It had gone so smoothly, thought Tuttle. But nothing in Thailand ever was quite as it appeared. A small, missing fragment of doubt lodged in Tuttle’s mind; he thought of the room where the Colonel would cross-examine Khun Kob, twisting each detail, and ask him to account for any inconsistency in the story. Khun Kob was a civilian; the Colonel, a police official, who had heard every conceivable account of how money had gone missing in action.
* * *
PATIENCE is the ability to withhold action over a long period of time; and wisdom is judging the right moment in which patience has paid off and the time for acting has arrived. The Colonel was both a patient and wise man. Genius was the rare ability to generate impatience in another because, in the state of rushing, mistakes are invariably made. The Colonel had a reputation as such a genius.
Two men waited for Tuttle outside the school in an air-conditioned yellow BMW. In the three months since Lawrence’s departure, he had often seen the same car parked in the alley with the motor running, windows rolled up, and the occupants hidden behind aviator sunglasses. Tuttle stepped outside the school, carrying his briefcase; a small gust of hot wind and bus fumes made his eyes water. The Bangkok heat recoiled off the pavement and building like angry gunfire. He blinked several times, then closed his eyes tight, shivered, and when he opened them the two men from the BMW were on either side of him.
“Kinda hot,” said Tuttle.
“We give you a ride,” said the taller of the two men.
“I doubt we’re going the same way,” said Tuttle, clutching his briefcase playing out the options in his mind. He was one hundred meters from the street. No one else was around. Both men were armed; it was difficult to conceal a handgun in Bangkok, the sweatsoaked clothes moulded against the gunstock. The two men had been out of the air-conditioned car no more than three minutes and they were sweating.
“We go your way.”
Tuttle shrugged and walked away with the two Thais on either side. He sat, briefcase on his lap, in the back with the shorter man, whom the other called Lek. He felt like a complete fool, he felt angry, but above all he felt the helplessness. The feeling went with the territory of expat existence, where the security of tenure might be no longer than a one-night stand.
The BMW drove the back sois, getting stuck in a snarl of tuktuks, trucks, buses, and cars on Soi Asoke. For over an hour nothing moved. Lek and his nameless companion smoked smuggled American cigarettes. The nameless one, a mobile phone attached to his ear, spoke with his minor wife about weekend arrangements; glancing throughout the conversation at Tuttle through his sunglasses in the rearview mirror, he never forgot his assignment in the backseat.
* * *
ASANEE stayed home from school with a head cold. Before lunch she had gone downstairs and placed a courier pack on Tuttle’s desk. She leaned it against the photograph of the two of them. It had arrived around ten that morning while she was still in bed; it was from New York City. After she had gone back to bed, a houseboy who worked for a neighbor in the compound entered Tuttle’s office, removed the pack, and delivered it to a man waiting on a motorcycle outside the main gate.
The motorcycle driver, who had been kept waiting nearly an hour in the heat, was in a foul mood. He kicked one of the soi dogs, the dog sprawled against the outside wall and howled with pain. He grabbed the packet, executed a sharp turn, and without a word, accelerated down the soi. The houseboy watched him turn onto Sukhumvit Road and disappear into traffic.
The howling dog woke Asanee. She went downstairs and straight into the kitchen, opened a Coke, stood at the counter, tipped the Coke back and took a long drink. Some instinct whispered something was wrong. She returned to Tuttle’s room, taking the bottle with her. She sat heavily in his chair, wiped the moustache of sweat off her upper lip with the back of her hand. She saw the courier pack was gone. A feeling of violation, panic, confusion hit her hard, doubled her over with fear. She dropped the bottle and she ran back into the house, shot upstairs and picked up the telephone. The line was dead. She heard someone else breathing in the room. “You stay upstairs. Wait for your father. He’ll come home soon,” said a man, who stood inside the bathroom.
“How did you get in? ” she asked, doubling up her fists. “Get out of our house.” She threw the telephone at him.
“Sit down and shut up. Or you get hurt bad,” said the young Thai, dressed in a white cotton shirt and jeans.
“You dog-mouthed sonofabitch,” she shouted.
He moved toward her, his jaw cemented with anger and fear.
Asanee yelled, screaming her lungs out, but he grabbed her, knocking her down and covering her mouth with his hand. His eyes were several inches from Asanee’s. He pulled a hunting knife. The six-inch blade reflected the sunlight from the window as he held it an inch from her face.
“You scream again, I kill you,” he said, between clenched teeth, smelling of garlic.
Her eyes terrified, she nodded her head and slowly, he removed his hand. She gasped for air, heart pounding in her neck and throat, she slumped on the bed. Her captor nervously shifted the knife from one hand to the another, glancing at his watch. He appeared as scared as she was. Asanee buried her head in a pillow. She had an overwhelming feeling that her father was in danger, and her assault was the start of something ugly, brutal, and cruel, something she did not fully understand had entered their lives, something barbarous had curved into their path. It was the distress of someone who had been hunted and captured.
* * *
THE letter inside the courier pack read:
PEGASUS HOUSE PRESS
25 East 36th Street
New York, New York 10026
Dear Mr. Tuttle,
Our fiction editor has been following your work for some time. Your short stories offer an unique vision of Southeast Asia at a time when Americans are asking about the people culture and customs of countries like Thailand. It would be our honor to make fifteen of your stories available in a collected work. We would like to offer you a contract for the enclosed list. We are pleased to offer you an advance of two hundred thousand dollars, against a ceiling of one million dollars.
We look forward to a long, mutually enjoyable relationship extending over many books and many years. With your permission, we would like to market your book under the title: ‘The Boy Who Loved Marilyn Monroe’. We understand that you have lived in Asia for many years.
Perhaps you might supply us with a suitable dust jacket cover photograph: one perhaps taken while you were a foreign correspondent covering the Vietnam war. The photograph should have something to make it identify for the reader such as a street sign pointing to Saigon.
Our lawyers in Los Angeles will he in touch with you early next week.
Sincerely,
Jerry Harris, Acquisitions Editor
* * *
THE BMW swung off Sukhumvit Road, passing rows of street vendors on both sides of the soi. Dust from the construction sites hung heavily in the air. Heavy trucks lined the road in long queues. One driver raised a small brown bottle of Singha beer to his lips and drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the heat. Long-necked boom cranes penetrated the skyline. Tuttle watched the sweaty faces of the workmen shoveling cement. Bangkok had become a maze of construction sites. A place of invisible, powerful connections, with overlapping personalities from business, politics, police, and society; complex links and associations near the altar of the commerce god. Elements anchored with money split off in random directions, turned back on themselves, poked up in a newspaper here, a TV interview there, in the back of a Mercedes, behind a conference table, and no one could ever be sure how these elements fit together. The uncertainty of connections within connections made everyone edgy, looking for their cut, expecting to win, and isolating the risks. It fed the paranoia of the front line, constantly shifting, stranding someone, benefiting others; and as with every front line, there were masses of porters, some troops, and an elite group of officers.
A few moments
later, the BMW turned into the Sukhumvit Golf Driving Range, and hard-braked into a parking slot in a gravel lot. Tuttle leaned forward, looking at what was a kind of privileged officers’ outpost in the midst of all the construction. A golf ball driving range. Mesh-net draped over a superstructure of poles rose ten stories on three sides. A vast open, green space littered with thousands of golf balls. Expensive, new imported cars were parked behind the main pavilion. Beyond the cars, dozens of green-shirted young women slept, gossiped, ate rice and chicken in an old wooden shed.
The teenaged caddies, like bar girls, wore numbers. They squatted on a small wooden block, knees locked together, staring down at the feet of a golfer. Tuttle watched one of the girls tee-up a golf ball on the narrow wedge of green artificial turf, her eyes cast down at the ground, waiting patiently, without a sound, for the loud thwack. Tuttle was uncertain if it was the crack of the ball or the position of the club that made him jump. With the club passing within inches of her face, she pulled out another ball, and without looking up for instructions, automatically set it on the tee. The gunshot sound of golf balls being struck pierced the air. Lek swung open the back door first and then motioned for Tuttle to get out.
In Bay 27, Colonel Chao stood in profile, wearing gray slacks, white golf shoes, and a white short-sleeve shirt; his knees slightly bent, his arms forward, he concentrated on the golf ball; the muscles in his forearms twitching, his face immobile as if he were mediating on the patch of green artificial turf at his feet. Effortlessly the Colonel, expertly and gracefully, raised the head of a number-two wood, and in a clean, single motion, struck the ball. His body in a half turn, his weight shifted to his left leg, his number-two wood frozen skyward like a smoking gun, the Colonel watched the trajectory of the ball. Tuttle watched the ball land near the two hundred-yard marker, bounce against another golf ball, and roll in front of the Singha Gold ad sign at the back of the range. He was a careful, methodical golfer, thought Tuttle. No rush in his shot; the patience of waiting for the moment of perfect concentration, and then following through.
Without turning around, the Colonel lowered his club. “Mr. Tuttle, how good of you to join me.”
“It was an unexpected invitation,” said Tuttle, sitting down on the bench behind the playing area.
“Do you play golf? ”
Tuttle shook his head.
The Colonel raised his eyebrows, concentrated over the ball, and sent it sailing toward the one-fifty yard green on the left hand side of the range.
“Now that is a surprise. My sources in Patpong told me about a rumor going around. You were in an upstairs gambling parlor and you were telling the owner I was your golf buddy.”
Tuttle sighed, thinking of Crosby sitting at a gambling table and over his head in trouble. Bangkok was the smallest town of ten million people in the world. His bluff to save Crosby had come back to haunt him.
The Colonel smiled with satisfaction as the ball bounced onto the green and rolled towards the flag. “I learned to play at Korat. During the Vietnam war, I was stationed at the air force base at Korat. You Americans installed a first-rate golf course and driving range.” He paused, changed to a five-iron, and hit another ball.
“And? ” asked Tuttle, breaking the silence.
“I wonder if your friend Lawrence is a golfer? ”
A waitress arrived with a coke for Tuttle. He refused to take it, tried to wave her off, and, taking her direction from the Colonel, she set the bottle and glass on the table beside Tuttle’s bench. She disappeared as quickly and quietly as she had arrived. “I never asked him,” said Tuttle, finally.
The Colonel smiled, then changed clubs, this time pulling a driver from his golf bag. His first drive bounced off the Singha Gold advertisement sign at the end of the range. “It’s been two or three months since he went back to America,” said the Colonel, leaning forward into another shot.
“Three months,” said Tuttle, waiting for the Colonel to gradually tip his hand.
The Colonel reacted with a shrug of the shoulders.
“One of my men caught a thief. He had stolen an air courier packet addressed to you. This criminal opened it looking for valuables,” explained the Colonel. “Instead, all he found was a letter from New York City. It has some very good news. Since we are friends, I wanted to bring the letter to your attention, personally.” He nodded to the driver of the BMW who handed Tuttle the letter.
The Colonel turned his concentration back to hitting golf balls as Tuttle read the letter. He reread the letter again. On the driving range, the loud whack of balls resounded. Tuttle was confused, angry, but above all he was scared. The Colonel waited until Tuttle raised his eyes from the letter, then he slowly took off his golf gloves.
“You are about to become a very wealthy man ,” said the Colonel. “So you should take up golf.”
The indirect, circular way of going around the main point left the burden on Tuttle. It was a grinding-down process. Guerrilla warfare tactics in fighting toward a goal; the Colonel was waiting for Tuttle to become angry, to make a mistake, to explode and lose control. Instead, Tuttle pulled back from the deep edge of anger he circled, and smiled.
“I played a few times in California,” he said, walking into the bay, and removing the Colonel’s three-iron from the bag. The caddie set a ball on the turf. Tuttle leaned forward, swung and missed the ball.
“You may want some lessons to brush up,” said the Colonel.
Tuttle felt his cheeks flush and burn red. He swung the iron again, this time slicing the ball into the netting off the right. The young girl squatting on her haunches showed no expression as she mechanically placed another ball on the turf.
“As a Vietnam war correspondent, you will appreciate how important help is in battle,” said the Colonel, pouring the Coke into the glass and taking a sip. “During the war, a crew would fly out of Korat in the morning for a bomb run, and in the afternoon, they were back playing a round of golf. Sometimes, a foursome didn’t return. Then all the Americans left. They turned the air base over to us. The golf course is still there. We are still playing golf. We have gone nowhere, Mr. Tuttle. This is our home ground. We always play the full eighteen holes; we never leave, say after nine. And like every world-class golf club, there are membership fees to consider. No one can play for free. That’s an important rule. If you’re not a member, then you must join.”
“And you want to be my sponsor? ” asked Tuttle, looking down at the golf ball. This time he sent the ball sailing high and straight toward the one-fifty yard marker.
“You see, you have potential,” he said, taking a drink from the glass. “I have a theory about the Vietnam war. Since you covered the war, maybe you will agree with it. The Americans built the golf course at Korat. So they think it would always belong to them. That was a mistake. Victory takes a commitment to play every day. With your friends and your family. A desire to win. An American mind builds a very good golf course; but an Asian mind masters the game.”
The Colonel took a practice swing, nodded for his caddie to set up another ball. He steadied his feet, concentrated, holding his yard marker, hit the ground six feet from the red flag and bounced. He did not take his eyes away from the shot until the ball had rolled to a complete stop.
“You might say the Vietnam war improved my game,” said the Colonel, reaching into his bag to change clubs.
“Yeah, well, I was a draft dodger,” said Tuttle, looking for some shock value.
The Colonel registered a smile. “Who went to Vietnam? ”
“I wasn’t looking to play golf. I was planning on finding something else.”
“So was I. And maybe we found what we were looking for. Today, I think to myself, maybe there is some lesson in all of this for Mr. Tuttle. I want to talk with you. I want to discuss these matters, and of course, to report that we have your stolen letter.”
Tuttle leaned forward on the iron, staring down at the ball. “Exactly what did we find, Colonel? ”
“It
’s up to you,” said the Colonel. “But with letters stolen in the post, I might worry about bank accounts. Some people are bad, dishonest, like in your country. They can be powerful. But if you should decide to deposit the money into a certain account, it might be a good idea. You have my personal guarantee no one will touch you. I think no problem for you.”
The mobile phone hooked on the side of the golf bag rang. The Colonel reached over and answered in Thai. He frowned, looking at the ground; barked several orders. He laid the phone down on the table and stared straight through Tuttle. “You have many problems in Thailand. Your daughter, she have a problem, too.”
“Asanee,” said Tuttle in disbelief. Her name hung in the air thick with the clean thwacking sound of golf balls sailing skyward. The sides of his rib cage heaving, Tuttle took a step forward. The two men from the BMW grabbed his arms; but he shook one loose, bringing the end of the iron into his gut. The driver, his sunglasses knocked off, collapsed in a heap across the bench. Lek, an ex-kick boxer, aimed several rapid kick shots at Tuttle. On the down swing of the last kick, Tuttle waited with the iron. He caught Lek’s ankle with the iron head, rolling him head over heels into the parking lot.
A Killing Smile Page 32