Purcell nodded. “When you took a girl you assumed she stayed the night,” he said. “Now the girls have broken down the old order. It’s all short-time comfort and hit ’n run tactics.”
“The girls converted to the new religion of money. Something you are familiar with. Money,” said Crosby. “In how many African countries did you flog guns?”
“We sold to Africa before there were countries,” said Purcell, seeing the bait Crosby had offered. Then he spit out the hook and went back to his state of mourning for the lost religion of HQ when comfort lasted through the night. “I remember the days when a girl would get up and make you breakfast, sweep the floor, make the bed, and then give you a wai as you handed her a purple.”
“When was this? Before Thailand was divided into provinces?” asked Crosby.
“Have you seen our mutual friend, Mr. Tuttle?” asked Purcell.
“He’s off on a search-and-rescue mission. Looking for an HQer named Daeng. Snow had her. But she slipped away. Proving your short-time theory.”
“Daeng,” he whispered. “Of course.”
Harry Purcell’s right eyebrow arched only slightly; there was nothing all that unnatural about Tuttle’s continuing his mad search for a whore named Daeng. But there was shooting in the streets, and HQ with the rule of two always in operation was guaranteed to have at least one more whore named Daeng.
“And Snow, where is he?”
“Filing battlefield reports for profit and fame,” said Crosby. “What are you doing in HQ on a night of indiscriminate shooting into crowds? Coming to the church of the new religion? Saying prayers for old jukeboxes? Or could Harry Purcell be on a routine field check?” Crosby had mixed feelings about Purcell, which accounted for the sudden burst of emotion.
That a half-farang named Harry Purcell had earned a double first from Cambridge at age eighteen, spoke many languages and came from an old, powerful, wealthy family gave him shooting flashes of envy. Most of all Purcell made Crosby feel shallow and small. But Purcell had been generous, giving Crosby many T-shirt slogans, and he had once financed a batch of T-shirts for the Big Promise Bar which read—Load and Fire your Big Gun. The fact the police had seized the entire lot of T-shirts and resold them on the Burmese border was hardly Harry’s fault. Nor was he responsible for a gloomy, dejected Crosby who had appeared in the newspaper flanked by police officers. Crosby had been photographed sitting at an interrogation table with his handcuffed hands folded together and pointing at a stack of the T-shirts. Two days later Purcell paid a negotiated fine and Crosby was released from jail. But he never repaid the loan to Purcell, or the fine money, and Purcell, to Crosby’s undying admiration, never mentioned the loan or fine. It was guys like Snow who would dig him, “Doing any deals for the Big Promise Bar? Or are you holding your fire? There are sightings of Karen jungle fighters wearing your T-shirts, how did that happen?” But never a word or jab from Purcell who had found a far more effective way to punish Crosby with this noble silence.
Along with the new jukebox, Purcell still had not adapted to several other drastic changes in HQ; someone with dark, black visions had decided to redecorate the interior.
“It takes time to adjust to the new HQ,” he said.
“Snow calls it post-modern whoredom,” said Crosby.
The job looked like it had been awarded to a firm which had specialized in warehouses, heavy leather bars, and boiler shops. The mirrors—which had become mainly fragments—around the top of each booth had vanished; the booths were reupholstered in black vinyl, and new booths had been installed where the girls used to sit at tables in the back. As Purcell looked around the room, a girl’s painted face peered around the corner of one of the booths like a puppet on a string and then vanished.
“It’s bound to catch on,” said Purcell. “Temples and weapons are the mirrors of change.”
“Christ, that goes on a T-shirt,” said Crosby. “Temples and Weapons— Mirrors of Change.”
“HQ has gone covert action.”
The HQ girls had quickly adapted to the new surroundings like smart viruses fighting off a designer drug. They used the new booths to burrow into their hosts; as their private, secretive spring traps, waiting with their bodies mainly out of sight, nervous, sensing danger and ready to take a victim. As a sexual battleground, the new arrangement favored the girls.
“HQers as intelligence agents. No one has ever made that charge stick,” said Crosby, lighting a cigarette. He passed the lighter across the table as Purcell stuck a Havana into his mouth.
Some HQ girls, Termites, dressed in tight jeans and T-shirts, leaned on the jukebox, eyeing the field, checking out who was in the gallery. They spotted Crosby—marked down one hardcore, then Purcell—marked down a second hardcore. Whispering to each other, they wondered among themselves whether the killing was going to mean another night hanging around without softcore farangs with purples willing to spend on them.
A couple of old Tommys slashed the smoke-filled air with their hands and arms, a dolphin-like sound coming from their throats. They hated Purcell’s Havana cigars. Sitting together around a table near the TV set, they coughed and tried to watch the news report about street violence. Pictures of troops walking in closed ranks flickered over the screen. The soldiers fired their rifles into the night sky. The Tommys gestured with screaming hands, in a loud silent rage among themselves, with one of the younger Tommys sending hand signs in a screaming arc across the room to the jukebox pue-an pod. Some hand signs were like whispers; others—when the soldiers came on the screen—were like fists looking for a jaw or a belly-landing zone.
In the middle of a Tommy conversation about the killings, Montezuma flipped a coin—should he vaporize, dissolve into a mist or spray?—and sprayed himself into HQ through a greasy air vent in the back alley. There was nothing to match a vaporization. He flown along in a thin, narrow column, crossed the central room, avoiding the toilet squalor. He rolled himself onto an empty stool, and allowed a presence to accumulate. A couple of bleary-eyed farangs leaned against the bar only inches away talking to a couple of whores. On the ceiling a small brown lizard with lidless eyes languidly snapped small red ants with its lightning tongue. It shuddered, hunched down in a frozen, immobile position as Montezuma came together directly underneath. Montezuma watched Purcell—remembering over the centuries how many of his relatives had been on his talk show.
At the same moment, Purcell felt an icy chill knife through his body, setting his teeth chattering. He knew the meaning of the cold draft. The “Presence” with a capital “P” was well recorded in the family chronicle. The sudden blast of cold happened whenever a Purcell was in a war zone or travelled through a killing zone. The family divided into factions on the cause of this flash of cold and the remedy dispensed to combat the chill: one group held to the guilt theory and the other held to the spirit or ghost theory. Since Purcell was a combination of East and West he believed in both theories simultaneously. He believed that Leonardo da Vinci haunted the Purcell family, given the role they had in his death, and of trying to steal his plans. This was also the source of the family guilt.
“You have the shakes,” said Crosby, quite pleased to see Purcell show a human trait and suffering.
His white hair stood on end on his neck and arms.
“I know. You don’t feel it?” asked Purcell.
“Feel what?”
“The Presence,” said Purcell. Then he quickly backed off. “The girl over there has the most tasteful way of displaying her breasts. The one lap dancing on the Hun.”
Crosby craned his neck around the whores in his booth, thinking this might be the night Harry Purcell turned mass-killer under cover of the madness on the streets, his timing would be perfect. He looked disturbed, all shakes and goose flesh, his eyes wide and unblinking.
The girls had the unofficial Termite floor show going at full throttle—silent voices and hysterical fists sculpting fighting words. He spotted her and smiled, the smile of hardcore reco
gnition, which said without saying, “I’ve had Meow.”
“Nice, was she?” asked Purcell.
“Quite a lovely cupcake,” said Crosby.
This was the Meow of Denny Addison’s documentary called The Unexpected Answer. Meow was the katoey whore who used a Q-tip to smear drugs on her nipples, taking her short-time tricks back for a fast lick into unconsciousness before she picked them clean of all valuables. Some people were born with severely retarded short-term memories; Crosby had seen the documentary and had fucked Meow and saw no connection between what appeared on the screen and what happened between his legs. HQ was a bar which catered to the derelicts of history, the rootless wanderers who had travelled from the far realms of the earth, the extreme cases who had washed up in the HQ temple—which they had heard on the travellers’ grapevine was a place containing women who could heal their fears.
“The Kraut’s an elderly man. Meow might shake something loose in his gearbox,” said Crosby.
Meow lap danced on the lap of a bald-headed German named Wolfgang Kleist. He was a tank commander at the battle of Stalingrad where 1.1 millions Russians died and 800,000 Germans perished in the snow and ice. Wolfgang—whom everyone called Kleist—had the aged, smooth look of a man who had beaten the odds, and having survived a battle which had destroyed just about everyone he ever knew, felt obliged to drink and screw with the determination of someone who had faced off the Russians and survived. Kleist had a shaved head. Meow was about to repeat the success of about 1.1 million dead Russians who had died defeating the Germans—she intended to defeat Kleist, get paid, and live to tell her friends about it. Kleist sat on the stool with the look of a gnarled tree the winter storm winds had curved earthward, or someone who had spent years crouched inside a tank and once he climbed out could no longer stand straight. He reached out and snared another girl, pulling her onto his other knee.
“Germans worship trees,” said Crosby, trying to get Purcell to joke about religion. “It’s absolutely true. The pagan ancestors of Bismarck, Hitler, Mozart, and Liszt for centuries fell on their knees and prayed to large oaks. Teutonic pagans flocked to the mountains and hills and danced in the forest. Old Wolfgang is HQ’s honorary war criminal and he would never have hurt a fir.”
“Wolfgang did his job. And he lost. Tonight I will give Wolfgang a second chance. Argggggh,” shouted Purcell, as another chill from Montezuma’s Presence slashed through his chest. The Presence was definitely in the room, and guns, war, tanks, any mention of soldiers or weapons would only made the cold run faster, deeper. His face twisted into a mask of pain.
“Are you okay, or do you need a gun?” asked Crosby, swallowing hard.
A waiter arrived with a tray of fresh drinks.
Purcell drank a gin and tonic straight down and ordered two more doubles.
“Gun-running, pickled-pork bellied, cottage-cheese nosed maggot-filled bum licker,” said Purcell.
“That’s not on the menu, Harry,” said Crosby. “Calm down, this too will pass.” Long ago he had accepted Purcell as strange; but Harry was over the top, looking more and more dangerous. HQ had its share of hardcores given to fits of temper, screams for no apparent reason, and heavy drinking bouts, but Harry Purcell was heading into new territory. It was rather like being with some of the unpredictable people who hung around on the London Underground to be seated near Harry Purcell at that moment and Crosby couldn’t think of a way to scoop up his T-shirts and bolt out the door.
The chill stopped as suddenly as it had started. Montezuma felt slightly hurt that each generation of Purcells had for the last four hundred fifty odd years confused his Presence with either the Italian arms designer Leonardo da Vinci or the Chinaman General Xue. When he had the Purcells on his show, the surprise they registered when they found out who the Presence was made everyone in the audience crack up.
The waiter the hardcores called the New Kid on the Block set down the two double gin and tonics, scooped up Purcell’s empty glasses, loaded them on the tray, and disappeared into the crowd. It had been Snow who, fifteen years before, had nicknamed him the New Kid on the Block.
“The New Kid on the Block’s got gray hair,” said Crosby. “Soon his hair will be white like yours. I didn’t mean it as an insult. I mean white shows wisdom. A cool heart.”
Purcell said nothing. He drank his gin and tonic and felt so much better for the regular pulse rushing hot down his arms and legs. He loved being hot. He loved hot women, weapons, and the company of old soldiers. The shooting in the streets was small-fry murder compared with the vast slaughter Kleist had witnessed in Stalingrad; it was why Kleist was at HQ, it was simply another night in another city. A flicker of happiness danced in Purcell’s eyes. A candle flame of hope which might last him through the night. Purcell looked at Crosby, knowing that Crosby feared him. Crosby had all the qualities of a dog except loyalty, thought Purcell. This simple fact explained Crosby’s obsession with trees.
Crosby twirled the nipples of his booth mate. This conduct had become a kind of nervous tic when his thought turned to bloody ambushes in the Alley of Revenge or a hardcore going over the top inside HQ and knifing someone in the neck. But in truth, he also twirled nipples when lost in thought about a business scheme, or daydreaming about the perfect T-shirt which sold a million. Crosby thought talking about business might settle Purcell down, take his mind off chills, weird screams, and interior changes of HQ. But he felt inhibited talking about the T-shirt business given his jail record and outstanding debt to Purcell. It was an awkward moment. It was now or never. The debt hung like Harry’s cigar smoke over the table. He fought his fear and started the conversation talking about names; this was an old hand stand-by—names that caused misunderstanding and confusion when imported from one culture to another.
“In London, I met a guy named Jim Key who had been posted to Bangkok,” said Crosby. “He lasted a month in Thailand. His last name, Key, makes the identical sound the Thai word kee—or shit. Kee is normally a classifier. He didn’t know that either. At first, he couldn’t understand why all the laughter every time he picked up the telephone, and said, ‘Mr. Key, speaking.’ Finally, someone told him. He seized up. He didn’t know what to say on the phone, but suddenly he hated his name. He hated that he had been burdened with a name that meant shit.”
Harry Purcell saw the play action.
“Kee kar roughly translates as ‘shit person,’ ” said Purcell.
“In ancient Thai it meant a slave,” observed Crosby, smiling.
It was working; Harry was looking better already.
Purcell stopped and looked around the room. He felt good but remained nervous, constantly looking around the room. The Presence had not left HQ but had stopped circulating, it had desisted from sending chill waves. “Or if Mr. Key had said, ‘Key, here,’ a Thai might have thought he had said kee tur which means a ‘stupid person.’ And when he gave up and returned to London, the Thais would have remembered him, if they thought of him at all, as kee pae or someone prone to lose. They would say over lunch, ‘Whatever happened to old kee pae ?’ ” said Purcell.
“The Thais hated to see a shit farang go home,” said Crosby.
“Of course, they missed the play. A farang who called himself Khun Shit. How could they not love such a man? Someone whose very name made them laugh. He probably never understood,” said Purcell.
“They would like Khun Prick,” replied Crosby.
“There was Mr. Lee which means prick in Burma. I sold him a great deal of military hardware. Some of which actually worked,” said Purcell, keeping the conversation alive as the music stopped.
“Bhutto means fuck in Bahasa Malay,” said Crosby.
“I once sold tanks to an Army general named Bhutto. We were at dinner in a world class restaurant in London. I leaned over and tossed a wallet under the table with one hundred thousand US inside. Then I said, ‘General Bhutto, I believe you’ve dropped your wallet on the floor.’ And he asked me, ‘How much is in the wallet?’ And
I said, ‘General Bhutto, your wallet has one hundred thousand US dollars inside.’ He grinned and shook his head, ‘You must be mistaken. That can not be my wallet. My wallet has two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars inside.’ ”
“A bribe?” asked Crosby.
“A gift among friends,” replied Purcell.
Crosby was enjoying himself—Purcell was no longer in the danger zone; he was himself again, grinning, lighting a fresh cigar, and getting warmed up on old war stories.
“ ‘Fuck’ in Lao means ‘to chop,’ ” said Purcell.
“I didn’t know that,” said Crosby. “So you would tell a general who wanted too much tea money that he should fuck himself and that would be a Lao pun.”
“Fuck, fuck, set lao,” said Purcell. “A phrase every Lao girl has used with her mother.” Chop, chop, it is finished.
What carried the punch line of a joke in one language was only a sound byte without meaning in another. What caused sadness in one made another sick and yet in another created rage. The absence of consensus about meaning creates the ambiguity and irony that streaks through life like lightning in a monsoon sky.
From the twinkle in Purcell’s eyes, Crosby knew that Harry was back from the place of dread and darkness. He rolled his cigar between his fingers, the diamond on the pinky ring flashing a rainbow of light across the whores in the booth.
Purcell thought that sound waves continued into eternity—the chill of the Presence was one of those waves passing from out of time into time and back out again. He figured one day such a disembodied voice could be recovered once the right retrieval instruments were invented. Harry wanted to patent this sound conveying instrument. He wanted to use it to recall Cortez’s words as he entered the Aztec temple.
Snow had once summed up what Harry would find on calling back the past. “I can save you the trouble of a machine. Cortez said, ‘Fuck, man, it’s a skull bar. We’ve found gold!’ ”
At the bar Montezuma was feeling no pain. It was the best part of being dead. But this crack by Crosby was so far off the mark that, could he feel pain, then pain would have vibrated through his blue vapor-like form. What Cortez had said was nothing like what Crosby thought. Cortez had said, “Pagans. We must stop these pagans.” Then he threw up his lunch on the temple floor.
A Haunting Smile Page 23
