“The cheque is good,” said Tuttle, standing behind Crosby and looking down at Lawrence’s cheque for two-thousand dollars.
“And who the fuck are you? And who in the hell let this asshole in? ” The fat man glared at two young bar girls in jeans and sandals who scurried through swinging doors and into the kitchen.
Everyone looked away. “You look like a goddamn draft dodger to me. So get the fuck out of here. We have some business to settle with your friend.”
“Let’s go, Crosby.”
“I don’t think you heard me, asshole,” said the fat man. “He ain’t going anywhere until he pays me five hundred dollars. That’s cash. Shit, this fucking turkey wants change! I ain’t giving him change for any goddamn bad cheque.”
“Who runs this broken down whorehouse,” said Tuttle leaning over the table, his face inches from the fat man.
“You just bought yourself a whole truckload of trouble, friend,” said the fat man, nodding across the table at two of the men. One moved away from the table, and took a branding iron off the wall. The other man’s hands disappeared under the table, and reappeared holding a bowie knife.
“You got it the wrong way. You see, my partner, Colonel Chao gets real upset when some fat-assed farang calls me an asshole. That’s real trouble. Maybe you never heard of him. Ask the first cop you see. Just mention his name.”
“That’s the oldest bluff in the book,” said the fat man, knowing who Colonel Chao was and his reputation for having a complete absence of opponents inside or outside the police force. That flicker of doubt in the fat man’s face betrayed his fear Tuttle might be on the level; the two men with knives and branding iron waited like an attack dog for its master’s order.
Tuttle pulled out Colonel Chao’s card, containing his rank and the district police office address, and dropped it on the table. “Here’s his card. He’s an old golf buddy of mine. Why don’t you call my bluff. There’s his personal home number. Dial it. Tell him you just called Robert Tuttle an asshole and you want permission to have your redneck friends stick a knife in me. You be in Thailand a long time, “Tuttle said breaking into Thai-ling, that patched together language which was part English, part Thai. “Maybe you no hear expression, ‘Watch your back’ ? Because you don’t let my friend go, you got a very big back to watch. And the Colonel is not someone to fuck around with.”
The fat man looked down at the Colonel’s card, lifted it up in his stubby fingers, lit his cigar. He held it to the light as if he were checking out a hundred-dollar bill. “Golf buddy, my ass. Get the fuck out of here. Both of you. I can’t stand your fucking sight. You make me want to puke blood.”
Crosby was still shaking by the time they had walked back to Silom Road. He hadn’t said two words to Tuttle. Every time he had tried to speak, the narrow passage in his throat constricted as if he felt the fat man’s hands strangling him. The entire time, he had been staring at the white skull of a water buffalo that had been nailed to the wall; the empty, dark sockets sucking away the light. All he could think at the moment before Tuttle had arrived was, “This is where I’m going to die. In front of this stupid creature. The only witness will be a dead skull.”
“That card was a brilliant scam,” said Crosby, having taken in a deep breath. “He was bloody well going to have my balls.”
“Couldn’t you even wait to cash the cheque? ”
Crosby lit a cigarette. “Sorry, Father.”
“Forget the irony. I have a little problem of my own, I need the pictures,” he said, as they walked across Silom Road.
“And what pictures might we be talking about? ”
“The ones Snow and you arranged of Lawrence and the girls.”
Crosby stopped at the corner of Convent Road, and leaned against the show window of Philips electronics. “What kind of problem are we talking about? ”
“He’s having second thoughts about the funding. I want to persuade him otherwise,” said Tuttle, watching Crosby stare at the new television inside the window.
“Why do you think we have the photographs? ”
“Because I caught up with little Lek at Jason’s and for three hundred baht he told me.” Tuttle shifted anxiously from one leg to the other.
“The sod. The problem in the world is there’s no loyalty. And no honor.”
“I need the photographs.”
Crosby rolled his eyes, bared his lower teeth, sinking them softly into his upper lip, he bounced his teeth up and down off his lip, looking at his reflection in the window. “You did save me some difficulty back there.” He paused and turned, facing Tuttle. “And it is for the good of the school? And what is good for the school, I presume, is good for the rest of us? ”
Tuttle nodded, sensing Crosby’s resistance weakening by the moment.
“Snow has them in his room.”
As Tuttle stopped a cab, turning off Silom Road onto Convent Road, Crosby leaned into the window. “Don’t forget, that’s our pension plan you’re dealing with.”
* * *
CONVENT Road ended at Sathorn Road, and on the opposite side, nestled between the Australian Embassy on one side and a brothel the size of Bloomingdale’s on the other, was the Highland Hotel. Snow’s room was on the third floor. As Tuttle walked down the corridor the hash smells drifted across his path. Snow had lived in the Highland Hotel for almost five years, and Tuttle had never once been invited inside. He guessed why. The interior had all the charm of a Thai slum; all that was missing were snotty-nosed, naked kids running around and basins of muddy water filled with clothes and dishes. The corridor had the cramped, shut-in feeling of a place where desperation was hatched; an anchorage where cheap pleasure floated on the edge of the night.
Snow took a long time coming to the door. Tuttle could hear whispers inside the room. Someone’s sweaty barefeet made a sucking noise on the lino floor. “It’s Bob,” said Tuttle, knocking on the door again.
Finally the door opened a crack, and Snow stuck his head out, looking at Tuttle, then up and down the corridor. “Jesus, man, you know what time it is? Four in the morning.” He spoke in chopped sentences. The hashish smoke rolled out of the door.
“I won’t stay long.”
“All right,” said Snow, seeing Tuttle was determined. “Only a couple of minutes.”
The large eyes of a young Thai girl, sitting erect in bed, with a sheet pulled to her neck followed Tuttle as he stepped over the threshold into Snow’s world. Three candles flickered on saucers near the bed, the warm slanting light danced against her face, reworking her expression like wax, from terror and fear to the fine etchings of worry. “Peu-un—friend,” said Snow to the girl.
“You had Ning sucking wind, man. She thought you were a ghost. A little dope makes her paranoid.”
Tuttle stared at Snow’s gaunt face. It had been the first time he had ever seen him without glasses. His eye sockets looked like blurred slots; the eyeholes that look like the ones in the steer skull nailed to the gambling den wall. On the door was a six-foot poster of a shaman priest. Snow looked over at Ning, who had squeezed a thick red cushion against her breasts, watching every move Tuttle made. At the foot of the double bed, two tables had been pushed together. Beakers, cubes, scarfs, cones, ropes, chain, sheets, and a black top hat were scattered on the tables, chairs, end of the bed, and the floor. Draped over the edge of one table was a black cape with red lining. It looked like a child’s room, disorder and toys that suggested a spirit of impatience in a child and drugs in an adult. Snow reached over and picked up a deck of cards.
The Lahu Godman joke had not been totally a joke; Snow had plowed that ground a hundred times, and Tuttle would have bet his last ten baht note that Snow had never taken the idea beyond HQ talk. A potential scam on some greenhorn who had stumbled over to the booth. Snow shuffled the deck.
“Pick a card,” said Snow.
Tuttle took the eight of clubs, looked at it.
“Put it back in the deck.”
Tuttle shoved it
back into the deck, and Snow grinned, glancing back at Ning, as he reshuffled the deck. “Ning loves this trick, don’t you, baby? ” A moment later he pulled the eight of clubs off the top of the deck. “Is this your card? ” Then, as Tuttle nodded, Snow reached out, touched Tuttle’s right ear, and showed him a large one-baht coin.
“I need the photographs, George,” said Tuttle, catching the coin that Snow had flipped into the air.
“My act is about ready for a cross-country tour.”
“Crosby told me you had them.”
“Crosby’s fucking insane. Everyone knows that, man.”
“Baring’s not going through with the deal,” said Tuttle. “I plan to lay the photos on him. It’s between me and him, George. Don’t get in the way.”
Snow who stood in a pair of blue bikini underpants, turned and slipped the cape over his shoulders. He produced one, then two, then three colored balls between his fingers and tossed them one by one onto the bed, bouncing them off Ning’s knees. “Those photos are our future, man.”
“That’s why I need them,” said Tuttle.
“How do I know you won’t fuck us around? ”
“You got to trust someone, sometime, someplace. Besides, what’s good for the school is good for you. Just in case you change your mind about going on the road with your act.”
“Hey, man. That’s like saying what’s good for General Motors is good for America. And looked what happened to America.”
“It’s going to be unpleasant business. Of course, if you want to handle it with Lawrence Baring, be my guest.” Tuttle made a move toward the door.
Snow looked distressed, and blocked Tuttle’s path.
“I thought this guy was your friend? ”
“Since when does money have anything to do with friendship? ”
Snow smiled, danced over to the table, swept his hand from one end to the other, picked up his black cane and tapped the brim of the top hat. He reached in and pulled out a brown envelope. He tossed the envelope to Tuttle. “Crosby and I are counting on you, man.”
In the photographs the girls had assumed a skull bar pose; mouths open, tongues extended, eyes wide open, the pupils turned up to find the camera. Lawrence held a hand pressed forward in one. He needed a shave, the knot in his tie was unfastened, his legs spread apart. A small childlike hand, fingers splayed, covered his crotch. His lips were parted, as if he were about to deliver an closing argument before a jury who needed a lot of convincing. In one photograph, one eyelid was half closed, giving Lawrence the expression of a bad drunk. There had been only three shots. Each revealing a different profile of torment, not anger or hostility as Tuttle had expected, but the anguished expression of someone trapped, his mask of control stripped clean off his face. Tuttle thought about the passage in Sarah’s letter, playing up to Lawrence’s need to be in control. Had she ever seen this face? If she had, would she have killed herself? It might have given her hope that, he, too, was vulnerable, frightened, scared as anyone else.
* * *
HALFWAY down Soi 27, Tuttle’s house was one among half a dozen located behind a large, gray metal gate. The cab driver knew which of the two buzzers beside the mailbox to press. Lawrence stood on his tiptoes and peered over the barbed-wire crisscrossing the top of the gate. Finally, he saw a light go on in a window at the end of a narrow path. Asanee, sleep lines on her face, appeared wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals.
“I want to see your father,” said Lawrence.
She rubbed her eyes, stretched out her arms, shaking her head. She yawned. “He’s not home.”
“I’d like to wait for him.”
Asanee looked at the driver, then Lawrence. She spoke to the driver in Thai, and he, nodding, got back into the taxi, backed into the drive of a modern high-rise apartment block, and disappeared into the night, leaving Lawrence standing on the pavement.
She threw her arms around him, and on tiptoes kissed him long and hard on the mouth. “You better come inside,” she said.
“Your father? ”
“He not here.” She squeezed his hand. “I think you not like me.”
“We need to have a talk.”
He followed her down the paved pathway, past the rows of small houses. Palm and coconut trees with thick trunks shrouded the doorways and windows in dark shadows. He realized it was late; and he had a sudden feeling that for the first time in his life he had no reason or explanation for being in a place. He had arrived because three HQ girls had sent him; he didn’t seriously question their judgement. He had gone. For what purpose or object, he didn’t have the slightest idea. The last thing in the back of his mind was discovering Asanee alone. All he knew was that for some unexplained reason, it seemed right that he should see Tuttle’s house; at least once before he left for Los Angeles the following evening.
The entire compound slumbered within another world of shrubs, flowers, lawns, and Lawrence felt like an intruder. His hands were clammy in the heat. Tuttle’s white-framed house, near the end of the path, had screened windows and a flat, corrugated roof; a small passageway linked the main house to a small, enclosed room where the door was ajar. Several pairs of shoes were lined up outside the door to the small room; another row of shoes beside the entrance to the main house. Lawrence stopped and peered inside as Asanee stood with the screen door open to the house.
“Father’s study,” said Asanee, gesturing to the little room on her right. “He’s usually working in there now.”
“I had no idea his work at the school kept him out late,” said Lawrence.
She laughed, standing inside the screen door of the house. “Not school. He writes stories. Tries to sell them. And when he makes a sale, the money goes to the school.”
“I thought he stopped writing,” said Lawrence.
Asanee frowned, sniffling from a tropical head cold. “That was the party line. The money wasn’t coming in. Every day Snow or Crosby would ask him. ‘Make a sale yet, man? ’ Or ‘Say, old boy, why don’t you write something on horse racing. That always sells’ So he told everyone he quit. I can’t see how it matters now. We don’t have to worry about money for the school. That’s what everyone is saying. It is true? ”
Lawrence walked through the door and entered the small shed. “Mind if I have a look? ”
“Up to you,” said Asanee, closing the screen door and walking over to the converted maid’s quarters. She reached inside and turned on the light. She had a disappointed look.
“He sleeps in here? ”
Asanee nodded. “Only one bedroom upstairs. I tell him Father, no good you sleep here, and I stay upstairs. He say, Asanee, mai pen rai—never mind.”
Tuttle’s study was inside what should have been the maid’s quarters. The cramped room was just large enough for a desk, chair, and a single bed. It struck Lawrence that the room was less a place to work and sleep than a place to do penance. A kind of shrine built to house his personal sorrow. Books lined a makeshift bookcase on one wall. The desk, jumbled with manuscripts, letters, old books, and an ancient Remington typewriter. A sheet of paper was in the typewriter. Several lines were x’d out; several sentences appeared midway down the page, “I was about to drop the used condom on the torn page from the magazine. Something made me read the page. There was something familiar about it. Then I had recognized that it contained my own story ‘The Boy Who Loved Marilyn Monroe.’ I stared at my by-line, then let the condom drop, pretending I was in a bomber at high altitude and had found my name on the target 35,000 feet below.”
There was a row of framed photographs. A photograph of Tuttle and Sarah from their college days. Another of Asanee and Tuttle in front of a wat. Another of Tuttle with Karen rebels, another of Tuttle next to a tank parked beside a road sign pointing to Saigon. A stack of rejection letters were secured in place by a five-hundred-gram bronze elephant, an opium weight bought in Mae Sai, Asanee informed Lawrence. He picked up the picture of Sarah and Tuttle smiling in the camera. He recognized the interior of the A
ngel Lady Bar in LA and the jukebox in the background. He remembered ‘Hey Jude.’ Tuttle’s arm was around her waist, his face turned, looking at her; he was smiling, a relaxed, idle smile of someone revealing adoration. He remembered that ‘Hey Jude’ was the only sound that had come from Sarah’s MG. For the first time since her death, Lawrence saw himself looking in the mirror of Sarah’s last few moments.
“Sarah,” whispered Lawrence, setting the framed photograph back on the desk. His eyes closed, he still saw their mental image. He heard Sarah singing along to the lyrics of the song like another person in another time, before confusion had entangled her, and swept her downstream. Slowly he looked up at Asanee.
“That’s the way Sarah looked long before you knew her. When she was about your age. When she was in love with your father.”
A Killing Smile Page 30