Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  As she walked along, looking for the child, the same routine played out at bar after bar. The competition for customers was intense, and Marisa watched as one by one the farangs—including the old-timers—were picked off and disappeared into the bars.

  Marisa had been at her condo when she’d received a phone call from Gung, a woman from a Thai NGO whom she thought of as a colleague. Gung understood the problem of dealing with a corrupt, self-serving, and compromised political and policing system; a system that consumed weeks and months before making a decision, only committees and memos, and then an attempt at consensus. In the vacuum, gangs that knew whose hands to grease distributed children to the red-light district along with a steady supply of trinkets, flowers, laser pens, and chewing gum for the tourists. Hundreds of children in dozens and dozens of red-light areas scattered around the city. Gung guessed the gang rotated about twenty kids in and out of Cowboy. Meetings had been held and reports filed, but on the ground nothing had changed other than that the kids would be off the streets for two weeks before they slowly filtered back.

  Digital photos of kids as young as eight or nine had been attached to one of the reports. In one photo, a girl who sold flowers and chewing gum on Soi Cowboy haunted Marisa. The girl wasn’t more than eleven years old. Gung had said she’d heard from the bamboo telegraph that the girl had been trafficked and was being watched as she made her rounds. Marisa had said she’d get the girl out. In a meeting with officials, Marisa had laid out the facts. Everyone had sympathized, but emotion hadn’t carried the day. Too much money was involved; too many people upstream and downstream were feeding from the action. By the end of the meeting, Marisa had been told to back off. Her superior took her into the corridor and told her not to get personally involved. She reminded Marisa about the policy of noninterference in local affairs; going around the authorities would be counterproductive in the end.

  When Marisa protested, she got the full Thai treatment: she was told point-blank that she was being selfish and stupid. Tackling the larger problem meant playing the local game. Sometimes sacrifices were unavoidable, but so long as the war was being won, casualties along the way had to be accepted. That was the nature of war: not everyone got out alive. Bakhita, who was her supervisor at the UN, reminded Marisa that hundreds of new refugees were crossing the border from Burma every day. The organization needed local officials on their side to help with the refugees. These were compelling intellectual arguments—like those of field commanders who threw men into battle, knowing the mission was hopeless, because it distracted the enemy from the main front elsewhere.

  War had a cruel and terrible face.

  Marisa was being asked to accept the price of saving children and women swept across frontiers. She had to let go of her personal desire to save the kid on Cowboy. That was the deal.

  She had done what she had been asked to do. She’d let go of the idea of any individual intervention. The police had been contacted, and they’d said they would handle the matter.

  But Gung hadn’t surrendered. She resolved to step up the pressure on the farang to do the job and take the heat. When she phoned Marisa, Gung had said, “Fon has only a couple of days. They have found a Chinese man who has paid for her virginity. He’s coming in on a flight from Taiwan in two days. After that, everything will change for her.”

  Then a child’s voice was on the phone: “My name is Fon. Can you help me? I think Auntie sell me soon.”

  Gung came back on the phone. “It’s up to you.” Gung broke the connection.

  The child’s presence night after night on Soi Cowboy told Marisa that the girl was probably Tai Yai or, as it turned out, Shan, an ethnic minority from Burma. If she had been a Thai child, the police or social welfare might have taken her off the soi and put her in a shelter. That wasn’t standard procedure for kids like Fon. She’d been better being a Karen, another ethnic minority from Burma that had been displaced by fifty years of civil war. Why a Karen? Because even after their villages were overrun and they ran out of food, the Karen rarely sold their daughters. But the fate of Shan and Tai girls wasn’t the same; their villages had a long history of exchanging daughters for money or its equivalent.

  Fon translated as “Rain.” Marisa thought it was a suitable name for a kid who never saw much daylight and whose future was clouded. Unless Fon at the end of the night had earned at least three-hundred baht, her handlers would beat her and send her off to bed without a plate of rice and fish sauce. She had fallen between the cracks; she was another kid who had been purged from a normal life of school and play.

  Marisa reminded Gung that her job prevented her from going out on rescue missions.

  “I could be fired and kicked out of the country,” Marisa said.

  “You have big puuyai to protect you. No one can touch Marisa.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Marisa. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  Gung paused for a moment, trying to figure out why Marisa, being a farang, didn’t get the seriousness of the situation. Or was she just playing a mind game? She tested the waters with one name. “Khun Somporn.”

  Marisa’s brother wasn’t even married into the family yet, but the word had already fanned out through the NGO community. At first she laughed when a Thai colleague said she was untouchable. Then she stopped laughing and felt disgust. Gung had made it clear that Marisa had entered the magic circle where people are protected, and that the locals would no longer view her as just another farang. She was now someone whose power and influence could prove useful at the street level. Gung had told her that this was the only way to deal with the police. They’d bend as soon as Somporn’s name came up. Her first reaction had been that she’d never go to Somporn for any favors, knowing that the moment she crossed that line, he would own her. She thought of him on the phone with his mia noi in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel. He was a man who owned women.

  “Helping this child has nothing to do with Somporn,” she said. “I would never ask him for anything.”

  That was about as un-Thai a statement as anyone could have uttered to a Thai. Not using your power and influence to give help to someone who asked for it was a gross affront. And Gung took Marisa’s words as a personal rebuff.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you ask him or not. You don’t seem to understand. You aren’t like us. Nothing can ever happen to you. You want another job? No problem. You want anything, no problem. Someone makes a problem for you, they have a big problem. So why don’t you think about Fon? Who does she have? What other life will she have? Maybe you don’t care. I thought you were different,” said Gung. “Sorry.”

  The line had gone dead. Marisa stared at her phone and thought of calling Gung back. She was about to say that Bakhita had ordered her not to get personally involved in any individual case. It was an argument that would have sounded hollow. Marisa was upset not because the call had been terminated before she could explain the policy—being cut off had saved her from that embarrassment—but because she realized that her brother’s marriage was about to turn her own world upside down.

  Marisa had paced the living room of the condo where Juan Carlos was working at the table, going over a thick file delivered by one of Lawman’s assistants.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking up.

  “Nothing. But I need to get some fresh air,” she said.

  “Good idea, why don’t I come along? I could use a walk.”

  That was the thing about Juan Carlos: he was joyful, trusting, upbeat, and in love with the world and life. She wished so much that she had inherited these qualities in equal share, but Juan Carlos got the full payload. He looked at her so openly, and she was not telling him the truth. She wasn’t just going for a walk. But what point was there in getting her brother involved?

  “I need some time to think, Juan.”

  He tapped the end of his pen on a stack of documents and stretched. “Phone me after you’ve done your thinking, and I’ll join you later.”

>   She nodded, grabbed her handbag, and went to the door.

  “You seem upset. Are you sure you don’t want company?”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Really, I’m distracted, that’s all.”

  “It’s your work. You shouldn’t bring it home.”

  She smiled and gave him a hug. “Of course, you’re right.” She hated lying to her brother, but telling him the truth increased the risk that he’d want to help her. That was exactly what she didn’t want to happen. She had to do this on her own terms.

  As she rode the Skytrain, she’d thought about what she should do, what she could do—thought about the likely outcome, and how she had truly wanted to follow Bakhita’s advice. But on the ground, things looked different; it was no place for policy wonks who focused on the abstraction of children but rarely got down in the dirt to save an individual child. She didn’t want to be like them. Gung hadn’t fully understood what was at stake. She could lose her job and be thrown out of the country for breaking this rule. It hadn’t carried any weight with Bakhita when she’d argued that the rule that barred intervention was wrong. She was simply told that, wrong or not, it was the rule and she was bound to follow it. If puuyais don’t have to follow the rules, why do I? she’d asked herself. The meeting had ended in a stalemate, much like the call with Gung. Everyone had her own position to uphold, and squeezed in between was a little girl named Fon, who was about to be sold to a sex tourist.

  As Marisa had walked along the platform at Asoke station, she’d almost decided to turn back when a farang had bumped into her. He’d tried to pick her up. At least she was still attractive enough for a man to make a play. She’d drawn in a deep breath. That’s it, she thought. Give Fon a chance to grow up. Bakhita had said the world had millions of Fons. As she walked down the street, every ten meters there had been a woman, sometimes old, sometimes young, clutching a baby in one hand and begging for change with the other, reminding her of Bakhita’s view of the larger dimensions of the trafficked children network.

  At the top of Soi Cowboy, Marisa stopped and thought again about turning back. Then she convinced herself that since she’d come this far, she owed Gung the courtesy of at least talking with Fon. Bakhita’s warning played in her head: “Thais have a thin skin when it comes to foreigners exposing anything to do with child exploitation, the sex trade, or the informal networks, official and unofficial, that feed off each other, making it all possible.” Thai sensibilities can go stuff themselves, Marisa had told herself. It was always the sensibilities of the wealthy, the bullies, and the influential criminal class that had to be weighed. Somporn and his kind of people created the environment. She had already worked herself up by the time she turned onto Soi Cowboy. If she lost her job and got kicked out of Thailand, she could go back to Spain. She would never ask him for a thing.

  “You can’t make a difference with a group unless you start with an individual,” she’d said at the meeting at UN headquarters. She’d regretted the declaration the moment it had come out of her mouth, but she’d said nothing to express her regret. She’d let it stand. Bakhita had chosen not to respond. Everyone had known exactly where they stood.

  Marisa walked the full stretch of Soi Cowboy from Soi 23 to Asoke and back twice before spotting a flower girl coming out of a bar, moving her way through the door girls and touts. The girl sidestepped a food vendor who dumped a large plastic basin of dirty water into the gutter. Marisa looked at the photo of Fon and then up at the flower girl. It was the same child. Then she saw Gung.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said. “That’s her.” She turned and started to walk away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got two more kids at Lumpini Park to find. Good luck.”

  Marisa watched Gung disappear down the soi, lost in the crowd. Marisa glanced back at the kid, who had her eye on a couple of farangs who were getting the treatment from three of the door girls. “Handsome man, welcome inside,” one quoted from the familiar script. It suggested a level of English vastly superior to the actual language skill of the girl.

  Marisa knelt down and looked the girl in the eye. “Gung’s gone. I want to help.” The response was restless, bored, no eye contact. With Gung out of the way, she’d reverted to flower-girl mode.

  “Are you Fon?”

  The little girl looked scared. She held out a packet of chewing gum. “Twenty baht. You want?”

  Marisa handed her a hundred-baht note. Fon smiled, her hand offering five packets of gum.

  “How would you like some noodles?” Marisa asked, ignoring the gum.

  “You don’t want gum? You buy laser pen? Very good quality, too. From Taiwan. Not expensive.”

  “You spoke with me on the phone, remember?”

  “Laser very good,” she said.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  With Gung gone, it was as if Fon wanted nothing to do with her.

  Fon spoke standard street-kid English, good enough to flog flowers and gum. Worthless stuff she had to push. If people bought, they did so out of sympathy rather than genuine need. She backed off as Marisa reached out to touch her hand.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” She could see from Fon’s face that she was scared. Her small black eyes darted, looking in either direction. Although it looked like she was wandering around on her own, the kid instinctively knew she was being watched all the time. Auntie had told her so. The woman she called Auntie had given her a new dress and makeup and showed her how to put on lipstick.

  For the past few days Auntie had been nice to her and told her she’d soon have a surprise. It had given her the feeling that she was special, not like the other kids. Fon had decided it was probably okay to hustle a meal from the mem-farang. At the same time, Auntie had said, mem-farangs might cause a problem. She should never, never trust one or believe anything a mem-farang said. All the kids in the house where she slept were told the same thing.

  Marisa took Fon’s hand. They walked to a food stall in front of one of the bars and sat on plastic stools. Marisa ordered two plates of chicken and sticky rice. A waitress set the plates down along with spoons and forks. Fon greedily ate with her fingers, stuffing her mouth with chicken.

  “Gung says you’re from the Shan State in Burma. Is that true?” asked Marisa.

  Fon nodded, her mouth full, looking around to see who on the soi might be watching.

  “Shan?”

  The girl nodded, eyes lined with heavy, gleaming mascara.

  “Where’s your mother and father?”

  “Mother’s dead. Father works by the river.”

  “What river?”

  Fon shrugged. “On the Thai side of the river. He has a card to stay. I will go visit him soon.”

  “Who said?”

  She blinked. “Auntie.”

  “Do you think I could talk with your Auntie?” asked Marisa. As soon as she’d asked the question, Marisa knew she’d made a mistake.

  Fon pulled a face, scooping up the last of the sticky rice. “Finished. I go work now.”

  Marisa put her hand on Fon’s wrist. “On the phone you said that you wanted help. Have you changed your mind?”

  The child sighed, stared at the table. She hadn’t connected the mem-farang with the woman who had been on the phone. Besides, that had happened what seemed like a long time ago, and she had so much wanted to please Gung. Now she wasn’t so sure what she wanted.

  “I’ll get in trouble.”

  “From Auntie?

  Fon looked unhappy, frightened. She had retreated to her non-responsive space. She twisted and turned on the stool, scanning the crowd. Marisa wasn’t certain how to get through to her—a kid who’d been programmed to distrust a strange foreign woman, her mother dead, separated from her father. At eleven years of age she was still cocooned in the last part of childhood, but her handlers had done her up to showcase her first hint of womanhood. Fingernails painted red; her hair, grown long, had been carefully brushed; and lip gloss and make
up signaled she was selling more than chewing gum.

  “Has Auntie told you that in two days she will give you to a man, and that man will want sex?”

  Fon rocked back and forth on the stool, her lower lip in a pout. “Auntie wouldn’t do that, I know. She takes care of me.”

  “Auntie sometimes forces a girl to have sex with a man. You know that.”

  Fon sighed, “I have to work now.”

  Marisa handed her another two-hundred baht. “You’ve got your money for tonight. You don’t have to worry.”

  The worry lines on her forehead suggested otherwise. “Auntie send me to my papa.”

  “She’s lying to you, Fon. Gung told you not to trust Auntie’s promises. I know she said that. And you told Gung that Auntie plans to make you sleep with a stranger. That’s why you asked me to help you. If you don’t want to sleep with a man, just tell me. And I’ll take you out of here. You can go to school, go see your father, have friends, a life.”

  “Auntie say mem-farangs say these things but they are not true.”

  It was Marisa’s turn to smile, “Auntie would say that. Has she ever beaten you? Threatened you? Or hit the other kids?”

  They both knew the answers to those questions. “You do know that Gung wants to help?”

  She nodded, a flicker of softening in her eyes.

  “I can’t help you, Fon, unless you leave here with me. Auntie can’t punish or hurt you. No one will hurt you. I promise.”

  Fon searched Marisa’s face for a long moment. “You don’t know things.”

  “I know one thing.”

  Fon waited, staying very still as if holding her breath. She had only experienced a world of broken promises.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Marisa held out her hand.