Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Listen,” the mamasan had said, “there’s one thing you can do. It only works for girls like you, because any man with sense can see you’re no natural to the Game, to say the least. So you find the best prospect you can, give him everything he wants from you, and allow yourself to fall in love with him so you don’t have to keep faking it. Nine times out of ten the faran will fall for you too and marry you or at least take care of you and your family for a few years, which is a lot better than selling your body in a bar.”

  How to fall in love? She shared a room with three other girls, all from Lalita’s home village near Surin on the border with Cambodia. Together they spoke in a dialect of Khmer, which made things feel cozy and happy. The three others knew all about Lalita’s problem with sex, for they told each other everything. After her little chat with the mamasan, Lalita had gone home to her friends and burst into tears. It was so frustrating. If only she could open her legs and screw with exaggerated abandon like the others, she would be able to save her mother’s sight and her father’s life and her brother’s future in less than a year. Nong, her best friend, realized that a radical solution was called for.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Lalita replied. “You’re going to say that I should aim for one special guy and give him everything so he can’t live without me—but I don’t have a clue how to do that.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say at all,” Nong countered. She took a DVD out of her handbag and inserted it into the DVD machine they had all bought together. It was Japanese hard porn, very professionally produced with unusual camera angles. As Nong had guessed, Lalita had never seen hard porn before. Of course, Lalita knew what other women did for their clients from the general conversation, but she had never actually seen a woman in action like that, really working the john. It made her feel sick and she told Nong to turn it off. “No,” Nong said, “you’re going to watch it to the end.”

  “Now what?” Lalita asked when the movie finally ended in an unconvincing crescendo of groans and moans, the girl’s face dripping with his goo.

  “Now you’re gonna watch it and watch it and watch it, and you’re gonna make sure you get every move, and then you’re gonna figure out how to refine it because you’re much more sensitive than that whore in the movie and a lot smarter, so when you’ve got the idea you can easily do better than her, depending on the john’s personality. And then you’re gonna ask yourself how many tequilas you need to do that. And then, because no way you’re gonna be able to keep up that kind of performance night after night, you’re gonna—”

  “Find the right john and lock him in,” Lalita supplied.

  “Right,” said Nong.

  So it all pointed to luck after all. For luck you need an expert. The monk at Wat Tanorn was from Surin; he spoke to her in her own Khmer dialect and liked to discuss the rice harvest and other agricultural matters.

  “The sow under the house is pregnant,” she told him, “due in a week’s time.”

  Phra Tanatika knew Lalita’s mother and father, both of whom were highly respected: poor but devout and dependable. Nobody wanted to see her mother go blind, or her father die, if it could be helped. In other words, he had to balance spiritual duty with community service. He tried to use his gift of clairvoyance wisely, in a way consistent with spiritual evolution. Lalita never told him she was a prostitute; she didn’t need to.

  “I’m having trouble making ends meet but I do work in a field where I meet farang men quite a lot, and I’m wondering if astrologically this is a moment when I can expect to meet my Number One, or someone close to it,” Lalita explained.

  “Tell me again your date and time of birth?”

  In Thailand everyone uses the Chinese horoscope, with some Hindu flourishes. Lalita was born in the year of the metal rabbit. This meant that although sensitive, smart, and more than a little inclined to freak out when life got tough, she nevertheless had about her a persistence, even a stubbornness, which no one ever saw except in extremis Then there was the hour of her birth, which in the young was at least as important as the year. Phra Tanatika was impressed with her dragon rising. It was tremendously well aspected at this moment and he told her so. But when she looked up athim, there was something else in her eyes, something that made him very sad.

  “This isn’t easy for you, is it?”

  “No,” Lalita admitted.

  “You have to be careful. You might not know it, but at this moment you wield extraordinary power, especially over men. And as we know, the world is balanced by duality. The other side of the coin is that you will have to give something from your heart.”

  “Enthusiasm?”

  “More than that,” the monk said, still feeling slightly depressed, for he was beginning to get serious signals concerning her future. “Look, I’ll give it to you straight. The man you are going to meet in the next few days is, well, someone who can help you much much more than you think, but the only way to really keep him is to give him something special.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You already know.”

  The monk, divining with little effort that Lalita was one of those pure souls who tend to take sexual love far more seriously than is healthy, decided to tell her about an interesting recent event. Soon after his alms round a few mornings before, when he had been eating the food his flock had prepared for him, he saw the astral body of Old Tou, whom he knew to be on his deathbed. Old Tou had led an averagely debauched life—a great womanizer in his youth, an alcoholic as he grew older, just another lost, self-centered soul. Phra Tanatika had watched in fascination while Old Tou’s astral body entered the body of a puppy who had just been born to one of the temple dogs. The puppy didn’t have a name yet, so Phra Tanatika called him “Tou.”

  “We copulate because karma forces us to,” the Phra explained with a smile. “Like Old Tou, everyone needs a body to inhabit—that’s all it amounts to. Humans make love for exactly the same reason dogs do.”

  Lalita smiled at the story and felt a great fondness for Phra Tanatika, for she saw he was trying to take the edge off of her problem with sex. Surely he was right: It was just an agricultural function, why did she take it so seriously?

  “What can I do to help my karma along in this regard and find the right man?”

  “Imaging,” the monk promptly replied. “You make an image in your mind of the kind of man you could give everything to—then when you see him you will know him.”

  Which is exactly what she did. Every night before she went to sleep, every morning when she woke up, she painstakingly built up an image of a farang man to whom she could happily give her heart and body and enthusiastically perform all those dreadful things that Japanese whore was doing in the porn video.

  The image she built up in her mind was surprisingly detailed: tall, slim, handsome, probably American, wealthy, a strong jaw, beautifully dressed in expensive casual clothes, with a telltale look in his eyes that most men don’t have: the look of a conquering dragon, to go with her own inner drag which very few people ever saw. She even imaged his favorite color: crimson.

  All that happened over the past week. Now she is taking Magnus’s photograph to Phra Tanatika at Wat Tanorn, using the sheet of paper as a makeshift fan in the hot, steamy bus that costs only two baht because there is no air-conditioning.

  “Is this him?” she asks the monk. Phra Tanatika stares at Magnus’s picture, complete with crimson neck tie and suspenders. What he sees there he dares not tell her.

  “What do you think?” he asks her. “Is it him or not?”

  “I’m sure it is,” says Lalita.

  “Then it is your karma, you cannot alter it.”

  When she leaves, the monk looks after her with a worried expression. He knows that we humans are in reality a spaghetti junction of intertwined influences, called samscaras, from previous lifetimes. Some of the samscaras we bear date back to reptilian lifetimes and simply lie in wait indefinitely, like tics, for an opportunity to
assert themselves, even in the most pure and gentle souls.

  BANGKOK, BY THE CHAO PRAYA RIVER, TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 2005

  Magnus watches while Tallboy and a dozen Thai men set up the giant plasma TV monitor in the warehouse in Bangkok’s Chinatown, near the river. Every now and then Tallboy receives a call from Colombia on his cell phone. Sometimes he’s the one to make the call to Colombia.

  “How’s your link?” Tallboy asks. “Everything in place?”

  Tallboy is talking to his opposite number in the enemy camp, but practical issues force a polite, even genial tone. War will resume as soon as they have fixed the glitches.

  “I know, the technology is never as advanced as they claim, there are always problems. How good is your satellite link? I mean, you’re on the top of some stone age hill in the Andes, right? I’m in the middle of a modern city, so most likely you would be the one with the problem, right? Okay, let’s do another trial run.”

  The giant screen, hung on the back wall of the ware-house, is joined to a box of technological tricks from which a dozen cables emerge. A Sony digital movie camera points at an empty gurney. When a technician flicks a switch, the screen fills with a kind of energetic fuzz, billions of pixels in some chaotic state.

  “Tell me something,” Tallboy says into his cell phone, “you got rain over there? Looks like rain on the screen. No, wait, okay, we’re receiving you. Shit, you weren’t supposed to start yet.”

  Lacking Tallboy’s finesse, the Colombians have already pointed their camera at Hercules Lee, who is tied to a chair and gagged and looking very sick.

  “Is Samson linked in to this?” Magnus asks Tallboy.

  “Sure,” Tallboy says, looking worried.

  “Better bring in the kid brother,” Magnus tells Tallboy.

  “Right.”

  Felipe Maria Jesus González Escaverada is swarthy, unshaven, in his late twenties, cuffed hand and foot. Maybe they tranquilized him, or simply beat the hell out of him already; he’s not fully conscious, anyway. But Magnus knows Tallboy has adrenalin and testosterone on hand: If necessary, the kid brother could be very alert in seconds. The boys dump the kid brother onto the gurney and strap him in with hospital-style restrainers. Now the screen splits: One half is Hercules Lee looking very sick on some hill in the Andes, the other half is Felipe Maria Jesus González also looking very sick strapped to the gurney in Bangkok. In Colombia they are watching the same split screen.

  “Ready?” Tallboy asks.

  Ready.” The thick Hispanic accent booms over the sound system.

  Tallboy looks to Magnus for strategic advice: What do I do now?

  “Ask if they’re ready to talk. Tell them what a childish waste of time this all is—waste of money too. It’s ridiculous in this day and age.”

  Talking into a microphone, Tallboy repeats what Magnus has said, word for word.

  It’s a matter of honor,” the Hispanic voice says from the speakers.

  “It’s a matter of two little kilos of coke,” Tallboy corrects. “What’s to get macho about? Are you in business or do you spend all your time playing with yourself?”

  Don’t get cheeky, flatnose.

  “At least I don’t have a whole forest growing out of my nose. Do you grow coca in there?”

  “You’re not a man. Men do not talk like that. Only boys, women, and Chinks.”

  Tallboy, fuming now and picking up a pair of pliers: “Okay, I’m starting with the left ear.”

  “Me too,” says the Hispanic voice.

  Magnus cannot stand to watch. This is a preliminary skirmish; no new stage in the negotiations will be reached before both victims are properly softened up with a few minor body parts ripped to shreds, gags off, screaming the place down. McKay needs a drink, preferably where he will not hear the screams.

  He leaves the warehouse and passes between ten of Tallboy’s men who are on guard outside. Magnus knows the area and heads toward the river. Small shops sell beer, basic provisions, and cigarettes. Magnus buys a pack of Marlboro Red and a can of Singha beer. He checks his watch. His experience with these kinds of negotiations suggests that a good ten minutes of terror on both sides is needed before anyone starts to see sense.

  Halfway through his cigarette, he hears a sound both muffled and tremendous, then the sky above the river lights up for a moment, illuminating the water, the opposite shore, his hand holding the can of beer, and the face of the old lady who owns the shop. Little stars rise and dance amidst the acrid stench of plastic, the crude fragrance of petrol, the primeval aroma of burning wood. He stands and turns to watch the conflagration, less than a block away, quickly diminish to a massive blaze.

  With the lightning reflex of a pro, Magnus realizes he misjudged the timing. Obviously the Colombians knew the location of the warehouse, and as soon as Pablo Escaverada, the godfather, decided the torture would have to be taken all the way, he preferred to kill his own kid brother along with Tallboy Yip and his men. He still held Hercules Lee, of course, and therefore had brilliantly gained the upper hand in the incomprehensible war.

  Badly shaken: How the hell did a bunch of Colombian bums find out a secret address in Bangkok? Fighting an adrenalin rush: He needs to hide. If the Escaverada family know about the warehouse, they must know about him too. Maybe the bombers saw him leave the warehouse and know he’s still alive?

  He calls Lalita on her cell phone. They’d had no time to make love, but he’d paid her bar fine, so she was in the hotel room waiting for him.

  “Get the hell out of there right now,” Magnus says. “Just get out right now.”

  They meet at On Nut Sky train station. He tells her things have gone terribly for him. He doesn’t go into detail and she is too smart to ask. He tells her she is not to worry, he still has plenty of money and will look after her, but she must help him. He will pay whatever she wants for a week or so totally out of sight, out of play.

  Lalita does not seem overly put out. Sure, she knows a place: her home in the country, near Surin, right on the Cambodian border.

  He waits while Lalita calls her parents, tells them she is coming to see them with her fiancé. After all, these are respectable, pious country people, no way she can turn up with a man unless she is at least engaged to him. Magnus doesn’t mind. He guesses enough dough will settle ruffled feathers at the end of the day. Things are difficult, but not so difficult he would consider marrying a Third World whore.

  Or would he?

  THE FARM, FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2005

  It is interesting, Magnus muses after a couple of days, how an environment can change one. Lalita’s parents’ house is quite big, a wood structure on concrete stilts on a couple acres of land in a flat hot dry region that owns a peculiar beauty. Tall trees break up the landscape; to McKay’s astonishment, elephants graze in fields. Wild-looking young day workers with cloths tied around their heads, bundled up against the sun, race by in the backs of pickup trucks from time to time. Monks from the local wat make alms rounds at dawn. Lalita, her near-blind mother, and her seriously ill father take food out to the road every morning to offer to the monks. Lalita has explained that sex is out of the question. McKay has already gathered this from the fact that there are no rooms in the house, only one vast space upstairs where all domestic business is conducted, save cooking which takes place under the house where the sow lives. Yet surely they could find a way? Only by going through a Buddhist ceremony, Lalita tells him firmly. Lawyer McKay notes that she is not talking about anything legally binding.

  In the meantime, he gets in touch with Samson Lee via a cheap cell phone, using one of a dozen SIM cards that Lalita has purchased for him. McKay will use each SIM card only once. A second cell phone fitted with the twelfth simcard he puts aside exclusively for Lee to use to call him.

  Better stay where you are for the moment, till I sort this out,” was all Samson Lee would say on the first call. “It may take awhile. Don’t tell me where you are, just tell me if it’s secure for a month or two.”


  “Month or two?”

  “This will take some time.”

  “Did they kill Hercules?”

  “Of course they killed Hercules, what was left of him. His mother’s seriously pissed.”

  McKay absorbs this information while, from an upstairs window, he watches Lalita’s mother pick rice. It doesn’t look so hard. You simply pull up a clump of the plant from the wet earth, bash it against the side of your foot, and chuck it in the basket. It’s hot though: The landscape turns into a mirage soon after sunup. And it cannot help to be almost blind. The old lady works mostly by feel.

  On the second call on the second cell phone the next day, Lee tells him there is a whole gang of Colombians still in Thailand. They bribed the cops in advance, so no one is looking for them except Lee’s people. Lee’s people, though, have connections with senior police that go very deep. As a matter of fact, Lee is connected to almost everyone important in Thailand. The Colombians, who only had the know-how to bribe minor cops, are still at large, but they will find it difficult to leave the country. Magnus is probably not in imminent danger, he just needs to keep his head down until the Thai side of the war is won.