The only thing of any value that she left behind was in the bathroom. On the counter next to the sink, just in front of the ceiling-high mirror, was a bottle of Francois Petain’s perfume. Looking at the bottle of perfume, Condley started laughing, despite himself. Van did have a wicked sense of humor, even when she was laughing at herself.
A sealed hotel envelope with his name on the outside was underneath the perfume bottle, as if the perfume had been left as a gift. Opening the envelope, he saw that she had written him a letter in her careful schoolgirl scrawl, switching back and forth between English and Vietnamese. What do I have? she asked him in the note. I am smart, I know, but so are others who have a better education. I can work hard, but doing what? For who, and where? I do have my beauty, though. When I compare myself to other people, I know that is my strongest weapon. But only for a short while, Cong Ly. You do not like this, but my beauty is my business! It is my college degree! It is all I have, and if I cannot find a good life while I still have my beauty I will have nothing! Or should I ignore the power of my beauty and grow old in Viet Nam, remembering that once a rich man loved me, and once another man took me for a week to see Bangkok?
And you, Cong Ly. I do think I could have loved you. But you love Viet Nam more than you could ever love a woman.
Someone knocked on the door. He opened it to see Hanson Muir in the hallway, looking like a sumo wrestler in a white terry-cloth robe.
‘I heard you laughing.’
‘I’m having a great time.’
‘Glad to hear it. Since you’re going to make me work tonight, I thought I’d take a dip in the pool and then nap for a while. Is that OK?’
‘Good idea, Professor.’
Muir caught Condley’s ironic smile and poked his head nosily into the room. ‘Where’s Van?’
‘Looks like she split.’
‘Then why were you laughing?’
‘Because I was starting to take myself too seriously.’
Muir stuttered a few times, trying to say something meaningful, the nurturing mundanity of his own life not having equipped him to understand how Condley might be feeling at that moment. ‘That’s a terribly ungrateful thing for her to do,’ he finally managed to say.
‘Not really,’ shrugged Condley. ‘It took guts, actually. She saw the brass ring and she grabbed it.’ He walked into the bathroom and retrieved the bottle of perfume, ceremoniously handing it to Muir. ‘Here, Professor. A present for your wife, from Francois Petain.’
Muir took it, daring now to smile. ‘Tigress,’ he said, reading the label. ‘Whooee. It must make you go wild, huh, Brandon? I’m almost afraid to let my wife put some of this on.’ He gave Condley a concerned look. ‘Are you all right? What are you going to do?’
‘About Van?’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing for now. I’ve got a lot of things to worry about before tonight. She doesn’t even make the top five.’
Muir pocketed the perfume. ‘Do you need my help?’
‘Go take your nap, Professor.’
* * *
The doorman at the hotel told him that a large white man about his age had picked Van up about an hour before. The man seemed to have been an American, spoke pretty good Thai, and had arrived in a chauffeur-driven black BMW. Simolzak was not in his office when Condley called, and he decided not to leave a message. He knew where his old friend lived.
As the hotel ferry made its way upriver he sat alone on the fantail, leaning grandly back against the seat cushions with his arms spread wide on either side of him. Just above his head, a large Thai flag flapped lazily in the dank and gentle wind. The sun beat heavily against his face and arms, hot as a lightbulb. He ignored the dozens of nearby tourists. He had absolutely nothing in common with them. They were zoo-kept, sitting with their sun hats and their street maps along the canopied side rails of the boat, pointing and chattering as if the fifteen-minute ride to the Oriental Hotel’s dock were somehow a grand Asian adventure. And he was certifiably wild, country-bred and jungle-trained, as untamable as a mountain lion.
The ferry churned against the wavelets and his mind floated above him to a place that neared nirvana, asking him when he would finally cease all this incessant struggling. The river surrounded him, timeless, deep, and powerful, its current no different than when he had first seen it or even when Rudyard Kipling had sat on the grand old Oriental Hotel’s veranda more than a century before and penned his poetry.
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.
The ancient Chao Phraya’s currents were the same and yet everything else about it had become vastly different, as had he in the decades since he had first come to Bangkok. The ferry made its way slowly past hotels and sky-high apartment buildings, making him think of all the changes in his own life since that first moment, just after he had left Viet Nam, raw with anger over the loss of a war and forever scarred by the death of a woman he had truly loved. A woman who had just as truly loved him. Yes, that was different. Yeu, as Van would have put it, not thuong. An unending, lifetime love.
The simpler, cleaner journey that the river had taken before the tall buildings and the factories had come to Bangkok was now forever gone. And so was the volatile but nonetheless simple life that he himself had led. Gone, the time of good and bad, right and wrong that drowned itself in blood, leaving lost visions of life and death but mostly death and more death. In its place, the enemies and allies that his returning years had squeezed together until there simply was no difference, leaving only friends. Gone, the innocence that had forever died with Mai, the marriage and babies that did not happen. In its place, surrounding him, the promises that took one turn around the track and always came back as lies.
He missed the river’s unpolluted beauty, in the days when the klongs that fed into it were open and healthy, dotted with fleets of small boats and floating markets rather than covered over with concrete and turned into sewers. He missed the simple thatch homes that once lined its banks and the time when smiling women could lean over from their houseboats and dip their cook pans into it without coming up with a bowlful of mud and disease. He missed it all, as deeply as he missed what life might have brought him had fate dealt him a different hand.
Or maybe it was just the thought that Van had split, even though he knew that running away was her own best shot. And the knowledge that before the evening ended he himself might end up dead.
* * *
He took a tuk tuk from the Oriental Pier to Sukhumvit, not even haggling with the surprised driver when he asked for the outrageous price of four hundred baht. It took an hour in the thick, impossible traffic. At the major intersections the policemen stood on boxes, wearing white gloves and gas masks, twin metaphors for the modern Thais. The Thais were a beautiful and gentle people who loved fine things; hence the cops in clean white gloves. And the gas masks were a sign that their leap into prosperity had rewarded them, Pandora-like, with a set of imported ills that they in their innocence had not been able to anticipate. Intransigent traffic. Air that choked the lungs. And the persistent, unending whirlwind of AIDS.
Simolzak had lived on a quiet, tree-lined soy in Sukhumvit for more than twenty years. Condley stopped the tuk tuk a block from the house, not wanting the lawnmower-like engine to signal his arrival. The yard in front of the narrow, two-story house held its very own jungle of overgrown tropical plants. Simolzak let the yard grow wild on purpose, to mask the teak-filled splendor of the home itself.
The BMW was parked in the narrow driveway that ran along the side of the house. Condley waved casually to Simolzak’s driver, who sat dozing in the car. The driver, who also functioned as Simolzak’s bodyguard, recognised him immediately and waved back absently. As he passed the driver, both men raised their hands prayer-like under
neath their chins in the Buddhist greeting of peace.
He knew the front door would be locked, and he knew that the back door would not be. That was just Simolzak’s way. Deliveries were often made to the back door, where Simolzak also kept a smaller office in case clients needed to meet him at his home on short notice.
He walked around to the rear of the home and silently tested the doorknob, then pushed the door open without a sound. Simolzak’s back porch was cluttered with floor-to-ceiling shelves that held stacks of files from cases he had pursued over the years. A bundle of new mail was on the floor. The door that led into the main part of his house was wide open, and Condley moved through it with the quiet grace of a panther on the prowl.
He could hear them upstairs. Simolzak was talking throatily to her, hoarse whispers and urgent little laughs. She was screaming high in her throat, not words, just screams, in persistent, uncontrollable pants that came again and again and again.
They did not see him standing in the doorway as she romped on top of Simolzak’s huge frame, straddling him with her hands on his chest, her back arched and her breasts flailing wildly in the air. Her back was to him and her long hair swung from side to side as if accentuating the abandonment of her screams. And then finally Simolzak noticed him.
‘Brandon,’ he said, clutching the top of her thighs in an effort to slow her down. ‘Oh, Jesus!’
‘Hi, guys.’
She rolled from Simolzak’s belly and clutched a sheet around her shoulders, crouching on her knees on the mattress. She was still panting heavily. Her eyes were wild and her hair was a sweaty tangle that stuck to her face and neck. She started looking from Simolzak to Condley and back again, as if waiting for one or the other to rescue her from her dilemma.
Simolzak sat up in the bed, slowly pulling a part of the sheet over his crotch. His eyes were glued to Condley’s, looking for clues. Condley leaned against the doorway, holding Simolzak’s gaze. Both men were fighters, and both knew the other would fight or die if the wrong words were said.
‘I can explain this,’ Simolzak finally said.
‘Look—’ started Condley.
‘No! Don’t say anything, Cong Ly!’ Van cut him off, raising two fists full of sheets up to her chin, not waiting for the inevitable to play out. ‘I’m not going back to Sai Gon!’
‘She called me,’ said Simolzak. ‘She asked me. Is that any different than Sal Marino’s daughter asking you?’
Despite himself, Condley started chuckling softly. ‘Keep the girl,’ he said. ‘I need your gun.’
Simolzak glanced tensely down toward the floor. Condley knew there would be a pistol underneath the bed. ‘Can I trust you if I give it to you?’ he asked.
‘Can I trust you if you reach for it?’ said Condley.
‘Brandon! Of course you can. We’ve been friends for a very long time. The last thing I want to do is kill you.’
‘Then you can trust me.’
Slowly, Simolzak reached under the bed, pulling out a new nine-millimeter Glock. ‘It’s loaded, Brandon,’ he said. ‘There’s an extra magazine in my desk, plus a box of ammo.’
‘Give it to me.’ As Simolzak started forward, Condley pointed quickly at him, a warning. ‘Turn it around so the barrel is toward you.’ Simolzak turned the weapon around, giving it to Condley handle-first, then lay back on the bed.
Condley checked the pistol, pushing the slide back to make sure it was loaded. Then he pointed it at Simolzak. ‘Get up. You owe me five thousand dollars.’
‘Now, wait a minute, Brandon! That was a fee!’
‘Fuck your fucking fee, get me the money!’
Simolzak stood warily, starting to dress, but Condley moved toward him. ‘No clothes, no pit stops. Hands in the air. Move it!’
Simolzak moved slowly from the bedroom and down the stairs, naked, with his hands above his head. ‘This is unethical, Brandon. That was a deal.’
‘Let’s just say I’m giving you a reciprocal charge for transporting a woman from Sai Gon.’
Simolzak reached his desk and began opening a drawer. Condley nudged him away, making him step back, ensuring that a second weapon was not inside. He took out the extra magazine for the pistol, as well as a box of ammunition. An envelope containing cash was also in the drawer. Condley tossed it to Simolzak.
‘Five thousand. Count it out.’
Simolzak grumbled as he counted out the hundred-dollar bills. ‘I already sent Marino his thousand.’
‘Write it off,’ said Condley. ‘Business loss.’
‘That pistol is worth at least five hundred dollars.’
‘I’ll get it back to you.’
‘I’m not sure you’ll be that lucky, Brandon.’
‘You’ll have to take that risk.’
They watched each other carefully as Simolzak reached out with the wad of bills, lest the larger man try to wrestle the gun out of Condley’s hand. Condley pocketed the bills, never taking his eyes off Simolzak. And then he backed slowly out of the room.
As Condley reached the back door, Simolzak dropped his arms, standing huge and naked in the inner doorway. And finally he gave Condley a smile and a wave.
‘Are we still friends?’
‘Shit, yes,’ said Condley.
‘Be careful, Brandon.’
Condley raised his head, as if looking upstairs. ‘She’s a sweet girl, Ted. Don’t fuck her up.’
‘How’d we ever end up this way?’ asked Simolzak.
‘Hey, man. It’s called Bangkok.’
Condley waved back to his old friend. He opened the door, beginning to leave. And as he left they both were laughing.
Chapter Thirty-Four
They left the Vietnamese Embassy just after lunch, dressed as laborers in old T-shirts and plain cotton slacks, each carrying a beaten knapsack under his shoulder, and walked for more than two hours under the afternoon sun. Manh decided that Dzung should wear his new walking shoes instead of sandals and had taken them into the basement of the embassy the night before and dyed them black.
As they walked, the ever-meticulous Manh stopped Dzung every few blocks to quiz him on key landmarks so that he could remember them later in the confusion and the dark. He had demanded that a dinner of rice and boiled chicken be made in the embassy kitchen and put in the knapsacks for each of them, lest food from the roadside stalls cause a sudden diarrhea that might abort their mission. The knapsacks also held a liter of bottled water, a change of clothes, and, in Dzung’s, his loaded Heckler & Koch P7 pistol.
Manh had personally loaded the bullets into the pistol, wearing plastic gloves and carefully wiping down each bullet, as well as the casings. Dzung could not understand why the Interior Ministry agent went to all the trouble with the bullets. No registry held his fingerprints. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was simply Manh’s fascination with old movies. Or perhaps Manh thought that such a sophisticated approach would steer investigators away from a Vietnamese suspect once they found the sanitised casings. Or maybe, shrugged Dzung, there was a new form of science that could pick up his body identification from oils left on the bullets and beam the information up into a satellite and then cause the satellite to instantly make him glow so that the police could come and pick him up. Who knew? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t work. He had not touched any of the bullets.
They walked south for a long time, toward the distant, curving Chao Phraya River. After an hour the city slowly began to change. After a few more blocks they entered a neighbourhood that seemed to have been built only yesterday, perhaps by using waste materials from old construction sites. The few people on the streets walked listlessly under the scorching sun, viewing Dzung and Manh with little interest. Others sat motionless under outdoor stalls, some numb from opium and others merely enduring the heat.
‘It smells worse than District Four,’ said Dzung, looking around them at a mass of ramshackle, open-air houses made of plywood and loose tin set along mud pathways.
‘That’s because there are no hogs in Dis
trict Four,’ said Manh.
‘Yes, another benefit of the revolution,’ said Dzung. ‘That it protects my family from having to eat such meat.’
Manh ignored him, having become deeply intense in this new environment. He pointed in front of them, where four open-air slaughter pens marked the center of another clearing. ‘They kill them there.’
A dozen huge hogs squealed and cowered in one concrete pen, early arrivals for that night’s slaughter. A muscular, bare-chested young man with tattoos on both his thighs stood in the dirt at the center of the pen, hacking away at the carcass of one hog that had died early from the heat. Concrete gutters ran along the edges of each of the pens. Much of the blood and debris from the daily slaughter would be washed down the gutters to the river, a block below them. Even now the gutters buzzed with flies, stinking horribly with pools of stagnant water from the killings of the night before.
Just off to their left, on a powder-dry half acre turned into a playground, a dozen little children pretended to chase an uninterested dog. A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from the little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.
Dzung walked a few steps further, uneasy in these raw surroundings. ‘What do they call this place?’
‘They call it Klong Toey,’ said Manh, enjoying his status as an expert travel guide. ‘We are at the very end of the district, in what is called the slaughterhouse section. The river is down there, on the other side of these buildings.’
It was four o’clock. Even as they walked, the trucks began arriving, one at a time, bringing the hugest hogs Dzung had ever seen to the concrete pens. Young men with hard bellies and shattered faces and wild tattoos were waiting for the hogs. They quickly unloaded each truckload at the pens’ open gates and shuttled the hogs inside. Soon the slaughter would begin, and it would last all night.
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