A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “And your Doggy fucking cult wishes to declare war on all missionary positions?” asked Tuttle.

  “We tolerate all positions. But acknowledge that a rear attack is our evolutionary heritage. It’s in our bones,” replied Harry, sucking his cigar and reaching up to pull a bone out of the box. He tried to stand it on end but it tipped over on the bamboo mat.

  “Why are you playing with the bone?” asked Tuttle.

  Harry looked up from the femur.

  “Woman talk a different sex talk from men. You asked me how I like to fuck a woman. I choose women who like to get fucked from behind. And before I can re-light my cigar you are spinning metaphors about boomerangs and I am doing the same thing. It’s better playing with bones. We can’t pry ourselves away from our technology and metaphors. That’s what we men cling to. Women don’t give a dead cat’s bounce worth of energy about anything other than the here and now.”

  Tuttle thought for a moment and persisted. “But, you, Harry Purcell, are playing a live cat’s game with these bones.”

  “It’s business,” smiled Purcell, not wishing to divulge the arms deal which rested on turning up MIA bones.

  “What are you really doing in Bangkok?” asked Tuttle.

  “Writing a paper on hilltribe culture,” said Harry.

  “I might be stoned but I’m not that crazy,” said Tuttle.

  “Just fucked up,” said Harry.

  “From behind or totally fucked up?”

  “I had the chance to study women when I pimped for the family business,” said Harry.

  “Pimped? Gun-runners pimp?”

  Harry traced his finger along the edge of a femur bone.

  “Helicopters, tanks, heavy artillery require buyers in the right mood. Our buyers—generals, politicians, influential people—expect to get laid. They command it. They give an order for a blond or a red head. You want to sell tanks, you better give them what they want.”

  Tuttle leaned back. “You see The Deer Hunter?”

  “About five times,” replied Purcell.

  “I had a walk-on part.”

  Purcell smiled. “I thought I recognized you. You’re a star.”

  “Blink and you would miss me.”

  “Blink and you won’t see the bullet which hits you,” said Harry.

  The encounter set a pattern of conversation—a way of expressing thoughts—which was to be repeated many times in the years which came later. The tropical birds sang from wooden cages hanging from nearby trees as they sat in the short grass beside the pond and Harry licked the Havana cigar before lighting it. Bangkok was where Harry always returned. No matter that he had an important university position, or that he searched for bones, or made arms deals on the side. It was in Bangkok where Harry waited for new appointments with history. Guns and bullets were the invitation card for these appointments. Bangkok was the only place where he could be absolutely himself and no one concerned themselves about his life, politics or family. A city surrounded by hostile, alien forces; a sprawling capital inside a country with dangerous frontiers. In a society where family was everything—protection against invaders, security against attack, business powerhouses; but Harry lived the life of an orphan. From where he drew his identity was difficult to judge: from the family chronicle, his university, his missions, sales conferences, the company he kept. What suited Harry’s personality, his business, his career was detachment; it gave him freedom from respectability which was the only freedom ever worth buying. It allowed him to sell killing machines without feeling any guilt.

  4

  WHAT DID HARRY Purcell intend to do with the boxes of bone fragments he had collected?

  When Tuttle asked him that question, Harry’s explanation only increased his curiosity—it was difficult to believe the bone fragments which had come from the north of Thailand had been part of Harry Purcell’s research project on hilltribe rituals and magic.

  “The bones had nothing to do with his research,” said Snow, in the early 80s. “I once tried to do a story on Purcell. But he just smiled that shit-eating grin, lit a cigar, and said nothing. Hey, man, this is not giving me a story. You think Harry Purcell gave a rat’s ass?”

  “Okay then, why did Harry keep boxes of bones?”

  “You are an idiot. Harry’s family had zillions of military connections, and intelligence community friends. How else do you sell submarines in Latin America and Southeast Asia?” asked Snow.

  “Harry sold the bones?”

  “You think he gave them away? Come on, man, get real.”

  Robert Tuttle remembered the huge grounds, the pond, the rare singing birds, the tree house, the large main teak house, and smaller houses which dotted Harry’s compound. Servants slipping in and out of sight with trays of food and drink for the guests. Harry dressed like a Spartan and lived like a king. No university professor on a research grant could have covered the bill for the life style. The explanation, again, was not a secret—Harry Purcell had private income, he came from the right background in England which produced huge amounts of cash to support a small estate in the center of Bangkok. Harry had a strange pride in the history of his family’s accomplishments in the history of armed conflict.

  “Fucking merchants of death,” said Snow. “I think he drinks human blood. He takes girls from HQ, slaughters them by the lake, drinks their blood, and buries them. Later he digs up the bones, and keeps them in boxes. That’s what I think. Harry’s really a thousand fucking years old and has never been married. A thousand years of leasing. The Purcell family motto is—if it flies, floats or fucks—rent it. What a story Harry would make, if I could get some shit on him, I’d be rich, man,” said Snow.

  “You think Harry ever feels guilty about selling arms?” asked Tuttle.

  “Bullshit. Harry Purcell is incapable of guilt. He told Crosby in HQ that his entire family had dispensed with morality over four hundred years ago. That it was bad for business,” said Snow. “You heard him on Nobel?”

  “As in the prize?”

  “The same guy, man. Harry’s got this thing about Alfred Nobel setting up prizes! Harry said Nobel’s prize winners acted as highclass pimps for old Alfred’s bad conscience. Old Alfred fucking lost it when he invented dynamite. Nightmares, crying jags, the whole enchilada and floor show. The guy took it personal that his invention blew up grandstands of people. Harry claims his grandfather once met Alfred and said Nobel wimped out. His clothes stank of black powder. Greasy hair. Dirty fingernails.”

  “Harry told me about the pimping bit. But I missed the part about Alfred Nobel,” said Tuttle. “It’s okay, Snow. You probably dreamt it in some drug-induced state. Acid flashbacks cause this kind of faulty recall.”

  Snow looked up, his head jerking with surprise.

  “Get out of here. Did Harry ever tell you about the time his girlfriend went down on a politician from Costa Rica so Harry could get a Cobra helicopter contract signed?”

  “Costa Rica doesn’t have an Army,” said Tuttle.

  Snow smiled. “Harry thought she might change their mind.”

  Tuttle shook his head. He didn’t buy it.

  “Have I ever lied to you? Well, not often. Yesterday and tomorrow but not now. The story is, according to Harry, they were at a five star restaurant,” Snow continued. “She crawled under the table, unzipped the politician’s pants, and blew him. She hummed God Save the Queen. Harry said she might have been a Purcell in a prior life.”

  “Costa Rica still doesn’t have an Army,” said Tuttle.

  Now it was Snow’s turn to flash a quick smile.

  “Maybe not, man, but they’ve got traffic cops diving speeders in fucking Cobras.”

  “He’s got style,” said Tuttle.

  “And enough money to change his style whenever he wants.”

  5

  IN THE SUMMER of ’79, Harry said that the Vietnamese claimed not to know where the bones were buried. He stood at a jungle clearing over the Laotian border with a map and compass. An
unlit cigar hung from Harry’s mouth as he squinted at the jungle fifty meters ahead. A colonel was reading the map which Harry held out. It had been marked by a villager, who claimed to have witnessed the crash of an American helicopter during the war. It was one o’clock and the sun bore straight down. The colonel sweated, his face wet and puffy; the frustration had been building for a couple of hours. There was no evidence of a crash site. Finally the colonel exploded.

  “Charlie, he knows,” said the American air force colonel, running his hand through his short cropped hair. “The sly little slope motherfuckers know the story, Harry.”

  Harry Purcell shrugged.

  “You know something, Colonel? I’m a half sly little slope motherfucker myself. On my mother’s side. She was one hundred percent motherfucking slope. She came from a long line of slopes,” said Harry Purcell, not breaking eye contact with the colonel.

  The colonel looked away, facing the sun as his face burned with embarrassment.

  “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” said the colonel. “We’re under heavy fucking pressure to resolve all the POWs.” He had that look of Christopher Walken as he pressed the revolver against his temple and squeezed the trigger.

  One simple image was the foundation for an entire industry of bone recovery. For Harry it wasn’t the money; he was establishing a line of chits for the family business. An English academic with Harry’s credentials, education, language skills was tailor-made for the assignment of bringing the bones home, or locating suspected villages, burial grounds in Laos where American pilots had been shot down in the secret war. The Pentagon loved Harry Purcell. They trusted him because of the Purcell family. And above all, Harry had about the most perfect cover you could ever hope for in a bone yard. The American assignment turned into an obsession with Harry, and one bone led to another bone, and one day Harry’s mind flipped back through the annals of the family arsenal business. On that day his thoughts turned to the bones left in the war between Cortez’s Spanish invaders and Montezuma’s Aztec civilization in Temixtitan. The Cortez deal had been the first war outside of Europe for the Purcells. The founding fathers of the business had armed troops who found the ultimate bone hunter’s bonanza—a forty-tower Aztec temple built in the middle of a salt lake in which there were 136,000 unclaimed skulls. ...And here was history repeating itself in Southeast Asia.

  He thought about bones.

  Without bones, the hilltribes’ conversations with their dead would be eternally interrupted, and as one village headman had told him, “The bone spirits of my ancestors are my audience for despair. Everyone needs an audience, Harry.”

  His job was to find and return the audience of bones left behind in the war. Bones were the residue left from the family trade in arms. Collecting them appealed to Harry Purcell.

  He knew the textbook stuff about how the spirit of the bone remained as a constant household force for multiple life-times. Bones contained the memory of family, tribe, and they belonged with the family, because without them, the family and tribe had no way of establishing belonging. No bones; no audience for the blues. Harry became not just a general in the secret Vietnam bone war but a commander-in-chief. This was why Harry Purcell brought back boxes of bones from Laos. He not only spoke their language, he spoke to their beliefs.

  6

  AS CROSBY’S CAB sped past the burning police kiosk at Asoke, smoke and flames belched into the air. The taxi driver hit the gas, complaining that Crosby wasn’t paying him enough to get himself killed. The car accelerated through the dark intersection—the traffic lights had been smashed out. Crosby gave the driver a fifty-baht tip, slammed the door, and told himself it would likely be a boring night on the Soi. He headed straight to the Crazy Eight Bar—a single-shop-house bar with a dozen girls—three bars inside the Asoke Road entrance to Soi Cowboy. Crosby leaned forward on his elbows and smoked a cigarette, looking over the crowd. He wore a faded T-shirt which had printed on the back: “If your wife drives you to drink, have her drop you off at the Barrel Bar.” Crosby was a T-shirt freak and had personally started a fad in Bangkok. There was snob appeal in wearing old T-shirts from Patpong and Soi Cowboy bars that had gone out of business years before.

  An old Bangkok hand would come up and say, “Yeah, I remember the Barrel. Number 15 was the best girl in the place. She married a cab driver from Ohio. A grifter. Who gave birth to three or four little grifters.”

  No one came up to Crosby at the bar. The Crazy Eight Bar—like most of the Soi—was dead quiet. The old hands had holed up in their apartments waiting for more reports of the killings. On the bar TV, Channel 5 ran the military version of the newspeak. The news left out a few minor details such as the massacre of civilians, the slaughter of young people around Sanam Luang. The commentator said the Army had discovered that the demonstrators had been infiltrated by communists and vandals, and the Army had intervened to save the country.

  “We had to burn the village to save it,” screamed Ross from across the room. “They stole that line from the US Government. Then an Army officer stared into the camera and blamed the loss of life on the “Third Hand.”

  “I don’t mind all the fucking lies,” said Ross. “But this bullshit about a Third Hand crosses over the line. Why not say, the country is under siege by men armed with two huge swinging dicks?”

  Crosby didn’t have an answer. He had arrived in Bangkok three days earlier and had been told by Ross that Tuttle had gone upcountry to fuck young girls. It was an explanation which suited Crosby’s idea of why anyone in their right mind would travel upcountry. Someone turned off the TV and tuned in 108.3 on the radio. The modulated DJ voice hyped on fear, booze, and pills was shouting.

  “The radio station is surrounded by tanks. I’m counting the bullet holes in the ceiling. But, freaky, I’ve lost track at twenty-seven. Listen to this.” He moved the microphone away and there was the hard whip crack of automatic gunfire. “Hey, those Army guys are some crazy guys. They don’t like the show. So they’re trying to close us down. They’ve threatened us; told us to go home. Someone threw a rock up the staircase with a note attached. It says go off the air or we will come in and kill you. Right. Come on up, fellahs. We’ve got Navy, mean-ass guards watching the stairs. These are armed, mean motherfuckers and they don’t like what the Army is doing. The Navy is keeping us on the air. They want you to know the truth. We have tanks and armored personnel carriers surrounding our building. Soldiers in the streets want to close us down. We say no. We’re staying here, Bangkok. We are staying here for you. Phone us at the hot line. Tell us what you’ve heard, what you’ve seen. The phone lines are lighting up. We had a call that trucks filled with bodies are heading north out of the city. Keep the news coming in. We aren’t going off the air until it’s over and it ain’t over yet. We’d like to dedicate this next song to the officer downstairs who ordered us to surrender. Power to the People.”

  The song Power to the People blared across the bar, until someone reached over and turned it down. Ross stood throwing darts several feet away. He was unsteady on his feet, balancing with one arm over the shoulder of Noi, who kept him pointed in the right direction. His chin pointed forward as he threw a dart.

  “You’re in a bad mood, Ross,” said Crosby.

  “Yes, I am. I wanted to fuck Daeng,” said Ross. “But she quit. She’s a nineteen-year-old whore from Nakon Bumfuck, or maybe Nan. I forget. And I heard she’s demonstrating for democracy. She can’t even pronounce the word—democracy—but she went to Sanam Luang.”

  “Tuttle’s looking for her,” said Crosby.

  “He can’t have her. I don’t care if he is my client. I found Daeng first. I have first right of refusal.”

  Crosby decided to bring up Snow.

  “Snow’s sleeping with her at the Royal Hotel.”

  Ross turned pale.

  “Snow is screwing my Daeng?”

  “But she fled the scene.”

  “Let me get this straight. Snow and Tuttle both want Daen
g?”

  “Apparently,” said Crosby. “But she’s disappeared.” He paused and watched Ross grow silent. “Ross, what is it about this girl? There are a thousand Daengs, Nois, Leks. Why is everyone looking for this one?”

  Ross clenched his jaw, his lips curled into a sneer as if this were about the most stupid question anyone had ever asked.

  “You wouldn’t ask such a question if you knew Daeng. She’s cursed. She bears the scar from a violent dog attack.” Ross’s voice lowered to a whisper. “And sometimes in the middle of the night she hears voices that no one else hears, in languages she doesn’t understand. And she loves men.”

  “In London, you never find a woman who loves men. You never tell an English girl that you spent the last twenty-five years of your life living in Bangkok,” said Crosby.

  “Why would you want to tell them anything? Why not just fuck them?” asked Ross.

  “You ever hear of date rape?”

  “That’s an Arab thing. Yeah, I’ve read about it.”

  “Not fruit rape. Date rape. Going out on a date with a woman and you fuck her.”

  “Oh, dates,” said Ross, throwing another dart.

  “Women in England bloody well crucified me each time I mentioned Bangkok. As if living in Bangkok is a criminal offence against their sex.”

  “They are men-haters. Thai women like men. Daeng likes men. She adored her father.”

  “Ross, you’d have trouble going back.”

  “Trouble’s my middle name. I had a law partner who used to say that. He’s dead, so maybe he was right. Trouble was his middle name.”

  “In London, my line was I had spent the last twenty-five years in Hong Kong. Skyscrapers, banks, money, and the Star Ferry. They liked that image. No woman in London has ever heard a sentence which contained both the words Hong Kong and sex.”