Munny’s memory flooded back. It was the tattoo map guy from Melbourne. He had wanted a two-color tattoo. First blue, and a week after that healed up, he had come back for the red lines. The map with rivers and mountains as well as three cities had turned out well. The customer’s uncle had been in the Vietnam War. After he finished the tattoo, the Melbourne guy had given Munny an extra two hundred baht tip. Backpackers rarely tipped. He’d even hugged Munny, saying, “My uncle will love this.”
The Melbourne guy on the stairs grinned at him as if Munny were one of those MIAs who’d finally been found.
“Meet my friend, Roger. He wants a tat of England on his bum,” he said, giggling. “Back home he plans to flash the Poms. I said you were the man. But where did you go? I went back to your place, and the owner said you’d left the country. Lying bastard.”
Munny looked the friend over.
“How many colors?”
The friend hadn’t given much thought to the colors. He palmed a joint, passing it back and forth with the Vietnam tattoo guy.
“Whatever,” said Roger.
Munny noticed the nose ring that fit the ponytail image.
“More than one color—three thousand baht,” said Munny.
Multiple colors were complicated. It couldn’t be done in a single session. A separate session was needed for each color on a tattoo. First the black ink, after a week the red ink, and a week after that came the final color. Like a root canal, a multi-colored tattoo was built over time—one stage, one level intricately connected to the next. The friend looked like a single-color map customer, not a connoisseur of the art, a man who simply wanted a message on his body that made some personal statement burning through his head. Roger looked like a one-session customer on a mission.
The friend pulled a face like he’d taken a fist in the gut.
“Discount?”
The guidebooks advised a tourist to always bargain. Munny didn’t see himself as a street vendor.
“Maps take time,” said Munny. “Show me the map you want.”
“The map of England,” he said, giggling. “You know, that map.”
He raised his hand and traced England with his finger in the air.
“Just like that.”
Munny looked at the sky. He didn’t see any map. His old customer intervened.
“Roger’s stoned. Just give him the standard tat of England. Nothing fancy. Hey, Roger, don’t fuck with him. He’s the best. You want England on your ass, try and find someone else who’ll do that for a hundred dollars.”
In dollars it didn’t seem so much.
“A hundred dollars? Shit, why didn’t he say so? Okay, you got a deal. ”
There was a problem, Munny told them.
“I can’t go back to my old shop. I had a fight with the owner. He owes me money.”
“No worries, we go back to Khao San Road, and you can make a deal with another shop to use their stuff,” said the Aussie with the Vietnam tattoo.
Not a bad idea, thought Munny, but it wasn’t that simple. The shop would want a cut of the action: at least fifty percent, probably more. He had an idea of his own. He had a friend who worked out of a hole-in-the-wall tattoo storefront off Khao San Road. He’d let him use the inks and equipment for five hundred baht.
“Three thousand is for me,” said Munny. “Five hundred for the shop. That covers the ink and needles.”
He built some margin into the price.
“Man, there you go raising the price,” said Roger.
“Up to you,” said Munny.
After a few months in the business, he’d been able to tell when a customer had made the irrevocable decision. Deciding was the hard part. Once he’d decided, the chances were he didn’t want to wait just in case he might start to have second thoughts.
“You cheap fuck,” the Vietnam-tattooed farang from Melbourne said.
“How long will it take?” asked Roger.
Munny tilted his head, looking down at the fish.
“Three, four hours, maybe.”
Looking at a customer, he could never figure what kind of tattoo they wanted. This guy didn’t look like someone who’d drop his pants and flash a map on his ass. But Munny had lived long enough and tattooed enough people to know he could never judge what a man or woman wanted to display, or hide, and how much shock and awe they were willing to pay for.
“Four hours? Jesus, that’s forever!”
“He could do just an outline of London,” said Munny’s old customer.
“That wouldn’t mean shit,” said Roger.
“Or how about the London underground map?”
Roger rolled his eyes.
“The point is to flash England.”
“Got it.”
They turned to Munny, who’d watched passively as the two farangs argued about the kind of tattoo that would cause the most outrage for a drunken Englishman in a Sydney pub and then over whether four hours was too long or not long enough.
“You’ve got a deal,” Roger said, taking a long drag off the last tailing of the joint. “Three hours, okay?”
It would take as long as it would take. Why did foreigners want an exact time for something like finishing a tattoo? It wasn’t a race. It was art, and art, like the fish in the basement, lived outside time, in a strange mental space that was hard to get to and hard to comprehend once you got that far. Roger leaned over the edge just as a large Banjar red Asian arowana broke the surface of the water.
“Hey, can you tattoo that fish on my chest? I want that fish on my flesh.”
A young boy came up from behind Munny and tugged his hand.
“My father waits for you,” he said.
Munny look down to find Heng’s son looking up with large, brown searching eyes.
“Vichet, I thought you’d gone with your mother.”
Vichet shook his head.
“Who would look after father?”
The boy was about the same age as his own son. The two had played together, and Sovann had helped Vichet with his homework. Complications of life kept adding up to large sums of misery, thought Munny, draping an arm around Vichet’s shoulder.
“Hey, where are you going?” asked Roger.
“Got some business upstairs.”
“We’re going with you. No way we’re going to lose you, man,” said the Vietnam-tattooed farang.
They climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. Heng sat in the southwest corner, his crutches leaning against the wall, shirtless, sweating, holding a bottle of water. The boy ran to his father and toweled off his father’s neck. Munny squatted down beside him.
“You don’t look so good,” he said to Heng.
“I want you to take my boy. I can’t look after him.”
Heng had made money begging on the streets, dragging his body along the pavement, one trouser leg empty, holding a cup. Foreigners dropped ten baht in the cup and hurried along. A final sideward glance was enough. Since the coup, though, it had become too dangerous to go out in the streets to beg, and he was nearly out of money for food.
“I was doing okay outside, but the owner didn’t like me begging there,” said Heng. “He called Kiri and Nimol to carry me upstairs.”
From the look of him, they’d roughed him up a bit on the way up.
Once Munny had arrived with two foreigners, it didn’t take long for word to spread, and Kiri and Nimol marched down the length of the sixth floor. The presence of the two large, young farangs standing on either side of Munny caused Nimol to reassess his approach.
“Munny, my younger brother, so good to see you.”
Munny stared through him.
“Vichet’s going with me,” he said.
Nimol pursed his lips, looking at Kiri.
“Nothing’s stopping you. But first, have a look at the generator. It’s busted again.”
“Got some business to do.”
Munny saw from the way Kiri was clenching and unclenching his fists that he was waiting for the signal from Nimol to
persuade Munny that the generator was a matter of great priority.
“People are living here? That’s fucking insane,” said Roger, looking around, holding his breath from the stench in the air. “Where do they shit?”
“You want us to look after Heng, you come on back after this business of yours is finished,” said Nimol.
In Thailand most people experienced that feeling of the hair raised on the back of their neck as they saw how others were held hostage by circumstances—believing it could never happen to them, as they held their last patronage card to be played against such a misfortune. The Khmers had no such cards, and a hostage without a patron was a dead man walking. Vichet wanted to stay. His father fought back tears and told him that he had to go with Munny. They had no choice.
The second digital protest moment happened at Victory Monument. The local press only gave it a few lines. But on social media the coverage, with comments and photographs, circulated widely as it was shared and passed on. Five students, two housewives and a taxi driver had been arrested. They had been standing on the walkway with cell phones. Someone on the scene had captured Munny’s image of four squatting peasants—he’d used his memory of Heng, Kiri and Nimol and himself for the models—who watched as two overbred toy dogs, one with a red ribbon, the other with a yellow one, each stained with blood, looking dazed from a street brawl. The commentators asked if the peasants had placed bets, wondered whether the dog owners also owned the peasants and speculated on what it was that one of the peasants was pointing at. Munny’s art had started an endless conversation.
The image had been projected for a few minutes from the cell phones at Victory Monument and then vanished. An hour later it had reappeared for a performance at a dozen other venues scattered through the city, only to disappear again after a few minutes. Munny’s art had the social media gurus scrambling to label and tag it—#HitNrun, #BanskyBKK, #BKKWall, #NoCoup. The authorities found no solid evidence against the people whom they’d arrested. The image survived as a screen capture and had circulated on Twitter and Facebook. Munny’s talent at last had been released into the world. Computer security personnel were ordered to deploy all necessary resources to track down and suppress the source of the art. A reward was offered for the first person to crack the code that led to the arrests of the persons responsible. In the bowels of the IT departments of a dozen agencies, a trace to the source code, only to find the GPS had been encrypted and all the back doors locked. It wasn’t going to be easy to pinpoint Munny’s location.
THIRTY-ONE
“We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.”
—Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
MCPHAIL, AFTER HALF a dozen attempts, had resigned himself to the fact that he might never find a replacement for the old Lonesome Hawk in Washington Square. He’d been in the middle of an afternoon massage, and it was just as the kneading by the twenty-three-year-old masseuse’s thumbs slammed into a nerve in his left buttock that McPhail sat up with an epiphany and a throbbing woodie.
“Why didn’t I think of that! It doesn’t need to be a restaurant.”
He arranged to meet Calvino the following day.
Calvino thought about McPhail’s solution as he looked in at the former site of Washington Square. None of the buildings remained, most of the rubble had been carted off, and the ground had gone feral with tall trees, leafy bushes and wild grass. Nature had reclaimed the Square, turning it into a mini-jungle sheltering wild cats and dogs in the heart of the city. A hundred meters beyond, Calvino wandered down a narrow sub-soi that ran next to the Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel. He glanced at the house numbers. McPhail’s great hope was hidden down the sub-soi.
The sub-soi, no wider than a driveway, had been encroached until it became a narrow walkway between motorcycles parked against buildings. The access to Soi 22 Sukhumvit Road was a point in its favor. It was inside the old defunct Washington Square country. The old-timers would go to a new place in the same area. The Lonesome Hawk regulars were men who liked things they knew and hated anything new. The first indication that McPhail might have overlooked a detail materialized as Calvino passed a Muslim-Thai restaurant halfway inside the sub-soi. The Lonesome Hawk crowd had too many rednecks to pass a Muslim-Thai restaurant without pulling a face, spitting, waving a fist or cursing, wanting to punch a wall. Anything Muslim made them lose their appetite. Farther along, Calvino stopped in front of a shophouse and checked the number above a grand wooden door, the kind that might be seen in a brownstone in New York or a terraced house in Burlington Gardens, London. It matched the address McPhail had given him.
A small sign above the door read “Cinépolis.” The second reason many of the old Lonesome Hawk regulars would shun the place was the foreign name over an imposing door that signaled a swank private members’ club. Jerry, the Lonesome Hawk regular whom Calvino had recently seen on Soi Cowboy, would look at the sign in Arabic for Muslim food, a woman in the window wearing a hijab, and then a sign with the word “Cinépolis.” The words “What the fuck?” would run through his mind. What’s with the funny comma hovering like a drone over the E? His hip would ache and he’d turn around and limp home. But Calvino was prepared to keep an open mind as he stood tall in front of the three-story terraced house, ringing the brass bell. He waited a minute or so until someone inside peered at him through a peephole. A moment later the door opened a crack. He saw the face of a young Thai woman looking at him. She asked his name and business.
“Vincent Calvino. I’m meeting Ed McPhail.”
“McPhail,” she said.
She smiled as she opened the door.
“McPhail” is the password, Calvino thought. He’ll be happy to know that.
As he stepped inside, he caught a whiff of leather and expensive single-malt whiskey.
“Khun Ed, he’s upstairs,” she said, closing the door behind him.
“Died and gone to heaven,” said Calvino.
“It ain’t heaven,” said McPhail smiling down at him from the mezzanine level. “But Lek is definitely an angel. Aren’t you, honey?”
Calvino walked through the ground floor, past framed pictures of actors, directors and a couple of movie posters. A highly polished writing desk stood at one spot, and old film cameras were scattered around as decoration. In the corner was a replica of Doctor Who’s time-traveling police box, the door ajar as if the Doctor would soon appear from another time or dimension.
McPhail leaned over the railing at the edge of the second-floor mezzanine, watching as Calvino took a good look at the police box.
“I went inside. I tried to go back ten years to the Lonesome Hawk. But the damn thing isn’t plugged in. Hey, Lek, honey, could you bring me another gin and tonic?”
Calvino looked up again at McPhail, who saluted him with an empty glass, and glanced at the waitress.
“You must be Lek.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“I’ll have a Laphroaig,” said Calvino. “Neat, no ice.”
From the mezzanine McPhail belched out a loud croak.
“Lek, cancel my gin and tonic and bring me a double Laphroaig, no ice.”
There was no sign of food. Single-malt was Scotland’s way of rescuing a hungry man from his need to eat. Substituting liquor for lunch and dinner had been the diet that killed off over half of the old Washington Square crowd. As Calvino climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the mezzanine, he tried to remember if he’d ever heard anyone at the Lonesome Hawk order Laphroaig? He had no such memory.
“On the third floor they’ve set up a little cinema with nine cinema seats. I told ’em we’d stick to this floor,” he said as Calvino emerged at the top of the stairs.
The open area looked like a Prince Street loft in Soho—polished wooden floor, a long gray sofa with white cushions at the end and a Persian carpet laid out in perfect alignment with the fake fireplace. McPhail sat on the sofa, his feet crossed on a long antique wooden box that functioned as a table, a pile of cinema ma
gazines on one end. Above the fireplace was an LCD screen.
“In fifteen minutes The Third Man starts. It’s a classic where nothing adds up—like the bar bill at Mama, Don’t Call. Orson Welles plays Harry Lime and Joseph Cotten plays a pulp fiction writer named Holly Martins.”
Calvino vaguely remembered the movie.
“Didn’t Graham Greene write a book titled The Third Man?”
“He wrote the screenplay,” said McPhail.
“The Quiet American, The Third Man... I guess he liked writing about secret agents. The Cold War.”
McPhail looked impressed.
“He did. He novelized his screenplay of The Third Man. But he didn’t write all of the lines in the movie. Orson Welles gave Harry Lime some of the best lines in the movie, like, ‘You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ ”
The waitress brought a silver tray with two glasses and set it on the table.
“Honey, can you go out and buy me a pack of cigarettes?” said McPhail.
“Alden Pyle gets murdered in The Quiet American,” said Calvino, “and Harry Lime fakes his murder in The Third Man. Greene believed there were two ways to go with an agent you want to get rid of. Kill him or have him create a situation that makes them think he’s been killed.”
Calvino’s eyes closed, and in that moment of darkness he saw Ballard standing in front of the Tabula Rogeriana, 1154 map, asking how much it would sell for. Would a man who is going to kill himself concern himself with the price? It occurred to Calvino for the first time that Ballard had left the copy of The Quiet American as a perfect piece of misdirection; it was the kind of thing that Harry Lime would have done. He lay back against the sofa.
“You okay, buddy?”
Calvino stayed silent, leaned forward and sipped on his whiskey.
Crackdown Page 27
