by Jake Needham
A hundred feet or so along, Tay passed the Grand Hotel, which didn’t look particularly grand, and next to it a shophouse with a tattoo parlor on the ground floor. There was a metal grating pulled down over the tattoo parlor and Tay glanced at his watch. A little after six. Either the tattoo business wasn’t very good these days, or maybe in Pattaya tattooing was strictly a late-night pursuit.
Tay walked past a bar called the Dollhouse and another called Annabelle’s and continued on until he came to Secrets, which was a hundred feet or so further along on the right. It was a simple whitewashed building with an oversized polished wood door and a small brass plaque next to the door that said Secrets. There were no flashing lights and no garish signboards. It looked almost out of place.
He was disappointed to find the little lane outside Secrets was almost deserted. He thought he could remember from before that there had been some food vendors with carts parked here and there as well as doormen hovering in front of the other bars, but now there was virtually no one in sight. Was it because it was early, or had trade in the area fallen on hard times?
Tay walked past Secrets and continued on until he came to where the laneway forked. Going left would take him generally back in the direction of the Hilton, while going right looked like it led into a warren of tiny alleys lined with a motley collection of second-rate bars and cheap hotels. He had taken a few hesitant steps up the alley to the right when a dumpy woman of indeterminate age wearing wrinkled yellow shorts, a stained t-shirt, and red flip-flops leaned out of a doorway and flapped her hand at Tay.
“Hey, handsome man!” she called.
Tay shook his head and turned away. He didn’t want to be too hard on the woman. After all, she was just trying to earn a living by offering the promise of sex to lonely males, although in her case it seemed to Tay like more of a threat than a promise.
He walked back to the fork in the laneway and spotted an elderly woman a little way up the other alley. She was wearing an orange t-shirt and a white cap and she stood behind a metal-wheeled cart that was piled high with bananas and other fruit he couldn’t begin to identify.
“Good evening,” Tay said to her.
The woman offered an uncertain smile.
“Do you speak English?”
The woman kept smiling, but her eyes darted side to side as if she was evaluating her escape routes.
Tay didn’t claim to be any kind of an expert on Thais and Thai culture, but he recognized that smile readily enough. It was the smile all Thais offered up when they were confronted by some crazy foreigner and had no idea what he was talking about.
Tay had hoped to find a dozen street vendors and perhaps another dozen doormen hanging around in front of bars. With enough people in static positions on both sides of Secrets, he was confident that somebody would have seen the woman pass and would remember what direction she had come from. He had not expected to find only a single vendor in the little lane. Usually the streets and alleys of Thailand were alive with vendors selling everything from exotic fruit to sex toys. The vague plan he had formulated for identifying August’s messenger began to seem a little bit naïve, maybe even downright stupid.
Tay walked back in the direction from which he had come and examined the businesses that lined both sides of the alleyway. A hairdresser, a motorcycle repair shop, a tiny pharmacy, a narrow beer bar open to the street, and another tattoo parlor. This one was open for business but without a single customer. He kept walking and passed a travel agency, a café simply enough called Eat Here, a small grocery store with unopened cases of soft drinks stacked in front of it, and a closed-up shop front with a sign out front that said Hair Man Cut. Tay assumed that meant it was a barbershop. At least he hoped it did.
When Tay reached Walking Street, he turned around and strolled back toward Secrets again, this time searching for security cameras on the buildings along the lane. The Grand Hotel was a possibility. Tay stopped and scanned the front of the building. Nothing. No cameras at all that he could see. Continuing on, he examined all the buildings on both sides of the little lane without finding a single camera anywhere.
When he got all the way back to the fork at the end, he stopped, turned around, and thought about what to do next. The woman with the fruit cart was still in the same place she had been before, but when she saw Tay had returned she looked as if she might be considering making a break for it.
Only one vendor who might have seen the woman going and coming from Secrets, no hovering doormen, and no security cameras at all? Tay thought about going inside some of the shops along the lane and trying to talk to whoever he found there, but that seemed pretty desperate. Besides, who was he kidding? What were the chances that he could communicate well enough with some random Thai working in a tattoo parlor for him to describe the woman he was looking for and ask if they remembered seeing her?
Tay felt like a complete idiot. Had he already lost his touch as a detective, or had he simply spent so much of his life in Singapore that he had no real grasp of how differently things worked in other places? He was certainly no fan of surveillance cameras when he looked at them strictly from a personal standpoint, but cameras had become indispensable tools in investigations when it was necessary to track someone’s movements. Their near total absence in Pattaya was both surprising and a little disconcerting.
So much for Plan A. If there was any realistic chance of keeping this whole thing from turning into an embarrassing fiasco, he had better trot out Plan B pretty damn quick.
And Plan B was to look up Mad Max.
Babydolls was on Walking Street, not more than a couple of hundred feet from Secrets in distance but a universe away in sensibility.
The front of the building was painted purple, and the entrance was an open space covered by heavy green drapes that looked like velvet but probably weren’t. Just in case that wasn’t eye-catching enough, an arch made up of thick layers of red, white, and blue balloons rose at least twenty feet up the front of the building. Two boys in shorts who were stripped to the waist and covered in sweat were unloading metal beer kegs from a pickup truck, and Tay waited while they each rolled a keg through the drapes and disappeared inside. Then he followed.
When the drapes fell closed behind him, Tay stopped and looked around. The place was more or less as he remembered it from the first time he met August there. The lights were up because the bar was still being made ready for the night’s customers and Tay thought it looked bleak and shabby. The odor of spilled beer and disinfectant mingled with stale cigarette smoke, and Tay perked up. The place might be a shithole, but at least it was a shithole where he could smoke.
To the left of the entrance there was a staircase leading up to a balcony with a couple of dozen small tables and a raised platform with stools all around it. A forest of chrome poles rose from the platform all the way up to the ceiling. The platform was empty now, but Tay knew that later in the evening an army of lithe young girls, each wearing a number pinned to whatever tiny bit of clothing she might have on, would be swinging from those poles in a vague imitation of dancing to the music booming through the bar.
To the right of the entrance was a short L-shaped bar. Behind it was a short L-shaped bartender.
The middle-aged woman was wearing a shapeless dress that might once have been green, and stacking glasses behind the bar. She didn’t look particularly Thai to Tay, more Korean or possibly even Chinese, but what would a Korean or a Chinese woman be doing working behind a bar in Pattaya with so much cheap local labor available?
When Tay walked over, the woman barely bothered to glance up.
“We closed. Open later. Come back.”
In a reflex honed over decades of talking to people who didn’t want to be talked to, Tay took out his wallet, opened it, and held it up to display his warrant card from Singapore.
“Police,” he said. “I want to talk to Mad Max.”
The woman’s head snapped up as if Tay had struck her. She stared for a moment, eyes flick
ing back and forth between Tay’s face and his warrant card, then she clapped her hands to her breast and backed slowly away from him.
“Mad Max,” Tay repeated in a tone that he tried to make firm but unthreatening. “Is he here?”
The woman backed off another step, bobbed her head quickly, and then turned and scurried away.
Tay smiled, shook out a Marlboro, and lit it. Maybe, he thought to himself, this authority thing was going to play better here than he had first imagined.
Tay rested his hands on the bar and watched the door at the back of the room through which the woman had disappeared. After a few moments, it opened a crack and a single eye set in a lumpy, unshaven face peered out through the opening. Tay stood still and waited, a neutral expression on his face. After a few more moments, the door opened the rest of the way as he had been certain it would. A man appeared in the doorway and began to move slowly toward Tay. He kept his body turned to one side and walked with an odd, crab-like gait as if he was trying to minimize his profile should Tay suddenly decide to pull a gun and open fire.
The man was a stocky Caucasian with a deep tan that didn’t look as if it had come from a sunlamp, muscles that appeared to be from hard work rather than a gym, and gold chains around both of his wrists that clanked when he moved. He wore a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt hanging over baggy khaki shorts with a beaten-up pair of brown Topsiders on his feet. He looked like he could have just stepped off a boat in Miami Beach, but he hadn’t. He was in a go-go bar in Pattaya, Thailand, and that made him a pimp as far as Tay was concerned no matter what he looked like.
As the man drew closer and turned his head a bit more, Tay realized that he wore a black patch over his left eye with the band holding it in place tilted rakishly over his forehead. The whole effect was to make him look vaguely like John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, a Western movie Tay was certain no one under forty had seen or even heard of. Tay had seen it, of course, twice in fact, but that didn’t really matter. The guy’s vague resemblance to John Wayne did nothing to improve Tay’s opinion of him. He was still a pimp.
The man stayed on the other side of the bar, using it to keep himself separated from Tay, and stopped about six feet away.
“Are you Mad Max?” Tay asked.
The man nodded, a single jerk of his head, but he didn’t say anything.
“I’m Samuel Tay. John August asked me to talk to you.”
Tay produced his warrant card again and held it up, although the man was probably too far away to read it.
“You told my girl you were a cop.”
“I am a cop,” Tay said. It appeared that August hadn’t gone into the details so he figured he wouldn’t either.
“Oh shit,” the man muttered. “You scared the piss out of me. August didn’t tell me the guy he was sending was a cop.”
Tay put his warrant card away. He could see the tension abruptly draining from the man’s body, his muscles loosening to the point that he actually began to sag toward the floor.
Tay glanced around the bar. The woman he had originally spoken to had reappeared and was hovering at a distance. She still looked absolutely terrified. He also spotted a couple of other women back in a dim corner watching him warily.
“Is there someplace else—”
“Yeah sure,” the man interrupted. “Better we go back to my office. You’re scaring the fuck out of everybody, man.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Max’s office was a tiny, windowless room barely big enough to hold a scarred wooden desk and two folding metal chairs. The furniture looked to Tay like stuff that had been bought surplus when a not particularly prosperous school somewhere had closed down. Max gestured Tay toward the chairs, one of which was presently occupied by a large cardboard box and the other by a stack of a half-dozen or so rolls of toilet paper. Tay chose the chair with the box, put the box on the floor, and sat down.
Max started to take the chair behind the desk, but stopped.
“You want a drink? A beer or something?”
“You have some bottled water?”
Max looked at Tay for a moment without expression, then shook his head. He opened the door, shouted through it in a language Tay did not understand, and closed it again. Tay was pretty sure the language hadn’t been Thai. Japanese maybe? But why would Max be speaking Japanese in a Thai go-go bar?
“You need to be more careful with that cop stuff, Tay. You’re scaring my people to death.”
Right at that moment, as if to illustrate what Max had just said, the bartender opened the door without knocking and came in with a bottle of water. She stood as far away from Tay as the small room would permit her to and placed the bottle and a straw on Max’s desk within Tay’s reach. Then she scurried quickly away and slammed the door behind her.
Max saw the puzzlement on Tay’s face.
“John didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Max waved vaguely toward the bar outside his door. “The ratline.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“These people are mostly Koreans. North Koreans. They escape North Korea over the border into China. Then they’re smuggled all the way south through Laos and into Thailand. Their ratline ends here. I keep them until we can get them on a boat to South Korea.”
Tay was dumbstruck.
“You’re smuggling people who have escaped from North Korea?”
“Most of these folks are Christians. So am I. I do what I can to help them, but I’m just part of a much larger group.”
Tay didn’t know what to say. A moment before he had pegged Max as nothing but a lowlife westerner living off the Thai prostitutes he pimped out of his bar. Now Max was telling him he was part of a Christian group helping North Koreans escape to the south. Could someone be both a pimp and Christian? Tay knew the world was a subtle and contradictory place, but he had never realized it was that contradictory. This was obviously neither the time nor the place to enter into a metaphysical dialogue on that subject so Tay busied himself with opening the water bottle, ripping the paper covering off the straw, and taking a long pull on the water.
After he put the bottle down, Tay said, “August didn’t tell me.”
“Huh,” Max grunted. “Figures.”
Max opened the bottom drawer of his desk and rooted around in it for a moment with both hands. When they emerged, one of them held a Kydex holster with some kind of a revolver in it and the other held a box of ammunition. Max slapped the box of ammunition down on the desk in front of Tay and then slipped the revolver out of the holster and held it with the barrel pointing up, turning it first one way and then another.
“Smith and Wesson J Frame .38. Not new, but in pretty good shape. It’s a solid weapon. You can rely on it.”
A gun? Tay was too surprised to know what to say.
“John said to get you a wheel gun because you were a little old fashioned,” Max said, raising his eyebrows at the stupefied expression on Tay’s face. “But I can get you a semi-automatic if you’d prefer.”
“August told you to get me a gun?”
Max nodded.
“What for?”
“I didn’t ask him. I didn’t really have to.”
“What does that mean?”
“Look, Tay, I don’t know you, but I do know this place. John said you were looking for somebody. I’m guessing that means you’ll be going around asking a lot of questions and that’s going to attract attention. Most of that attention is likely to be unwelcome. Some of it may even be very unwelcome.”
Max shoved the revolver back in the holster, snapped the retention strap, and laid the rig on the desk next to the box of ammunition.
“You keep that baby handy. You probably won’t need it, but you might have to show it a few times. Now, you want to wear it out, or do you need a bag?”
Max made it sound like Tay was shopping at Marks & Spencer. Tay didn’t want a gun. He certainly had no intention of carrying a gun in a country wh
ere he had no authority to carry one, but he thought refusing it might make Max doubt him. He needed Max and he needed his help. Better to take the gun without arguing and just stuff it in his room safe.
“A bag, please. If it’s not too much trouble.”
Max produced a plastic carrier bag from the still-open drawer, dumped the revolver and ammunition inside, and then rolled it up. He placed the rolled-up bag inside a second plastic carrier bag and plunked that bag on the desk in front of Tay.
“Use it in good health.”
“I’ll try not to use it at all.”
Max nodded and slammed the desk drawer shut with his foot.
“Good luck with that, Tay. So, when are you going to tell me what this is really all about?”
Tay told Max what he knew about the woman he was trying to identify, which wasn’t much.
“Why does John want to find this broad so badly?”
Tay was pretty sure he hadn’t heard anyone refer to a woman as a broad since Frank Sinatra died, but somehow the expression went nicely with Max’s Hawaiian shirt and gold bracelets so he made no mention of that.
“August didn’t tell you?”
Max shook his head.
“He didn’t tell me about the North Koreans, and he didn’t tell you about why he needs to find this woman. I guess that makes us even.”
Max shook his head again and chuckled.
“Okay,” he said, “I get it. I’ve always figured John was involved in all kind of shit I didn’t want to know about so I’m not going to start getting curious now. He’s really CIA, isn’t he?”
Tay said nothing.
“Well, he does something other than run a bar in this shithole, doesn’t he?”
Tay still said nothing.
“Fair enough,” Max shrugged. “You’re absolutely right. None of my business.”