by Barry Eisler
Checking the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, I told myself, was a mix: business and pleasure. The introduction she had provided was what led to the Manny assignment, and, if I could straighten out the aftermath of that one, there might be more where it came from. But business wasn’t really why I kept the bulletin board, or why I continued to check it almost every day. The real reason, I knew, was the stolen time we had spent together in Rio after our initial run-in in Macau and my subsequent near-death experience there.
It wasn’t just the sex, good as it had been; nor was it only her stunning looks. Instead it was something deep inside her, something I couldn’t reach. What that thing might be I couldn’t really say: regret over her role in so many killings; bitterness at her ill treatment at the hands of her organization; sorrow over the normal life, the family, that she had chosen to forgo and that probably now would be denied to her forever. She hadn’t been the perfect companion with me. She could be demanding, sometimes moody, and she wasn’t without a temper. But sweetness and perfection were the charade I assumed she played with the targets of her work. The uncertainty and the barriers that spiced her relationship with me made her feel real, and led me in the direction of trusting her. And trust, as I was discovering with Dox, is a dangerous narcotic. I thought I had weaned myself from its rapture, gotten the monkey off my back. But then I had a little taste, and that thing I’d lived without for so many years was suddenly indispensable.
I had the cab let me off at Silom Road under the Sala Daeng sky train station. The sky train had opened a few years earlier, and this was the first time I was back in Bangkok to witness its effect. I wasn’t sure I liked it. No doubt its presence made the city easier to traverse, bringing together points once rendered impractically distant by automotive gridlock. But there was a price. The overhead passage of steel tracks and concrete platforms smothered the streets below in shadow, and seemed somehow to compress and amplify the noise, the pollution, the pent-up weight of the whole metropolis. I smiled, without any mirth, because I had seen the same thing done to Tokyo with the elevated expressways, to the long-term regret of everyone bar the construction companies and their corrupt government cronies, who profited from the implementation of such schemes and who would no doubt profit again when the city planners determined that now it was time to banish those dark monstrosities they had once seen fit to invoke. By building a subway across the sky, the custodians of Bangkok had made the streets below effectively subterranean. I could imagine a time, not too distant, when the sky train would be so dramatically expanded and agglomerated with food courts and wireless shops and video outlets that life on the streets below, the pedestrians and the cars and the stores, would without conscious planning or the apportionment of blame become by default the city’s true subway, its final stop for those denizens who had fallen through the cracks and who would now lie unseen in a darkness from which they could fall no further.
I walked, zigzagging along the sois and sub-sois—the main streets and their arteries—between Silom and Surawong, passing several storefront places advertising Internet access and overseas phone calls. Most of these were tiny spaces in larger buildings that had probably gone unused until the Internet arrived and created the possibility of profit for places with a half-dozen tables and chairs and terminals. Soon enough, I found one whose looks I liked. It occupied a ground-floor niche in a gleaming Bank of Bangkok building, and seemed almost to be hiding there. Inside there were ten terminals, several of which were occupied by women who looked to me like bar girls, who were perhaps now sending e-mails to those farang customers foolish enough to provide addresses, telling interchangeable stories of sick mothers and dying water buffalos and the other reasons for this one-time-only, embarrassed request for the farang’s dollars or pounds or yen. I chose a table that put my back to the wall. The girls, intent on their correspondence, gave me barely a glance.
Before getting started, I downloaded some commercial software from a storage site I keep and checked the terminal for keystroke monitors and other spyware. When I was sure it was clean, I went to the bulletin board I had established with Delilah, not with any more than the usual inchoate hope.
But there was a message waiting. My heart did a little giddyup.
I entered my password and went to the next screen. The message said, I’ve got some time off. Do you? Followed by a phone number starting with 331—the country code for France and city code for Paris.
Damn. I looked around for a second, a reflex in response to having my sense of aloneness unexpectedly disturbed. The girls typed determinedly away, their eyes filled with calculation and hope.
I looked at the screen again. The message had been left the day before. I wrote down the number, using my usual code, exited the bulletin board, and purged the browser to erase all records of where I’d just been.
I got up and walked back out onto Silom. My heart was racing, but my brain hadn’t shut itself off. It was hard to believe that the timing of her call was a coincidence. More likely it had something to do with the Manny op. Although I couldn’t be sure.
I stopped and thought, You can’t be sure? What the hell is wrong with you?
I’ve never believed in coincidences, not for things like this. Sure, maybe they exist, but you act as though they don’t. Most times, the thing that might have been a coincidence wasn’t, and your doubt helps you survive it. And if you’re wrong, and the thing was a coincidence? Well, what’s the downside? There is none.
But now there was a downside, apparently, and it was as though my mind was trying to warp my worldview accordingly. What I wanted to believe wasn’t the point. What I needed to believe was everything.
Then ignore the message. Don’t call her. At least not until Manny is straightened out.
The thought was depressing. Even painful.
Dox hadn’t known, and I would never tell him, but his comment about the last time I “got laid” had hit home. Yeah, I pay for recreation from time to time. You have to take care of your physical needs. Something real, though, something worthwhile? Not since Delilah, and there hadn’t been many before her, either.
How could I know what this was about, what she had in mind, unless I saw her? She might have the information I would need to get close to Manny again. She might be able to give me insight into her people’s thinking about what had happened in Manila, about their related plans. Yes, there would be risks. But there always are. And I could control the risks. I always do.
My gut told me it was worth taking a chance. For a moment I was afraid that I couldn’t trust my gut, that maybe the instinct that has always served me well had somehow been distorted, the internal navigation instruments compromised. But then I thought, If your gut’s no good anymore, you’re done anyway.
Which might itself have been a distortion. But the hell with it.
I found an international pay phone and called the number. As the call went through, I felt my heart beating harder and felt foolish for it. Dox would have ribbed me if he’d known, told me I was acting like a kid or something.
She answered after one ring.
“Allo,” I heard her say.
“Hey,” I said, staring out at the street, afraid of my hopes.
“Hey,” she said back. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How have you been?”
Whatever I’d been expecting, I hadn’t expected it to be awkward. “Good. You?”
“The same. I’ve been working on a . . . project, but I can get away for a few days, if you can.”
No mention of business. Either this was a personal call, as I wanted to hope, or it was business disguised as personal, which among the current range of possibilities would probably mean the worst.
“Yeah, I can get away. I’m in the middle of something that’s quiet for the moment, but it might heat up suddenly.”
I wondered if she would react to that. She didn’t. She said, “I can come to you, if that’s better.”
I considered for a moment. I
needed to stay in the area, in case Boaz and Gil turned up something that could put Dox and me back in the game with Manny. And I wanted to meet Delilah someplace that would pose difficulties for her if she was thinking of bringing company. Just in case.
“Can you make it to Bangkok?” I asked.
“Sure. I can probably get a nonstop from de Gaulle.”
“Put your itinerary on the bulletin board and I’ll meet you just outside customs.”
“All right. Are you sure you want to do Bangkok, though? They say taking a date there is like bringing a lunch box to a restaurant.”
I smiled. “I know the kind of food I like.”
She laughed, and the tension eased a little. “All right, then. I’ll make the flight arrangements, and leave the rest to you.”
I recognized the concession to what Dox might call my paranoia. She knew that letting me choose the final destination, without telling her in advance, would be more comfortable for me.
“I’ll need to know the name you’re traveling under,” I said. “To make reservations.”
“I’ll put it all on the bulletin board.”
“Okay, then.”
There was a pause. She said, “It’ll be good to see you.”
“Yeah. I’m glad you got in touch.”
“Jaa,” she said, displaying a little knowledge of Japanese. Well then.
I smiled. “À bientôt.” And hung up.
I walked for a few minutes, then went into another Internet café. I did the usual spyware inspection, then checked on flights to Bangkok from Paris. The only nonstops were on Thai Air and Air France. The Thai flight left daily at 1:30 P.M. Let’s see, it was already 1:15 P.M. in Paris, so she’d missed that. The Air France flight left daily at 11:25 P.M. and arrived at Bangkok International at 4:35 the following afternoon.
I thought for a minute. Either she had some sudden free time, as she’d said, in which case she would want to make the most of it, or, more likely, she was coming on business, which would entail its own form of urgency. Either way, I could expect her to move promptly, which would probably mean that evening’s Air France flight. All right, I’d bet on that.
I thought about where to take her, and how to go about it. It had to be someplace special. Partly, I had to admit, because I wanted to impress her. More important, because I wanted her to feel far away from whoever might have sent her. A sense of distance, of disconnection, would increase the likelihood that she would talk openly, or at least that she would slip. The place also had to be secure. And we’d have to get there in a way that would give me the opportunity to satisfy myself that she was traveling alone.
I checked the bulletin board again and saw that she had already left me the name she would be traveling under. Good. I spent the next half hour making the appropriate reservations online. I thought it all through again when I was done, and was satisfied in all respects. The only problem was a sudden feeling of impatience. Everything was set, and I had nothing to do but wait. The next day would feel like nothing more than killing time.
Ordinarily, killing time in Bangkok would mean taking in a Thai boxing match at Lumpini or Ratchadamnoen, or jazz at Brown Sugar or in the Bamboo bar at the Oriental, maybe an evening with one of the girls from Spasso in the Grand Hyatt. But tonight, it seemed, I would simply go out with a friend.
The thought felt strange. Not unpleasant, by any means. But strange. It was like hearing a song I had enjoyed a long time ago, and had then somehow forgotten, a simple tune that at the time had been rich and fresh and full of promise and that now, by its unnoticed loss and unexpected reappearance, had been alchemized into something haunting, a reminder not only of what was but also of what had been lost in the accumulated years, the melody now tinged with hope that what was gone might be recovered and fear that its loss instead was irretrievable.
Dox and I met in the lobby as planned and, after the appropriate precautions, caught a taxi to Silom. I asked him where we were going on the way, but he refused to tell me. It was a measure of the degree to which I had come to trust him that I didn’t just stop the cab and leave. But the childishness of his demurral was irritating.
We got out in front of the State Tower Bangkok building and took the elevator to the sixty-third floor, the building’s highest. Emerging from the elevator, we walked through a pair of floor-to-ceiling glass doors and were greeted with what I had to admit was an impressive sight.
Stretching out along the open-air roof below us was a tableau of symmetrically arranged tables covered in white linen and, at one end of the arrangement, a circular bar on a promontory glowing in red, then blue, then yellow. To our left was a higher terrace, upon which a jazz quartet was making music for the diners below. The restaurant’s floor, stone and dark teak, stretched all the way to the edges of the building, beyond which in all directions twinkled the endless lights of the city, the Chao Phraya River, expressing itself only as a sinewy absence of light, winding its way silently through it. A glass sign at the bottom of the stairs announced discreetly that the place was called Sirocco.
“Well, what do you think?” Dox asked. “Do you like it?”
“I do,” I admitted, failing to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“What did you think, I was going to take you to a go-go bar or something?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
He frowned. “Sometimes you don’t give me enough credit, man.”
I was surprised by that. Dox played the buffoon so often and so well, it seemed odd to me that he would want to be acknowledged for occasionally possessing some good taste.
“How did you hear about it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I spend a fair amount of time out here, so I keep my ear to the ground. Just opened a few months ago, and it sounded like your kind of place. So I figured we could give it a try.”
I looked at him and said, “Thank you. I didn’t mean . . .”
He grinned. “Ah, forget it.”
“I was just going to say, I’ll order the wine.”
The grin started to fade, then came back at double voltage. “Whatever makes you happy, man,” he said.
The hostess brought us to our table. The menu, consisting of what Sirocco called “Inspired Mediterranean Dining,” was as good as the view. We ordered garlic-rosemary marinated grilled double lamb chops, grilled Phuket lobster with lemon and aromatic olive oil, confit of duck and pan-seared foie gras appetizers. I took care of the wine: a ’96 Emilio’s Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve. It would be a little young, but some air would bring it around.
“Damn, this is good,” Dox said, after the waitress had opened and decanted the bottle and we had taken our first sips. “I don’t know who Emilio is, but I’d sure like to shake his hand. How do you know so much about wine, man?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that much.”
“Cut the modesty routine. I can tell you do.”
I shrugged again. “For what I do, I need to be able to blend in a lot of different strata of society. To do that, you need to know the little things, the tells. Could be wine, could be the right fork to use. Could be the right clothes to wear. Or the right words. I don’t know. I just watch and try to learn. I’m a good imitator.” I took a sip of the Emilio’s Terrace. “But also, I just like wine.”
“So you can just . . . put these things on, then take them off, like they’re a disguise?”
“I guess so. You do it, too, although a little differently. You’ve got a way of disappearing when you want to, I’ve seen that.”
“Yeah, that’s from sniper school. You just . . . draw in all your energy, like. It’s a Zen thing. Kind of hard to explain. A buddy of mine once told me it’s like what that creature did in Predator, or a Klingon warship with a cloaking device. I think that’s about right. I wouldn’t mind being able to move comfortably in all those different societies like you do, though. Still, it must be strange, to be able to move in them but not really belong in any of them, you know what I mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
The meal turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. The food and wine were first-rate, and the feeling of being in the heart of, and yet above and isolated from, the dense metropolis around us was invigorating, almost heady. The weather was Bangkok’s finest: cool and relatively dry, and a few stars were even visible through the polluted pall above. We talked a lot about Afghanistan, which was the conflict we had in common: the men we had known there; the crazy things we had done; the unintended consequences of an armed and well-trained cadre of Islamic fanatics that had followed in the wake of the departing Soviet army we had helped to drive out.
We talked, too, of Asia. I was surprised at his knowledge of and affection for the region, and his inquiries about Japanese culture, in particular, were intelligent and insightful. He told me about his love for Thailand, where he had been “sojourning,” as he liked to put it, for years, staying longer and longer with each visit, and how he hoped to retire here. How he no longer felt at ease in the States.
I understood his feelings. There’s something accepting about Thai culture, and there are species of farang, foreigners, who find themselves drawn to it. On the dark side of the phenomenon are pedophiles and other deviants who come to indulge their secret sicknesses. And there are the aging middle-management types, who anesthetize regrets about failed ambitions and the implacable, day-by-day approach of death by renting women with whom they are in any event too old and too far gone to function, and by reassuring themselves of their worth by living in a neocolonial style that the locals can’t afford. But there are many who stay for more benign reasons. Some, in a sense, are Easterners trapped in Western bodies, who find their truer natures liberated in Thailand’s “foreign” climes. Some are simply adventurers, addicts to the exotic. Some are refugees from a misguided affair, or divorce, or bankruptcy, or other such personal trauma. And some, like Dox and me, are soldiers who found themselves too altered by the things they did in war to return to the lands of their youth. For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes that you want so badly to forget.