A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “He has all the local expressions like termites, Water Buffalo University, peu-un pods, purple, or short-time down pat. And he knows other names, too. Thai words never spoken in public by Thais. Garee is one Thai word for whore. Yeeng! so peh!-nee is a more polite form, meaning prostitute. Words you hear some men whisper only among themselves. The language and usage of onenight stands. At four in the morning he tips one of the waiters to play number 119—‘Women in Love’ on the jukebox. The Thai waiter knows enough English to understand the joke.

  “Outside of HQ there are other titles for the girls. Khun Kob calls our students’ sex industry workers.’ I have visions of workers in white coveralls and matching hats marching ten abreast through the factory gate at HQ where they punch a time clock and ask questions about their collective agreement to the shop steward. You want a language phantasm, look no farther than ‘foreign guides.’

  “Guides who work the go-go bars. Guides whose uniform is no uniform. Some of these girls know the floor plan of every secondclass hotel in Bangkok. The new language floats through those rooms every night. I’m curious about Dan because I understand him too well. Like him I’ve become a nomad with a language only other nomads speak and understand. I think in that language. And that scares me. I understand the consequences of building thoughts with those words.

  “The girls are inside a no-man’s-land and can’t find the words to get out. They have one chance. A way to learn English. Not Dan’s English, but real English. A week later, I’m teaching English to a class of foreign guides. A few months later I have opened a school. A few years later I have run out of money and there is a wobble in my life, and I know what I’ve built is about to tip over.

  “You want me to write a check? ” asked Lawrence. “Is that what this is all about? You need the money but are too proud to ask? ” The Bangkok Regent Hotel reeked of money, influence, and power. The deference that money bought was the tall, erect carriage and whispered tone of every staff member; an elite serving an elite. The luxury that money captured was visible in every place setting, the teakwood counters, the thick carpeting, and the air-conditioning that chilled the stately rooms for the comfort of those dressed in formal dinner jackets.

  “You think I asked you to come 12,000 miles to hit you up for money? ”

  “Didn’t you? Wasn’t that the plan? ”

  Tuttle had the wan smile of someone who had the upper hand. “On the contrary, I asked you to come because Asanee has something to give you.”

  “Give me what? ” Lawrence felt back in control; in an environment where he could breathe and think. “The sexual experience of my life? ”

  “I’ll forget you said that,” said Tuttle, a stern tone entering the conversation for the first time that night.

  Lawrence had hit a nerve. “Oh, we are saying her, are we? ”

  “You might say that.”

  There was a pause as the waitress returned and stood at attention before Lawrence, and bowing from the waist, asked in perfect English, “Would you like another drink, sir? ”

  Lawrence waved her off, not taking his eyes from Tuttle, whose face was flushed. Was it anger? The drinks, Dan-the-man, his school going down the drain—or was it something going back a long distance in their common past? “Or are you afraid of the competition? ” Lawrence finally said what was on his mind from the moment it was clear he wasn’t going to meet Asanee that night; that Tuttle for unspecified reasons was putting him off. It was as if the years hadn’t dimmed the original competition over Sarah. And Lawrence, his wife dead, in the lobby of a luxury hotel in Bangkok, found himself striking out.

  “There never was a fair competition, Larry,” said Tuttle, regaining his composure. He managed a smile.

  “Wasn’t the word jai yen? ” asked Lawrence. “Keeping a cool heart.”

  Tuttle raised his glass in a toast. “You learn real fast, Larry. You were always first in your class. Being first was important in the old days. Sarah needed to back a winner. She got what she desired. And that should have made her happy.”

  “It did,” said Lawrence, a little too quickly.

  Tuttle nodded, guessing that even Lawrence hadn’t fully believed that. Like most achievements, they masked an elaborate attempt to reconfigure life in terms of the winner’s circle. In a strange way, Tuttle found himself resisting the urge to console Lawrence; the man whose life had been consecrated to pension law, isolated from a wife whom he never really knew.

  “Besides, I don’t think you could handle Asanee. She might break your heart. So why don’t we forget her. It was a bad idea,” said Tuttle.

  “And Sarah used to call me a control freak,” said Lawrence.

  “You are.”

  “What are you afraid of? ”

  “She’s waiting outside. I’ll send her in.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “Just like before,” said Tuttle. Lawrence had waited in the wings with his promise of money and career for Sarah; a combination that had been his edge—he had been defeated by the very forces that he and Sarah had stood against. This time, thought Tuttle, he couldn’t lose. Money wouldn’t buy Asanee.

  And Lawrence’s first night outside the sanctuary of the Bangkok Regent Hotel ended with an awkward silence. Neither had anything else to say. Finally, Tuttle rose and gave him a printed card with the address of the school in Thai. “Give this to your driver tomorrow. I’ll see you at the school around nine. Don’t keep Asanee out too late. She’s one of our best teachers.”

  “Why not leave it up to her? ” asked Lawrence.

  “Why not,” said Tuttle.

  “She might like me.” Lawrence smiled.

  * * *

  ASANEE sat alone in the back of a taxi. Tuttle opened the rear door and climbed in beside her. The exterior lights from the fountain outside the Bangkok Regent Hotel illuminated Asanee’s face as she leaned forward out of darkness and rested her arms over Tuttle’s shoulders. She tried to find his eyes in that dim light. This was the moment of truth that he had been waiting for, planning for, living for, she had suspected, for a length of time that included all of her life. She loved him enough to do whatever he asked of her. He knew that she would never question him. Deep inside, though, she had wanted this chance as much as he had; but she had kept her feelings secret.

  “He’s waiting inside,” said Tuttle.

  Her arms stiffened around his neck. Even in the small light, her eyes were on fire with anticipation, that electric feeling of meeting a stranger; a feeling that she had long forgotten along with her days working a bar. She searched Tuttle’s face for some hint of how he felt. Was he remembering that first night they had spent in a hotel in Mae Sai? But nothing in his expression betrayed his heart.

  “I want to go now,” said Asanee.

  He squeezed her tight for a moment. “Go,” he said.

  He watched her walk away from the taxi. The sharp report of her high heels on the pavement were soon lost in the noise of passing traffic. She was steadfast, devoted, and loyal beyond any shadow of doubt, he thought. Her tall, elegant form in the night sent a sudden chill ripping through Tuttle’s chest; it was less the panic of loss, than the terror of losing himself in the void of the dead. She was the only person he had ever loved more than Sarah. It was ’68 all over again; a second chance, a rematch with the same stakes, only this time Tuttle was absolutely certain the outcome would be different.

  After the doorman closed the door behind Asanee, the taxi pulled away. A moment later, the driver turned on Rama IV in front of the Dusit Thani Hotel. At the Belgian-Thai intersection, the taxi stopped for the light. Tuttle thought of Sarah on the day of her wedding. He had cornered her alone in the washroom of the church basement two hours before the ceremony. She had gone down alone for a quick fix. He watched her take the syringe out of her handbag, heat the solution, draw it into her syringe, then double up her fist as she injected the heroin into her stomach.

  “A needle mark in the belly button. Clever idea,”
said Tuttle.

  Sarah jumped, her face twisted with terror, she saw Robert standing a couple of feet away. “Jesus fucking Christ, are you trying to give me a heart attack? ”

  “Aren’t you a little glad to see me? ”

  She finished her injection, pulled down her sweatshirt and dropped the syringe into her handbag. Her face glowed; she shuttered, closed her eyes, and let out a long whistle. “Bobby, Bobby what in the hell are you doing here? ”

  “I thought I might change your mind.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “You can’t marry Lawrence Baring. He’s a joke. And you know it.”

  “Then the joke’s on me!” she said, moving toward the stairs.

  He grabbed her arm. “Say that you don’t love me. Go on, say it.”

  “Let me go.” She tried to pull away from him but couldn’t break free.

  He shook his head. “Say the words. I don’t love you.”

  “I can’t, Bobby.”

  “Then let’s get out of here. I’ve got an apartment on Point Grey Road. The bedroom looks out over English Bay. We can walk down to the beach.”

  She rested her forehead against his. “You just don’t get it, do you, Bobby? ”

  “Get what? ”

  “Love isn’t enough. Not for any woman. We’re practical. We need to know where our next fix is coming from. Who’s gonna pay for it. You think my mother loves my father? Forget it. But you think she’s unhappy? She’s got everything she ever dreamed of and more.”

  “Why Baring, Sarah? ”

  “What you’re asking, Bobby, is why not you.”

  He let go of her arm.

  “Because you don’t have the appetite to go for the kill,” said Sarah. “Jesus Christ, don’t you know who you are? You’re the most dangerous of all men. A goddamn dreamer. There’s some decency that will always fuck you up; and if I stay with you, fuck me up, too. Larry would do anything to win. He doesn’t dream about anything except getting ahead. He’d step on anyone, fuck them up. He will always beat you. Because he knows in this world you gotta fight dirty to stay ahead in this life. Go back to Vancouver, Bobby. If the FBI knows you’re in town, Christ, you’ll end up before my old man. He’d love that.”

  “I’m going to cover the war. I’m leaving in two weeks.”

  “You make no fucking sense. You refuse to report for the draft, and then you want to go to Vietnam by yourself.”

  “Come with me. Great drugs, Sarah.” He began humming ‘Hey Jude’ at first a little off-key, and then she broke in singing the words.

  “Christ, I do love you.” Her hand slid down the side of his leg. Her tongue darted into his mouth. He pulled her sweatshirt over her head; as she unfastened her bra. As she guided him between her legs, Sarah moaned, her nails slowly digging into his back. On the floor of the church basement, as they made love, a rain shower began. They could see their breath in the gray, cold morning air. She wrapped her legs around his waist and they rolled over their clothes spread on the floor, laughing and singing, as if the moment would never end, as if it would always be 1968, and a single syringe lasted a lifetime.

  * * *

  FROM the first moment Lawrence Baring saw Asanee enter the hotel lobby, he understood Tuttle’s reluctance in allowing her out of his sight. He clasped the edge of the table and squeezed down hard. He closed his eyes and opened them again. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Her thick black hair fell straight to the small of her back; it had a sheen of red highlights. She was taller than he expected, tall and slender, and she crossed a room with a kind of animal intensity. Her eyes swept the tables, yielding a discernible distance, an aloof declaration that she belonged in the hotel alone that time of night. The outline of her thighs appeared beneath her dark skirt; revealed beneath her blouse were large, full breasts and broad shoulders, in total, the effect was to make Asanee closer to a work of art than a living, breathing human being.

  Lawrence found himself rising from the table and gesturing to her. What he couldn’t understand is why Tuttle had mentioned her in the first place. As she came towards the table, smiling, he remembered what Sarah had once said about Tuttle. “He’s a man who will always be defeated by his decency.” Asanee had needed help. The entire set-up at HQ began to make sense; all the stories about the danger of Thai woman, their greed, temper, and double-dealing had been for a specific purpose; the idea was to put maximum distance between him and this woman. And there was Tuttle sending her to exactly the right person, thought Lawrence. Tuttle deserved an A-minus for trying, he thought.

  Asanee sat down across from Lawrence and they exchanged those first few brief words that Lawrence couldn’t have remembered if his life had depended upon reciting them. What information he learned in the first half-hour was distorted, spoiled, lost in her every glance and gesture; he was in a state of pure absorption, making his way over the tall wall of emotions that he might have felt once a very long time ago. What had attracted him to Asanee with the G-force gravity that flattened him against his chair? He held on, hearing himself talk inside the loop of an immediate, uncontrolled flow that was part fluid, part light, and he was floating in the farthest regions he had only known with Sarah.

  What combination of emotions, chemicals, dreams, and past had been fused together when Asanee greeted him? And whatever that truth was, he couldn’t begin to understand the power of the catharsis he felt inside himself. She averted her eyes, her face flushed. It would have been easy enough to say two people have felt the surge of an attraction, a surge with enough force to wobble the carriages of the underground train that had travelled from childhood to that moment. She was looking out of every window as if she had always been in Lawrence’s life. She had arrived, as people rarely do, full-blown into his life, as if she had distilled the essence of what he had always desired, leaving behind an empty shell of all those years of wasted, false desires. How or why he felt this way, he couldn’t begin to understand; it was a case of reverse emotional engineering, of understanding the low melting temperature where feelings became alloys for action. Beyond all his feelings was an overwhelmingly powerful sense of lives about to overlap irrevocably.

  Lawrence felt the sudden impulse to tell her about Sarah. It made no sense, this desire to explain to this stranger how he had cried out in his sleep for his dead wife. He shivered and looked away from Asanee as if he had dreamed her appearance. She was there already. Patiently waiting. Sarah’s name had a strikingly sharp taste in his mouth. The girl Tuttle had sent for his assistance had caused the waves of that naked horror of Sarah’s loss to wash over him again. Somewhere in the power of her attraction he had lost his feet. What sensation clustered wasn’t sexual; but a spontaneous desire to be comforted by her.

  “Tuttle said I was vulnerable,” he said. “I recently lost my wife. It was a kind of violation of how life is supposed to work. Husband and wife should live a long time. The man dies first. Then the woman. That’s the order of things. But it didn’t work that way for me. I thought I was in pretty good shape. But I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I should go,” she said, pushing back in her chair. There was a shock in hearing him speak so openly about Sarah’s death.

  “No. Please stay. Sorry, I was thinking of Sarah. My wife.”

  She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “It was a very bad thing. Sarah left an empty space “ she said. “I wish for you she could be here now. She would like this room. This table. These flowers.” Asanee bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to say that. But his flood of feeling had swept over her, too; making her less cautious. She improvised quickly. “Is it too late to order? ”

  Lawrence made a big flurry of ordering her something to eat. Nothing pleased him more than providing what had been excluded behind an artificial wall of time. The kitchen was closed, he was informed. A couple of moments later, the waitress brought over the manager, and Lawrence pressed two purples into his hand. Plates of fruit, cheese, and bread appeared several
minutes later. He watched her eat as if he had never seen another living being press a strawberry to their lips.

  “Is Tuttle your boyfriend? ”

  She pulled the strawberry away from her lips; a wide smile crossed her face as she shook her head. “Not boyfriend.”

  “He might think otherwise.”

  “He’s very protective. He only want me to be happy.”

  “Sarah used to say that about him.”

  Why was Tuttle doing this? The guy’s sick in the head, thought Lawrence. I should be the last guy in the world he would ever ask to help a woman he was interested in. Unless, it was some kind of weird rematch. From the way Tuttle had spoken about Sarah, it was clear the loss had never really healed. Lawrence, in the end, couldn’t resolve the problem; Tuttle had thoroughly confused him. What he didn’t know was that it had been Sarah’s idea to bring Lawrence to Bangkok. In a real sense, she wanted the rematch between Lawrence and Tuttle even more than Tuttle had. Certainly Tuttle didn’t desire a home court advantage for Lawrence; he had been through that one before and wasn’t anxious for a repeat. Lawrence was the “away” team. This was Tuttle’s field of play, and the ball was in his hands.