from his ear.

  “Sarah’s been in an accident.” His voice sounded small and frightened; the sense of authority drained away.

  * * *

  On the way to the hospital his lawyer’s mind raced through the possible meanings of “seriously injured”; alarming words that suggested hope, however slender and feeble. He rehearsed how he would tease her about a cast running from her toe to her hip. He missed the traffic lights on the way. Lawrence prayed. Make it two casts. That’s serious. That’s injury. He wanted to control the words; fill them with his content; decide what was their fair measure.

  He swung his BMW into the driveway in front of the emergency ward entrance and ran inside. The waiting room was filled with a couple of stabbing victims, a boy with a broken arm, and a couple of women watching the news on television.<
br />
  “My name’s Lawrence Baring. My wife . . .”

  The orderly looked up at Lawrence and said nothing. Then he nodded for Lawrence to pass down the corridor where two uniformed policemen, who looked suddenly very young, stood drinking coffee. A young doctor with a blood-flecked white coat appeared from between curtains pulled around a cubicle. Lawrence caught his eye, and he knew from that second that Sarah was dead. He couldn’t move forward or back. The older of the cops caught sight of him. Experience had taught him to spot a relative half a corridor away; that face blurred with apprehension was a billboard waiting to record a message of grief.

  “Mr. Baring? ”

  Lawrence nodded. The doctor walked up to him. Lawrence noticed the funny way the doctor’s Adam’s apple moved. It registered an emotional pulse; a pulse fluttering between frustration and resignation.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mr. Baring. Your wife’s been in an auto accident. She’s dead.”

  The banality of death was an eventuality no one ever expected. There was nothing special, clever, or original in the lines. Something from the typical fare of prime time television. Sarah was a professor of English. She goddamn deserved a better message; an older, more distinguished messenger. The doctor and cops were just kids. They were pretending to be officials in control of the situation.