A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “And what do you do when you drive in Bangkok?”

  There is laughter from the woman, she shuffles her feet.

  “I tell you what I like best. I like to cut the numbers all in a row off in traffic. I don’t let them get in front. I don’t care if their number is for the big person. It isn’t mportant for me. I am a Thai person. But I’m not afraid. I know not many people think like I do. But not many people know the code. The secret code is impressive for those who are taught to see how much power comes from locked numbers. I don’t think the man with registration plate with locked numbers is better than me. I say, he wait like everyone else. Why should I let him in? That’s what I think. So far no one cut me in half.”

  She laughs and the film cuts away to the credits which roll without ever revealing the face or rising above the waist of the power number reporter.

  2

  CORTEZ AND MONTEZUMA strolled along Ratchadamnoen Avenue at three in the morning. The Avenue had become a killing field. A free-fire zone, with soldiers shooting thousands of rounds into the sky and finally into the crowd, killing people here, there, and everywhere. An overturned city bus with red stripes smoldered, the windscreen riddled by machine-gun fire. They passed a Honda Civic with bullet puncture marks sprayed across one side. A gas tanker exploded, igniting a ball of orange flames which rose into the night sky. Montezuma did what he often enjoyed, he hop scotched among the thousands of abandoned sandals and shoes scattered on the sidewalk and spilling onto the Avenue. The feet belonging to them had long fled in terror. A column of two dozen soldiers beat and kicked a half-dozen demonstrators. Blood gushed from the wounds of some teenagers who lay on the pavement. Soldiers circled around the bodies, kicked heads, legs, stomachs with their boots, bringing down rifle butts in the soft, fleshy parts of the curled bodies. Others poured gasoline on lifeless bodies and loaded them into trucks. On Sanam Luang one of the soldiers looted a body. As they walked another fifty meters a soldier searched the body of a dead demonstrator, taking a gold chain and watch. Not far away another soldier scored a camera. Another a pager. Mobile phones were a dime a dozen. The crack of M-16 rounds mingled with more diffuse sounds of shouting, and crying and moaning among the wounded who were too badly hit to run away. Off to the right some soldiers stuffed bodies into plastic garbage bags, which they tossed in the back of a jeep.

  Montezuma stopped behind the soldier who held up a mobile phone as a trophy. The soldier marveled at the instrument, and so did Montezuma, who liked spoils himself and if sound carried between the world of the living and the dead, he would have dialed to the soldier—“Fool, you are overlooking a three-baht gold chain. Two steps ahead, one to the right, then look down.” Not that the line was engaged; there was no fiber optic connecting Montezuma to the soldier.

  “If we Aztecs had invented these Sound Wave Machines, we would have known about you fucking Spanish the moment you landed on our turf. Sound Wave Machines would have changed our history—your history,” said Montezuma, whose attention reverted to the phone. “You might have avoided your burden.” This was the euphemism Montezuma used to describe Cortez’s cosmic task to assist a good samaritan in the rescue of worthless human beings.

  “It is called a mobile phone, Monty. We downloaded ourselves into Harry Purcell’s computer through a phone,” said Cortez, avoiding the slight. He had acquired a thick skin having endured more than four hundred years of being needled by Montezuma.

  “Rapid fire, invisible communication. A miracle. If only the Aztecs had such an object. Do you think that you would have gotten within ten kilometers of Temixtitan?”

  Cortez shook his head. Montezuma had trouble putting two and two together when it came to high-tech innovations. All through the Industrial Revolution he had raved about the advances other cultures had made and how the Aztecs would have kicked ass with access to such a tiny piece of such technology. Cortez pulled Montezuma around the corner, as he had done in other times and other places, and showed him a couple of journalists with videocams, silently and secretly filming the soldiers.

  “You see what he’s doing? He’s recording what those soldiers are doing. Think about journalists with their video cameras, mobile telephones, pagers, fax machines, shortwave radios, satellite transmissions, telecommunication facilities running around your temples at Temixtitan. They would have shown the world the real truth, the real story of Montezuma, the monster, the slaughter of local natives by the village full. Look around. How many have these soldiers killed? Less than a hundred. An afternoon’s work for you and the boys. Your Government—and I use that term loosely—killed more than two hundred thousand. Do you think with a few phones and TVs, you would have gotten away with all that murder and expect others to swallow your excuse—this sacrifice for the temple gods nonsense? Forget it. The United Nations would have been on you like flies on shit. CNN would have had close-ups of your priests ripping bloody hearts out of the locals. Panel discussions, Monty, would have followed. Then a clip of one of your princes smearing blood on idols. The Americans would have paid for someone to slam a stone into your skull.”

  “Bosh. Soldiers are doing their duty. Look at them. Not a mean bone in their bodies. Like my priests they are following orders, doing their duty. Soldiers killing idiots who have volunteered to sacrifice themselves to the god of democracy. In my day, no one came forward to be sacrificed. We never had a single volunteer. We had to chase them down. These people invited the soldiers to shoot them. They got their death wish.”

  “As seen from the trash can of a sixteenth-century mind,” said Cortez. “Democracy is not a god. It’s an idea. You are talking sacrifices; what is happening here are executions.”

  “What’s happening here is entertainment. Executions are sacrifices transmitted by the Sound Wave and Eye Wave Machines. People ten thousand miles away are watching it inside juice joints,” said Montezuma. “Remember all those lies which you stuffed into your dispatches to Charles V? ‘Oh, me and the boys feel so sad, I simply couldn’t get our allies to stop butchering and looting the Aztecs.’ You never tried! Your men helped themselves! You never fired into the sky. Spaniards killed 240,000 Aztecs; the dead filled the streets and the lake. What would the people in London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, and Temixtitan watching such a massacre on TV think of the great Cortez? You would be tried as an international war criminal. The verdict? Cortez guilty on all counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Instead you are tried off camera as a dead war criminal, and sentenced,” said Montezuma, chuckling.

  “Remember your defense?” continued Montezuma. “ ‘I tried to stop them.’ Did that get you very far? Did it? Mercy? There is none. You, the great victor Cortez, understand that what a general can get away with in life doesn’t mean shit.”

  “You were born in the wrong century. You should have done live talk shows this century,” said Cortez. “Your talent is wasted on the dead.”

  Montezuma looked thoughtful. “With the right sponsor, a little affirmative action, I would have been a star.”

  “Until CNN news panned the fifty-three heads of my men and their horses which you stuck on pikes, facing the sun and planted in your temple yard,” said Cortez, who was getting excited. He framed the remembered scene, using his hands like a film director explaining a shot to the director of photography. “Start with a close up of a horse head, then pull back and dolly past the heads of the Spanish soldiers. What a shot that would be.”

  “Cortez the movie maker,” sneered Montezuma. “The frustrated film producer. Still, you have a valid point. On TV you don’t see many heads stuck on pikes. It is a forgotten art. And I think it is very entertaining.”

  “You are not getting the message, Monty,” said Cortez. “These Sound Wave and Eye Wave Machines would have stopped village dictators like you…”

  They were no longer on the streets but in a TV studio and before a live audience of the dead—this was the kind of living-dead contradiction which the Aztec liked most about the afterworld. Mont
ezuma, green mist pouring out of his ears, smiled into the camera.

  “And there will always be pirates and raiders like you roaming the earth, Cortez. Think of the TV cameras on the trail, tracking the massive troop movements of the one hundred fifty thousand Indians who hated the Aztecs. You used them—organized them—to loot a quarter million Aztec bodies in a couple of days. I would have you on my talk show. Our program today is entitled: The Great Killers and Looters of the Past, and we are pleased to have—not exactly fresh from the grave—Hernan Cortez who is here to promote his new version of that old favorite—Liberation—The True Story, The Real Story. I love the new title, Hernan. Tell us what you Spaniards liked better. The killing, or was it the looting?” Montezuma put the invisible microphone in front of Cortez, who stepped forward, running a hand through his beard as he prepared to speak.

  “That was war, Monty. In battle people die, sometimes innocent people. But what you did wasn’t war; it was religion.”

  Montezuma held up a copy of Liberation—The True Story, The Real Story. “That was the thesis of your old book, Conquest. But now you’ve reinvented the story from a modern perspective, Hernan, can you explain to our viewers how the old conquest and the new liberation concepts are different?”

  Looking into the camera, Cortez smiled. “Good question, Monty. Your average audience alive today owns videocams, faxes, VCRs, they are in high-tech heaven and they didn’t have to die to go there.”

  “What I hear you saying is, it is more difficult to run an oldfashioned conquest today,” said Montezuma.

  “Exactly,” said Cortez, playing with his sword.

  “But liberation is a politically correct appointment with history. It is not slaughter for slaughter’s sake. And this explains the new title. The story you have written is still pretty much the same old biased reportage.”

  For a moment, Cortez didn’t answer. He was steamed.

  “You can’t get away with burning, destroying, and killing and call it that old-time religion. Making idols out of blood, guts and heart tissue. The Aztec sense of humor, I guess you might call it, Monty. But we lived in the golden age of murder. I wrote down how I saw it; and that was that. Some of your people wrote down their side. Put them side by side, and it’s pretty much the same eye-witness account of murder.” The camera followed Cortez’s eye line to a soi near Democracy Monument in Bangkok against a background of smoke and flames. “But these soldiers, look at them carrying on—killing, kicking, beating, and looting—in the grand tradition, but they won’t get away with it. They will end up like me, searching and never finding it…”

  “And why not?” asked Montezuma. “And tell our audience out there. What is this ‘it’?” The studio camera picked up the action going on around Montezuma and Cortez.

  “The moderns call ‘it’ human rights. World opinion says soldiers killing and looting civilians violates their human rights.”

  “Another temple god?” asked Montezuma.

  “Worshipped in the West as a god of non-human sacrifice.”

  “What perverse god would not welcome sacrifices? The mind recoils,” said Montezuma, getting angry. “Think of the ratings, Hernan. Your new book is filled with sacrifices and is an eternal best seller. So, Hernan, give us the goods. Straight up.”

  Now they were cooking.

  “Tourists who worship the human rights god know the difference between conquest and liberation. They watch the Eye Wave Machine which watches what the soldiers are doing, and they want to barf out their guts, Monty. Just like I nearly vomited when I saw your idols seeped in human blood inside those goddamn forty towers of your hell temple. Tourists would have boycotted Temixtitan.”

  “We didn’t have tourists in 1519,” said Montezuma. “Except you and the boys…and then you were hardly tourists. Or is this the point of your new-old book?”

  “Tourists and travellers take vacations. They travel like they watch TV…”

  “To be entertained,” interrupted Montezuma.

  “Obviously. They travel to countries which have not violated their gods of democracy and human rights. When they witness on their screens these images of Bangkok, right on the avenue behind us, and back at the Royal Hotel, they will feel horror, dread, anger, and danger.”

  “Another genre of entertainment.”

  “I hate to break the news to you, Montezuma,” said Cortez. “But tourists hate that kind of entertainment when they travel. In my book, Liberation—The True Story, The Real Story, I reveal how you felt when I ordered my soldiers to throw your idols down the temple stairs.”

  “Shock, horror, fright. A world-class sin,” said Montezuma. “And a big mistake. You wonder why you suffer!”

  The applause sign was turned on and a huge wave of silence engulfed Montezuma and Cortez.

  “And your reaction? You wanted to punish me and my soldiers.”

  Montezuma nodded, remembering the moment he had known bloodshed between the Aztecs and the Spaniards was inevitable.

  “Well, Monty,” said Cortez, playing to the camera. “Most of the world will demand revenge for what we are seeing in the streets of Bangkok tonight. Heads will roll.”

  “That means more human sacrifices, that’s good,” said Montezuma, suddenly feeling better. “More blood. I was starting to feel quite depressed. Come on, Cortez, get real. You and your boys didn’t exactly arrive in Mexico on a package tour. No one invited you. But I don’t want another fight about travel agents, air fares, and the price of five star hotels. My point is, has a Sound Wave Machine changed human nature? Do living people need human sacrifice? Do they enjoy human sacrifice? Of course they do. Only the names of the gods who receive the sacrifice change. The temples of sacrifice, no matter what you call them, will never come down. After these soldiers finish with their slaughter, the Sound Wave and Eye Wave Machines will broadcast whose gods were stronger and more powerful. The Army will say that their gods of order and command won. The protesters will say their gods of human rights won. Machines report that the gods will always require such a sacrifice if they are threatened. Of course, it will happen again. People never change. People require sacrifice to flush them out. They are cleansed. They are saved. They are all brothers. Everyone should forgive and forget. Until the next time.”

  “I think it will be different,” said Cortez. “The machines are changing the people.”

  “Tell us about your luck with Daeng. How is it going? Will she be the first? Will you break the cherry with Daeng? After a four hundred fifty year dry patch, will Daeng be the first subtracted from 240,000?” Montezuma hit the applause button again for another earthquake of silence.

  “You spy, you scum. How long have you known about Daeng?” asked Cortez. For a ghost he showed a great deal of negative emotion.

  “We’ve been cheering for you. Haven’t we audience?” Montezuma raised his hands to the darkness. Thunderous applause splashed back from the void. Montezuma turned back to Cortez who remained seated on the podium. “See, what did I tell you? We want you to score one point.”

  Cortez smiled, and neither trusted nor believed the Aztec chief for a moment. Montezuma started chanting, “Save Daeng, save Daeng.” Soon the audience in the void beyond the lights joined Montezuma, chanting, “Save Daeng.”

  The chanting stopped when Montezuma raised his hand.

  “I’m afraid we are outside of time and space for the show. Thank you Hernan Cortez for being with us forever. If you’ve not read it, the book is Liberation—The True Story, The Real Story written by our guest forever, the self-styled Liberistador of Mexico—General Hernan Cortez. The man who had the chance to jump four and a half centuries with the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. And blew it.”

  “Can I take off the mike? Or are we still taping?” asked Cortez, turning around.

  Montezuma had already gone.

  3

  CROSBY FOUND THE form of a man in black silk, a long shock of white hair over his shoulder, shrouded in cigar smoke and leaning on the ne
w jukebox at HQ.

  “One day the old jukebox vanished,” said Purcell.

  “Missing in action,” said Crosby.

  “It had character. Life. A history.”

  “It had cockroaches knitting dust balls under the colored plastic panels,” said Crosby.

  “You miss the point, Crosby. The old jukebox was the temple altar.”

  Crosby looked at Purcell, thinking he might be the kind who one day showed up with an automatic weapon and sprayed a roomful of people because someone removed a piece of furniture he had attached supernatural purposes to. The best tactic was to get Purcell onto a subject closer to home. “There was a rumor you brokered a tank deal with the Army. And that your father sold guns to Mao on the Long March,” said Crosby.

  “What this jukebox lacks are the stained-glass church windows,” replied Purcell, ignoring Crosby.

  Crosby stopped and studied the three arches rising above the control deck, and the three upside-down arches falling below it. The colors ran from blue, to pink, orange, yellow, and pulsating light bulbs flashed in the central arch loop. No question about it; Purcell was that cigar-smoking loner who would come unglued and take a room of people to the next life.

  “You miss the old religion of HQ?” asked Crosby.