Red Night Zone - Bangkok City

by James A. Newman

  Knocked twice.

  The door opened.

  She was dressed in a pattern blouse and black leggings. A glass of red in her hand. Joe followed her into a room with a floor to ceiling window looking over the city. The neons and the flicking lights below them, a bookcase with medical editions, and a stuffed teddy bear sat on a black leather couch. Rays of streetlight shone through the window and reflected from the bear’s beaded eyes.

  “It’s a beautiful view,” Joe said.

  “You get used to it. Sit.”

  Joe sat.

  She sat next to him. “There’s been more than one. Several in fact. I thought about not calling you and then I thought about calling you. I thought about many things. About giving up the profession and writing a book about it. You see, in this city, sometimes the dead speak to us, leave us clues. The city is a bad listener. The city couldn’t care what happens to these girls. It took my whole career to convince the police use DNA testing. The autopsy brought up no missing body parts. But there’s still something missing…”

  “What?”

  “A reason.”

  “Do we need a reason?”

  “I guess we don’t. Would you like a glass. It’s good. Chilean.”

  “No. I gave it up. I have an allergy.”

  “Right…One of those… interesting theory… The allergy theory. If something you ingest causes social problems, then, yes, I suppose that you could call it an allergy. I think alcoholics are simply mislead, compulsive personalities.”

  “How many bodies have there been?”

  “Twenty-six. All across the city. Always a cheap cold-water apartment. Each time made to look like a suicide. All female, aged between nineteen and thirty years of age. In what should have been the prime of their lives. They were all from Isaan. Poor, uneducated, no employment records.”

  “All believed in black magic?”

  “Who knows? They don’t believe in anything anymore,” she put the glass down on the table, “they are dead.”

  “Mr. Mortician not here this evening,” Joe asked.

  “There is no such man. I lied,” she looked directly at him, “I get lonely.”

  “It’s lonely at the top.”

  “Sometimes.”

  It happened suddenly.

  The pathologist stood. Turned to face him, held out a finger, beckoned. She turned her back to him and moved towards the drinks cabinet. Put her glass on the cabinet. Moved to the window. She faced the glass window; the city was beneath them like an exotic animal. Joe stood and touched her shoulder. Her hand guided his hand lower to her waist. He held her. Looked over her shoulder and drank in the bright lights of the city. Thousands of cars, streetlights, flashes of neon from the night markets, the Zone, and the blinking headlights, streetlights, the city.

  He felt alive.

  A king.

  A king in a castle.

  He kissed her neck. Her palms rested on the window. It was like heaven.

  Like cheating death.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE HOTEL room was open. Inside, on the floor next to the refrigerator nine black candles burned in a circle. Inside the circle was a dead lizard. The Venus fly-trap was missing. Joe checked the attached bathroom. Empty. The computer was still there. His heart hammered. An email from Francis’ kid. Khao San road. 2pm. He put out the candles with wetted fingers. Threw them in the trash.

  The phone rang.

  “Joe, we need to talk,” said the witchdoctor.

  “Woody. I’m in bad shape. A break in.”

  “What did they take?”

  “It’s what they left that bothers me. You still working in black magic?”

  “Chai.”

  “What does a circle of black candles with a lizard inside mean?”

  “The end, for the lizard. What does the name Carina mean to you?”

  “Out of my league.”

  “She wrote me a letter. You know the coffee house on Convent road?”

  “Which one?”

  “Opposite the Catholic school.”

  “11am.”

  “Got it.”

  Joe dressed. Went downstairs. The receptionist spoke.

  “Mr. Dylan. Have package.” She passed him a box. He opened it. Inside was his glock with a card from the Demon Dreams. The card read.

  Be careful.

  He took out the gun.

  Pocketed it.

  Walked to Asoke. Down into the subway. The MRT train shuttled to Silom. Took a slow walk to the coffee joint.

  Joe walked in. Staff outnumbered the patrons. Pretty young women dressed in the usual quasi-American baseball-cap and polo-necks, were hovering around trying to find a reason to justify their employment.

  Woody was sitting there.

  The waitress walked over and Woody gave it to her. He rattled off an order in her local Laos tongue. “Impressive,” Joe said.

  “My old man was stationed in Bangkok during the Vietnam conflict.”

  “You’re half American?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like Tiger Woods?”

  “Yeah. Just like Tiger Woods. I never saw a golf course. Look, this woman Carina. She’s missing.”

  “Lucky for her,” Joe said.

  “We got the letter. She got in touch.”

  “I figure that she isn’t part of the big picture. She’ll resurface.”

  “No, you don’t understand.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “When I was a brat I shined shoes without shining them,” Woody said. “I could take a mark for what he was. I look at you now and I know that you poked a few sisters, but you didn’t abuse them. Shoe shine. I think maybe you loved one. It is not a crime. It’s a neat trick played late at night in the street bars. I take your shoes and run around the corner. I spit on them, rubbed them with a rag and then waited around for forty minutes or maybe a couple of hours. Then I returned with the shoes in hand. You were so relieved to get your spats back that you tipped me generously. The shoes were never shined. That was business. High society gets pissed when you take their shoes away from them. When you offer to give them back their shoes, after, you know, smelling the shit on their sole, they’ll pay whatever you fucking charge. Hookers play the same game. It is all about finding the weak spot.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “Well, I didn’t get a girl pregnant. I didn’t wreck a motorbike. I didn’t get involved with drugs or alcohol. I beat the odds. I shined shoes. The odds weren’t pretty. Monica used to sell flowers on my patch. She was nine years old.”

  Joe glanced out of the floor to ceiling window on to Silom Road. He knew what the kids selling flowers did on the side.

  She never had a chance.

  School kids rushed along the street buying snatches of breakfast from vendor’s carts parked along the sidewalk. Barbeque pork kebabs, hotdogs, doughnuts, grasshoppers. Woody picked up his large Americano and Joe considered the espresso.

  “She went in there, Joe.”

  “Who?”

  “Carina. She went into the bar.”

  “She come back since?”

  “Not that I know of. She owes me money.”

  “She’s worth a fortune in that place.”

  “What’s the story, Joe?” He sipped his coffee and raised his eyebrows. “Shame what happened to little Monica. Word on the grape is he had something of a problem with hookers and was mixed up in some dark sex type stuff. Couldn’t leave them alone and took it too far. That was his downfall. Her downfall was that she was attached to a noose. If you want my opinion, she tried to take some money from him and he axed her. Now that’s just my opinion, Joe.”

  The waitress walked over and put a plate of pastries on the table. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Joe wasn’t hungry. He ask
ed him, “You think it wasn’t suicide?”

  “She was killed and that English guy killed her and looking at the pictures, he made a mess of it. Now he will kill Carina.”

  “What do you know about the Demon Dreams bar?”

  “I know you should stay away from it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s not somewhere I would take my niece for lunch. Come on Joe, you know what I mean. That place is dangerous. Girls go in there and don’t come out, or if they do, not the same person.”

  “And black magic?”

  “Well, if I was you, I’d keep clear of that place. My advice to you is that sometimes things are better left alone. There’s something wrong with that bar. I’ll tell you one thing for nothing, Joe. The closer you get to Francis, the closer you get to finding out what happened to Monica.”

  Joe passed him the piece of A4.

  “What’s this?”

  “Read it,” Joe said.

  We open the box

  We surrender to the Ancient Ones.

  We open the box,

  ToRavana, the Destroyer,

  To Soma, the drink of pleasure,

  To Sita, Bringer of Beauty, love and hope,

  To Fonkeal, Master and Guardian of the secret

  To the number 10102555’

  He looked at the spell then spoke:

  “Well, whatever you have to do, you’d better do it fast. That last set of figures is a date. Tomorrow’s date in fact, today is the 9th of October, 2010,” he said lifting his coffee cup to his lips. “Or if you go by the Thai calendar, then it’s two-thousand five hundred and fifty-five. Tomorrow, to be precise. 10102555.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IN THE Banglumphu district lays the neo-hippy hangover of On The Road. Kho San Road.

  An oasis of West in the East.

  It was a long time since Jack Kerouac hit the American freeway, but the spirit’s still out there and there wasn’t a Chinaman’s chance in hell of it stopping anytime soon. Beautiful Caucasians wore tie-dyed shirts and browsed market stalls, drank bottled water and gulped large bottles of Chang beer on the street. Tall Nordic blondes sauntered past, barefoot in loose fitting tank tops, braless and carefree. Nipples. Legs. Smiles. Shirtless gangs of western males. Toned biceps. Muscles stamped with contemporary tattoos. Complex mazes. Asian scriptures. Sacred texts. They ate fried rice and watched Hollywood movies. Guesthouses lined the road on either side. Pale-skinned novices huddled around tables pouring over maps and guidebooks. Initiated backpackers relaxed and drank beer, and watched the world go by. Flashpackers lounged around drinking mochas, consulting iPhones and planned their routes by GPS. They booked hotels and airplane tickets electronically. Some had left the rat race. Some were never in it. Some were retired and some were gap year students. Some were Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus. Old, young, rich, poor. All united by their hunger to explore the world.

  Joe found the coffee shop and saw her sitting in there alone. He was almost thirty minutes late, but time didn’t matter much in the land of the free. She had bleached blonde hair and a synthetic tan. Her nose curved upwards slightly and her eyes were shaded by expensive sunglasses.

  She wore a pink Gucci tank top and stared at her coffee. Her hand grasped a Styrofoam cup and she wore a silver thumb ring with the image of a butterfly. Several, perhaps too many, junk metal bracelets wrapped around her wrists. A small tasteful tattoo of a salamander painted on her left shoulder blade and another butterfly on her ankle. All recent.

  “Joe Dylan. You must be, Janey?” Joe offered his hand. She looked at it briefly and then continued to stare at her coffee cup, and then at her watch.

  “Bangkok traffic,” Joe tried to explain.

  She kept focusing on that coffee cup.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Silence answered him.

  He told her. “Look, I have travelled from the other side of town. Bangkok is a big city, and Khao San Road is not the epicentre of it, although it once was kind of in the middle. They have some of the best temples here in the old city. The river. It’s a nice place to start.”

  She stared at the coffee cup with increased intensity.

  “You wanted to speak to me. Now you’re not speaking. I don’t have the time to play daddy and try and convince you I’m a good guy, because I’m not. You wanted to hire me, so I am here. And now you are not speaking. This is not the way it works, honey, so now I am leaving.” Joe stood up, turned around, and headed for the door.

  “Wait!”

  He turned back around, walked back to the table, and sat down on the chair.

  “Nobody, and I mean nobody, is ever late when they meet Janey. Nobody!” She screamed.

  Joe glanced around the coffee house. The staff was staring. They had a right to stare. It was their place. Was she for real?

  “Are you for real?”

  “What?”

  “Welcome to Bangkok.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you like the city?”

  “Like it? I can’t stand it here. I know what these girls do and I know what the men do. It’s horrible. Why, oh my God, why did I ever agree to come to this godforsaken country? It smells.” She lifted up her nose and sniffed. “Can you smell it? It’s like the smell of toilets, or drains. God, take me away from this place, Mr. Dylan. It’s like India or somewhere, where they have all those smelly people who wipe their fanny with their hands. It smells!”

  Joe smiled slowly and looked her in the eye. “Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. You have concerns about your father?”

  “The sun makes my skin all itchy. I have, like, an allergy or whatever. There was this time on campus where some guy, his dad owned an oil company, anyway he spiked my drink and…”

  “Okay. I get the picture. You contacted me. I’m listening.”

  “Yeah, sorry, what was it now? I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “With your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you want to know? I mean really want to know? Remember anything that I find out may affect your relationship with your father in a way you are not ready for. All our life we rarely see our parents as real people, we see them as parents. Whether they are good or bad people remains a mystery until we are much older. The psychologists call this learned behaviour. It’s there to protect us. Sometimes, it is better to go on believing what we have always believed. The truth can really mess up a young girl’s head, especially if it’s a truth about her family. Hell, I’ve seen grown men go insane after discovering a family secret. It can disturb and sometimes destroy our mental well-being. Sanity is more fragile than most of us think. Most of us are only one truth or one secret away from the nuthouse.”

  “I know all that already. I just need to know what’s going on, Mr. Dylan. I’m not looking for a therapist. I’m looking for answers.”

  “You ever really liked a boy and then found out he’s not into you?”

  “What’s with the questions? You are a strange man.” She returned to staring at that coffee cup.

  Joe continued, “You know that feeling when you find out he just doesn’t like you? It feels crappy, yeah? Well times that by a thousand and you are getting close to what you might discover by spying on your father.”

  “I need to know the truth, Mr. Dylan.”

  “Okay, fair enough. You’ve been warned. What can you tell me about your father?”

  “Well, he’s always been kind of strict and well, just like such a pompous English person. We’re so different; sometimes I wonder if I am even his daughter.” She smiled. If there was a likeness between her and her father, Joe couldn’t see it.

  “What does he do for enjoyment?”

  “I don’t think that he does enjoyment. He used to go hunting back home and he likes to read
books. I don’t know. He’s just Dad. I can’t explain it.”

  “Right. Let’s take a walk.”

  Out of Starbucks and along Kho San road, tourists sat on plastic chairs and had their hair braided in the street. A Thai man had a paper bird on a string that rotated above his head like a helicopter propeller. Rows of CDs, DVDs, Bookshops, clothing stalls, sunglasses, and at the mouth of the road was an American theme pub. They walked inside, sat in a booth, and studied the menu. The pub did an exceptionally good burger. “Would you like to eat?”Joe asked her, she said yes and they ordered two of the house special burgers. She had a beer and Joe ordered a soda water, no ice.

  “Would you say that your father is a secretive man?”

  “Right now, yes. I know him and Mom have had some problems, but prostitutes! Oh my God, I just want to die. What would Mom think?”

  Mommy’s probably into the gardener, Joe thought, but he didn’t say it. “Look, I’ve checked into the address and there doesn’t seem to be anything going on there out of the ordinary for a single man in Bangkok. If you want me to continue the investigation, I’ll need a retainer. The work I’ve done so far is free.”

  Her eyes turned into those of a hurt child. She sat there smiling. “About the retainer? I thought that perhaps we could come to some kind of arrangement?” She smiled.

  Joe looked her in the eye. “Bangkok is a tough city. I have to keep swimming. If I don’t keep swimming, I drown, and I need money to keep swimming. I can’t afford to work for free. Sorry.”

  “But I thought...”

  “This is not a holiday for me. Sometimes, I wish it were. Sometimes, I wish I could just jump on a plane back home and get on with a regular life. But I can’t. I don’t have a home anymore. This is it. I’m the guy that made a big mistake and now tries to help others making the same mistakes I made. Maybe your father is one of them. We all make mistakes. Some big. Some small. Some beyond remorse. I deal in mistakes. I do what I know, or at least what I think is best most of the time.”

  “That must feel terrible.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not. You mentioned in your message that you’ll be doing some teaching here. I’ll look into your father’s activities for you and you can make a payment once you get paid by the school or the agency. Have you met any of your father’s friends here in the city?”