The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller
Page 35
“You need to stay here, all of you,” Arthit calls again. “Everybody in the back, tighten up. Don’t let anybody in.”
Rafferty hears feet scrape pavement all around him, and the circle becomes almost solid, women shoulder to shoulder, staring at him and Arthit, more interested than afraid. Horner is a still figure at the end of the path that’s been cleared for them. Rafferty takes five more steps, and Horner is at his feet.
A knife stands upright in his chest. The blade had sunk in only an inch or two before Horner fell away from it, and four inches of naked steel gleam above his bloody shirt. At the edge of his vision, Rafferty sees that Arthit is looking at him, but when he turns toward his friend, Arthit slowly raises his eyes to the tangle of electrical lines above the street and stands there studying them. Rafferty waits until it is clear that Arthit is lost in contemplation of Bangkok wiring, and then, his pulse suddenly racing, he lifts his foot, puts the sole of his shoe on the handle of the knife, and presses down.
A sigh escapes the circle of women.
Without looking down at Horner, Arthit says, raising his voice only slightly, “Listen to me. Is there anyone who can’t hear me clearly?”
No response. Women in one-piece bathing suits, flimsy wraps, bikinis, T-shirts, cowboy hats, all looking at him.
“You all came out here because there was a rumor that this man was— Who’s your favorite movie star?”
A woman beside Rafferty—one of the heavy women from Bottoms Up—says, “Johnny Depp.”
“Somebody said he was Johnny Depp,” Arthit says. “You ran out here, and he wasn’t. He was just a drunk farang who fell down in the street. Is there anyone who doesn’t understand this?”
Once again no answer.
“That’s what you tell everyone. The customers in your bars, the cops if more come around. You came to see Johnny Depp, but it was someone else. And get rid of those weapons, now. All of you go back to work, except for the ones who are right here.” He makes a full circle with his finger. “Count the heads in front of you, in between you and me. If there are four, go away. If there are three or less, stay here.”
The outer layers of the circle peel away, women heading back to their bars. Not many of them bother to look back.
“I need you to stay tight around us,” Arthit says. “We’re going to take him to Silom.” He pulls his cell phone from his pocket, pushes a speed-dial number, and says, “Anand. Send Wan back to work. Tell her we’re through for the night. Meet us in the car in two minutes.” He repockets the phone. “Kosit?”
Kosit and Arthit kneel and get their arms under Horner. Each grabs one of Horner’s arms and hangs it over his own shoulders. Then they tug him upright. Horner’s head drops to his chest so sharply that Rafferty can hear his teeth snap together.
“Poke. Get that knife out of his chest.”
Rafferty grabs the handle of the knife and pulls it out. He’s suddenly dizzy with exhaustion, stranded by an outgoing tide of adrenaline. He has no idea what to do with the knife.
“Hang on to it,” Arthit says. He raises his voice again. “You women move with us. Keep the circle tight. We’re going to a car parked at the end of the street on Silom, and I don’t want anyone getting close to us. If anybody asks, he’s a drunk who got in a fight. Clear?”
A chorus of affirmatives.
“Here we go. One. Two. Three.” Slowly and clumsily, the circle begins to glide toward Silom. “Make noise,” Arthit says to the girls. “Talk, laugh.” To Kosit he says, “Anand will drive. You sit in back with our friend here and make sure he doesn’t die of his injuries.”
Kosit says, “Got it.”
“Poke,” Arthit says. “Give him the knife.”
Rafferty does.
“That’s the knife we don’t want him to die from,” Arthit says. With a glance toward Rafferty, he continues. “If he does die, there’s no point in taking up valuable hospital space, and we don’t want to bother the Americans.”
Kosit says, “The river.”
“Why not?” Arthit says. “It’s already polluted.”
Chapter 30
The Final Curtain
The level of audience enthusiasm, which had dropped off a bit when Ferdinand and Miranda came out for their bows, spikes sharply as Miaow runs onto the stage in her mirrored cloak. There are even some cheers, mostly, it seems, from kids. The follow spot hits her, making her the center of a blaze of light until the boy behind the spot snaps it off. He wasn’t supposed to turn it on in the first place; it’s Rafferty’s guess that it’s his way of applauding.
The whole cast is lined up now, and Prospero limps onstage, slowly abandoning his crouch as he goes, as though to amaze the audience by revealing that he isn’t really an old man after all, but the flourish doesn’t get the anticipated response. In fact, the applause drops off somewhat. It remains at a polite level as he takes his place in the center of the line, and then it increases slightly as everyone bows in unison, and the curtain falls.
They stand, Rose grabbing Rafferty’s arm and hugging it to her. “Wasn’t she wonderful?”
“She was,” he says. “And what about that adaptation?”
“It was long.”
“It was a lot longer before I got to it.” He stands in the aisle as she slips out of the row, and they edge down the slope toward the stage, threading their way between the people heading up toward the exits at the rear of the auditorium.
Rose looks over at him, wearing his one jacket and tie, and then down at the clothes she bought herself for the evening, a loose, off-the-shoulder blouse in a silvery material and a pair of midnight-black velvet pants. “We’re a handsome couple.”
“You raise the average,” Rafferty says.
She pats his cheek in a matronly fashion. “It was a great adaptation.”
He takes her hand and leads her toward the stage door to the right of the orchestra pit. Even before they get the door open, they can hear the hubbub of voices behind the curtain.
Rose had sat forward in her seat when the lights went down and the curtain went up to reveal the shipwreck, played way downstage to the accompaniment of wind and wave sounds, with airborne handfuls of silver confetti to simulate splashing water. But after the sailors staggered off the stage clutching their masts and sails and the silhouetted black rock of Prospero’s island had loomed in front of the gray cyclorama, she had sunk her nails into his wrist. Not until Luther and Siri were well into their eternal opening dialogue did she sit back and relax, only to claw him again when Miaow exploded into sight on top of the rock. Three or four minutes into Miaow’s scene, Rose had wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. When Trinculo and Stephano had stumbled onstage, she’d laughed.
“You told me the clowns were terrible,” she says as they climb the stairs to the stage.
“Well, they were until tonight. The kid who played Trinculo was great.”
“He was the little one?”
“In the big yellow cape.”
“He was funny. And he’s almost as little as Miaow.”
At the top of the stairs, Rafferty stops. “We’ve just seen the final curtain, right?”
“What’s that mean, the final curtain?”
“When the play ended, just now. Everything was solved, everybody was saved, and all the secrets came out. Didn’t they?”
Rose’s face assumes an expression Rafferty can only characterize as complicated. “Yes,” she says with some caution in her voice.
“So,” he says. “Were you or weren’t you in Patpong that night? And don’t ask me which night.”
Rose gives him a full and frank gaze and says, “You told me to stay at Arthit’s. So of course I stayed at Arthit’s.”
They stand there, looking at each other and listening to the cheers and laughter from the stage.
“Well,” Rafferty says, “I’m glad that’s settled.” He opens the door, and they step around a bunch of canvas rocks and find themselves far stage left.
“Oh,” Rose says, starin
g up. “Oh, my.”
From where they stand, the mighty rock is a jumbled construct of two-by-fours covered with heavy canvas, with three sets of roll-up stairs staggered beneath it to hold Miaow up. Looking at it from this perspective, Rafferty is happy he hadn’t known how fragile the structure actually is. He wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else whenever Miaow was on her path.
Rose says, “I wish I’d seen it this way first.”
Clumps of people have gathered all over the stage, each attracted by one of the actors, and Mrs. Shin trots from group to group. Luther So stands, theatrically exhausted and literally mopping his brow, in the middle of a mob that looks like half the population of Chinatown, while Siri clasps a funereal armload of flowers, undoubtedly presented to her by the mob of adoring boys that presses on her from all sides. Her onstage lover, Ferdinand, is playing to a coterie of boys who seem to be wearing discreet makeup.
Rafferty hears half a dozen languages: English, Thai, Mandarin, what may be Swedish from Siri’s parents, who are trying to elbow their way through the boys, Italian from somewhere, and a few he doesn’t recognize.
“She’s over there,” Rose says.
Rafferty looks and sees first a bulky cape wrapped around one of the scrawniest little boys he’s ever seen, a kid whose shoulders are barely wider than his neck and whose thick glasses, which he hadn’t worn on the stage, are the size of silver dollars. His parents, not much bigger than he is but just as studious-looking, flank him proudly, and in the middle, her back turned to Rafferty and Rose, is Miaow, still wearing her mirrors.
“Trink-something,” Rose says.
Rafferty says, “Wait a minute.” He opens the program and runs his finger down the cast list. He comes to Trinculo and follows the line of dots to the actor’s name: Andrew Nguyen.
He starts to laugh.
“What is it?” Rose says.
“Nothing.” Miaow has heard his laugh and turned, and she waves them to her, her face incandescent with happiness. When they reach her, she hugs Rose and then Rafferty.
“Where’s Pim?” Miaow asks.
“At Arthit’s,” Rose says. “Learning to be a maid. You were wonderful.”
“Thank you,” Miaow says politely, but it’s clear she has something else on her mind. She steps to one side, inhales, breathes out, and inhales again. “Mom,” she says. “Dad.” She swallows and turns to the kid drowning in the yellow cape. “This is Andy.”
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, but it also isn’t.
On the fiction front, the picture of U.S. defense contractors presented by Howard Horner and John Bohnert is absolutely not meant to be representative. I personally know a couple of people who are serving in Afghanistan right now, and they’re motivated primarily by patriotism and belief in their mission. But anyone who has served with any of the companies who contract out this work will tell you that weeding out psychopaths is a constant, and not always achievable, priority.
On the nonfiction side, what Rose goes through in her transformation from village girl to sex worker is commonplace. Somewhere in some northeastern village, a young girl from a poor family takes the first steps on that path almost every day of the year. Particulars vary, but each of these women will endure a long process of change, leaving behind the names and the attitudes that once defined them and becoming someone almost completely new. The scene in which Teacher Suttikul and Mr. Pattison come to Rose’s house to confront her father is based on an actual event. In that case, I’m happy to say, the girl was able to remain in school, although it might just as easily have gone the other way. And it often does.
There’s a tendency in male-written novels about Bangkok to idealize bar workers or, in some cases, to demonize them: They’re lost innocents on the one hand and flint-hearted gold diggers on the other. The only thing I’m trying to say about them in this book is that every Nit and Noi and Fon is a real person who has been given a very narrow range of choices. I think that most of them cope with their difficult situation with a certain amount of grace.
I don’t know that we can ask much more of anyone.
Acknowledgments
I had a lot of help with this book—from individuals, from the restaurants and coffeehouses where I was taken care of while I wrote it, and from the artists who emerged from my iPod to get me through the process of envisioning the story and putting it into words (those are two very different things).
My previous editor at William Morrow, Peggy Hageman, gave the first draft of the manuscript the most sympathetic possible reading and made a number of suggestions that tightened and improved it, especially the last chapters. My agent, Bob Mecoy, put his finger on the book’s potentially fatal weak spot at first reading, confirming the instinct that had me wincing every time I read certain passages. My wife, Munyin Choy, listened to the whole thing in its roughest, most raggedy form, and helped me sort wheat from chaff. There was a lot of chaff.
My current editor, Gabe Robinson, gave me the book’s title over my wrongheaded objections, and supervised the development of the jacket and the page design.
I wrote the book in Los Angeles, Bangkok, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thanks to the people at BB Cafe in Los Angeles and the Novel Café in Santa Monica, who kept me caffeinated during the American stretches of the work. In Bangkok I fueled at Coffee World; and in Phnom Penh at Corner 33, K-Coffee, and the famous Foreign Correspondents Club, which overlooks the river just around the corner from my apartment there.
If coffee is one of my fuels, music is the other. This time around I was carried along by James McMurtry (yeah, “Choctaw Bingo”!), Bob Dylan (I must have listened to “Brownsville Girl” thirty times), Vince Gill, the perpetually beautiful Emmylou Harris, Mindy Smith, Eliot Smith, The Smiths, Pete/Peter Doherty, Van Morrison, the Soweto Gospel Choir, Randy Newman, Vienna Teng, Elvis Costello, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Delbert McClinton (as always), Calexico, Franz Ferdinand, Aimee Mann, and a hundred others.
The long central section of the book, which is pretty much all women, was written almost exclusively to Tegan and Sara. I made a playlist of fifty-four Tegan and Sara cuts and just repeated it over and over. Almost the only exception is the chapter when Rose is in the water, which was written mostly to Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a piece of music that’s got dark water running all the way through it.
Finally, several times when my courage flagged during the writing of the book, a reader sent a nice note to my Web site. Heartfelt thanks to all of you who did so. And let me urge readers who have that impulse from time to time to yield to it. You have no idea how much it can mean to a writer who feels like he or she is drowning and no longer has any idea which way is up.
ALSO BY TIMOTHY HALLINAN
Breathing Water
The Fourth Watcher
A Nail Through the Heart
The Bone Polisher
The Man with No Time
Incinerator
Skin Deep
Everything but the Squeal
The Four Last Things
About the Author
TIMOTHY HALLINAN is the author of nine widely praised books: eight novels—including the Bangkok thrillers featuring Poke Rafferty, A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water—and a work of nonfiction. Along with his wife, Munyin Choy, he divides his time equally between Los Angeles, California, and Southeast Asia.
www.timothyhallinan.com
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE QUEEN OF PATPONG. Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Hallinan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-
exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hallinan, Timothy
The queen of Patpong : a Poke Rafferty thriller / Timothy Hallinan. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-167226-2
1.—Bangkok (Thailand)—Fiction. I—Title.
PS3558.A3923Q44 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010002112
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EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062006905
10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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