Bangkok Knights

by Collin Piprell

  He snapped something else at them that I couldn’t make out. I heard a splash, and I realized the boatman had gone over the side. I was myself preparing to crumple over backwards into the water with the first gunfire. I preferred to do this alive, of course, and this meant I shouldn’t be their first target. The Invisible Man. It’s better you take Mr. Macho first; he’s an asshole.

  The Loony shrieked something in rage and swung his M-16 across his men and towards us. This was it They steadied down and their guns leveled with cold purpose.

  At that moment there came the sound of a motor — a long-tail boat coming up fast around the bend. No one moved, except for B W and the Libber; they were lurching towards us, oblivious to the imminence of violent, shocking death. At that range, the flat, nasty smack of bullet against flesh and bone comes an instant before the sound of the shot, an almost simultaneous splat-bang. I waited for it, willing my knees to buckle on cue—at the split instant of the first gunfire.

  The racket of the diesel cleared the turn in the river, racing towards us.

  The guns wavered again. Then a quick fat splatter of raindrops strafed the beach. There was a breathless pause before a crack of thunder rent the stillness, and the storm broke. Tattoos and the Pistolero looked at each other, struck with consternation, and then they turned and ran, much like a couple of au bouffant debutantes caught out in the rain. The Loony fired a wild burst in the direction of the approaching boat before disappearing into the deluge, dropping out of sight down the other side of the bank.

  I´d gone over the side the side; a neatly-executed backwards tumble, an award-winning portrayal of a dead man going into the river, I landed right on top of the boatman. It was entirely unnecessary, of course. But what the hell, the way the rain was coming down I wouldn’t have stayed any drier in the boat.

  By the time the other boat had pulled in, Mr. Macho had taken Wife in charge, and was hollering at me through the downpour, asking me if I had any brandy. I didn’t have, more was the pity. I covered BW and the Libber with my polyethylene sheet, and tried to get them to say they were okay. A soldier and the driver from the other boat, together with our driver, fished Husband out of the river and wrapped him up in plastic. Wife seemed uninterested in his mortal remains — a sensible attitude, I thought, though one that wouldn’t have made for very good cinema.

  There were several travelers in the other boat; they were most helpful, and had some Mekhong whiskey Mr. Macho could feed to Wife. It wasn’t really the same as brandy, mind you, and she got sick on one mouthful and wouldn’t try another. Mr. Macho managed a good belt of it himself, though. The Libber had a big stash of Valiums; she gave three to Wife before dispensing some more to BW and herself. Mr. Macho had another pull at the whiskey. A sodden, dispirited crew we were. I guess we were all in a bit of shock, as well.

  “Oh, yeah,” Mr. Macho was saying to the new gang of travelers. “We’ve had a rum go of it She has, you know—the wife, I mean. It was that sudden. And the rest of us, we were that close to having the biscuit ourselves I could feel the bullets. Too right. There was nothing you could do; that was the worst of it”

  And so on. This would become a better yarn than white-water canoeing in Canada could ever have been.

  We were taken back in convoy to where we’ d begun the river excursion earlier that day. The remainder of the boat-ride was uneventful. I devoted myself mostly to getting cozy under the plastic, steaming away with BW and the Libber.

  B W was actually named Eunice, I discovered, but she hated the name and preferred to be called Sandy. I liked Sandy — name and girl both—and I offered to take good care of her and the Libber, too, if I had to, once back in town. After all, as I told them, I had more travelers checks in my bag, thank God the bandits had never gotten around to unloading the luggage. The Libber was called Jerry, which was short for Jessica or something, and she told me they could look after themselves quite nicely, thank you anyway. The two of them did some of the requisite blubbering and cuddling, and Jerry let me know one way and another that Sandy had all the protection she needed and I could stay under the plastic with them because it was raining but this didn’ t mean we were old buddies and chances were we never would be either. I found myself thinking it would not have been a bad idea if this lady had stepped on a snake, after all. But Sandy didn’t give me a sign, so maybe it was never fated to be in any case.

  We didn’ t have to wait long at the pier for the police to arrive and to escort us to the police station in Chiangmai for questioning.

  Jerry was looking after Sandy, and Mr. Macho had Wife in his care, so I gave the police the benefit of my perceptions. My main theory was the boatman had had something to do with it all. How else could there have been bandits at just that spot at just that time? But they were unimpressed by this line of reasoning. Nor did they think it peculiar that the second boat, the one with the armed escort, had abandoned us right at the outset What did impress them was Husband’s stupidity. You almost got the feeling they felt he’d deserved to get himself shot, he’d been such a lamebrain.

  Anyway, they took our descriptions — three young men in T-shirts and jeans, one looking like a loony, one like a pistolero, one covered in tattoos — and assured us justice would be done, no matter our descriptions fitted half the young men in northern Thailand.

  But Husband’s camera promised to make it easier for them. After the storm had broken, I’d noticed Husband’s sturdy old Nikon lying in the bottom of the boat where he’d dropped it. Tucking it away under the tarp, I suddenly wondered if he’d gotten that last picture, just before he died. What a great photo to illustrate a story. For a moment, I found myself weighing the pros and cons of removing the film and pocketing it. Of course, this smacked more than a little of looting the dead, and even if I were to have pleaded journalistic license, the police would’ve called it removing evidence in a murder case. However you looked at it, it would’ve been a crummy thing to do, I suppose.

  Under questioning, both Mr. Macho and I had the distinct impression the shutter had fired before the M-16 had. Snick-splat-bang, it had gone.

  Wife told the cops they could take film and camera, when they asked, and she didn’t care what they did with them.

  Mr. Macho had been the only one to lose all of his money in the robbery, and I lent him a bit to tide him over—so he could buy something to wear on his feet, and whatnot.

  I met him in Bangkok a week later, to collect my money. His name was Robin Pilcher, but I could call him ‘Robbo’. He was still grinning and glowing away with tanned good health, and he was still wearing a vest with nothing underneath. I saw he was sporting brand-new lizard-skin boots, and I wondered if he had a new knife.

  Robbo and I ordered more beer, and he told me how he’d stayed there in Chiangmai for a few days and looked after Wife.

  Actually, her name was Ellen. Ellen Brown, from Sandusky. Husband’s name had been Stanley.

  I waited for him to tell me how he’d shagged her back to normalcy, and how she’d begged him to stay with her for ever after. What he told me was she’d been doped up most of the time, and he’d only met her for meals and helped out through the hassle with the police.

  He hadn’ t seen much of Sandy and Jerry. Jerry was a flippin’ bull dyke, anyway, in his opinion.

  He told me how shit-scared he’d been, and how ashamed he’d been he couldn’ t do anything to help the girls. I told him I knew exactly what he meant.

  Stanley and his damn-fool camera. It was hard to say what would’ve happened if Stanley hadn’t gone and gotten himself shot just when he did. Things could’ve turned very nasty, indeed.

  Robbo said the cops gave Ellen back the camera and the slides, only she hadn’t wanted the camera. “Gave it to me. I didn’t want it; give me an automatic any day. I flogged the thing on the train coming down here.”

  “What about that film?” I asked. “The one in the camera — did they find anything on it?”

  “Naw. Nothing — just a blur. Ca
mera shake and underexposure, both. In fact, none of the pictures was worth looking at.”

  “When I think of the story I could’ve written to go with that shot — ‘A Split Second Away From Death: Man Photographs His Own Killer’.”

  “Yeah; what a drongo. His wife was right: that guy just couldn’t take pictures.”

  I never did get that story I’d been after, I told Robbo. When I finally got up to my contact point, nobody ever showed. I got a little background, maybe, but nothing I really had to go all the way up there for. A wasted trip. And I hadn’ t had a good story in months.

  CRUNCH

  “Try the omer-ette... Try the omer-ette...” Meow was standing at one of the five cages that hung about the alfresco dining area behind the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse. She was talking to the resident of that cage, an obviously depraved mynah bird.

  “Try the omer-ette,” Meow said.

  “There,” Eddie told me, almost loudly enough for Meow to hear. “She’s just about got it right. As soon as she can say ‘omelet’, Nixon’ll teach her something else.”

  Nixon was the chief linguist and undisputed leader of the gang of five mynah birds, while Meow was Eddie’s sister-in-law.

  Eddie’s wife considered his birds a pain in the neck: they were noisy, they were unhygienic and, most damning, they did nothing to earn their keep. Evidently, she had assigned Meow the task of turning them into speaking menus, touting breakfast specials to the guests.

  “How’s business?” I asked Eddie.

  Not much happening, he told me. There was a Marco Polo from Canada with Kodiak boots and a compass wristwatch. Then we had a couple of Siddharthas from Frankfurt with about eight weeks left to find enlightenment before going back to sell insurance in Germany. “Oh, yeah. And Trevor. You remember Trevor? From Kuwait?”

  Who could forget? Trevor Perry was the traffic engineer who’d been in Bangkok several months before shopping for a wife.

  “What? You mean he’s actually staying here?” I asked. You come out of the Gulf staggering under the weight of your ill-gotten loot and looking for a good time, you don’t generally stay in the Cheri-Tone.

  “Yeah, well, as a matter of fact he was at the Sheraton, but it turns out you still can’t leave the young scallywag to his own devices.”

  This much Trevor had amply demonstrated during his last visit First of all, he’d come up with various bruises and abrasions while showing us how best not to open a champagne bottle. Next, he ‘d pretty well conclusively indicated he couldn’t tell a virgin from a star dancer (retired) from Shaky Jake’s Gogo Bar. He’d arrived in Bangkok with a computer print-out scheduling fifty-five dates (interviews, he’d called them) with prospective life’s companions — twenty-five here and thirty in Manila. He’d left without consummating even one of these appointments. And he’d never gotten to Manila. But now, I gathered, he was back for another try.

  “You wouldn’t believe it. I get this phone-call, and it’s Trevor telling me he’s back in town and he’s got this girl in his room that he doesn’t know what to do with. He had to start interviewing wifely candidates, but this girl is in his hotel room and she won’ t go away. All she does is lie around watching TV and eating.

  “She’s a nice girl, he tells me, but he’s afraid she’s not exactly what he’s looking for. He’s afraid she may be a trifle common, you know, but nice of course, for all of that.

  “I ask him where he met her, and he says in some park — Sanam Luang, probably — while he’s watching the kite-fighting; she comes up, as friendly as can be, and says what’s his name and where does he come from, she’s always been a sucker for blond farangs and which hotel does he stay in? A very friendly girl, Trevor tells me.

  “Would I like to have lunch with them, he wants to know, and maybe give him some advice?”

  Eddie told me Trevor’s companion had been a nice woman, with a heart of gold, he had no doubt, and most of her teeth, too, but his first impression was that this was not what Trevor had come shopping for. His second impression didn’t do much to change the picture.

  “At one point in the meal, ever the perfect gentleman, Trevor says to this lady, * And wheah did you learn your English, my deah?’ probably expecting her to say Cheltenham Ladies College. ‘G.I.,’ she answers. ‘You know — Sattaheep; many G.I. Many year ago, many year. Many G.I.’

  “Now she’s saying all this real fast, and it sounds more like Thai than English. Trevor’s really just making small talk, anyway, so he smiles fondly and says ‘Ah, yes. Um-hm. Yes, I see.’

  “Only he didn’t see, of course. When I got him alone, a little later, I’m telling him how I’d almost busted out laughing when she’d told him where she’d picked up her English. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘I mean when she told you how she’d learned it from the G.I.’s,’ I answer him.

  ‘”G.I.’s! You mean American soldiers? You mean... R and R from Vietnam, and all that? Good Lord, that was back in the60’s!’

  “Well, the 1960’s don’t seem so long ago to some of us, though anybody would have to admit it wasn’t exactly yesterday. And I’d say the lady in question had already been around some even back then. Anyway, it wasn’t so bad, maybe, I told him; there were still G.I.’s around here in the early 70’s.

  ‘”How can I get rid of her?’ he wanted to know. You could try giving her some money and saying good-bye, I told him. ‘Money?’ he asks. ‘Do you think she wants money?’ You try it, I suggested.

  “Next day he phones to say she’s gone. When I ask him how much he gave her, he says 500 baht a day; did I think that was enough?

  “Enough? The lady probably figured it was a miracle. Young again. You have to imagine she asked some Thai construction worker for 500 baht the very next day, and got her jaw broken for her trouble.

  “You know, I’m starting to think Trevor isn’t as swift as you’d like your average traffic engineer to be.”

  It did seem Trevor lacked a certain savoir faire, even if you allowed for his youth and a measure of bad luck. This was the second time he’d come out of Kuwait to Bangkok with his computerized shopping list only to find high-tech planning and scheduling betrayed by his weakness for first targets of opportunity. It was something hormonal, probably. Trevor could fall victim to propinquity and a friendly smile in less time than it takes to say ‘What yo’ name?’

  On his last visit it had been the legendary Long Tall Lek, formerly the star dancer at Shaky Jake’s Gogo Bar and more recently a born-again virgin, who had been the bug in the program. She’d laid waste to months of planning and dreaming, not to mention meters of computer print-out, simply by nailing the lad with a winsome smile and the suggestion they should probably get married. By the time he had worked it out that she in no way qualified for a white wedding and besides that wouldn’t excel as hostess at any tea party for the vicar back in Norwich, it had been too late to operationalize the fifty-five assignations his computer had lined up in Bangkok and Manila.

  Trevor had put a good face on it all, though, and had thanked Eddie and me for helping him avoid an unfortunate entanglement. He’d learned his lesson, he’d said. Indeed, you could see he’d been tested in the fire of experience and come out all the harder and smarter for it You could see it in the way his ears had flared red with earnest resolve and in the way his upper lip had quivered with manly emotion.

  And here he was again. He emerged from the back of the Cheri-Tone all decked out in a new safari suit, big red ears arrayed like radar dishes, ever alert to new opportunities for trauma. I noticed he’d more or less covered the aforementioned lip with a blond moustache once again. (It had been his almost affianced Long Tall Lek who’d inspired its removal last trip.) He was also sporting a goatee. At least there were some wispy things stuck to his chin.

  He did cut quite a figure, and it was easy to see why both Eddie’s wife Lek and her sister Meow had been left with fond memories of this young man who had a set of ears and a nice British accent that would’ve done Prince Charlie p
roud.

  I told him he was looking well, and Trevor said he was happy to see me again. I asked him how the shopping was going this time, and he told me there’d been a few set-backs, but that he still had four weeks left. He’d scheduled some of the more promising wifely prospects for later in the trip, anyhow. I still hadn’t heard why it was he had moved into the Cheri-Tone, and now he told me himself.

  It seems he went into a decline, immediately following his affair with the woman who had learned her English from the G.I.’s. It was hard to say what had been ailing him, he said. In any case his vital forces had been at a low ebb, and he was prescribed a spell of good old-fashioned mothering, with lots of hot soup and stroking of the fevered brow by gentle ladies. He had canceled three days of interviews, moved into the guesthouse, and submitted to the tender ministrations of Lek and Meow.

  “I feel super, now,” Trevor said, briskly stroking his sort-of moustache with a forefinger. “Tomorrow I can get back to my interviews.”

  “And seeing as how he’s back in the land of the living,” said Eddie, “we’ve decided to celebrate by introducing him to a genuine Bangkok gogo bar, even though he’s heard all about these joints back in Kuwait and knows he won’t like them. We’re meeting Leary at Boon Doc’s in half an hour and then heading for Shaky Jake’s. Want to come along?”

  This sounded like a good idea to me, but I noticed Meow, who had reappeared in time to hear Eddie’s proposition, was not registering approval. Far from it. Displaying a remarkable dexterity when it came to non-verbal communication, she managed to caress Trevor with a look of sweet concern while at the same time she gave Eddie a glare that should’ve set his sideburns on fire. Meow probably figured Trevor wasn’t strong enough for a night on the town with the boys. Not yet, anyway. And maybe never, come to that. Something in her eyes made me think she’d like to go on nursing this specimen even when he wasn’t sick. But perhaps it was merely a trick of the light.

  There was no mistaking the import of his wife Lek’s abrupt attack on the patio with a mop, however. Even Nixon was caught up in the sudden alarm, and he shrieked “Omer-ette!” in a futile attempt at placating this Fury.