A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Every night Tuttle auditions for the Lahu Godman role. Does he get a call back? No way, Jose. He pays his purple COD like the rest of us. He’s not a student of the visuals. Tuttle would only get hurt. The Lahu would take him apart like an edible berry.”

  “Why not stay here? There’s no shortage of women,” said Lawrence.

  Snow glanced at Tuttle and smiled. “You ain’t told him, man? ” asked Snow. Tuttle shook his head as the girl on his lap massaged his neck.

  “Told me what? ” asked Lawrence, looking back and forth between Snow and Tuttle.

  “You share this ant colony with every anteater in the world, man. We’re talking about well-used girls who have been fondled, fingered, licked, and sucked by legions of the unwashed rejects from New York to Berlin. Get real lucky and you might find a ringer. And you know what? Every resident shows up looking for the same invisible, supernatural girl who descends from the heavens above the jukebox. She walks over to your booth, hooks her finger, and says follow me. But she ain’t never coming; she don’t exist, and that’s why we have to invent her. Pray for her coming one night. Meanwhile, you end up with another girl who Gunter or Wolfgang has pawed and gnawed the night before.”

  “Magic,” said Tuttle, brushing the hair away from the girl’s face on his lap. “That’s what you were saying, Snow.”

  “That’s it. Magic. Take the bus north of Chiang Mai. Stop at any shithole village. Climb off in the middle of nowhere and hike up a mountain. Find a hill tribe with a tradition of Godmen. Then audition for the role. You show them a lava flow, and straightaway you get a long term contract. Next, you settle into the village. Close it off to those fucking trekkers. Man, no fucking trekkers, yuppie lawyers and accountants ever get in. To make your point, leak a little lava; throw a jet of fire out of the palm of your hand. You got their attention now. So you roll with it. Second order of the day—and this is why you’ve called New York City at great expense, paid for a courier to get the illusions delivered—is the numero uno. You call the headmen of the village, sit them down in a circle. Smoke a few pipes of opium to mellow them out. Then you lay the trip on them.”

  Snow paused, licking his thin, dry lips; his eyes looking blurred beneath the thick glasses. He unwrapped a piece of hard-rock candy and popped it into his mouth and made loud sucking sounds.

  “And lay what on them? ” asked Lawrence.

  “Lahu Godman wants virgins,” said Snow with a sense of satisfaction. He crinkled his nose as he continued to suck the candy. He unwrapped a second piece of candy and dropped it into the open mouth of the young girl sitting on Tuttle’s lap. “That’s the first phrase you learn in Lahu. It’s the first phrase out of the mouth of any self-respecting Lahu Godman. Round up all the virgins, man. You make one of the head guys your major domo. His job is to deliver virgins. You let him know this is a full-time job. He’s on call twenty-four hours a day. And if he fucks up, man, there’s a massive price to pay. Lahu Godman’s got no fucking sense of humor about virgins. Every night and every morning, like clockwork, you get a virgin in a white silk gown carried on a chair and put down in your room. Sooner or later, you have to face the reality of life. Your major domo’s gonna crawl on his hands and knees across your floor, looking as grim as death, and holding his balls—because, man, you’ve threatened to have lava leaking out of his balls if he ever doubled-crossed you—and he lays on the bad news. The village has gone virgin dry. There ain’t a single virgin you haven’t fucked before breakfast or after dinner.

  “The first crisis of your reign. You can’t let them think for one minute that any Lahu Godman is gonna put up with this shit about no more virgins. You throw a jet of fire and graze the right earlobe of your major domo. That does the trick. He’s pissing in his pants and thinking that it is lava leaking down his leg. He’s freaking out. Word spreads quickly through the village just how much the godman is disappointed in this no virgin news.

  “More virgins, you roar. Lahu Godman say, go to next village and steal their virgins. This is, of course, an act of war. But the villagers have no choice. You got them entertained and scared out of their gourds, man, I’m telling you, they’ll raid every fucking village between Chiang Mai and Mae Sai. You’ll get their relatives Federal Expressing virgins from Burma and Laos.

  “No more goddamn condoms, worry about clap, AIDS, virulent herpes, killer crabs. Just give the line, Lahu Godman want official visit with morel virgins. Or shoot a spike of flames up the ass.”

  Tuttle stretched his legs out as girl left to join her friends at a table near the television set. They watched a Thai kick-boxing match with a couple of waiters.

  “You’ve left out the down side, George,” said Tuttle.

  “Which is? ” asked Lawrence.

  Snow held the melted down piece of red rock candy between his teeth and pointed at his mouth. Then spit the piece of candy into an empty Kloster beer bottle.

  “You need self-will, man. You’ve got to know when to stop. Tuttle and I’ve gone over my Lahu Godman trip. You see, he’s got a point. All these Lahu Godmen ruin it for everyone else. Each one gets a little taste of power, and before you know it, fucking virgins isn’t enough fun for a day. He’s getting his rocks off at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then he gets a real funny idea. He forgets about making the call to New York, his couriered tricks, his American Express bill—and he convinces himself the illusions are magic. He thinks he is a real Lahu Godman. People filter in from other villages to bow down at his feet. He’s an event. What began as sex ends as politics. He becomes a politician with a mission. With an agenda. With an ideology, man, and that’s the worst of all. He thinks he’s figured out some great system for how time passes through the world. It’s not that hard. The villagers believe him; after all, he’s fucked every virgin in a hundred-mile radius. But this is a different scale. Every Lahu Godman ends up not only fucking all the virgins, but everyone else. So the villagers do the right thing. They get their revenge. They get rid of him. Shoot him, man. Spear him, bury him alive, cut off his fucking head, his dick, and his balls and bury them all in different ratholes. No Lahu Godman dies a natural death in his bed with his grandchildren around him.

  “So I stick to the safe ground. Just the standard bullshit, no tricks, no virgins, one night at a time, purples handed out COD. Maybe you could handle it. Ask yourself if your contentment factor is two virgins a day. Or three. You’ve gotta be brutally honest with your answer. If you want to go for it, my old man works in Hollywood, and I might get some development money for a script. But I need a real life character who’s done the trip, man. Think about it. You’d get a story created by credit, and some back-end money. Lahu Godman and a cast of virgins is the kind of stuff people want to see. Man up against himself and the hill tribes of Thailand. Special-effects heaven. People would go nuts over the story.

  “Or you can hang out at HQ like the rest of us, listen to the music on the jukebox, knock back Mekhong and Coke, and ask yourself if you’ve ever taken Noi back to your apartment. I’d go upcountry and take on the Lahu, but I know my own limitations. I wouldn’t stop with the virgins. Man, the American State Department would have to send in a team of forensic experts to dig up a mountainside just to find where they had buried my ass. And I’ll be perfectly frank with you. The Lahu are exporting most of their virgins to Bangkok. The Chinese characters in that business aren’t impressed with my cutting into their supply of virgins.

  “But while the power lasted, think of the possibilities. Each morning, the first words out of your mouth, ‘More virgins. Lahu Godman wants more virgins.’

  “The best you can hope for in Southeast Asia is a war. During the war, Vietnam was a well-ordered society. All the women in the bars; all the men in uniform getting their asses shot off in the jungle. Peace sucks. You get desperate thoughts. And before you know, you’ve had two too many drinks, and you’re on the telephone, and the guy answers the phone over a crackling line. You tell him—this is Bangkok, listen carefully. I’m an appr
entice Lahu Godman, can you give me a quote on a few illusions. Does all your shit come with clear instructions. And when you’re packing the order, put in an extra couple kilos of lava dust.”

  “Lawrence practices law in Los Angeles,” said Tuttle, a couple of moments in Snow’s thoughtful silence. The revelation darkened Snow’s face; his features twisted into a look of scorn. He slowly unwrapped another piece of hardrock candy, staring down at the tabletop.

  “What kinda law, man? ”

  “Pension law.”

  “A Lahu Godman for the ancients in America,” said Snow, shaking his head. His tone had changed as well as his expression. A crude bomb had exploded his dream.

  “We were at UCLA together in the ’60s,” said Tuttle to fill the awkward silence. “We shared an apartment together. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. He’s a good guy, George. Not every lawyer’s a complete asshole.”

  “Thanks,” said Lawrence, who had grown uncomfortable as if it had been announced he was the carrier of a fatal virus.

  “I guess it could be a comedy. Lahu Godman racks up a thousand billable hours with hilltribe virgins,” said Snow, with a slanting glance at Tuttle. “Lahu Godman sues major domo for failure to deliver. Lahu Godman pleads insanity.”

  After Snow had gone, Lawrence slumped in his booth, a confused, perplexed expression on his face. Snow’s unscheduled arrival and departure had left skid marks on his ego. His livelihood had always been a source of pride; of course, he knew of the anti-lawyer jokes, but knew underneath that his position provided a powerful identity and monetary significance. His name and the name of his law firm opened any door in Los Angeles. But in Zeno’s he was a displaced person; Snow had treated him as if he were a representative of evil, someone devoted to the force of decline, greed, and intolerance.

  “It’s an irrational thing with Snow. His hatred of lawyers,” said Tuttle, rubbing his jaw. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “I didn’t,” said Lawrence, lying. “He lives in Bangkok? ”

  “He has a room at the Highland Hotel on Sathorn Road. Your basic box that comes with no windows or carpets. The girls love it, he says. It reminds them of their own rooms. They can’t afford windows. Outside his hotel on Sathorn Road is a traffic nightmare. Ten lanes of tuk-tuk hardbraking all night. Sirens wailing. Paint thinner heads going one-hundred-ten-plus on motorcycles. The sounds of madness pounding in his head. He uses the place to refine his Lahu Godman act. He picks up girls from Silom Road and takes them back. They are like Valley girls. That Silom Road Valley girl and her deflowered friend know people who gossip to rangers, cops, Thai males with guns, bikers who eat bags of yah mah—speed. One day Snow’s going to be an item in the Bangkok Post: Thai male with paint thinner on his breath flees the scene. That’s after he’s wrapped three blocks of piano wire around Snow’s neck for screwing his sister.”

  * * *

  TUTTLE had logged enough time in Thailand to know that magic wasn’t for the cities. Not in peace time. Bangkok was a one-shot, try-out location for certain drifters like Snow who sooner or later found enough courage to take their show to a hilltribe audience. Tuttle didn’t tell Lawrence the real reason for Snow’s disappointment about the lawyer business. Snow had been looking for some years among the newcomers to Zeno’s for a sponsor. Someone to finance his trip. His father had nothing to do with Hollywood. But life had dealt Snow the hand as a major domo to watch, in his mind’s eye, some other farang’s ass busily pumping away on a virgin that by rights, he believed, belonged to him.

  ‘Like a Virgin’ played on the jukebox. Several girls sang along to the lyrics, dancing in an open circle, bumping hips, laughing, and ignoring the kick-boxing on the television at the other end of the room. The song got played several times each night that Tuttle came into Zeno’s. Snow got a little tearful each time it played. “I’m fucking serious,” he’d say, “I’m buying the rights to the music for my film.” No one ever believed that Snow was serious about the song, the Lahu Godman movie, or his own life.

  Snow had gone for a smoke in the alley. Before he left, he warned Lawrence to keep his plan confidential. “And don’t tell anyone about the Lahu Godman idea. You’re a lawyer. You understand that original ideas can’t be used. Anyway, I don’t want it getting around.”

  The more Snow had thought about it, the more he convinced himself that he should go upcountry and apply for the Lahu Godman job. After a few months at the Highland Hotel he had begun to miss not having a window. Besides, as he once confided to Tuttle, once Zeno’s started filling up with American lawyers, Bangkok was over; it would be time to head to the hills and take one’s chances with the villagers. Tuttle hadn’t forgotten that conversation months earlier when he dropped Lawrence s occupation into the conversation. He knew, however, that Snow would be back; Tuttle’s plans called for his reappearance.

  6

  Old Bill arrived at eleven-thirty dressed in a freshly ironed safari suit. Bill, who was in his sixties, had a wardrobe of hand-tailored suits made to fit his six-foot-two frame. Lanky, with perfectly erect posture, combined with sparkling gray-blue eyes, and straight white hair combed back with the hint of a part on the left side, Old Bill had a patrician appearance. Someone who had estates abroad; servants and staff running his local manor, and Royal Polo Club obligations as a former president. In truth, Old Bill lived on a small pension in a simple apartment.

  In the long, wide dimly lit alley behind Zeno’s, Old Bill on any given night was known to stop and run his eyes over one or two parked red Lotus or Porsches parked near the rear entrance. He had an attraction for fast foreign sports cars and was rumored to have been a professional race driver before the war.

  “Where do they find the money to buy these cars? ” A question Old Bill sometimes asked Tuttle, his hands calmly folded.

  “Business deals, Bill,” Tuttle would answer with a wide, open faced smile.

  “What kind of business deals, Robert? ”

  “Shipping, gold, cement, oil, or whatever.”

  “I once worked in a lighthouse in Cornwall,” Old Bill would say. “The entire structure, foundation and all, was cement. Could that cement have come from Thailand? Made the fortune for one of those boy’s grandfathers? ”

  “Maybe, Bill. But it would have been cheaper to have used Cornwall cement,” Tuttle would say, as Old Bill passed. “Think of the shipping cost.”

  “A point well made, Robert. Personally, I think the money from the cars comes from the whatever.’

  “The whatever gets my vote as well, Bill.”

  Neither Old Bill nor Tuttle believed the cars were bought from legitimate business transactions in shipping, gold, cement. But it never stopped Old Bill from asking the question and talking about his stint at the lighthouse in Cornwall. They talked in the coded language of expats; the “whatever” categories of human activity that went without specific names. The expensive sports cars attracted hungry eyes. As the overcrowded two-baht buses belched thick black fumes up and down Sukhumvit Road, crammed with Thais squeezed and dazed in the exhausting heat, sweating, standing silently, some hanging out of the open doors or leaning out of a window with a white handkerchief held over their nose, a new red Lotus was looked at with amusement or indifference; a transitory reflection of chrome and light from another cycle, another world.

  The fact such an expensive car would always be unavailable, beyond reach in this life, was not a cause for resentment. Tuttle discovered early on that one of the first things a farang new to Thailand was to relearn the limits of his world, his language, his capacity to acquire; he learned to describe a hurricane as a wind storm; and he understood for the first time that there were ways he was unable to help others.

  Old Bill who always paused in the alley of Bangkok’s most famous farang, gathering spot was a master of indirect language. He was also a master of the royal “we”; and the girls who employed his services came from a great distance to seek his assistance and advice.

  O
ne of the girls powdered her nose in the large wall mirrors above the dirty sink outside the bank of open toilets. She caught sight of Old Bill passing behind; a smile ignited on her face, and she turned away from the mirror, proudly holding an airmail letter with cancelled American stamps in the right corner. Old Bill stopped, hearing his name called, glanced in the mirror, smoothed back his white hair with his hands and lifted the envelope flap. He nodded as he read as if the truth of the man’s letter was being recovered bit by bit, considered and examined, and then Old Bill looked up with a studied expression in his flashing gray-blue eyes.

  “l think we can write a pleasant reply,” Old Bill said.

  At the far end of the HQ where the television was suspended from the ceiling in a small metal framed cage, an old woman, her bare feet crossed, wriggling her toes painted fire-engine red, sat deep into a bench and smoked a cigarette. Sitting directly opposite her, slouched in a chair behind a table, an old Thai man propped his dirty feet on a smudged chrome chair where he watched the kick-boxing match on television.

  Five hard, long rounds. Feet flew at the thighs, shins, ankles of the opponent. The barefoot kick struck out of nowhere. A foot aimed at the midsection, neck, or face blocked by a gloved hand. Another punch, another series of blows exchanged. A foot struck out but missed the face. The fighters circled each other, light on their feet, looking for an opening. Suddenly, there was a flurry of quick kicks followed by a couple of punches to the chest and stomach. A kick landed hard on the jaw of a fighter no more than seventeen years old. He blinked, shook his head, and stepped back to land a kick of his own. Round after round of punishing, brutal blows, but there was rarely any sign of cuts or blood; as if prolonged violence that everyone had witnessed could never be proved. It had been inflicted; but where was the evidence?