A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  Asanee had answered that Tuttle wasn’t her boyfriend.

  “Robert wants me to stay in Thailand. I’m not so sure. I think sometimes the United States is better for me. I was in Los Angeles.”

  “And you liked it? ”

  “Very much. When Robert said you were coming, I asked if I could talk to you about Los Angeles. But he’s very afraid the bad thing could happen to me in America.”

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s an old draft dodger who could never make it in the States. He’s a little bitter. He washed out a long time ago. Lack of ambition or drive. He’s no different than he was twenty years ago. Only older. An aged hippie who spends the night talking to teenage prostitutes. So I wouldn’t plan my life around what he’s told you.”

  “I think you hate him.”

  Lawrence felt he had gone too far. Hate was a strong word. “I didn’t say that. He’s just different. Not like us.”

  There was surprise designation in the middle of the conversation; the use of “us” to put them on one side of the divide of life from Tuttle. It registered immediately on Asanee, who nodded in a gentle, reassuring way.

  “How you know I’m not like him? ”

  “I can see it in everything about you. He would never go to Los Angeles. Who’d hire him? And he wouldn’t want us to go either.”

  “Why you think that? ”

  “What if I invited you to Los Angeles. Would you come? ” Asanee’s observation was undoubtedly true; the improbable invitation always struck the Thai as a characteristic of overblown farang intentions; plans and promises never acted upon.

  “You want me to write it out?” He reached in his pocket and began writing on a page from Tuttle’s short story. “I’ll write a contract. You can sue me if I’m Iying.”

  He didn’t really care how stupid that sounded. He had stopped thinking. Once in a lifetime, a woman like Asanee walked into a man’s life. Someone who hits every chord: the sexual, the spiritual, the physical. She had a centered quality as if the whole universe was contained inside a stillness located deep within. In her selfless, quiet innocence was a quality of inexhaustible hope, a dialogue with the regions where people redeemed themselves.

  To possess such a woman was to have everything, he thought. Most of life was a search for such a woman without ever knowing it. The rarest of women, the kind men wrote bad poetry for, gave up everything for, went to war for, killed over, made a fool of themselves, betrayed their friends, their family, their country to possess. Pure, selfless, quiet innocence. Someone untouched and unspoiled; that life hasn’t soiled, torn, or damaged. This was a new threshold of life. Like the one he passed two decades earlier when he met Sarah.

  What did he find himself talking about? She had reduced him into a schoolboy, all self-conscious, trying to impress. “And I was on law review. That helped get the clerkship on the Ninth Circuit. And my practice. Pension law sounds boring. But there’s a lot of money involved. I’m always dealing with the cutting edge of the law.”

  “How old are you? ” asked Asanee, not following most of his conversation about the law. Yet his childlike happiness was touching.

  “Guess? ”

  She pretended to examine his features in detail. “Thirty-two, maybe.”

  “Tuttle must have told you we went to school together. So you know I couldn’t be thirty-two.”

  “I think you look thirty-two. Never mind if you think I’m flattering you.”

  A year older than Kelly Swan, he thought with some satisfaction. They were now alone in the foyer dining area. Lawrence looked around and saw the manager make an obvious gesture of looking at his watch.

  What’s inside Asanee’s head, Lawrence wondered. His thoughts drifted to Sarah. For the first time since her death he felt that he could go on. That he was over the edge of that loss. From across the table, Asanee watched him pay the check. I thought he would have a bad heart, she thought. So why is he very kind? I’m confused. Do not think. Thinking is bad. Just be. Now, here, with this man.

  The attraction had become mutual. Despite herself, Asanee felt the pull as well, something she hadn’t counted on. Would she be able to keep the motions of her mind away from Tuttle? She didn’t know. She found herself in an absurd and difficult position. Tuttle had assumed that she shared his contempt for Lawrence, and she knew that he would ask her every detail of the evening. She had surprised herself; her impulse was to like this man whose eyes seem to swallow her whole. Though she wasn’t surprised when he invited her to have a night-cap in his suite.

  “You ever see a suite here? ”

  She shook her head. “It is not good for Thai girl to go to farang’s room.”

  “Just to talk? ”

  “No one would believe a farang just wants to talk.”

  “That’s because you’ve been around Tuttle and his friends too long. Some foreigners say what they mean.” That lawyer’s sense of authority rang through the words.

  Inside the suite, Asanee sat in a chair, legs crossed, watching Lawrence pour a drink. “You want to go to UCLA? ” he asked, turning toward her.

  “To study English.”

  “My wife taught at UCLA.”

  What she liked most about Lawrence was his tenderness, almost a caress in the way he used the word wife. Most farang she had known hated the mem, always contemplating and devaluing them in their barroom conversations. His devotion to Sarah touched her deeply. It had been the principal reason, in the end, she had agreed to trust him and go to his room unescorted.

  Lawrence had closed her doubt with Sarah’s name. Asanee had stopped stalling for time. She long ago learned how to live with contradiction, thinking minute by minute that Tuttle would come, and feeling, at the same time, with the same degree of conviction, that he might not. Her sense of obligation to Tuttle was overwhelming, unquestioning, absolute. She tried to hold tightly on to her sense of responsibility, but a spark of something between Lawrence and Asanee; some kind of recognition, a connection, an attraction, pulled her away from her duty. In Lawrence’s suite, two strangers thrown together by events larger than themselves, people who would have never met, suddenly sat face-to-face in the lavish sitting room cradling their drinks. Something had altered in the tone of the conversation, a shift of speed out of loneliness, and lost in that narrow passage of discovery. She made small talk about teaching at Tuttle’s school. Lawrence made small talk about beauty of the campus at UCLA; and the commuting time from his house to the campus.

  Did she really want rescue from Lawrence now that she had relaxed? He had been true to his word; once inside the suite, Lawrence made no move toward her. He remained, though, tender, gentle, and kind. He was totally unlike what she had expected. Where was the fault in him, she thought. This man who had hurt Tuttle before she had been born wasn’t a monster. She didn’t know what to believe; whom to believe.

  * * *

  TUTTLE walked briskly into the hotel lobby and paced in front of the bank of elevators. He pushed the button for the seventh floor. The journey seemed to take forever. He paced inside the elevator, finding his own face in the mirrored walls; a drawn face lined with worry. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He hit the wall with the edge of his fist out of frustration. His heart pounded in his throat as the elevator doors opened. He turned left, walked down the corridor, stopped and knocked on the door of Lawrence’s suite. I’m too late, he said to himself. He shifted from side to side. Then he pounded harder. Lawrence opened the door, holding a drink in his hand, his tie loosened around his neck. Tuttle slammed a hard right hook punch, catching Lawrence just below the eye on the right side of his face. He reeled back, the drink flying out of his hand in a shower of mist. His legs went out from underneath his body and he landed in a heap beside the sofa.

  Asanee uncrossed her legs and set her glass down on the table. As she rose, she smoothed down her skirt.

  “I made a mistake. Let’s go,” he said to Asanee in Thai.

  “Are you totally crazy? ” asked Lawr
ence, shaking his head and trying to rise to his feet. “We were just talking.”

  “A girl wants to ask you about LA and you take her straight to your room,” said Tuttle, shoving Lawrence back down. “Asshole.”

  Lawrence had never realized how strong Tuttle was; how the weight-lifting for twenty-five years had built a muscle tone easily concealed beneath a loose-fitting shirt. He decided to stay down on the floor. Tuttle was like a raging bull, pumping the muscles in his forearms into thick knots of hard flesh, looking for something to move so he could hit it again, and again. He smelled blood; he wanted to draw Lawrence into a fight, any excuse to finish the game. It wasn’t going to be a draw or loss this time.

  “Get up,” yelled Tuttle.

  “You’re still in high school,” said Lawrence. He sat back, resting his head on the edge of the sofa, touching his face where the swelling had already begun.

  “Why don’t you stand up? ” asked Tuttle.

  “He’s had enough,” said Asanee in Thai.

  “Fuck him. I haven’t had enough.”

  “Was that for Asanee or for Sarah? ” asked Lawrence.

  Tuttle didn’t answer him, grabbing Asanee’s hand, and pulling her toward the door.

  “I’ve asked her to go back to Los Angeles.”

  “You shit,” he reached down and pulled Lawrence up.

  “She’s not available. You understand what I’m saying to you? ” He shoved Lawrence hard, sending him sprawling over the couch.

  Lawrence reared up on his knees and slowly staggered to his feet. “Why don’t you ask her if she wants to go? Or are you afraid the answer you’ve programmed into her might fail? ”

  “I already know the answer.” This time the punch to Lawrence’s stomach knocked the wind out of him. He doubled over onto the floor.

  “See you tomorrow at nine,” said Lawrence, looking up at Asanee. “Am I still invited to see the school? ”

  “We see you tomorrow. Don’t forget,” said Asanee, glancing back, her face sad.

  It was the kind of answer that gave Lawrence a great deal of hope that Tuttle had not yet won the larger war.

  10

  Lawrence had been uncertain what to expect the next morning. It took his driver nearly thirty minutes to locate the school. The right side of his face had turned the bluish gray of spoiled meat; he wore sunglasses, and the combination gave him the appearance of someone who employed lawyers rather than that of a lawyer. He had trouble sleeping, tossing and turning, Asanee never quite leaving his thoughts. His wake-up call seemed to come moments after he had finally dozed off.

  The driver circled the surrounding sois until he located Tuttle’s slum school. It was tucked in a squalid soi lined with dusty, bashed up late-model Fiats and Honda Civics, fist size rust holes in the hoods, heat-curled for-sale signs in the windows, and flat tires. Against one wall, piles of old car tires tilted to one side. A large rat scuttled through. The driver rolled down the window of the air-conditioned car, and asked a street vendor barbecuing chicken for directions. The small, skinny man with crooked teeth pointed at a series of the dark shops with rusty metal grates pulled half-way down over the windows.

  The car slowly moved forward past a cramped restaurant with a half-dozen tables. A fat cook with a large belly, sweat streaked face and watery eyes, his arms folded on the ledge between his chest and belly, eyed the Mercedes. He stood nervously at the entrance, watching Lawrence as he was driven past for the fourth time. Gangsters looking to make a hit drove in such a fashion. Lawrence had the kind of battered face that went with a king-sized grudge. The fat-bellied man’s mind drifted to what possible insult or bad business deal had reshaped the farang’s face, and who in the neighborhood was going to pay the price from the rough looking man in the back seat of the Mercedes.

  Around the same soi, opposite a line of wrecked cars. several young men perched on a concrete stoop. Stripped to the waist, they leaned out of the shadows; their dirty toes wiggling in the dust. The driver stopped again, and asked directions from a second street vendor, who was lighting a charcoal fire; the man looked up, eyes everywhere, on the car, the driver, Lawrence in the back seat, on neighbors sitting nearby. This wasn’t a farang street, his eyes said. Another Thai hacked a fish into bloody fragments with a large knife. That could be me laid out on that wooden table, thought Lawrence. No sign marked the school.

  Lawrence, out of the corner of his eye, saw a girl carrying a schoolbook up a dusty, old back staircase. He jumped out of the Mercedes and followed a safe distance behind her. She led him down a path, between a row of houses, to the broken-down wooden staircase. The girl disappeared up the stairs, and Lawrence counted the number of steps as they echoed under her feet. It was a long way up, he thought. At the top of the entrance a red temple cloth from Wat Po had been nailed above the door to ward off evil spirits. He had no idea what the Thai words meant or the fierce half-human, half-demon creatures were intended to do. He was beginning to realize there was a lot he didn’t know.

  Lawrence climbed the first flight of stairs that led to a small landing. He caught his breath, bending over, hands on his knees, and when he looked up, the girl who he followed stood two feet away holding a knife. He recognized her face under a large fluorescent light on the wall.

  “Why you follow me? ” she asked.

  Lawrence, caught off guard, put his hands up as if he were being robbed. “Me lost. Look for Tuttle. For Asanee.”

  The girl slowly lowered the knife and smiled. “You no speak good English. Maybe you come for lesson? ” She laughed, turned, and ran up the balance of the stairs.

  He pushed open a heavy door that led into a large room divided into a series of smaller rooms. From inside one he recognized Snow’s voice; and another he heard Crosby’s English accent, as he read vocabulary from a lesson book. The main room had bare walls and yellow lino floors cracked and stained, a giant rotating floor fan, and a blackboard, a few scuffed wooden chairs. Several rows of books, most with broken spines, were stacked on boxes against the far wall near a dirty window. A young girl sat, her back to Lawrence, bent over in a chair near the wall, writing in a notebook. She hadn’t looked up as he entered the room. The girl he had followed appeared framed in one of the doors in the narrow corridor, Tuttle nodding as she spoke to him in Thai. As the door opened further, Lawrence saw Tuttle standing in profile, talking to a middle-aged Thai. He noticed that Tuttle’s right hand was wrapped in a bandage, and that gave Lawrence some belated sense of pleasure.

  “Any trouble finding the school? ” asked Tuttle, coming out with the Thai man.

  “I just followed the first girl carrying books.”

  “Khun Kob’s our headmaster,” said Tuttle.

  “Robert say men jump you last night. I said, should go to police,” said Khun Kob.

  “These things happen in the big city,” said Lawrence, looking at Tuttle and wondering how he had slept the previous night. From the puffy skin billowing the folds beneath his eyes, he doubted that Tuttle had slept much either.

  Khun Kob, the Thai, who stood next to Tuttle, his head coming to Tuttle’s shoulder, was all smiles; he made it obvious that he had been waiting to meet Lawrence. He had come out of his classroom with a big smile and his hand extended. It was clear Khun Kob needed no formal introduction. He greeted Lawrence like someone he had known for years. Someone he owed respect. What was the Thai word Crosby had used? thought Lawrence. Kreng jai! That was it, remembered Lawrence, glancing at Tuttle. Why hadn’t Tuttle mentioned the headmaster? Was it some unconscious need to present himself as the headmaster of the school? Tuttle, as far as Lawrence could see at that moment, was another teacher like Snow and Crosby. What was the business about this being his school? Lawrence was filled with a hundred questions, but with no immediate opportunity to ask even one of them. And where was the elusive Asanee?

  “My friend, so good that you come,” said Khun Kob. “Robert say you might not come. We wait. But I think you come. “

  As if to
read Lawrence’s mind, Tuttle interjected. “Asanee is finishing a class. She’ll be done in twenty minutes. That will give Khun Kob and you a chance to catch up.”

  Catch up on what? thought Lawrence. He smiled and said nothing. He thought that Khun Kob didn’t shake hands like a schoolteacher. The headmaster launched into a brief rundown on his own background. Nearby Lawrence listened, glancing over at the young girl, with her head down, writing in her notebook. Khun Kob saw the distraction and immediately led Lawrence and Tuttle into this back room which appeared to be an office. A small, battered window air-conditioner chugged along, the gauge turned up to high. In one corner, Old Bill sat marking a stack of papers. He glanced up at Khun Kob and Tuttle. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and fiddled with the papers.