A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  Did he dare tell her? Or trust her once she knew the truth? After all he had broken the rules and if Montezuma ever found out there would be hell to pay, so to speak.

  “Because you are not forgotten,” Cortez said.

  “I don’t understand,” she replied, sitting on the ragged sofa smelling of dampness. Thousands of brown ants crawled along the wicker arm rest.

  “You are perfect for my plan. Because your life registers almost no value,” said Cortez. “But despite your absence of value, someone wants to save you. This makes you count. Countable. And if he really, actually succeeds and you survive the killings then this is…very good for Cortez.”

  “What about good for Daeng?”

  She really had no idea why she had ever left the Royal Hotel. Snow hadn’t been a bad sort, the room was okay, and the soldiers had only said she was better off leaving as soon as possible. Suddenly she was angry with herself because Snow hadn’t given her any money; but, then, she had forgotten to ask him, and also the officer had said that if she didn’t split quickly, other soldiers would soon come and arrest her, beat her up, and throw her in jail. So far she had been so lucky. Not like the dead boy in the street. Why had the farang photographer cried over the body, tears streaming down his cheeks, onto his camera? Cortez saw that Daeng’s mind had drifted. She was out of her body, drifting, drifting towards the sun and moon. He called her back, hungry to tell her the truth of distances travelled, and memories of high mountains, rivers, and diamonds forgotten. And skulls lined up end to end until they stretched beyond the seas of imagination.

  “If you are so cheap maybe you should cut off your hair and go to the wat. I don’t think you are any good at being a dead person. Why you no have TV?”

  That hurt coming from the living because it was basically true. Cortez had never been good at being dead. He wasn’t a patch on Montezuma who was so perfect at it that he might have been born dead.

  “The apartment’s a temporary rental. The previous owner died. I took it with the chains and locks. I thought it added…charm.”

  “You make joke. But maybe you think like old, dead man. Like monk. Not want any fun.”

  “Phom khon john!—I’m poor,” he said. This was also basically true since the dead didn’t have money.

  But his old-fashioned Spanish attempt at joking at his condition failed Cortez miserably. Montezuma was so fast on his feet, always had people cracking up with laughter. He envied the Aztec for this quality. His wish was to relax her, gain her trust, since his mission rested on her having confidence in him. But all he had managed to do was enrage her and make her more suspicious. She was on her feet, walking up and down with clenched fists.

  “You must never say that. Not ever. Unless you really poor. That mean you have no money. Not one baht. You understand.”

  “Poot len—I made a joke,” he replied.

  “You no understand Thai people. Khon john! no joke.”

  “There is a man looking for you. You do not know him. And he doesn’t know you. But now he goes into the streets looking for Daeng.”

  “Why he look for Daeng?”

  “Because a living man believes saving one girl who has no value can make a difference. And he’s right. Because such a rescue makes a huge difference.”

  It sounded like a farang con to Daeng.

  “Do the dead tell lies?”

  He thought about Montezuma.

  “Yes, pretty much like the living. This man who searches for you wants nothing for his deed.”

  “Impossible,” said Daeng.

  Cortez nodded; so far, in all the years he’d been dead, her observation had proved true. “Remote, but possible,” he admitted.

  “Okay, what’s his name?”

  “Robert Tuttle.”

  She stared at the ghost, trying to think if she had ever heard Robert Tuttle’s name. His name meant nothing to her. She remembered practically every man’s name she had ever gone to bed with—and they were many—she remembered their faces, too. But Robert Tuttle’s name and face left her staring into a nameless, faceless void.

  “I don’t know this farang,” she said.

  “Ah, that is the point. And he does not know you. It’s like two lovers with bags over their heads. But who never lose their faith in love.”

  Cortez omitted to mention his own vested interest in seeing Tuttle’s mission succeed. Until he had assisted in the rescue of 240,000 valueless, worthless individuals from the clutches of invasions, rebellions, uprisings, police actions, wars—the list was quite broad—he could never, and would never break his cosmic link with Montezuma. He thanked Leonardo da Vinci many times for not inventing the helicopter which would have only increased this huge casualty list of those his Army had killed. Cortez spent his time searching for that one person—the Daengs—lost in a battle zone who was worthless and yet someone had launched a search to save her simply because it was the decent thing to do. Cortez’s record was dismal. Since 1519 he had three near misses. But as of the blood letting in Bangkok, he had not erased even one from the total of 240,000—the number of kills in Montezuma’s home town. This in itself had been a fluke, a mix-up, his Army had killed many more than this, but this was the number Montezuma had been given the honor of choosing. Victims of mass murder were allowed to set the number of missions assigned to the mass murderer.

  Unlike Cortez, Montezuma retained an after-life sense of humor. “Cortez, you killed much better in life than you ever rescued in life or death.”

  Cortez often despaired. Montezuma was so right about his shortcomings and incompetence as a dead general. The odds were extremely long he would ever break with Montezuma. How many living people were willing to risk their own life on a battle ground, in house-to-house fighting, against heavily armed troops, to search for and rescue without a scratch a stranger whose life had no intrinsic value? Not that Cortez himself necessarily believed prostitutes lacked value—battlefield temples were filled with them; but they were on the rather arbitrary list of candidates without value—along with lawyers, tax officials, advertising executives, some baseball players, sit-com actors, and most people in the T-shirt business. Bitter experience over more than four hundred years had taught Cortez that hardly anyone ever wanted to rescue people on this list in peacetime let alone in the midst of an armed rebellion. In the end, everyone he had ever tried to help by intervening on the side of the rescuer went missing in action and disappeared without a trace. There were closings and openings in time and space, and Bangkok had become a ground for the dead to test themselves with the living. Bangkok was an opportunity for Cortez to remove this black eye. Much depended on the co-operation of Daeng (she was already hostile about the decorative state of the apartment), the skill of Tuttle (someone who confused bones with stones), and of course, keeping Montezuma in the dark (otherwise he would scuttle the rescue). Montezuma liked this cat and mouse game. He calculated that at Cortez’s current rate of failure, the universe would stop expanding, shrink back to the size of a pin hole and re-bang several dozen more times before Cortez ever came close to erasing the full number allotted to him. This wasn’t eternity, but it was a very long time to contemplate.

  “Why don’t you have a TV? I want to know what is going on.”

  “My dear, never watch TV. I will give you money if you stay with me and wait for Tuttle.” He lied because, being dead, he didn’t have money and even if he could find a way of getting some, giving money was not allowed between the living and dead. In any event, from Daeng’s expression, it was clear that she didn’t believe him.

  “I’m going outside,” she said.

  “You can’t,” said Cortez. “I will bring Tuttle here. Then he can rescue you.”

  “I never liked pimps,” she said, and walked right through Cortez, opened the door and was back on the street. “And a dead pimp is probably the worst kind of pimp.”

  Cortez ran after her, but she walked covering her ears with her hands. “I know where Tuttle is. You will like h
im. He likes you. He wants to save you. It is important that he save you. Please.” Cortez pushed the panic button but everything had started to come out wrong.

  “Why would he want to save me? He doesn’t know me. Save me from what? I’m just a whore. You said so yourself.”

  Cortez threw up his hands and watched her walk toward an Army patrol. It was pretty much what he expected. He was doomed just like Montezuma had said. “Cortez, you’re doomed. Another couple of thousand years and you will learn to accept it.”

  He shouted after her. “I want to save you from them.” But the sound of gunfire muffled his words. She turned around and looked back at the empty street. Thinking she had heard something.

  13

  ROBERT TUTTLE FOUND thousands milling around the university. Fires had been set in trash cans. Tongues of flame and sparks shot into the night sky. People gathered around the fires, squatting, lying on a mat, huddling in clusters. Barricades had been put up to stop the Army. Some students were listening to Radio Bangkok 108.3, and he heard Denny Addison’s voice belching the usual line.

  “Hey, there is in the universe, the bizarre, the strange, the weird and then there is what is happening in the streets of Bangkok. But I’m cool, the Army still wants to shoot to kill and not ask questions later, but I’ve got my babe, my friends, my records and most of all, I’ve got you out there. People in the streets telling the dictators that democracy is not a four letter word. Actually it has nine letters. Unless you misspell it—then the number of letters varies. Latest rumor is that public relations has been assigned to Pol Pot. You remember him? Pol Pot and his Khmers were that strange 1970s rock ’n roll band which killed their audience. We’re talking a group that took in millions.”

  Tuttle hurried out of earshot of Addison’s voice, he had the polaroid photo of Daeng and showed it to people in the crowd. Everyone was courteous but no one knew her or had seen her; she was just another faceless face in a sea of students, workers, peasants, and yuppies.

  He approached a rumple-suited Thai in his 20s.

  “You see this girl?” asked Tuttle, showing the photo.

  The Thai smiled. “We were at Sanam Luang last week. I’ve been on the street since. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. But I don’t remember her. You see so many faces, you can’t see one face.”

  The knot in his flash red tie was smudged with food stains. He turned away and held the mobile phone to his ear. There had been one hundred thousand demonstrators at Sanam Luang in early May. It was like a picnic, a festival then. They were called the mob nom priew. The yogurt-drinking mob. Or the mob rot keng. The car-driving mob. They gave strength to each other. The yuppy mob had thought going to the demonstrations was a great way to spend time with their friends. Most had fled for the safety of their condos after the first bus was set on fire. Only a few remained out on the street. Tuttle watched the young Thai, thinking why was it some people fled the scene while others stayed behind? He had no answer.

  Beside a trash can fire, he showed the photo to a student in jeans and T-shirt wearing a black pro-democracy headband to hold back her long black hair.

  “You see this girl?”

  “You a reporter?” she asked.

  He shook his head and saw the obvious disappointment creep into her expression. It wasn’t his battle, his turf; he was an outsider, a spectator who had come to watch and she didn’t have much time for anyone who was not part of the movement.

  “You should leave. Go home, farang. The Army will come soon and start killing us,” she said with eyes studying the photo of Daeng.

  “I’m not afraid,” said Tuttle.

  “Then you are the only one who’s not. Everyone’s afraid to die. Soldiers are already here. I hate what the Army does. I hate it very much. They wait before they start killing us. Sure.”

  She had used the “killing us” tag line twice. It wasn’t killing people, or me; one death was a loss from the whole which she counted herself as belonging to—that was what she was sure about.

  “I saw people killed last night,” he said.

  Tears came into her eyes. “I see people die, too.”

  “Troublemakers are dwindling in number,” said an announcer on a portable TV set someone had hooked up to a generator. The small crowd booed.

  The woman wiped away her tears and handed back the photo of Daeng. “I didn’t see her,” she murmured.

  “This is my country,” said one of the Thais beside the TV. “They have no right to lie to the people. They care about no one but themselves. They are selfish. They want to destroy democracy.”

  An old, stooped man emerged from the shadows. He was eating rice with his fingers. His pinched, sagging face and wide-open eyes were illuminated for a moment by a burst from the fire in the trash can near where Tuttle stood.

  “No one cares a rat’s ass about democracy,” said the old man, and then he turned and vanished into thin air. This was a trick Montezuma had perfected over centuries.

  14

  CORTEZ’S TEMPLE

  by

  Harry Purcell

  WE ARE BACK to the interior of Montezuma’s temple watching the Aztecs becoming aroused as they hacked up their victims, showing beyond much reasonable doubt that we have deified what stimulates and arouses: sex, torture, and pain. The founding elements of pagan and Christian religions. The basic selling line for the latest line of weapons. Our family gun business has flourished alongside the religion and political businesses.

  A man nailed to a cross corresponds to a pagan man with his heart ripped out and offered to an idol. Cortez had, much to his horror, discovered himself in the Aztec temples, and recoiled into his prayers and masses to ask for forgiveness for the self which had witnessed itself in the mirror.

  But Cortez was a man built from Western sensibilities. The West had long possessed the mythology, teaching its people that there is virtue in rooting for the underdog. Christianity was founded on protection of the underdogs. Montezuma’s Aztec religion was founded on taking their skulls. The East adapted the Montezuma reaction to those down on their luck. In Asia the underdog had tank-tire tracks over its back, and was kicked into the gutter with a jackboot. To be an underdog in the East was a sign of weakness, failure, lack of support, and at the first sign someone had slipped and fallen, this was not an opportunity for compassion, to offer the helping hand—no—this was the precise time to launch the attack and finish off this animal before it regained its strength and bought weapons from the Purcells and came hunting for you.

  General Xue had come down with a fever when he was given a cup of poison to drink. Some say it was a cup offered by one of his junior officers, a man who left General Xue dead and his mouth covered with ivory from the tusks of white elephants. Others say the cup was delivered by the carver who grieved that another white elephant had been ordered slaughtered and the tusks delivered for more ivory beads.

  PART 5

  MEGALOMANIA

  1

  MEGALOMANIA

  A Denny Addison Documentary Film

  Running time: 57 minutes

  THE CAMERA WOBBLES along the pavement, angling on the smooth nylon well-turned legs of a smartly dressed Thai woman whose red high-heels click-clack down a cement stairwell, and then move across a parking lot attached to a hotel in Bangkok. The angle is all important, revealing only the woman’s long, tapered legs which look like honey poured into nylon stockings. A black seam snakes down the center of the nylons and disappears into the heel of her red patent leather shoes—the kind of sexual killers with the standard issue buckles circling the tiny ankle. The camera follows a line from her shoes to the trouser legs of hotel security guards who appear and disappear from the frame. The camera angle loiters on registration plates on the expensive imported cars in the lot.

  “You have some thoughts about Thai society and car license plates,” says Addison off camera.

  “It’s very simple,” says the Thai female voice with a slight accent. “You lear
n about a person’s power by studying registration plates on cars. A person’s rank is found in the registration plate number. It’s like a secret code. A numbered account like in a Swiss bank. I think not many farang know how to read the power code. But maybe I’m wrong.”

  “Can you teach us the code?” asks Addison.

  The camera focuses on a registration plate with the woman’s calf nicely flexed near the edge. “I can tell the man who drives this car is not powerful.”

  “But it is a Mercedes,” says Addison. “He must be loaded. A Mercedes costs five million baht—two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I thought you say that. Big mistake. I not criticize you. Many people think the same. The amount he paid for the car makes no difference. Luxury car is very beautiful. You say, this is not an ordinary man. Not ordinary, sure. Not powerful, also sure. The model of a car can fool you. Because you do not know how to read the code.”

  The Thai woman walks along the concrete parking lot with the camera following her legs.

  “Why isn’t the owner of the car powerful?”

  “Because if he’s very powerful then he can lock a number.”

  “Lock a door. But lock a number, bizarre,” says Addison.

  “See this registration plate?” asks the woman.

  The camera zooms in on the plate.

  “This man is powerful for sure,” she continues. “There are five numbers on every registration plate and you see all five numbers are in a row. The most powerful man has 1 followed by a single Thai letter and after that 1111. Like that. Five ones in a row is very impressive. This means you must fear him. It is not easy to get all those numbers in a row. It’s no accident. He has to pay a lot of money. Or if he gets it free, then he so powerful even the powerful won’t touch his money. You remember the new Mercedes with registration plate with numbers all mixed up? That man has money but he has no power. It is very complicated. People think money is power. It is true but not exactly true. This man with new Mercedes he’s new Chinese money. He sees the other man in other car with number 7777, and he thinks important Thai man for sure. New Chinese lets old Thai money go first. Even if all the sevens in a row are on a model not as expensive, he has fear. He stays back until the sevens man finishes his turn or he lets him in line. If he cuts the man with all those sevens, he’s afraid the sevens man will take down his number and have him cut into seven parts. That part is a joke. Maybe Mr. Sevens have him cut only in half.”