A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  There was a formula for handling newly arrived farang. Tuttle understood that in Thai there was even a formula for revenge—one that he had taught himself over the years. The first rule was patience; the second rule was gaining the other person’s confidence. And the last—the most important came last—create an event that challenges the victim to defeat himself. Tuttle had waited many years for his chance. As he watched Lawrence trying to politely and quietly eat the noodles, Tuttle knew his old roommate didn’t stand a chance. He had lived inside the tube of America; and now he had tumbled out and couldn’t find his feet. And what were among the first words off Lawrence’s lips?

  “Do you want a job? I can help you find something. I have connections. I have people who owe me.”

  All the while Tuttle was laughing inside at these words rolling off Lawrence, the lawyer, and into the smoke-filled air of HQ. Tuttle had his own debt to collect and his own way of collection. But the night was young, and there were many hours before Lawrence understood the scale of things that Tuttle had organized; understood the strategy that had gone into his own defeat.

  * * *

  A couple of tables away from their booth, at one of the center tables four deaf and dumb women—the silent ones some residents called “Tommys”—sat around waiting for their regular customers. The Tommys signed each other over warm Cokes, moving their hands with feeling. They made sex jokes and traded gossip about sexual encounters solely in sign language. The Tommys had a large vocabulary of hand gestures for every sexual act: straight sex, oral sex, anal sex, bondage, S&M, and countless positions and locations for sexual organs and the execution of the sexual act. If it had ever happened in a bedroom or the back of a car, they had a sign for it. Their hands went a hundred miles an hour like major league baseball catchers. Giving a signal. The pitcher waving off that one. Then giving another, followed by a nod as the Tommy and the customer left the premises holding hands.

  “What are they doing? ” asked Lawrence, pushing back his plate. By now Lek was stroking the inside of his leg with her hand, and nestling her head against his shoulder.

  “Two Tommys are discussing the merits of oral sex in parked cars,” said Tuttle, giving Lek a pat on her thigh to send her scurrying off.

  “Hey, where you going? ” asked Lawrence, as Lek slid over his lap.

  “She’s looking for work, old buddy. You’re not buying her out, so you are wasting her time. Or in lawyer’s terms, there are other files.” Tuttle kissed her hand. A moment later, she turned and disappeared among a group of girls who huddled around a table where the Maw doo—fortune teller—was turning over cards and making predictions.

  The old woman seated at the crowded table had a wrinkled face caked with makeup; each night she read a Tommy’s palm, or some other group of girls, she was an expert reading cards and tea leaves for nineteen baht.

  “What’s she doing? ” asked Lawrence.

  “Chances are she’s telling the girl that a farang with a good heart will appear in the next couple of weeks. He will give her a lot of money, marry her, take her back to America. Buy her a jeep, microwave, and split-level house in a burb outside Houston. The usual list of prizes sought after by girls who grew up working in rice fields and who know a reasonable number of oil riggers.”

  “She looks ancient,” said Lawrence.

  “She’s two years younger than you, Larry. It’s been about two, three years since anyone bought her out. But she never misses a night. Her name, you ask? You’ll like this. Her name’s Bun. She was here the very first night I walked in twenty-one years ago.”

  “You actually slept with her? ” asked Lawrence, shaking his head, and smiling to himself.

  “She told me she was Harvard Law Review.”

  Lawrence laughed and nodded to himself. “I deserved that.”

  “Back then she was my neighbor on Soi 22. After three or four years of seeing her almost every day, talking to her, just passing the time, she stopped me and pulled out a chain with a Buddha in a small case. She wore it around her neck as a locket. Most Thais wear one. Another formula. Bun wore a small Buddha image. One night in bed she asked me if I had any idea where she got this tiny Buddha. I shook my head. She smiled with those perfect teeth of hers, and said it was an amulet made from a tooth—a tooth from her deceased father. A tooth pulled out of her dead father’s mouth and turned into the perfect formula: a Buddha image.”

  Another girl with a shy smile sat in the chair in front of the fortune-teller. She laid down two ten-baht notes and shuffled the deck of cards while her friends, standing behind her, looked on. Lawrence moved a chair over from the next table and joined the girls. The fortune teller loved that she had an audience; a farang in a Western suit showing interest in her talent brought out the performer in her. She looked up at Lawrence and smiled, keeping her lips closed as she remembered at the last moment that she hadn’t put in her teeth. Perhaps her own fortune was changing. The girl leaned forward, all eyes, as she cut the deck into three piles, Tuttle pulled alongside, and began whispering to Lawrence.

  “One night I took a friend from Las Vegas to the strip in Patpong. I tried to explain the idea of formulas in Thailand to him. I thought he understood. But you can never be certain when people nod their heads, if their brains have registered anything remotely similar to what you said. So we sat in Superladies, watching the girl bathe in a large plastic champagne glass, bubbles lathered over her body, pouring water over her shoulder from a champagne bottle. The red Harley-Davidson motorcycle descending to the stage with a Thai girl and man screwing. The girl straddled the skinny Thai who wore a biker’s hat and heavy, black leather jacket with big metal studs stitched on the lapels and chains draped over the shoulders.

  “In the best biker tradition, he pumped away, holding her hips as he kept tune to the music: ‘Jingle Bells’. They shifted position, and the man stood on his knees on the black leather seat as the girl slowly sucked his erect cock, working her mouth to the beat of ‘Jingle Bells’. My friend gives me a nudge, and leans over and says, ‘How could anyone ever celebrate a family Christmas around the piano with Mum and Dad, cousins, uncles, aunts and grandmother again? ’

  “Everyone singing ‘Jingle Bells’. You see in Bangkok, there was a motorcycle on stage, and a couple of . . . well performers in mid-March. Yeah, Grandma, it was kind of a religious act. No, they weren’t carollers.

  “Next, two naked girls on the stage started eating each other. One strapped on a large black plastic dildo, ran a thick strip of K-Y jell down the shaft, rubbed it around until the dildo glistened in the overhead light. The girl wearing the dildo mounted the other girl in the strict missionary position, and had pumped no more than three or four times when the lights flashed off and on. That means a cop has come up looking for a paycheck. The girls bounded from the stage. The dildo bouncing up and down as they ran away. Bus driver fled the scene of the accident. Twenty dancers jumped on stage, their slips pulled to cover their breasts and began dancing in a slow, shy fashion; as if they were standing along the dance floor of a high school prom, moving to the music, innocently looking for a dance partner.

  “After the cops left, the fuck show started up again. The glistening dildo reinserted into the pussy of the one girl who lay back with her legs spread high into the air. Her face filled with pleasure as she moaned to the music. Twenty minutes later, my friend paid the bar fine and bought out the girl from the floor show. He took her back to his hotel room. The dildo business had turned his crank; he travelled with a couple of dildos in his suitcase. Put them through airport security x-ray machines, custom inspections, I mean this was a fairly determined guy.

  “I heard all of this later from the girl, from a doctor friend, as well as the guy. He’s got her stripped down on the bed. He has her distracted with a lot of tongue action. Meanwhile with a free hand, he’s grabbed one of his travelling dildos from under the mattress and begins to insert it in the girl’s pussy. Her eyes spring wide open, her body stiffens, her hand tr
avels down to between her legs and she feels the plastic dildo, no different in color, texture, or shape from the one that she had taken with such pleasure on stage, and she uncoils like a tiger.

  “She’s all fist and nails and teeth. He’s got scratches all over his face, neck, back, shoulders. He looks like he’s been mauled by a wild animal. All because he violated the formula. He robbed the girl of her face. What had happened on stage was a “performance” with another Thai girl; this was a business arrangement with a farang. What she did on stage was not an attitude about sexuality; the prescribed template only existed in the context of the show and on the stage. It had little to do with her. This wasn’t a tease factor. These weren’t Western girls who would try anything once. These were teenagers who walked from one spotlight into the next and never stopped long enough to draw a connection that some farang might confuse the public performance with the private one.”

  The fortune-teller turned over the jack of hearts and smiled. The girl applauded as the fortune-teller explained that a man would propose to her within three months, and that he would have much money, and that she would have a great deal of good luck. Tuttle had begun to translate the fortune-teller’s predictions for Lawrence’s benefit. Though Lawrence’s lawyer mind was still digesting the images of the scratched face, limbs, and back of Tuttle’s friend and the enraged face of the bar girl turned lunatic.

  Finally Lawrence leaned over and whispered to Tuttle. “They really believe this fortune-telling stuff? ”

  “And in ghosts and in multiple lives. Along with quantum physics and cancer research. And they see no contradiction.”

  Tuttle had learned that in Thailand people believed that they were born with a karma. Life was not a process of bettering oneself; but accepting one’s lot with serenity, a smile, and a Mai bpen rai— “no problem” attitude towards adversity. Whatever happened in this life was destined from a prior life. And there was no way to alter one’s fate. Happiness was accepting one’s position. Happiness was being with people who understood and respected that position. People who always smiled and laughed; people who were lighter than air. The unhappy or angry were avoided; no one who complained was liked. They danced to one simple tune—and the beat went on, and on. Accept your fate, gain merit, respect those above you for they have earned this life and if you’re an HQ working girl, then you’ve earned that from your last life. That’s your rain-making dance; looking for the heavens to open and the money to pour down.

  “What did that girl just say? The one who was pointing at us? ” asked Lawrence, looking over a short Thai girl in a miniskirt, who was smoking a cigarette and smiling at them.

  “She said, ‘You can fly only as high as your wings will take you.’ It’s an old Thai saying. Don’t ever expect your wings to take you higher. Or you will crash and burn, and the ashes that fall into the next life will be remoulded into a creature that you don’t even want to give a name.”

  “What a curious thing to say.”

  Tuttle waived for Meow to come over. She bounded over and sat on Tuttle’s knee.

  “This is my friend, Larry. He’s from America.”

  Meow raised her hand to shake with Lawrence. As Lawrence reached out to shake, she pulled the old bar trick of quickly withdrawing her hand, leaving his hand foolishly isolated in midair.

  “How far have your wings taken you? ” Tuttle asked, spinning Meow around on his lap. He asked the question again, this time in Thai, and Meow leaned forward and kissed him on the nose.

  Meow’s friend began massaging Lawrence’s shoulders.

  “How far will your wings take you, Bobby? ”

  Tuttle smiled and nuzzled his nose into Meow’s neck. “As far as the moon.” Sarah’s death had suddenly sprung open the cage door and Tuttle was perched ready to take flight, and Lawrence was the runway.

  * * *

  YOU stayed inside the established formula. Don’t risk breaking new ground—if you value your face. Avoid people who spring surprises on you; the farang might throw you off balance. Outside the formula you were lost. You can fail; make mistakes. Failure accumulates bad karma in this life. The loss of Sarah had been Tuttle’s first major failure. The first emotional bruise that had never healed. If there was a next life, Sarah was in it at that moment. And she’d be in the next one after that. She was locked inside a hall of mirrors.

  Tuttle had spent years searching for the elusive spiritual dimension. The shaman’s trance, the monk’s begging bowl, the temple Buddhas, the amulet from a dead man’s tooth, the nineteen-baht fortune-teller, came to him as fragments of that same dimension. If a person could make enough merit, she might be reborn in the center of the universe, Bangkok, to a higher position than the one she had left. It had been Lawrence who had thrown her off-track; stopped her from going away with him; the man who had phoned Sarah’s mother and father, who flew down to prevent their daughter from leaving.

  He knew, however, that he needed to counsel patience. Lawrence had to be handled carefully; he couldn’t be rushed or the entire plan would collapse. Why had his friend left Bangkok with twenty-eight stitches in his body? He had pulled a rabbit out of his hat at the last moment. The girl hadn’t been prepared.

  Suddenly she turned all claws and teeth against this force that threatened to load her down with a mountain of bad karma; she slashed, ripped, and cut the devil who came to secure her rebirth at a lower position in the next life. He had pushed her over a spiritual edge that in her eyes had condemned her face and her soul. And there was a bill to pay. A bill she collected by burying her nails in his flesh. Tuttle was convinced he would have the pleasure of presenting his own outstanding bill to Lawrence. With the accumulated interest, there was a large outstanding debt, Tuttle told himself; a debt that he would have the satisfaction of collecting.

  4

  By the third drink Lawrence had relaxed, his clipped speech slowed, his tense posture loosened. The aloof exterior had begun to crack, concealing a keen interest in the whirl of girls washed in by the early tide of the evening. He had taken off his tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He had paid the fortune-teller to read his cards. Tuttle sat next to him, leaning forward looking at the card, listening to the old woman, and translating her prediction. “You will meet the woman of your life in Bangkok,” said Tuttle.

  “Get away,” said Lawrence.

  “She will bring an emotional disturbance. But you win her.”

  “I like that,” said Lawrence.

  Later, Tuttle led the retreat to his booth as the crowd of young women in bright, painted faces, their red fingernails clawing the air, swelled; here and there, a girl discreetly scooped up her handbag, nodded towards a farang and disappeared through the narrow passageway leading to the alley, the farang walking two feet ahead, turning, motioning, waiting, and joking. Reappearing a couple of hours later, she might buy a round of drinks for her friends.

  “Erotic encounters all night long,” said Lawrence. “I could use a few associates with this work ethic.”

  “You might want to take one back,” replied Tuttle in a serious tone.

  “For what? ”

  “You’re the pension lawyer. Think of her as an annuity.” Lawrence laughed. “Think of me introducing a Thai service girl at the firm Christmas party.”

  “You could tell them it was in the cards,” said Tuttle, looking over at the fortune-teller, who met his glance with a stiff nod of recognition.

  “They would think I had gone off the deep end.”

  “The deep end is more interesting than the shallow end, Larry.”

  Lawrence produced a note pad and a pen from his suit jacket and began writing. He looked up for a moment, and then resumed. Then he folded the paper in two and handed it to Tuttle, who opened and read it.

  “Sixty-thousand dollars,” said Tuttle, refolding the paper.

  “That’s what I would start you at the firm. Office Manager,” said Lawrence. “Computer systems analyst. You tell me what title you want. It can be in t
he cards for you.”

  Tuttle slid the paper back to Lawrence. “Sixty thou and I can create my own title? Thanks, Larry. But I figure I wouldn’t fit in too well back there.”

  Lawrence shook his head. “I don’t get it. What’s the attraction. Bangkok’s polluted. Gridlocked with cars, criminals, and crazies. No one speaks English. It’s hotter than hell. The army calls the shots. Rabid dogs on the streets.”

  “All true. But you’re missing the carnival.”

  “What carnival? ” Lawrence blinked looking at Tuttle, then down at his own handwriting.

  “The carnival all around us. The one we are part of. This is what I belong to. I can’t pull out. This is what I am, always have been. Sarah’s parents’ worst fear come true.”

  From the way Lawrence looked down at the table, Tuttle was certain he hadn’t made the connection. Tuttle thought of him as someone who had stepped out of the new Dark Age, someone who harboured the illusion that he lived in the Golden Age of Man, a place where titles and dollars were in the hands of the Gods of that place. Lawrence’s world mirrored the same commercial values which had taken root in Southeast Asia. In America and Asia, there were no longer any ceremonies performed to rescue the fallen man, the fallen woman; they had fallen because they lacked merit in this life, and this life was the only one that mattered. There could be no resurrection from failure in such a world. Economic progress was the gravity that warped the system of thought, values, and activity, not so much replacing morality as making it just another market force.