by Jake Needham
Why not? I asked myself.
I suppose I should have known better than to put it that way. That was the very question that had doubtless started more wars and resulted in more pregnancies than all the other questions taken together that men had asked themselves since the beginning of time.
Patpong had a history, but like a lot of history most of it was made up.
It started when somebody opened a tiny bar and hired a few Thai girls to go-go dance to American rock-and-roll on a bumpy alleyway running a couple of hundred yards between Silom Road and Surawong Road through property owned by a family with the surname Patpong. That was during the sixties when Bangkok was full of American soldiers on R&R from the war in Vietnam and within weeks the little street was wall-to-wall with American soldiers and lithe, beautiful young girls, and suddenly there were twenty other bars just like it up and down Soi Patpong.
None of the girls were particularly good dancers, but they were all gorgeous and wore very small bikinis and very high-heeled shoes so nobody cared much. It didn’t take very long for Soi Patpong to become the most famous little street in Bangkok, maybe in all of Asia.
It was in the eighties and nineties that everything changed. The American military went home and didn’t leave much behind but a motley band of sad and bedraggled misfits: ex-soldiers with no place to go, toothless old Air America pilots, burned-out Peace Corps volunteers, and hordes of German and Scandinavian tourists in baggy shorts, leather sandals and nylon socks. Before long Patpong was enveloped by a slightly wistful air, one that spoke of time having passed too quickly and for too small a purpose.
When Anita left, I sold the apartment where we had lived and moved into a hotel not far from Patpong. I lived at the Grand Hotel for nearly six months, although truthfully the Grand Hotel wasn’t particularly grand. To be entirely honest, it was downright shabby. But it was clean, it was a ten-minute walk from the business district, and it had soul. The Grand was almost a private club, one dedicated to the preservation of a particular species of foreigner, the slightly off-kilter refugees from reality who always seemed to wash up on the great dirty beach of Bangkok. It had been my personal safe house while I was trying to decide what was to become of me, and I would always be grateful to it for the sanctuary it offered.
I wondered what had become of Mr. Tang, the elderly Thai-Chinese who ran the place. When I lived at the Grand, he could generally be found sitting behind the reception desk in the small lobby sucking on a pencil. I’d bet old Mr. Tang was still sitting there. I could get the cab to drop me off on Sathorn Road and walk by the Grand on my way to Patpong, couldn’t I? Of course I could. And that was exactly what I was going to do.
I unpacked quickly and headed downstairs to find a taxi.
AFTER I MOVED to Hong Kong, I stayed at the Grand whenever I went back to Bangkok, which was why I couldn’t stay there now. To be honest, I felt a little embarrassed about that, disloyal really, like I had turned my back on an old pal. The Grand had been a steadfast friend when I needed one, and I felt like I owed it the same allegiance and fidelity in return.
The Grand is located in one of the few pockets of the city that real estate developers have somehow overlooked. It’s a neighborhood wedged into a narrow strip between the embassy compounds on Sathorn Road and the bars of Patpong, and it is marked by narrow streets overhung with trees and high walls concealing crumbling villas a decade or two overdue for a paint job. The streets are quiet and empty of traffic, the sidewalks are dappled with shade from the rows of big leaf eucalyptus trees that border them, and the high walls around the old villas capture the warm breezes filled with the smells of charcoal cooking fires and fresh fish. It’s a reminder of how life in Bangkok had been once, back in a time almost nobody but me seemed to care all that much about anymore.
I got out of the cab on Sathorn at the end of Convent Road and walked north toward the Grand.
At first I thought I had gotten confused and somehow ended up on the wrong block. But I soon realized I wasn’t confused. It was simply that everything had changed. Almost nothing looked the way I remembered it.
The eucalyptus trees had all been cut and most of the old villas were gone. The road had been widened and now bland looking condominium buildings lined both sides of the street. No more dappled shade, no more soft breezes rattling the big leaves, no more smells of cooking wafting from behind high walls. Now the neighborhood was just bare and hot and utilitarian. I could have been anywhere.
My God, I thought, it’s only been a couple of years since I was here and the whole neighborhood is just… gone.
I walked faster as I approached the Grand, concerned now, like a man rushing to check on a friend he had not heard from in a while. I feared for what might have become of it. I feared the worst. And, when I got to where the Grand was, the worst was exactly what I found.
It was gone. Completely gone. In its place rose a humdrum-looking tan concrete structure of no particular character about a dozen stories tall that I assumed had to be yet another condo. My eyes swept up the structure and when they reached the top all doubt as to what had happened to the Grand was ended. The big red letters on the roof said MARRIOTT.
A Marriott had replaced the Grand Hotel? It was worse than finding my friend expired of old age and creeping infirmity. The Grand Hotel had been cut down and buried under a goddamned Marriott. There’s not even any dignity in that. Not a fucking bit.
Only a generation or two ago Bangkok had been a gracious place crisscrossed by canals rather than streets, an uncluttered scattering of mostly wooden buildings set in thick groves of mango trees that cast cool shadows as they swayed in the tropical breezes. Only the gilded spires of the Buddhist temples reached up more than two or three stories, and life took its rhythm from the moods of the muddy Chao Phraya River.
Things changed and life moved on, of course. I understood that. What I did not understand was how a city I had once loved with all my heart could have become an entirely different place so quickly.
Almost all the small shops, family homes, and neighborhood restaurants that once were the living heart of Bangkok had been swept away by a flood tide of soaring condominium towers and massive shopping malls. The things had sprouted everywhere, toadstools in a rainforest, lavishly fertilized by a potent combination of hot money and obliging banks. What not long ago had been narrow, tree-shaded lanes like Convent Road had been turned into little more than deep valleys between jagged mountain ranges of gleaming marble and bronzed glass, all of them gridlocked day and night with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Concrete, steel, and the Mercedes-Benz had buried Bangkok in less than a generation.
I had always known it would change, of course, that someday all I truly loved about Bangkok would be snuffed out. Even when I was living at the Grand, I had understood the city would never be this way again. I was dwelling in a world that was under relentless assault, and I took for granted that those who wanted to finish it off would eventually win. I just didn’t think they would win so quickly.
I figured the Grand and its neighborhood would be the last stand, the final holdout against unreasoning change cynically peddled as progress. If it was gone now, too, the struggle was truly over.
I hung my head and trudged off in the direction of Patpong.
NINETEEN
WHEN I GOT to Silom Road, I dodged through the traffic to the other side and walked up Soi Patpong.
During the day, Soi Patpong is a sleepy little alleyway that doesn’t carry much traffic because there isn’t anywhere on it anyone really wants to go. At night, the neon signs flicker on above the go-go bars, the music starts up behind the heavy curtains covering their entryways, and street vendors fill every last patch of empty space, their stands heaped with fake wristwatches, pirated CDs, and the other cheesy junk tourists love to buy. The road is closed, and Patpong is transformed from an empty alleyway into a heaving, roaring, sweaty mob of people.
I elbowed my way through the crowds until I found the Madrid, a bar wher
e I’d downed many a drink over the years. The word around Bangkok was that the Madrid had been a cover for a CIA safe house back in the days of the Vietnam War. It was there the Air America pilots went to get their briefings when they hit party town and it was the place where CIA legends like Jack Shirley and Pat Landry drank beer and smoked Camels in the back booth while they planned the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia. Sometimes, so the stories went, you could even find Tony Poe hanging out at the Madrid. A CIA man who was more myth than human being, Tony Poe achieved a sort of immortality when Francis Coppola wrote him into the film Apocalypse Now as the half-insane intelligence officer, Colonel Kurtz. After the movie came out, nobody ever thought of Tony anymore without seeing Brando.
That was all way before my time, of course.
When I first came to Bangkok and started hanging out at the Madrid, Jack Shirley, Pat Landry, and Tony Poe had all long passed into history and the only Air America pilots still around were a few stooped old men trying to hit you up for a beer. Still, the Madrid itself was more or less the same as it had been back then, or so they told me, and there in the paint on its walls and the fake leather of its booths I always felt a connection with everyone who had sat there before me.
That was the romantic side of Bangkok. So many wonderfully weird and quirky people had been there before you and, if you knew where to go, you could hang out with them for an hour or so for the price of a bottle of Singha beer.
I slipped between two vendors’ stands piled high with junk and made my way to the other side of Soi Patpong where I found myself in front of a shabby looking bar called Goldfinger’s. Once Goldfinger’s had been called the Mississippi Queen and it was one of the hottest spots in Patpong, famous for playing the soul music American soldiers on R&R from Vietnam loved. But what really brought the place its worldwide fame was Michael Camino picking it for a role in The Deer Hunter. In the film, Christopher Walken and Robert De Niro played Russian roulette at a table out front and for decades afterward tourists lined up to get in. Years later, the Mississippi Queen achieved new notoriety as the favorite haunt of Charles Sobhraj, the international mass murderer who befriended foreign backpackers in Bangkok, drugged them, and killed them.
The history of places like the Madrid and the Mississippi Queen was the history of Patpong. A potent stew of American movies, and international secrets, and wars, and murders. Not much was left of any of that now. Just a few shabby façades half hidden in the jumble of a crowded market that hustled tourists. Patpong wasn’t what it used to be, but then I wasn’t either.
I shook off the nostalgia and turned down an alleyway toward Le Bouchon.
LE BOUCHON HAS been serving French bistro food in Patpong for over twenty years. There are restaurants in Patpong older than Le Bouchon, but something about it makes it feel like it has been there forever. The decor is basic, as is the service, but the food is good and the place has the feel of a French colonial outpost fighting to maintain standards of civilization even in the midst of the barbarian hordes.
Inside, Le Bouchon is about the size of an ambitious telephone booth. There is jazz on the stereo, murmured conversation in French, and comfortably dim lighting. A tiny bar with eight stools is crammed against one wall and a single row of tables lines the opposite wall across a narrow aisle leading to a kitchen even smaller than the bar. I had never met the owner, but everyone who came to Le Bouchon knew who he was. He presided over the place every night from a stool at the end of the bar and, fittingly, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Gérard Depardieu.
When I pushed through the door, I found the tables about half occupied by what I gathered were Europeans or Americans. There didn’t appear to be a Thai in the place.
I took a stool at the end of the bar furthest away from where the owner and two friends were huddled in quiet conversation. The bartender was a woman, a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me for some reason, and she was an absolute knockout. She was very tall for a Thai, and slim. Her deep brown eyes were so large they didn’t look quite real, and her high, wide cheekbones gave her face the watchful air of a lazing cat. She was wearing some sort of high-necked tunic that looked vaguely military and her long black hair was swept up on the back of her head in what I thought I had heard women call a French twist.
“Do you make a good martini?” I asked when she came over to me.
She said nothing. She just looked at me, smiled slightly, and waited.
“Gin then,” I said. “Very dry. With a twist. No olives.”
She nodded, selected a bottle from the display behind her, and set to work. I watched her make my drink, and I enjoyed every minute of it. After she set the martini glass in front of me, she took a couple of steps away and glanced back to gauge my reaction. Perhaps I was hot and thirsty from my walk, or maybe I was simply in thrall to the bartender, but the martini tasted absolutely wonderful.
“It’s good,” I nodded. “Really good.”
She smiled, lowered her eyes, and started to walk away.
“Wait,” I said. “I think you’re expecting me.”
She stopped and shifted those big eyes back to me.
“My name is …”
For a moment, I went absolutely blank. I couldn’t remember who the hell I was supposed to be. But then all at once it came back to me.
“… John Smith,” I finished quickly.
At first, the woman seemed not to have heard. Her face showed no reaction at all. She just bent down, lifted up a small whiteboard with the day’s menu written on it, and propped it up on the back of the bar across from where I was sitting.
“You order dinner now?” she asked.
She had a striking voice, soft and reedy. It had the quality of jazz played on an alto flute.
“The Dover sole is very good tonight,” she prompted when I didn’t respond.
I shifted my eyes back and forth between the woman and the menu board. Had she not heard me? Or was I talking to the wrong person, someone for whom Jello’s fake name held no meaning?
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Did I say my name is John Smith?”
The woman giggled softly, lifting one hand to cover her mouth in a gesture so delicate and graceful that it utterly disarmed me.
“I heard you… Mr. Smith,” she giggled again. “I think you should have dinner now and after that perhaps we will talk.”
She reached underneath the bar and brought out a placemat and silverware and set a place in front of me for dinner. From somewhere else she produced a folded white linen napkin and arranged it in the middle of the placemat. It appeared I was having dinner.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” I said.
“No, I didn’t.”
The woman looked at me, cocking her head to one side.
“I suggest you start with the French onion soup,” she continued after a moment, “and then have the grilled Dover sole. It really is nice.”
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I was in no hurry, was I? Besides, French onion soup and grilled sole sounded good.
And they were good. About halfway through the sole, I asked for another martini. The woman made it, removed my empty glass, and placed the fresh drink in front of me. I tried it and nodded in satisfaction.
“As good as the first one,” I said.
She smiled. “Alisa.”
I didn’t immediately see what she meant, and I’m sure the puzzlement showed on my face.
“You asked before if I had told you my name,” she said. “I’m telling you now. It’s Alisa.”
I sipped at the martini, which gave me a moment to think before responding.
“Why now instead of then?” I asked after I put the glass down.
Alisa slipped an iPhone out of a pocket hidden away somewhere in her tunic. She pushed at a button, placed it on the bar, and turned it toward me. I glanced down and saw a picture of me taken from the side while I was eating my French onion soup.
“I wanted to be certain you are who you say you ar
e.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
“So you confirmed I really am John Smith?”
She scooped the iPhone off the bar and it disappeared back into the folds of her tunic.
“Yes, Professor Shepherd. I have confirmed you really are John Smith.”
Instinctively I shot quick glances up and down the bar, but Alisa had spoken so softly no one was nearly close enough to overhear her.
“Finish your sole,” she said. “Then we can talk.”
Ten minutes later she had cleared the dishes away and removed my placemat.
“Will this cover it?” I asked as I peeled a few Thai baht banknotes off of my money clip and placed them on the bar in front of her.
“That’s too much.”
“It’s okay. I tip for service.”
I suddenly realized my choice of words probably hadn’t been the best. In Patpong, the word service has a lot of meanings.
“Don’t take that the wrong way,” I added quickly.
Alisa smiled, but she didn’t say anything else. She collected the banknotes and disappeared through a door. When she reappeared, she walked around the bar and approached the owner who was sitting at the other end. She bent close to his ear and I could see her lips moving, but of course I couldn’t hear what she said.
The owner’s eyes abruptly flicked toward me and he examined me with what seemed equal parts of wariness and distaste. Then he nodded sharply once to Alisa, although he didn’t take his eyes off me.
Alisa came back to where I was sitting. “Let’s go,” she said.
Without waiting for me to say anything, she turned away and walked toward the door.
I took my napkin off my lap, dumped it on the bar, and followed.
TWENTY
ALISA AVOIDED THE worst of the night market mob and led me out to Surawong Road. When we reached it, she turned left. The congestion thinned out after we passed the Le Méridien Hotel, and the further we got from Patpong the emptier the sidewalk became.