by Alisa Smith
The track was in ill repair from the war, and the train travelled fitfully across the countryside. I wished I could see it, since this was my first time outside of Bangkok. Just once, I pushed the curtain forward an inch and Bill broke from his reverie. “I got to tell you twice? Close that,” he said, and I did, resentful. Who could possibly be out there, in the middle of nowhere beside a moving train?
I wondered why I could not stand up to Bill. In our years apart, I’d proved I could make a success of something, with my saloon in Sequim. But that was the sort of thing any schmuck could do. Bill was in another league. The best I could hope for was to be his faithful lieutenant and experience adventures at his side. If I angered Bill or let him down, he could send me away, I supposed, and I wouldn’t even have that much. But I was pretty sure, much as I admired him, I didn’t want to be him. His success didn’t seem to make him any happier than I was. All he wanted after all these years was Lena, it seemed, and he didn’t have her. The curtains didn’t matter. Let him keep them closed.
“You know it was called the Death Railway?” Bill asked.
“No,” I said, wondering why we were travelling upon its rails, then. It did not sound safe.
“Because so many POWs died building it. Twelve thousand dead, they say.” He jittered his knee. “And Link Hughes wasn’t one of them.”
“A lucky bastard,” I said.
“Yes. Well, at least he’ll be useful to me.”
When we arrived at the station, there would be a separate automobile for each of us, while Smile would walk as befit a monk, Bill explained. Then he pulled his Panama hat down over his eyes and slept, or at least pretended to. His breathing did not sound easy.
After a few hours of jolting and shuddering, the train slowed to a full stop. The station was a small wooden building through which we hurried toward the waiting cars. Looking around quickly, I saw a monstrous gold structure like an inverted bell, which was the temple rising above the trees. Though it looked substantial, the inside would just be hollow, I reflected. People flowed toward it with the eternal hope of seekers, yet they would never know until they were dead if their faith had been of any use. The street was unpaved, and in the opposite direction from the temple, there were more stray cats than people. The town itself felt abandoned. Maybe the prison hospital was bad luck.
I climbed into my car. The Siamese driver had beefy shoulders, and I supposed he was one of the corrupt policemen Bill had enlisted. The man did not speak. The rear windows were curtained, limousine style, so there was not much to see, either. My thoughts turned inward to the night before.
* * *
AS WE’D FINISHED the last of too many drinks, Bill still had not answered my question about how he would know when Lena arrived. It did not sound like she had responded to his invitation. He just said “I’ll know it” and fell silent. I felt impatient in the unfamiliar heat. It was heavy as a wet cloth against a fever patient’s brow. Maybe he had Shively staking out the ports. As usual, I was at Bill’s whim, and all I could do was wait to find out. I decided to change the subject for the sake of pepping up our reunion. Bill would no doubt enjoy talking about his success in this country.
“In your telegram you said you needed a numbers man,” I said, “so what business did you bring me here for?” Besides writing his biography and smoothing the way with Lena, I thought with annoyance.
“It’s legitimate. I’m quite proper now,” he said, his mood brightening, just as I’d hoped. He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops as though asking me to take in the cut of his linen suit, which was admittedly fine. But such outward measures did not signify. As a thief he had worn nice suits at times, and we had reposed a while in a mansion on Capitol Hill, which was Seattle’s swankiest district. I raised my eyebrows.
“It’s an agricultural product,” he said. “Guess what it is.”
“Rice?”
“That’s not so profitable. It’s the opium poppy.”
“That’s what you call legitimate?”
It was legal to sell in Siam, he said, though it was only grown in the remote mountains of Burma, and that’s where his crops were. Now I understood how he’d got entangled with that mountain girl. Bangkok was by far the best market, Bill said, since the Siamese government ran licenced opium dens. This was a peculiar country, I thought.
“Isn’t it hard being in this business with your old drug habit?” I asked, my caution gone at least three drinks back.
“When I decide something, it’s done. Quit is quit. Anyhow, there’s a world of difference, By God, between coke and this monkey business. You ever seen someone in an opium stupor?”
“I did it once. All I remember is my head floating off by itself.” I hoped he would not ask me the circumstance, since it was after the cops shot me running away, when Bill was caught. I remembered staggering through the forests of Washington State, clutching my wounded arm, on fire with pain. I made my way to Chinatown in Bellingham because of its reputation for opium dens; I thought it would be a good place to hide while I recovered. I supposed others in the den must have been equally pie-eyed but I was in no condition to know it.
“That’s just it,” Bill said. “While you thought your head was floating, you were laid out flat doing nothing. Cocaine at least keeps a man busy. You’re ready to take on the world.”
“You’re never tempted to try your new product?”
“That’s what my quality control associate, Smile Chang, is for. He has a naturally vicious and active nature that seems to benefit from opium’s calming effect. His knowledge of the drug can’t be matched. When he grades the batches I know exactly what I should pay.”
Smile was connected to the Chinese Nationalists through his family, Bill added. They, in turn, were friends with an important general whose army was garrisoned in Burma—safe, but also convenient to the battle with the Communists in Yunan. The general’s main funding came from the opium business. To operate in Burma Bill had to give him a cut, and he’d protect the shipment until it reached the border with Siam. There, Bill’s other connection—the Siamese chief of police, called Phao—took over the racket. He was trying to position himself as a military force, Bill said, and might have designs for a coup.
“This sounds an uncomfortably political business,” I said.
“More than you know, but the chief’s going to help us get Hughes. We’ll go tomorrow on the nine o’clock train.”
The sky had closed in since I arrived in the garden and it had grown hotter, though it seemed the hour had turned late. Bill stood up and put his face to some exotic white flowers the size of teacups that were planted in a large ceramic urn alongside the pool deck. “Come look at this, By God,” he said. I got up, a little unsteady, and peered at the flowers. They were big and sweet enough that each one had five bees in it, lazy and stumbling. “This is Siam,” Bill said, and laughed a hard, barking laugh of pure delight.
As we sat down again, he said he had filled a closet upstairs with clothes for me, figuring I would not be prepared for the tropics or the ways of his new crowd. It was not like America. Here, everyone dressed for dinner, and he announced it was time to get ready for ours.
“My size has changed since we last met,” I said, patting my stomach. Though in truth I was only one size larger than in my youth, and in pretty good shape if I did say so myself. I waited in vain for Bill to disagree.
“Shively telegraphed me your measurements,” he said instead.
I suddenly imagined filthy Shively, on our trans-Pacific journey, creeping into my cabin at night to measure me like a corpse. His exacting nature would encourage such sneaking, rather than simply reading the labels of my clothes. I suspected I wasn’t imagining it at all, and it just might have been a memory. Unsettled, I followed Bill inside to dress.
Dinner was a peculiar affair. The table would have seated twenty, but there were only three of us: me, Bill, and Smile. Bill, of course, sat at the head of the table and arrayed us on his left and right. Sm
ile had the build of a speakeasy bouncer. His fists were the size of softballs, disproportionately large and meaty. His head was shaved bald, and my own brown waves seemed a little poncey in comparison. I thought it best not to be seen observing him, and I averted my eyes. Smile’s handle must have been born of sarcasm. He hadn’t so much as twitched his mouth so far.
There was a mural on the wall behind Bill, with some nasty-looking naked baby angels flitting around a reclining naked woman. This all seemed unfitting should there be lady guests, but perhaps it was classified as “art.” Bill caught me gawping at it all, and explained his luck in snagging the mansion. It had become available with the tasteful purging of some Japanese collaborators who had used the palazzo during the war, to satisfy the Allies that Siam had not, in fact, been an enemy nation.
“Though they bloody well were. Now they’re friends with the Americans. And the British,” Bill said, chewing on his food. I had taken the roast to be a ham but did not ask in case it turned out to be another switcheroo for a foreign creature, which would dampen my enjoyment of it. “Smile knows them well, which is useful.” Smile had gone to a colonial school in Burma and learned the Queen’s English, Bill related, while Smile remained silent. I noted that Smile had an identical tuxedo to my own, right down to the red pocket square, which made my blood boil. Was I just some kind of bookend to Bill?
“Smile here is equally suited to fine dining or fisticuffs,” Bill said, possibly noticing my interest in his apparel, and I lowered my eyes. “He’ll come with us tomorrow, just in case. A moment, gentlemen.” Bill laid his white napkin on the tablecloth and walked out of the room.
Was I some kind of weak flank? I felt a little touchy. Bill hadn’t even asked me yet what I’d done all these years. In that regard he had not changed. He was only interested in himself and his own schemes. I supposed I could not expect that being yanked from the brink of death had changed him entirely, as though he was rebuilt top to bottom like some Frankenstein.
With Bill out of the room, I tried to seize on anything to talk to this Smile fellow about, since it was clear I would have to make the first effort. He sat staring straight ahead. Certainly Bill chose his associate wisely in that he was no rattletrap, and no secrets were going to escape from him. His eyes shone like the gaping windows around us, black with the night outside, reflecting me back to myself, tiny and marooned.
“What does your family do in Burma?” I asked.
“Run an opium den,” he said, his voice surprising me, sounding British and upper crust. I wondered what such a criminal upbringing would be like, as opposed to my own gentle mothering. But my father had been a Wall Streeter—some considered that a criminal pastime after the stock market crash.
Bill returned grinning and carrying a small canvas sack that looked unaccountably heavy for its small size. He thumped it on the table beside my dinner so that the china rattled. “Take a look.”
I untied the bag to see gold pieces stamped with foreign scrollwork. “Jesus,” I said. “Are you King Midas now?” I held up a coin to the light and it glinted, beyond beauty, a sight that had corrupted men’s souls for time untold.
“This is what I need you for. What’s the value of the gold I pay out to the cops versus what I make from my business? Then I get paid in guns or gems. What are they actually worth when finally, down the line, I get some hard currency? Right now I got stashes everywhere like some fucking squirrel. I need an accounting of it all.”
“The war’s over. Who do you sell your guns to?”
“By God, don’t ask questions when you won’t like the answers,” he said, spearing an escargot. Or at least I hoped it was nothing worse than French snails. “Let’s talk about tomorrow.”
I would go into the hospital alone, Bill said, posing as a cousin of Link Hughes to sign him out. Bill could not go himself because some of the British officers knew him from his work liberating the prison camps, and he did not want them noticing his interest in the man. I wasn’t sure why this would be a problem, and Bill did not explain. Smile would wait outside to ensure that nobody troublesome got through Chief Phao’s net. I wondered if this plan came from Bill’s perfectionistic nature, or from a distrust of Chief Phao.
Alone, Bill had said. I was nervous about that, but at least he had faith in me.
* * *
THE CAR SLOWED and I craned forward to see through the front windshield. There was a gap in a long wall where a metal gate had been wrenched off its hinges, twisted back like the lid on a sardine can. We drove through unchallenged. Passing row after row of wooden buildings on the vast hospital grounds, I felt a growing dread. Not just for the job I had to do, but at what the war had done. I’d been remote from it until now. The place was desolate. There was only pounded dust, and not a single tree. How many thousands of wounded had there been, to fill these buildings? With their roofs of slatted bamboo, they were hardly better than huts. I could still see the faint outline of Japanese writing on a post that had been painted over. These outer structures, which the Japanese forced the prisoners to build, would be empty, Bill told me, and only the old headquarters building, solid pre-war masonry, was being used to house the last patients. The car approached its entrance, two half-hearted columns surrounding a heavy wooden door. The hospital was a two-story rectangle painted beige like the dusty earth, and its roof was covered in terracotta tiles the colour of dried blood.
There was a single soldier posted outside with a rifle. British, I thought from his uniform, which I’d seen in news trailers during the war. He looked battle-hardened and I hoped I wouldn’t need to tangle with him. At least there was only one of him.
“I wait,” was all the driver said as I got out of the car. It felt equally threatening as helpful.
All the curtains were drawn in the hospital windows, giving the place a reclusive air. I detected a flash of motion on the second floor, as though someone had been peering out a crack and let the curtain fall again. Somebody curious, as I had been on the train. I walked past the soldier, who did not challenge me, and continued through the hospital doors, wishing I had eyes in the back of my head. I would have to trust the driver, whoever he was, to watch out for me. I wondered what Russians looked like. I could only picture Cossack hats, but that was absurd. I wished I was back in Sequim, drinking a nice cold beer with farmer Joe types. I wiped my palms on my trousers. I paused at the front desk where there was a nurse stationed, wearing a crisp white uniform and cap. I opened my mouth, closed it again. Come on, By God, I told myself. Bill is depending on you.
I looked around the glaring white foyer, but it was empty of any other people. I supposed Chief Phao had done his work and cleared it out.
“I’m here for Link Hughes,” I said to the nurse.
“And who are you?”
“Charlie Hughes, his cousin from Canada.”
“They told me you’d be coming,” she said, and I hoped “they” were Bill’s men. The nurse ran her finger down a list. “Bed 247. Follow me.”
She was young, barely past nineteen I guessed, and I wondered what brought her here. Had her parents supported her Florence Nightingale dream of healing in foreign lands? As we passed the moaning patients, many missing limbs or with lesions all over their skin, I looked away. This was not merely mopping sweaty brows—this was gruesome work. The men were just skin and bones. I wondered if Link Hughes would be like this, and how Lena would hold up when she saw him. Maybe she’d need me, for once, after all.
The young nurse led me upstairs, where the men looked a more normal weight. Some were walking around in their white robes. They must be getting ready to ship home. That was a relief after the scene below, though I felt an uncharitable dread that Link would be hale and heroic.
The nurse stopped in front of a bed that was empty. “Maybe he’s in the bathroom,” she said, and went to knock on a nearby door. There was no answer. “Link?” she said, cautiously pushing it open. She returned to the empty bed and unhooked the chart from the metal bedframe, sc
anning the first page. “He’s not getting any tests,” she said. “Let’s try the common room.”
As I followed her down the white hallway, there was a tall man bumping his head against the wall, over and over. It was odd. The nurse paused to speak to him softly. He stopped a moment, but as soon as we passed on, he started up again. Another fellow with hair down to his shoulders tugged at my sleeve. “Have you seen the little prince?” he asked, his dark eyes looking everywhere but at me.
“Who?” I asked.
“We’ll look for him later,” the nurse assured the patient. As we rounded the corner a horrible noise assailed my ears. A tuneless piano played at top volume. We entered what must be the common room. Crowded on one table, there were clay heads of extraordinary talent jumbled in with alarming lumps barely recognizable as human. All the other tables were empty, as were the chairs. There was only one person in the room: the frustrated musician at his stool. He was missing his leg below the knee and was wearing a metal contraption with a boot in its place. I assumed it wasn’t Link, since I hadn’t heard he was so afflicted, but I looked sidewise at the nurse to see how she reacted.
“This is strange. There’s nowhere else he could be,” she said. She approached the musician and put her hand over his, and the loud music, if you could call it that, stopped. The silence descended sudden and heavy as a thundercloud. “Jefferson, have you seen Link?” she asked.
