Big Mango (9786167611037)

by Needham, Jake

  “What the hell’s going on?” Bar murmured.

  “You guys go ahead,” Eddie said, handing his carry-on to Winnebago. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  With a shrug, Winnebago turned to join the crowd jostling through the narrow gate to the plane, but Bar was still watching Lek. “I’ll catch up,” he said.

  When Bar walked up behind Eddie, he could see that three policemen had Lek and her carry-on bag surrounded. A security officer was blocking Eddie from approaching her.

  “You cannot leave the lounge, sir.”

  Eddie pointed toward Lek. “She’s with me. I’m just trying to see what the problem is.”

  The policeman nearest them overheard and stepped toward Eddie, checking him out.

  “Did you say you were traveling with this woman, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  The cop held out his right hand, palm up. “Your passport, please.”

  “You’ve already checked it. Twice.”

  Eddie slowly and deliberately folded his arms and looked at the policeman, who was very young. A black plastic plate pinned over the left breast pocket of his khakis spelled out his name—Tan—in thick, white letters.

  The policeman continued to hold out his hand, his face expressionless. “Your passport, sir.”

  Eddie took his time about it, but he unfolded his arms and slowly pulled his passport from his back pocket. He twirled it in his fingers for a moment in a modest show of defiance and then slapped it into the young policeman’s open hand.

  In return, Tan took his time about opening the passport, and then he studied the picture with particular care. He glanced up several times at Eddie as though comparing facial details one at a time.

  “You are an American, sir?”

  “That’s how you get the passport.”

  Bar winced inwardly. This wasn’t the right place for Eddie to start lobbing wisecracks. He was in Asia now, not San Francisco, and out here, if you didn’t lose the attitude pretty quick, somebody would snatch it away and beat you to death with it.

  “May I ask what the problem is, officer?” Bar cut in, attempting to defuse the growing hostility.

  Tan flicked his eyes to Bar for a moment. Wordlessly dismissing him, he pointed his forefinger at Eddie. “Wait here.”

  Eddie and Bar watched silently as the policeman walked over to an older man in a dark business suit who appeared to be in charge. They spoke briefly and the man turned his head and looked at Eddie. Eddie wasn’t sure if he should smile or not, so he didn’t.

  After a moment, the man took Eddie’s passport from Tan and walked very slowly across the boarding lounge, appraising Eddie as he approached. He appeared to be in his forties, with black eyes in a hard, unlined Chinese-looking face that gave nothing away.

  “What is your relationship to this woman?” he asked Eddie.

  “She’s the widow of a man who recently passed away,” Eddie replied in his lawyer voice, playing it straight. “I’m her attorney and I’m assisting her with the settlement of his estate.”

  Close enough for government work, Eddie thought to himself.

  “And you?” The man inclined his head toward Bar. “Who are you?”

  “He’s my assistant,” Eddie responded quickly, and Bar nodded at the man with a serious expression.

  The man looked at Bar for a long moment and then studied Eddie’s passport some more. He folded back the first page and held it up to the light, although what he might be looking for completely baffled Eddie. When he finally closed the small blue booklet, he stood tapping it against his hand as if making up his mind about something. Suddenly he flipped it back to Eddie, who grabbed it clumsily out of the air. The man wheeled and walked away, gesturing at the guard at the table who immediately began replacing Lek’s things in her bag.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Bar whispered to Eddie.

  “Beats me.”

  They both stood and watched while the guard finished repacking Lek’s carry-on. The last thing he returned to her were the two little books Eddie has noticed when the guard was emptying her bag. She snatched both of them out of the man’s hand, and then she grabbed up her bag and stalked away.

  Lek sailed by Eddie and Bar without stopping, her mouth fixed in a tight line. They caught up with her at the entry to the loading bridge.

  “Self-righteous little Singaporean pricks!” She was so angry she was almost spitting.

  Eddie gave her a moment and then asked neutrally, “You going tell me what that was all about?”

  “Bullshit.” Lek’s eyes were flashing. “It was all about bullshit.”

  “And the size and color of the bull were…” Eddie made a rolling gesture with his right hand.

  In spite of herself, Lek laughed. “Sorry,” she said.

  She blinked a few times and then she moved her hand slowly across her face like a child miming a change of expression. When she dropped her hand, she was smiling again.

  “My American passport has my Western name in it and my Thai passport has my Chinese name. My mother was very traditional. These morons thought they’d nabbed a terrorist with a phony passport.” Lek’s anger appeared to be burning itself out quickly. “I’m sorry. Singaporeans just piss me off. They’re all a bunch of damned bananas.”

  “Bananas?” Eddie asked, clearly puzzled.

  “Yellow on the outside,” Bar stage whispered, “and white on the inside.”

  Eddie laughed as the line shuffled closer to the plane.

  “Why did they make such a big deal out of that?” he asked Lek when they bogged down in the crowd. “I thought it was common for Asians to have a Western name and an ethnic name.”

  Lek cocked her head at Eddie. “An ethnic name?”

  “Well, I meant—”

  “Yeah, I know what you meant, white boy,” Lek smiled as she disappeared into the aircraft.

  Eddie ducked through the door behind her, straightened up, and looked around. The aisle was jammed with a gathering of mismatched humanity frantically trying to shove into the airplane’s tiny overhead lockers what might easily have been the booty from the sacking of a good-sized city.

  Lek slid into her seat and Bar and Eddie edged on down the aisle to theirs. An elderly Chinese woman hefting a large box improbably labeled DENTAL EQUIPMENT ran interference for them.

  When they were halted by a bemused stewardess who tried vainly to separate the old lady from her box, Bar glanced quickly back over his shoulder to where Lek was settling into her seat. He nudged Eddie gently in the back. “What did you make of all that?”

  Eddie shrugged without turning around. “The Singaporeans get carried away sometimes. Just normal petty horseshit for them.”

  Bar leaned forward until his lips were almost brushing Eddie’s ear. “I don’t want to make something out of nothing,” he whispered, “but I think I got a pretty good look at Lek’s passports.”

  Eddie was silent, completely transfixed by the sight of the stewardess trying to force the elderly lady’s four-foot box into a two-foot locker. The old woman blocked the aisle, shrieking and flapping in near hysteria.

  “I’ve seen a lot of Thai passports,” Bar continued. “I don’t think that’s what Lek has.”

  That got Eddie’s attention and he turned his head around just as the stewardess gave a mighty heave and wedged most of the box into the overhead bin.

  “What was it?”

  “I might be wrong. I don’t want to end up with shit on my nose here, but I think it was a diplomatic passport.”

  Eddie cocked his head and thought about that. “Lek is carrying a Thai diplomatic passport?”

  Bar shook his head slowly.

  “No, not Thai.” He took a deep breath. “I think it might have been Vietnamese.”

  Eddie absorbed that as the stewardess gave the box one more shove and somehow slammed the bin door shut on it. As the line of waiting passengers started to creep slowly through the aircraft again, he puffed up his cheeks and cautiousl
y contemplated the implications of what Bar had just told him. When he found his seat, he flopped into it and dropped his bag on the floor. Tilting his head back, he exhaled very slowly in the universal sigh of deep fatigue and utter exasperation.

  “Well,” he murmured to himself, “fuck a goddamned duck.”

  Twenty-Seven

  IF people have ever heard of any place in Thailand other than Bangkok, and most haven’t, it is usually Phuket.

  A large limestone island set in the Andaman Sea just off the country’s south coast, Phuket reinvented itself in a single generation from a scarred landscape of abandoned strip mines into a world-famous beach resort. On the other hand, after the churning maelstrom of Bangkok and its ten million or so souls, lost and otherwise, nowhere else in Thailand actually counts for anything anyway so being the second best-known place in the country doesn’t really amount to very much.

  When the Silk Air plane whistled in over the steep sea cliffs of the island’s barren north coast and taxied to a stop at the small terminal building, the passengers were herded quickly through a cursory immigration and customs check and then let loose. Lek went to look for a restroom while Winnebago lit a Camel and Bar strolled off in search of a beer. Eddie hung back and scrutinized the other passengers as they passed through immigration. No one was paying any attention to him, he decided after watching for a while. That was what he had expected, of course, but nevertheless he felt a twinge of relief to see that it was true.

  Eddie walked into the main terminal building and glanced around to get his bearings. The structure looked fairly new, but it was already a long way down the road to shabbiness. The concrete floors were cracked and stained; orange plastic chairs scattered throughout the building were bolted into the concrete; and the only decoration were some large dead plants and a few wooden racks with some old newspapers. There was a dreary-looking shop of some kind, and out near the main doors a few plastic tables seemed to harbor ambitions of becoming a coffee shop.

  Eddie spotted Bar sitting alone at the back of the waiting room, his head buried in a small book. He walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. “So, what do you think?”

  Bar looked up. “You mean about Lek?”

  Eddie nodded and Bar chewed that over as he closed his book.

  “Don’t get all worked up yet,” he said. “I may have been wrong about that passport.”

  “But if you were right?”

  “Maybe it still doesn’t mean anything. There are a lot of Vietnamese in Thailand, Eddie. They’re not all out to get you.”

  “Don’t you think we had better find out for sure whether this one is?”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  Eddie sat down without answering, his eyes on the door and his back to the wall. He would have answered Bar, but he had no idea what to say.

  “What are you reading?” Eddie asked after a moment, glancing toward the thin book Bar was holding.

  “It’s a Thai phrasebook. Somebody left it in the seat pocket on the plane.”

  “I thought you spoke Thai. What do you need a phrase book for?”

  “I saved it for you. It’s pretty good. None of that ‘Your pencil is on the table’ shit. Want to hear some of the phrases?”

  Eddie shrugged noncommittally and then looked at his watch, losing interest. Where the hell were Winnebago and Lek? Maybe they had wandered off for perfectly ordinary reasons, but nothing ordinary had happened for so long that Eddie couldn’t keep himself from worrying a little.

  “It starts with, ‘Can you find me a hotel?’ That’s Ga roo na chuay pom ha rong raem noi krap?”

  Eddie fidgeted, his eyes flicking around the terminal, searching for Lek and Winnebago.

  “Then comes, ‘Can you get me a woman?’ Ga roo na chuay pom ha poo ying noi krap?”

  Eddie glanced at Bar.

  “After that, ‘How much do you cost?’ Khun ra ka—”

  Eddie held up his right hand, palm out. “Wait a minute. That’s not in there. You’re making this up.”

  “No shit, Eddie. It’s all right here.” Bar tapped the book with one finger. “Then comes, ‘That is too expensive,’ so I figure this thing was probably printed up for Chinese tourists.”

  Eddie tilted his head back and started to chuckle. “Anything else?”

  “‘I think you are beautiful,’ and ‘I love you.’”

  “Those are real useful.”

  “There’s one more,” Bar added.

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s ‘Will you marry me?’”

  When Eddie saw Lek and Winnebago coming across the terminal toward them, he stopped laughing long enough to lean toward Bar and whisper a few words into his ear. Bar nodded, glancing up at Lek, but then grinned again in spite of himself. By the time Lek and Winnebago slid into two of the orange chairs near them, Bar and Eddie were both laughing so hard they were wiping away tears with the backs of their hands.

  ***

  THE flight to Bangkok left a half hour later and, since it arrived at Bangkok’s domestic terminal, Eddie wasn’t overly concerned about being spotted. Anyone looking for them would have been working the international terminal building, not domestic arrivals. Their return therefore went unnoticed, at least as far as Eddie could tell, but just to be on the safe side he hustled everyone outside and into a taxi as quickly as he could.

  The Forty Winks guesthouse was in Chinatown at the end of a dimly lit lane that dead-ended at the river. There was a small sign next to the green metal gate. It was a tiny, yellow glass pane with one line of Thai characters and one line of Chinese, but nothing at all in English. It wouldn’t have been an easy place to find had Bar not hunched forward from the back seat and given directions to the taxi driver in staccato whispers as the little Toyota whipped through a maze of tiny, twisting streets.

  When their headlights flashed across a gate set back into a concrete wall, two white-shirted boys in dark trousers and black bow ties leaped quickly from folding metal chairs and pushed it open. Once they had driven inside, the boys flicked on flashlights and, directing the taxi with frantic but completely silent motions, led it toward a parking place like an airport ground crew guiding in a jumbo jet.

  The narrow alleyway inside the gate was lined with concrete parking bays, each hung with a green vinyl curtain. Above every bay was a red light bulb; some of them lit, and others dark. The attendants stopped at a bay about halfway down where the light was off and motioned the driver toward it. After he pulled inside, the curtain was quickly shut, leaving the taxi and its passengers hidden from view.

  “Okay, boss?” One of the attendants bent down close to the window. Bar nodded and the boy bowed deeply before stepping back and opening the taxi door.

  “Back in a minute,” Bar murmured to Eddie.

  He then spoke a few words to the driver in rapid-fire Thai and stepped out. Slipping through a crack in the curtain, he disappeared.

  The others watched as one of the teenage attendants walked to a metal door at the end of the parking bay. He pushed it open, gesturing for them to enter. Lek and Winnebago glanced at Eddie, and when he got out of the taxi and followed the boy inside so did they.

  They all examined the room beyond the metal door in silence while they waited for Bar to return. It contained a large round bed with yellowed sheets; a single brown naugahyde chair with a jagged rip across its seat; a metal stand opposite the bed with two thin towels, two tiny bars of soap, and a plastic comb; and a small black plastic television with a crack down one side on which music videos with Chinese subtitles flickered soundlessly. On the ceiling above the bed, mirrored tiles were arranged in a square outlined in tiny white lights.

  Before anyone could say anything, Bar came back and beckoned them outside. They followed him out past the taxi, through the curtain, and around behind the building. Hidden out of sight behind the parking bays, a weathered wooden deck was pitched up like a p
ier, hanging just above the brown waters of the Chao Phraya River. It was narrow and nearly rotted away in some places, but what there was left of it still stretched along the river for thirty yards or more. A large table and four wooden chairs were arranged at one end where the boards appeared to be the most solid. Two young girls had just finished setting out bowls of food and one of them was spooning rice from a big silver serving dish onto the plates set in front of each chair.

  Eddie looked amused. “Just part of the usual service, Bar?”

  “I’ve got a few friends here and there.”

  They were tired and ate quickly without much conversation. After dinner, they all filled coffee mugs from a big vacuum flask one of the girls had set up on a side table and pushed their chairs around until they faced out toward the river. Winnebago struck a match as he lit a Camel.

  Across on the opposite bank of the Chao Phraya was a nightspot of some sort draped in strings of brightly colored lights. Looking at them made Eddie think for a moment of the Christmas lights his father had made a ritual of stringing around their front door every year in New Jersey where he had grown up; but that had been in a time that was probably as much myth as real memory for Eddie and now when he tried to bring it back into focus from half a world away he found himself wondering if it had ever really happened at all.

  Eddie shrugged aside his memories and turned to Lek. His voice was soft and without inflection. “We have to know everything you can tell us about Captain Austin. I know you might not want to talk about it, Lek, but we have to know.”

  “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

  “Have you?”

  Lek looked at Eddie and said nothing.

  “We need to know who he hung out with; how he spent his time; where he went.” Eddie went on. “Somebody knows that. If it’s not you, it’s somebody else. Who would that be?”

  Eddie’s question hung there in the damp, night air. It bubbled and swirled, mixing with Winnebago’s cigarette smoke, and then it was carried away with the smoke into the darkness. The others shifted in their chairs and Lek shot a quick look at Bar, but he was studying his coffee as if something totally absorbing was floating there on its surface.