The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  All gone now, scattered apart and blown through the big city. Living now among strangers. All the buildings lost, even the spirit houses, knocked into dust and chunks of cement.

  You don’t see many spirit houses in the city now, he realizes, except for the big commercial ones with all the gilt paint. When Wallace thinks of a spirit house, he thinks of a small wooden structure on a platform, a miniature old Thai-style village house, the paint long bleached away by the sun and the wood a dry, pallid ash-gray . . .

  How noisy it had been when they destroyed the place, the machines growling at the buildings like big dogs before taking bites of them, the residents staring dolefully from across the soi, like attendees at a cremation. The funeral of an entire village, all its smiles and stories wadded up and tossed away to make room for something useful.

  He gets up slowly, straightening carefully through the sudden grab of pain in his lower back, always there and always a surprise, and launches himself toward the bathroom, feeling a slight fizziness in his head. He stops abruptly, trying to remember where he left his shoes. For the last ten years or so, after one too many panicky, flailing, full-length falls over one of his own shoes in the dark, he’s made a point of creating a clear path between himself and the bathroom.

  But wait. He’s got enough light to see. This is not, is not, is not the shophouse.

  And what time is it? His wrist is bare. It’s been weeks, and maybe a lot longer (maybe years?), since he could find the heavy steel Rolex his father had given him to take to ’Nam. He promised his parents he’d keep it on California time so he’d be with them whenever he looked at it, but that hadn’t lasted. Nothing had lasted. Not even the Rolex. When he’d lost track of it, whenever that had been, he’d bought a counterfeit at a street market, and as he turns on the bathroom light, the watch gleams fraudulently at him from the edge of the sink and informs him it’s 11:21 p.m. So he’s slept through the day’s heat and dust, and outside, the Bangkok he loves best is once again camouflaging the city’s dirt and dreariness behind the bright nightly tangle of neon and steam.

  The bathroom mirror shows him the grandfather or great-grandfather of Wallace, never Wally, Palmer, shockingly old. In place of his thicket of bright, curly hair, a few long, iron-gray strands, inexplicably straight, paste themselves across his scalp, which is mottled like a faded map of countries no one wants to visit. He’s played a few times with the strands, trying to comb them lower on his forehead to simulate a real hairline, but the last time he’d done it, Ernie’s phrase, “turban renewal,” flashed through his mind, and he’d laughed and abandoned the effort.

  Wallace says, “Shit.” He looks away from the mirror, avoiding the sight of his neck or the slope of his once-broad shoulders, and picks up his toothbrush. Sees the yellowness of his nails, the spots on the backs of his hands.

  Someone knocks on the door in the living room.

  “It’s always something,” Wallace says aloud, although he’s aware that lately it hasn’t been. He leans heavily against the sink, closes his eyes, and waits for whoever it is to go away, but then there’s a triplet of knocks, louder this time, and a basso profundo voice calling, “Wallace? You are in there, Wallace?”

  Leon, Wallace thinks with a minor surge of despair. Leon Hofstedler, the most boring man in Bangkok, which is saying a lot. So boring, Leon’s friend Ernie had once said, that if you’d just come out of a cave where you’d spent a year alone and saw Leon, you’d turn around and go back into the cave. What happened to Ernie? Ernie always made him laugh. He again sees Ernie’s grin, white in the dark face, the gap between his teeth—

  The knocks sound once more, loud as kicks. “Wallace? I need to hear you talking. Everybody in the bar asks is Wallace okay. Even Poke says hello to you.”

  Leon isn’t going away. Leon has nothing better to do with his life than to stand in that hallway, kicking Wallace’s crappy door and singing German opera for everybody in the building to hear. A fucking menace. The German Peril.

  The idea of Leon being dangerous makes Wallace laugh as he heads toward the living room. Wallace lived with dangerous day and night for three tours of steaming, blood-stinking duty. The only thing Leon had ever killed was time. He’d like to say that to Ernie, Wallace thinks. Ernie always looks surprised before he laughs, as though it startles him that other people are funny.

  “Coming, Ernie,” Wallace calls. He looks down at himself and is reassured to see that he’d gone to sleep fully dressed.

  “Ernie?” Hofstedler bellows though the door. “This is not Ernie. Ernie—mein Gott, Ernie is a thousand years dead. You should not be alone so much.”

  “I’m not alone,” Wallace says, undoing the door’s assortment of locks—a joke, given that the door itself is made of soda cracker. “You’re here.” He opens the door on the mountain that is Leon Hofstedler.

  Hofstedler, his magisterial bulk draped in one of his many-pocketed safari shirts, narrows his eyes as if trying to sight Wallace through a fog. He says, “Ernie?”

  “Been thinking about him,” Wallace says.

  Hofstedler continues to study Wallace’s face. After a moment he gives a grudging grunt. “I will tell them you look okay.”

  “Of course I’m okay,” Wallace says around the sudden bloom of irritation in his chest. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  Hofstedler shrugs. “They worry, you not coming, night after night. You know, thinking maybe . . .” Whatever they’re thinking, it’s too dire for Hofstedler to voice it. “Tonight,” he says, “tonight we almost had a fight. In the bar. You remember this man Varney?”

  “Sure,” Wallace says, wishing he could shut the door. “Varney.”

  “You would have liked it.” Hofstedler is looking past Wallace, into the apartment. “Talks, the man talks all the time, and tonight Poke—do you remember Poke?”

  “Leon,” Wallace says, and it’s close to a threat.

  “So,” Hofstedler, says, lifting placating hands, “Poke, he had enough, and he asked the man, Varney, if he ever shuts up. And I said that I also would like to talk once in—”

  “Sounds great,” Wallace says. “I’m a little busy.”

  “Yes?” Hofstedler sticks his head around the door as though to make sure no one is standing behind it. “You are alone?”

  “Writing my memoirs. Before I forget them. Funny, huh, Ernie?”

  “Ernie is—” Hofstedler shakes his head. “Tomorrow, eight o’clock, I will come for you. Take you to the bar. Will you remember?”

  “I’ve got a memory like a . . . like a . . .” He scratches his head—shocked, as always, at the bare skin beneath his fingertip—but he manages a laugh. “That’s a joke, Leon.” He puts some weight on the door, forcing Hofstedler back. “You tell them I’m fine and say hello for me, ’kay?”

  “And tomorrow,” Leon says. “Eight. Do not forget.”

  “Yeah, yeah, tomorrow.” He pushes the door closed on Hofstedler, completing in his mind the sentence . . . whatever is supposed to happen tomorrow. Through the door he hears Hofstedler sigh and then the man’s heavy tread drawing squeaks from the cheap plywood flooring.

  A shower. That’s what he needs, a shower and some clean clothes. Jah, it’s Jah he wants to see, he realizes with a jolt of electricity. Whip-thin, tousle-haired Jah, who went with him to Don Mueang Airport the first time he flew back to ’Nam and cried inconsolably at the departure gate. And was there, jumping up and down like a teenager, when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other guys stared.

  Jah.

  In ’Nam the women and children had been terrified of him, afraid to meet his eyes, and he understood why. His very idea of who he was had been shattered, that easy, cheerful California boy broken into pieces one death at a time and reassembled wrong. Six months in country, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies
of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with the terror and revulsion the Americans occasionally earned: Twice, men Wallace knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind on the packed earth the sobbing remnant of a human being.

  And then his first R&R furlough. After a copter out and an hour or two in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who loved him, or at least seemed to. Girls who looked at him and saw a young, handsome man, not a beast. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “No problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole tableful of food toward himself, feeling like some fool out of Playboy but finding, in the crowded beds, a kind of life that flowed into him and filled him back up. And then one night, the bed too full to give him room to turn over, he got out and slept on the floor, waking in the morning to find that he’d been layered over with towels from the bathroom and that sleeping next to him on the carpet, curled into a ball against the chill of the air conditioner and uncovered except for a hip-length cascade of tangled hair, was a slender dark-skinned girl. When he smoothed a towel over her, she opened her eyes and smiled at him as though he were the God of Morning, and Wallace, for the first time since leaving ’Nam, felt his heart unlock. Her name was Jah, and after that it was Jah, just Jah, always Jah. Staying with her for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Smooth cheek against his. Crossing the river once in a long-tail boat to sleep in a musty-smelling, lantern-lighted wooden shack, not a vertical wall anywhere and overhead the dry scrabble of rats as she breathed her way into sleep. He was safe. Writing her letters from ’Nam, letters he never sent. She couldn’t read a word of English.

  But she could read him.

  Hansum man, Jah called him. Teerak, Jah called him, Thai for “sweetheart.” Wallet, Jah called him, and he’d thought it was a joke about his money until he realized that Thais can’t pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she was trying to say his name. He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating its appropriateness even if Jah didn’t understand it.

  The airport’s name nags at him. Don Mueang? Do military flights come through Don Mueang? It sounds wrong, but he shrugs it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and pads toward the shower. The women may be professionals, he thinks, but they’re still Thai, and Thais are clean. It shows respect when you come to them fresh from the shower.

  He steps into the shower still wearing the cheap watch and sees it just as the stream of water hits it. In seconds he’s out of the tiny stall, scrubbing at the watch with a graying towel, holding it up to see whether the second hand is still jerking forward in the one-second increments that mark the watch as a fake. He dries it a final time, puts it to his ear, and slips it back on his wet wrist, then sees what he’s done and yanks it off again to pat the skin dry, and a few minutes later he’s back on the bed, drying his shoulders and toweling away the drops of water that hit the top of his head. He checks the watch again, sees the second hand lurching from silver numeral to silver numeral, and asks himself, Weren’t these luminous? Asks himself, Wasn’t “Rolex” written in gold? What watch is this? How many of these has he bought since he lost the Rolex?

  He leans back against the pillows, sees in his mind’s eye the face, the hair, the timeworn, destroyed Wallace he’d seen in the mirror. Jah, he thinks. She’d be seventy by now. A kind of deep-sea pressure settles on him, squeezing out a long sigh. He hears Jah’s laugh, as though she were in the living room.

  The light in the living room is on. Wallace thinks, Leon. Leon was here, wasn’t he? And then he pulls the thin blanket over himself and closes his eyes, and he’s asleep.

  7

  A Rat on a Sharp Stick

  “He’s American,” Rafferty says. “No regional accent, could be from anywhere.”

  “We get about three-quarters of a million Americans every year,” Arthit says, rubbing his eyes. “And we’ve got another twenty, thirty thousand living here.” He’s wearing an industrial-gray T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, baring short, hairy legs. It’s Saturday, and he’d obviously planned to sleep in, although Anna has already left for the homeless-children’s shelter. On Saturday she teaches her special class of nonhearing children. On the weekdays they’re mixed in with those who can hear. Coffee is dripping in the kitchen, but Rafferty, who was up most of the night—stewing, as his mother would have said, in his own juices—has already downed a pot and a half and is feeling the persuasive, strumming adrenaline of anxiety.

  Rafferty says, “Thank you for the statistics, but he’s not like most of the tourists and expats. He stands out. He’s after the money, Arthit, Murphy’s money. He tracked me down in that bar somehow and set the whole thing up. He was in the bar when I arrived last night, talking, of course. About ten minutes after I came in, he said he forgot something. So he goes back outside for a minute or two, just long enough to make a phone call or give an instruction. When he comes back, he’s not carrying anything I can see, so maybe he didn’t forget anything after all. Half an hour later, the kid barges in and gives me this.” He taps the piece of paper on the table, now stiff and dry. “He was watching me as I read it. He wanted to see my reaction.”

  “And how did you react?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea. It was like I’d gotten caught between a pair of cymbals, and all I could do was wait for the ringing in my ears to stop.”

  “I’m not going to minimize any of this,” Arthit says. “But who could he be?” They’re in the living room, wan morning light filtering through the windows, the sky outside flashing a few optimistic, misleading patches of blue like fake watches gleaming inside a con man’s coat. The house is silent and immaculate but wrong to Rafferty’s eyes—Anna’s pictures are on the walls, and her small ornaments and prizes litter the tables, spaces that had been decorated with the things that Noi, Arthit’s wife, dead now for a year and a half, had kept there. Still, it’s immeasurably better than it had been in the months following Noi’s death, when Arthit had closed the door on the world so he could drink uninterrupted, his loneliness a beacon he defied anyone to acknowledge. “Who would know Murphy had all that money?” Arthit interrupts himself with a yawn. “Who’d know how much it was? Most important, who’d know you had anything to do with him?”

  “Someone exactly like Varney,” Rafferty says. “Someone who was involved with Murphy. He’s the same kind of man Murphy was. There’s nothing soft in him anywhere. You should have seen his face when he lit into poor old Leon, practically calling him a Nazi. Tormenting him like a rat on a sharp stick. You know as well as I do that Murphy had to have a network, probably a loose group of sociopaths he could call on when he needed them. He’d survived as a fixer and a strong-arm man for the US government and whoever else would pay him, all over Southeast Asia ever since the Vietnam War ended. My guess is that Varney was closer to him than most of them, close enough to know about the money, maybe even working with Murphy on whatever operation the money was for—that bombing operation down in the south, for example. Not just a hired hand. Closer than that.”

  “If that’s the kind of guy he is, you know what it means.” Arthit leans forward, stretching his lower back, his palms on his thighs, seesawing his shoulders up and down. “He could be connected, he could be official or semi-official. Murphy was working with the Yanks, and he had the private phone numbers for our internal spook corps. Major Shen, for example.”

  Rafferty says, “He doesn’t feel military. Murphy was ex-military, using his army connections and experience to work as a fixer. Frighten some farmers off their land, arrange to break some heads if a bunch of pea
sants protest the fact that they’re being poisoned by a gold mine. He probably knew dozens of thugs, guys with skills. Ex-CIA, ex-whatever. They’re all over the place. As Varney would say, they’re drawn to the hot countries.”

  “But too young to have been with Murphy in Vietnam,” Arthit says.

  “That’s what I mean. Not military. Maybe a contractor who worked in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan—some war of the week—through one of those fake soldier outfits, Axe or Whisker or whatever they’re called. But you know, Arthit, the fact that he wasn’t actually military isn’t very comforting. Some of these guys are worse. I’ve got a pregnant wife and a daughter, and these aren’t the kinds of people I want coming through my door.”

  “You don’t know any of this for sure,” Arthit says.

  “I do.” Rafferty puts his fingertips on the note and slides it back and forth on the table. “I know with certainty that Varney sent that kid in with that note. He knows I’ve got the money, Arthit. And he wants it.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Arthit says, “but it’s not much.” He grabs the edge of the table and pulls himself to his feet. “Coffee?”

  “Oh, hell, why not?” Rafferty says, getting up. “Black, okay?” He follows his friend through the dining room. When Noi was alive, the table had always been lush with flowers, but Anna doesn’t have Noi’s magical sway over plants, and now the centerpiece is a pair of antique Thai fish traps, weathered, elongated baskets with reeds pointing inward around the opening so the fish can swim in but not out again. They’re from the largest and poorest region of the country—Isaan, in the northeast, where Rose lived with her family until she ran to Bangkok to avoid her father’s plan to sell her into the sex trade.