Thai Shorts

by Lilburne, Guy

  “And what brings such a beautiful lady into my bar?” he asked, before knocking back the vodka in one go.

  “I didn’t know it was your bar.”

  “I own most of the buildings this end of Walking Street. My name is Ivan.”

  “Nice to meet you Mr. Ivan. My name is Nana.”

  “Drink!” instructed Ivan, nodding to the glass in front of Nana.

  “I only drink orange juice.”

  “When I buy a girl a drink, I expect her to drink it.” He softened the statement with a smile.

  “And when I tell a man that I only drink orange juice, I expect the man to buy me an orange juice,” she smiled back.

  Ivan looked into her big brown eyes for a moment. Anger flashed across his face, but quickly turned to amusement. Nobody had ever spoken to Ivan like this before. Well, not spoken to him like this and lived! Ivan burst out laughing. After a few moments the laughter turned into a coughing fit. When he stopped coughing he shouted out something in Russian and one of the girls behind the bar rang the bell and everybody clapped and cheered and vodka shorts were poured for everyone in the bar. Nana got her orange juice. There were several well-built and heavily muscled men standing around the bar. They didn’t seem to be doing much other than simply watching what was going on in the bar and paying special attention to Ivan. Nana suddenly realised that they must be his bodyguards. She guessed that he was Russian Mafia. It didn’t make any difference to her. She sipped her orange juice and smiled. Ivan realised that this girl wasn’t going to be a push over, but he had already decided that he wanted her. She just wasn’t like the usual bar girl. Maybe, he thought, she wasn’t a bar girl at all. He decided that if she wasn’t then there might be long term prospects between them. The more he talked to her, the more she smiled and laughed at his jokes, which really weren’t funny.

  After another hour had passed Ivan laid his cards on the table.

  “I’ll give you 50,000 baht to come to bed with me now.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I have a big house near Sri Racha, but we can use one of the rooms in one of my hotels. It’s just down the road. We can walk.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Ivan slid off the bar stool and Nana stepped down and smoothed out her dress. They started walking towards the open front of the bar and one of the bodyguards fell in step behind them. Nana laughed.

  “Is your bodyguard going to watch us or does he have to stand in for you?”

  On another day Ivan would have been quick to anger over such a remark, but he really liked Nana. He thought that she was probably too headstrong for her own good, but she was also very charming and just simply beautiful. So he laughed and waved the bodyguard away. He spoke in Russian and the man nodded. Nana walked out of the bar with Ivan and they walked the short distance to a hotel on the other side of the road. Ivan spoke to the young Thai girl behind the reception desk in Russian and she handed him a room key and gave a very long respectful wai to her boss. Nana noticed that the hotel, just like the bar, had no CCTV security. She would have expected a ‘mafia’ boss to have had this sort of basic security, but it really didn’t make any difference to her. She followed Ivan up one flight of stairs. He was more than a little breathless by the time he had climbed the twelve steps and he took a few moments to get his breath back, before walking along the short landing and opening door number 4 with the key that the receptionist had given to him. The room was surprisingly plush with elegant wood and wicker lamps, which matched the furniture and the frame of the oil painting that hung over the bedhead. A sliding glass door led out onto a balcony that looked out over the pool and garden at the side of the hotel. Ivan wasted no time in unbuttoning his shirt and pulling down his baggy shorts, kicking them against the fridge door. His huge belly hung down to his thighs, so Nana couldn’t see if he was wearing any underpants or not. But she guessed that he wasn’t.

  “I don’t want to waste any time. Take your clothes off. I want to see what I am paying for and then I’m going to give you something that you will remember for a long time,” said Ivan, clapping his hands in anticipation.

  “I was in Bangkok earlier with your associate Igor.”

  “You had sex with Igor?” Ivan looked confused, as his brain tried to assimilate the information that Nana had just imparted.

  Nana smiled demurely and reached up slowly to her hair. She slowly pulled the two huge silver pins from her hair and shook her head, tossing her long hair free. She looked stunning. Holding the silver elephants in the palm of each hand she wrapped her fingers tighter around them and in one swift movement she stuck them both their full length deep into the sides of his chest, piercing his heart and lungs before she pulled them out again. Ivan gasped for breath as his lungs hissed. The confused look on his face turned into a look of terror. Nana raised a foot and kicked him in the chest, knocking him backwards onto the bed. She leaned over his helpless huge frame and whispered near his ear.

  “I don’t sell sex. I sell death and yours and Igor’s have already been paid for.”

  Ivan felt a sharp pain in his left ear, but it was only very brief, before Nana inserted the full length of one of the pins into his ear and through his brain and out of the other side of his skull. His eyes crossed and his nerves twitched in the moment before he died. Nana wiped the pins on his shirt before washing them in the bathroom sink and using the clean pink towel to dry them. She put her hair back up and used the two pins to hold it in place. She opened the glass sliding door and went out onto the balcony. She held her high heeled shoes in her hand and climbed over the rail before dropping to the ground below. She put her shoes back on and walked back out along Walking Street, mixing in with the crowd. She checked out of her hotel and hailed a taxi to take her back to Bangkok.

  As she sat in the back of the taxi, as it drove along the expressway towards Bangkok, she retrieved one of the two mobile phones in her bag and sent a text message;

  ‘2 Timid Drunk’. The words weren’t important. It was the initials that mattered. This was a TD message. TD stood for Target Dead. In this case there were two Targets Dead. The only other messages that she would ever send from this mobile phone were a D message, which would always be followed by a number; for example Daffodils 36 would mean Delayed 36 hours. The initial D stood for Delayed. Another message could be an MF message; Mission Failed. But in six years Nana had never sent an MF message. Nana was 26 years old. She received no reply to the text message. She didn’t expect one, but she knew that the second half of the payment would be in her bank account by the next day. She looked out of the taxi window as the big buildings and bright lights of Bangkok grew nearer. Nana knew that she was well past redemption, but in the morning she would go to the temple, as she always did after a contract. She knew that she would suffer in the next life for the things that she was doing in this life, but she figured that any merit she could make with Buddha might help a little.

  Nana hadn’t always been called Nana. That was a name that had been given to her on her 20th birthday - the day that she officially died!

  Nana was born in a tin shack in the slums of Bangkok, in a little shanty town under one of the expressway flyovers, which seemed to have crept over the city like Ivy during the last 25 years or so. She did have some brothers and sisters, but she couldn’t remember what happened to them all. She was born into poverty and suffered at the hands of a drunken father and a drug-addicted mother. She could remember when her father died and she remembered her mother moving away, taking two of her brothers with her. Nana was left behind with a younger sister, who was snatched and taken away by someone a few days later. Nana then survived on her own. She became a tough street kid and did whatever she had to do to survive. She could fight and she could steal. She had a good brain so she knew that she would be alright. She shed no tears over her missing family. She knew no different. To her
this was a normal life. Her name at that time was Fah. She had a pretty face and big eyes and got money by begging from the farang tourists who visited Bangkok. They took pity on the pretty kid with the dirty face and cute smile. She was never going to starve.

  She didn’t know it at the time, but for nearly two years until her tenth birthday, she was being watched by someone. The middle-aged Thai man in the smart suit used to drink coffee in one of the smarter coffee shops, opposite where Nana spent so much of her day begging. The man had watched her begging. He had seen her steal and he had seen her fight to keep what she had. He was impressed by her resourcefulness. Nana didn’t know that it was her tenth birthday, but it was. She had been begging and had some money. An older boy tried to take her money and she fought him off, but he came back with four other boys. They tried again to take her money and she had to fight all five of them. The boys eventually ran off with black eyes and bloody noses and Nana got to keep her money. She sustained a cut lip and some bruises for her trouble, but she still had her day’s takings. The smart Thai man in the coffee shop had seen it all. After he finished his coffee he paid his bill and left a good tip. For the first time in two years he decided to go and talk to the little street girl, who had impressed him so much over the years.

  He tossed down a 100 baht note and Nana wai’d to him.

  “Are you alright?” said the man, without a smile.

  “Yes. I’m alright.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Fah.”

  “You have no family?”

  Fah just shrugged her shoulders.

  “I can give you a better life. I work for the government. I have a good job and a nice house. I can adopt you, if you will say that I am your uncle. You can live in my nice house, have nice things and wear nice clothes, go to school and have a good education.”

  “Why?” said Fah, looking up at the man’s face for the first time. He had a nice face, but not a kind face. There was no smile, no emotion.

  “Because I can use you. When you are older you can work for me and earn a lot of money, live a good life. It’s better than surviving on the street.”

  Fah shrugged her shoulders again.

  “Do you want to come to see my house and then you can decide?”

  “Okay.”

  Fah got up from the kerb and followed the man in the nice suit to his nice car. It was big and black and new. The seats were leather and it smelled nice. The house was just outside of downtown Bangkok. It was a big house and Fah thought that the man in the suit must be the richest man in the world. Inside, everything was expensive. There were two housekeepers who kept it clean, polished and did all the cooking. Fah wandered around the house with wide eyes. The man in the suit followed her around, but said nothing. There were four bedrooms and each had a huge bed with deep mattresses. Each room had its own bathroom. Everything was clean and smelled lovely to Fah.

  “The big bedroom is mine, but you can take your pick from any of the other three rooms. If you want me to adopt you I can do this. I will buy you everything you need. You will wear nice clothes and eat good food. Your life will be different from before.” There was still no smile and no kindness behind his eyes, but Fah knew that she was being offered a kindness. It was the first time in her life that anyone had ever offered her anything.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “You can call me ‘Uncle’.”

  “Are you going to touch me?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I told you. I will educate you and train you. When you grow up you will have a very special job and have a good life.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you are already special. You just need training.”

  “Okay.” Fah shrugged her shoulders and walked along the landing into the bedroom that had the sun shining into it. She jumped onto the bed.

  “I’ll take this room,” she smiled. Uncle didn’t smile back.

  Uncle did indeed work for the government. He used to be in the military - Thai Special Forces - before he started working for the government as a secret special agent. He had lots of contacts and knew a lot of things. He was 10 years away from retirement and Fah was part of his retirement plan. He paid some money to some people and Fah was officially adopted by her ‘Uncle’. He changed her name to Fon and she was enrolled in a top school and even received extra tuition at home. She was to become fluent in English and Chinese and she was top of her class in Maths, Science and Computer Studies. She adapted quickly to her new life and in her own way she started to love her uncle for everything that he had done for her, but there was no love or emotion on his side. Whenever she tried to kiss him, or cuddle him or even be close to him, he just pushed her away. It didn’t matter to her. She had lived her whole life without love, but at least now she had someone taking care of her. She didn’t need to be loved. She was discouraged from having any proper friends and nobody was allowed to come to the house. The older housekeeper really liked Fon and she had started to become a good friend. She showed Fon real kindness and Fon really liked her too. Uncle sacked the housekeeper and replaced her with a younger woman, who was given strict instructions not to befriend Fon. She never did.

  Uncle came home one day soon after Fon had moved into the house. He had bought her a little white pet mouse in a small cage. It had bottle feeders for fresh water and nuts and seeds for food. Fon was excited and delighted with the pet. She had never had a pet before. She played with it every day, petting it and feeding it. It became the friend that she had never had. A few weeks later Uncle sat watching her playing with the mouse. He very calmly and very coldly told her to kill it. Fon was shocked and a bit scared. She refused and received the biggest beating of her life. Battered and bruised and crying she was ordered again to kill the mouse.

  “How can I kill it?” she sobbed.

  “The best way you can. It is small so you can just crush it. Do it quickly so it doesn’t suffer. Or you can use a knife. Up to you.”

  Fon held her little friend in her hand and squeezed. It didn’t bite her. It just squeaked loudly and then it was dead. Fon looked into Uncle’s eyes.

  “Why?”

  “Because you have to learn many things. Life and death are not about emotions. You have to learn to live without feelings or emotions. One day you will thank me for it.”

  Another mouse was brought back to the house a few days later. Fon didn’t want anything to do with it, but Uncle made her take care of it; feeding it and cleaning the cage. A few weeks later she was again ordered to kill the pet. Uncle suggested that she think of other ways to kill the animal - ways which would be less painful to herself and the mouse. She drowned it in a small glass. The next one a few weeks later she killed by chopping its head off with a cleaver. The pets got bigger; kittens and puppies and eventually full sized cats and dogs. Fon’s favourite weapon of death was the gun. It was quick and it was easier to detach herself emotionally from the act. Killing things became part of her life. It was her secret. To survive it she had to squash any feelings of guilt and any emotions. It was just an act that she had to do when ordered by Uncle. If she did it she didn’t get a beating. Instead she received some money; enough to buy some new shoes or a new dress. Her life was easy if she did as she was told. She had stopped becoming attached to the pets. She just looked after them until Uncle told her to kill them. She learnt how to dispatch them with efficiency; quickly and as painlessly as she could make it. It became a chore that she didn’t really like doing; like cleaning the dishes or mopping the floor. She didn’t like it, but she did it and she got paid for it. She didn’t think too deeply about it. In fact she didn’t think about it at all. Her thoughts, like her feelings, were buried deep inside. It was the only way that she could deal with the situation. She realised that Uncle was a cruel man, but
she didn’t think too much about that either.

  Fon grew from a young girl with a pretty face into a beautiful young woman. At 14 years of age Uncle had started her on a rigorous fitness regime. She trained every day. She was fitter and stronger than anyone she knew. At 16 years of age Uncle took her to her bedroom and told her to undress. It was rape, but Fon didn’t realise it. It was just another chore that she had to do. Uncle told her, as he penetrated her innocence for the first time, that sex wasn’t about emotions. She had something that men wanted and told her that she could use it as a weapon. He taught her as many sexual acts as he knew. He trained her in the art of seduction. There was no emotion, no love. It was just another part of her training! When Fon was 17 years old Uncle enrolled her in a military school in the north of the country, and she joined the Thai Army. At 18 years old Uncle used his influence to have her transferred into the Thai Special Forces. She became expert with firearms and explosives. She was part of a secret mission over the border with Cambodia and she killed her first man, a Cambodian soldier. It was up close and personal with a knife. She felt nothing. He died quickly and quietly, not even a loud squeak like her very first victim all those years ago.