Crackdown

by Christopher G. Moore

  At last he got the generator started again, and the plastic blades on the fan rotated once more. Chamey rewarded him with a genuine smile but said nothing. There was no need. His boy smiled at him too and raised his fist in the air. The others at the gutting and packing table looked like they’d won the lotto. “Thanks, Munny,” fell from their lips.

  He’d always been a solitary type, even as a child, and had grown into a man who didn’t like trouble. He was also his wife’s cousin. They shared the same grandparents on their mothers’ side. Chamey’s mother, Munny’s aunt, was still in Cambodia. Munny had married Chamey when she was fifteen and five months pregnant. The other two women on their part of the third floor were his other aunties. After gutting and packing the fish, five members of the family went to set up a stall to cook and sell them. The family had come from Battambang, an old Khmer Rouge stronghold, leaving behind them a place of landmines, ghosts and hunger.

  The family had outfitted their corner of the third floor with bamboo poles and canvas stretched between them for sleeping quarters; it was a family lair. Other floors had more families from villages along the border. They all sent money back home each month. No one living in the Aquarium ever used a bank. Cash was hand-carried to its recipients, and sometimes men in uniform would stop the courier, take the money and push him back across the border—if he was lucky. It didn’t much matter whether what uniform the official wore. The result was the same. Pay. Munny’s best friend, on the fifth floor, had lost his cousin on a cash run to Kampot. No one ever heard from him again or found his body. He vanished, and there was no one to go searching for him. He could have run away. He could have been killed. There were so many ways for someone to go missing. And there were many rumors of Thai authorities roughing up illegals, putting them in jails or selling them to fishing boat owners as crew. The stories were enough to feed their fears that life outside the Aquarium had as many dangers as a Battambang minefield.

  The Aquarium was no holiday resort. Its lack of architectural finishes made it an elevated outdoor experience. They did have a roof and a floor, and that was something. But a coffin had those things too, and also sides. There was no satin lining in the Aquarium. Prisons at least had painted walls. Raw and rough interior concrete walls and floors gave it the appearance of an ancient cave. At night, shadows from lanterns and candles danced over the cave walls, and the sound of someone playing a flute—or vomiting or shouting—echoed as if demons had ambushed a victim, and the rattle of his last breath whipped through the structure.

  The mothers of the Aquarium sometimes threatened their children with banishment to the watery basement if they misbehaved, and Chamey was no different. Some of the younger children were terrified of going down there. The guards even told them stories about how alligators had eaten two or three children. Because of the depth of the water, it seemed possible. Pillars shot up from the watery depths, and the dank vapors made the children’s eyes water. Fish up to three feet long broke the surface, spraying everything around them.

  Like fishermen back home in Cambodia, the building’s residents lived close to their food supply, mended their nets and hung them out to dry. The community had been organized around farming the fish. Some of the men had escaped from Thai fishing boats, where they’d worked for months at a time but had never been able to repay their “loans.” They knew about fish. They knew about the kind of men who owned boats to catch fish. And their history had taught them that the owners were as dangerous as the old Khmer Rouge. The squatters argued at night whether to put out Claymore mines like the ones around their village. They only knew one or two people who had died of old age. For their community death came calling long before the body was ready to go. Living like hermits, they played hide and seek with their fate.

  At night they lay on their backs, as in their village, but could see no stars. Sovann asked his father to paint stars on the third floor ceiling over the chalk lines. Munny painted the Orion constellation, mixing fish scales into the paint. Each painted, cut-metal star in the constellation was the size of a soccer ball, beautifully designed, with sharp edges that caught the light. The stars sparkled when Munny pointed a flashlight at the ceiling. Sovann smiled at the heaven his father had made. Not everyone had such a high opinion of Munny’s artwork. The aunties who’d watched him moving a bamboo ladder to climb up and reach the ceiling thought he wasn’t right in the head. There was no money in it. Since he was a child, Munny had had the same reaction to his art from others in the family and village. Better to fish than to paint a sky that wasn’t real.

  After the first constellation, Munny had started on a second one, choosing Taurus the bull. No one but his son praised his work, but that was enough. Munny found that an artist needed only one admirer to sustain his faith. Within a few months he had added Taurus, Sagittarius and Pegasus, drawing on his memory of the night sky in all its detail. As if he were lying in the fields once again, his mind’s eye moved across the curtain of darkness that stretched from one horizon to the other, remembering.

  Having fixed the generator, Munny headed for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” asked Chamey.

  “I have a new job.”

  Everyone who’d been talking stopped.

  “What kind of work?”

  “Art work.”

  “Tattoos?”

  He shook his head.

  “A Thai hired me.”

  Chamey looked doubtful.

  “It might be a trick,” she said.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  “What kind of art? Stars?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find out.”

  “How much is he paying you?”

  Munny looked at all the faces studying him for the answer to the one question on all their minds.

  “She’ll tell me today.”

  Chamey and the others reacted with disappointment.

  “Why didn’t you ask her?”

  Munny shrugged, wondering why he hadn’t thought to ask the night before. But the shock of having ten thousand baht stuffed in his shirt pocket was a good enough reason. No need to ask too much with someone stuffing cash into your clothing.

  “I think she’ll be fair.”

  “When has any Thai treated us fairly?”

  “Are you going to paint her stars?” asked one of the aunties.

  The others laughed. Their laughter burnt a big hole through his pride. He thought that after a lifetime of taunts and rejection of his drawings, perhaps he should have developed a rhino hide, but his skin remained as thin as when he was a boy.

  “Don’t you have fish to sell?” Munny reminded them.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He ran down the open concrete staircase to the landing on the second floor and nearly ran into an Eight-Niner guard climbing up the stairs from the basement.

  “Where are you going, star man?”

  “To look for work.”

  “Good. You come back and pay what your wife owes, okay?”

  TEN

  “Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.”—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  EVER SINCE THE wrecking ball had demolished Washington Square, McPhail had been on a personal mission to discover a new lunchtime hangout, one that would draw what was left of the old gang of regulars from the Lonesome Hawk. All kinds of new bars, cafés and restaurants had opened along Sukhumvit Road since the Lonesome Hawk had been reduced to matchsticks, loaded into dumpsters and hauled away. The problem was the new places were either too far away or too upscale, or they had rules against smoking and getting drunk, or waitresses who cadged drinks and checked off for a short time, dragging the customer up a flight of rickety stairs.

  The fact was, most of the Sukhumvit crowd had forgotten Washington Square as quickly as a young woman who trades in a poor husband for a rich one. The expat culture had changed from the old days. It had been a long-running party witho
ut many rules or the need for much money. By the time the wrecking ball arrived, the bars in the Square were on life support anyway, fed by a group of regulars who had informally decided they would not go to a lot of trouble to live a long time. They’d all been around long enough, and waiting for the inevitable only pushed their drinking from evening into afternoon, and by the end of the Square’s life, into late morning.

  They’d made things up as they drifted through the long, hot days. It was a time when a man got lost for a long afternoon with a bottle and a woman, and no one could reach him. A time before iPhones and iPads, Facebook, Twitter and Line messaging. The Lonesome Hawk was one of those bars where stupid things got said and argued about. No evidence of those old conversations survived, only the failing memories of old-timers who’d lost the plot. Most of the time they shouted about the unfairness of not having enough money or women who wanted too much money. Maybe lifting a shirt to show off a war wound, they would bitch about meager social security benefits and advise listeners how to stay out of serious trouble. They had trouble adjusting to the modern world, where young foreigners compared their own scars not from violence but from bicycle accidents in the Bangkok traffic. They complained that finding a reliable friend among the new generation was as likely as stumbling over a Gothic pipe organ in an Isan brothel.

  McPhail, though, never gave up hope of discovering a new drinking place.

  “I found it,” he said to Calvino as they took a taxi into Soi 49. “The perfect bar.”

  Calvino nodded. He’d heard McPhail say it before and with the same conviction. He had that Bill Clinton, I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman kind of sincerity. Even though you knew he was lying, you couldn’t stop yourself from wanting to believe him.

  “Time to bring along the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign?”

  “Fuck you.”

  McPhail saw that he had lost Calvino’s full attention as his iPhone was distracting him.

  “In the age of signs, everyone gets two words for their T-shirt. What do you choose, McPhail, other than of course ‘Fuck you’?”

  “I’m keeping an open mind,” he murmured.

  McPhail let Calvino’s skepticism slide pass. There was no point arguing until Calvino saw the place—and either he could see the potential, or fuck him, he was a fuckwit.

  “Did I tell you it’s called the Happy Bar?”

  “You did mention it. ‘Happy’ is the magic word of the moment. Have you heard about the detentions?”

  McPhail nodded.

  “It’s just the locals screwing around with each other. I don’t see any foreigners being taken in. Besides, the army says they’re treating everyone well.”

  “Cookies and milk. What do you expect them to say? We tortured two academics today? They promised to change their footnotes, so we let them go?”

  “Calvino, look. If you go around bad-mouthing the coup, they won’t make it easy on you. They’ll make it tough. Why do you care? The traffic’s moving, people are going to work, eating lunch, drinking and screwing.”

  McPhail leaned forward and instructed the taxi driver to turn into a small sub-soi in a residential area.

  “Almost there.”

  “The new bosses want everyone to be happy,” said Calvino, reading from his iPhone screen.

  Scrolling through Fah’s Twitter timeline, he read one of her Tweets aloud: “Junta adjusts the attitudes of scholars who are unhappy with them.”

  McPhail’s head had begun to resemble an ancient sandstone lion’s head eroded by sun, wind and rain. He tilted his head to the side.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Tweets.”

  “I didn’t think you did that shit.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Right. ... I thought it was you talking.”

  “It was me talking, Ed.”

  “You know what I mean. You were reading someone else’s words?”

  “Alan Osborne’s girlfriend.”

  “Stop,” McPhail told the driver. “Go back. It’s back there.”

  McPhail rolled his eyes because the driver had overshot the bar by twenty meters. They got out of the taxi and walked to the front of the Happy Bar, where half a dozen katoeys lounged in high heels, fishnet stockings and the larger-sized exotic sleepwear sold by street hawkers. He looked again. One or two might have been actual women who blended in with the katoeys. The right makeup, surgery and outfits camouflaged the original gender much as green-brown netting covered a tank in the desert. The staff lolled about in chairs out front, smoking and jabbing their fingers on their cell phones. Looking up to see real, live customers, they waved and smiled. Two of them made straight for McPhail, throwing their arms around him. One of them took a cigarette from her lips and stuck it between his, and then kissed him on the face.

  “You’ve been here before, Ed.”

  “Man, I told you that. They know me. Don’t you baby?”

  “It’s probably better that Old George isn’t around anymore.”

  They walked into the bar. Calvino followed behind as McPhail strutted like a fighting cock, with a katoey on each arm, smiling as smoke spiraled out of his nose. The katoeys marched McPhail to a booth in the back near the kitchen. McPhail, distracted, didn’t notice at first a man at the adjacent booth, seated with his back to them, curled up with a newspaper. The man turned around.

  “Vincent. You’re right on time.”

  Ballard held up his wine glass and toasted McPhail and his two escorts.

  “Ed, this is Ballard.”

  “Your houseguest. I’ve heard about you.”

  “All good things,” said Ballard.

  “Why don’t you join us?” said Calvino.

  What was Ballard doing at the Happy Bar? Dressed in an expensive white shirt open at the collar and tan trousers with a perfect crease, he also wore a cologne scent that had one of the katoeys sniffing and sighing.

  Changing seats, Ballard turned to Calvino and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I join you for lunch. Your secretary said I could find you at the Happy Bar.”

  “You know how many Happy Bars there are in Bangkok?”

  “I got lucky,” said Ballard. “Only one deep into Soi 49. I took a chance and here you are.”

  He looked around the room.

  “What do you think?” asked McPhail.

  “An inspired find,” said Ballard. “A place I’d never have found by myself.”

  “It’s not in the guidebooks,” said Calvino.

  “Don’t listen to Calvino.”

  The katoeys drifted over to the TV, connected to a DVD player, sitting like an artifact wired from another time. Covered under a film of dust, it still functioned like a museum display on a metal shelf bolted to the cheap wall paneling. One of them cranked up the volume of Beyoncé’s “Dangerously in Love” video, and the katoeys started to dance and sing along. The walls were plastered with posters of Jimi Hendrix, John Wayne and Michael Jackson, some of them framed, others taped to the wall, their edges frayed and curling up like a sneering Elvis lip.

  “Everyone needs a theme song,” said Calvino.

  “Mixing danger and love is risky business,” said Ballard.

  “I’m gonna like you, bud,” said McPhail, “because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

  He turned to the waitress.

  “Bring me a double vodka and soda, sweetheart.”

  “If I’m interrupting something, let me know,” said Ballard.

  “What do we look like? A couple of spooks?” said McPhail.

  Calvino sat back in the booth, wondering exactly what Ballard wanted from him.

  “Ed’s been scouting for a new lunchtime hangout.”

  “A place with character,” said McPhail.

  “Some people confuse a place with character with one filled with characters,” said Ballard. “Still, I believe you’ve found both.”

  “See, Calvino, what did I tell you?”

  “I can’t st
ay long,” Ballard continued. “I have an appointment on Sathorn Road with an Englishman named Alan Osborne. He said that he’d known you for years.”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  Calvino wondered how the two of them had connected, and the possibilities formed a succession of dodgy deals in his mind. Calvino had known Osborne for more than twenty years, but he kept that detail to himself.

  “How do you know Osborne?”

  “It’s not all that different from how I came to know you. Pure accident. We both love flying, and it turned out we owned the same kind of plane. Piper Seneca V. Same year, 2001. Our planes were parked side by side in Phnom Penh a couple of years ago. We stayed in touch.”

  “You’re meeting up with Osborne?” asked Calvino.

  “Not Alan but someone he knows who wants to buy a yacht. Alan thought I might know a seller and could help broker the deal.”

  “Osborne knows a lot of rich people,” said Calvino. “He would have loved Christina Tangier. Though he would have likely stolen the teddy bear.”

  “That was my impression, too. Seems that markets are much smarter than people who deal in them. Some people buy a ship like a racehorse because it will enhance their status in a certain crowd. While other men buy a ship like a draft horse, to build an empire. I know both kinds.”

  Ballard pushed back his chair and stood beside the table. Raising his half-filled glass of the Happy Bar’s cheap red and looking at it, he then set it on the table without drinking from it.