A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “You’ll excuse me,” said Old Bill, rising to his feet. “I have a class to teach.”

  After Old Bill disappeared, and Tuttle and Lawrence had found chairs, wiped dust off the seat and sat down, Khun Kob, without taking a breath, started explaining his political ambitions. He had run for political office many times but always failed to get elected. He confided his latest plan. He had decided to run again, if his party would have him, and if not, then he would form his own party. Lawrence figured out the language of his handshake. It had thrown him at first. Teachers didn’t shake like that when Tuttle and he had been students. Khun Kob’s political aspirations pinpointed his handshake in a larger context. Lawrence suspected that the headmaster had experimented with several variations in each losing election. And that he had spent countless hours, as all politicians did over a lifetime of seeking and retaining power, attempting to discover that inexpressible difference between the handshake of a winner and that of a loser.

  Khun Kob wore oil in his hair and combed it forward from the crown to a fringe of bangs an inch on his forehead. As he spoke, Lawrence thought of those Saturday morning TV shows when he was a kid in the States. He always wondered if Larry’s hairdo in the Three Stooges would make a comeback. It had in the back alleys of Bangkok.

  Khun Kob, like Lawrence, wore a pair of dark glasses inside the dimly lit room. A month earlier he had had surgery for the removal of a cataract. Lawrence wasn’t prepared for what followed. Khun Kob carried the cataract around in a contact lens bottle with a plastic stopper on top. He pulled it out, handed it to him, expecting him to examine it closely. The cataract looked like a tiny, yellow snail shell under the florescent light. Khun Kob kept it submerged in saline solution since the day the doctor had plucked it from his eye. Like a dead language, it had a blurred meaning in the world.

  And Lawrence thought of guys like Dan who had gone languageblind living in Bangkok. Men unable to see with their words in America; they had slammed into a wall of their native tongue and bounced off, dazed and confused—because they were no longer natives who belonged. They were lost tribers looking to join a peu-un pod of their own kind.

  “Foreign guides very good for Thailand. They make tourists happy and bring money to Thailand. And when they go back home, they send more money to the girls. My daughters, I call them. In the next general election, I think I will run on the platform of health clinics for foreign guides. No good these girls do not get good care. I think I have good idea. Maybe you can help me with it. Khun Tuttle tells me you a very famous lawyer in America. I’m thinking of export/import business. Maybe you have some idea. Many friends give me brief on business. Khun Tuttle pays me good. But I tell him maybe I’m no longer so strong. Not so much energy. Export/import business maybe better for me. Any idea you have, I appreciate very much.”

  Khun Kob played with his wide blue tie sliced with narrow orange stripes; it was loosely knotted against his white shirt that opened at the throat. He took off his glasses, squinted his eyes, then cocked his head, as a young woman entered the room. Lawrence had been lost in his own thoughts. Just as he thought he had figured Tuttle out, some new piece of evidence wrecked the basis of his previous judgement. The Thai girl waied to Khun Kob and Tuttle, then turned and stood in front of Lawrence.

  “Hello, Larry,” she said in nearly perfect English, extending her hand. Her oval green eyes shone bright in the morning light; her long, black hair cascaded down her backs. She stood a half-head taller than Khun Kob.

  “Father thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you would, though,” said Asanee in American-accented English.

  Lawrence had that confused look of having witnessed an optical illusion. He looked at Khun Kob and then back at Asanee.

  “All my daughters come from the Northeast. They know nothing in Bangkok. They follow Asanee. She is their senior. Their role model. They can see how Asanee improved herself. Made her life better. So we are very glad of your offer to help. Thank you very much.”

  He flashed a toothy grin and left. Lawrence and Tuttle stood in an awkward silence. The best they could do was exchange a side glance.

  Asanee looked over at Tuttle. “Did Khun Kob ask him for legal advice on setting up his export/import business? ”

  Lawrence sensed discord in her voice. “It’s all right. Your father only asked me about any ideas. But I’m afraid I don’t know much about export/import businesses.”

  “My father!” Asanee spun around from Tuttle, reaching out with a finger pointed at him. “This is my father.”

  Lawrence thought, at first, it was a joke. He looked at Tuttle and then Asanee; a matching set of green eyes. He had simply assumed she was Thai, like many farang, Lawrence had failed to observe the individual detail. His absorption of her had been so complete, and Tuttle so far removed from the moments they had shared, that it had never crossed his mind. Now that he looked at her closely, the features, not only the eyes, but the line of the cheekbone, her height, even something of the smile bore a clear trace of Tuttle’s.

  “No one ever made that mistake before,” said Asanee, brushing back her hair as she laughed, nudging Tuttle.

  The conversation of the previous night in the lobby of the Bangkok Regent Hotel made his cheeks flush red; he had, with little tact, explained to Asanee what a complete failure Tuttle was. And he had accused Tuttle of being afraid of the competition.

  “Your daughter? ” he asked, lowering his sunglasses and looking from Asanee to Robert, his eyes in unblinking shock. “Your own daughter.”

  “I wasn’t certain you’d help her if you knew.”

  “You think I’m that big an asshole? ” He immediately turned on his heels and apologized to Asanee for his foul language.

  Lawrence had, with a great deal of assistance from Tuttle and Asanee, misled himself; he had leaped headfirst from the past to the present without considering there might be more than one reason why Tuttle had so carefully sheltered the mysterious Asanee.

  Both Tuttle and his daughter shrugged it off. Lawrence was grateful when a moment later Asanee shifted the conversation away from his error. “Ever since Dad made Khun Kob headmaster of the school, he has been running around using the title in politics and business. But I think in his heart he cares about the students.”

  “Tuttle, I don’t know what to say. About last night,” began Lawrence.

  “Forget it.”

  “I really didn’t do, I mean, try anything. I wanted to help. Of course, I would, I mean I will help. You have a daughter who is a woman. My god, my god.”

  Asanee looked from Lawrence to Tuttle, standing erect, her hands clasped before her, head tilted toward her father. A beautiful twentyyear-old half-Thai, half-American loomed in the small, cramped room like an illusion. A trick performed by a Lahu Godman. The more Lawrence looked at the girl, the more apparent became her physical resemblance to Tuttle. She faced him with her father’s half-crossed smile on her face.

  “I’m not so certain it’s the kind of help I had in mind,” said Tuttle, exchanging a glance with Asanee.

  “If only Sarah had seen you, Asanee. Known what an incredibly beautiful daughter—sorry, I didn’t mean,” Lawrence sputtered his words out in shock as if he had been forced to pay one of his own legal bills. “I wondered if. I thought she. Shit, I can’t talk.”

  “Sarah was my good friend,” said Asanee, her face clouded with emotion; tears swelling as she said Sarah’s name.

  “You knew Sarah? And you didn’t say anything last night? Either of you. Why? What is going on? Could someone answer that simple question? I get set up, knocked down, set up and knocked down again. For what end? ” asked Lawrence, dropping into a chair. He looked over at Tuttle whose face betrayed no emotion. How could Sarah have known, thought Lawrence. Jesus, Sarah, he said softly to himself. What had Kelly said that last night in Los Angeles? That maybe he had never known Sarah?

  “I went to Los Angeles two times. I saw my father’s family. My grandmother tell me about how Sarah
was Father’s old girlfriend. I’m curious. I go to university. I see her. We like each other very much. From first time we meet. I go to lunch with her every day for one week. She says she can give me a job at the university. I can work as her assistant. It will help my English, she says. I say yes I will work very hard. She helped me so much. I loved her so much, too. I am so sorry she die. Sarah jai dee. I think she was like a second mother. I cannot say anything last night because I want to know what kind of man you are.”

  Asanee broke down weeping, covering her face with her hands. Tuttle slipped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her head to his chest. She wept for what seemed like an eternity. Neither Lawrence nor Tuttle said anything. The more she had spoken, the more broken and fragmented her English had become until, at the end, only sobs came from her mouth. Asanee collected herself, a shudder of emotion shook through her body.

  “You worked for Sarah. How long? ” asked Lawrence, his eyes closed, as if the room would disappear, Tuttle, Asanee, and Bangkok, and he would wake up out of a nightmare and Sarah would be beside him asleep.

  “Three months,” answered Asanee, blowing her nose in a handkerchief produced by Tuttle. “She say I go back next year. And every year. Before I go home, she gave me something. She say anything happen to her, I must give to you. I very afraid. ‘Why,’ I ask her. She say, ‘The bad thing can happen to anyone.’ I don’t understand. She say, ‘Never mind. You like my daughter. Just keep for me, okay? ’ And I say, ‘Okay, I keep.’”

  Asanee pulled an airmail envelope from her pocket and offered it to Lawrence. He stared at it for a long moment before reaching out and taking it. His name was printed in Sarah’s handwriting. On the back she had written over the sealed flap: OPEN ONLY IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. Beneath those words, Sarah had written, FOR LAWRENCE BARING, ESQ. EYES ONLY. Lawrence turned the envelope back over, tapped it on the side of his chair. He looked up at Tuttle; hot tears streamed down Lawrence’s cheeks. He leaned forward from the chair, elbows on his knees, his cupped hands cradling his forehead.

  “We’ll be just outside,” said Tuttle, taking Asanee by the arm as he opened the door. “If you need anything, you know, give a shout.”

  Lawrence waited for several minutes before he walked over to the window. Below a group of children played “war” with toy rifles inside a couple of the wrecked cars. A soi dog, balled up near a food vendor, scratched its ear with a hindleg. Looking away, Lawrence tore open the letter.

  “Neither Tuttle nor Asanee are aware of the contents of this letter. Or the request contained in it. I met Asanee almost by accident. She was in LA staying with Tuttle’s parents. His mother said if she wanted to see a nice campus she should go to UCLA, that her father had an old girlfriend working in the English Department. Larry, Asanee and I became very close. I told her a great deal about you.

  “She became the daughter I never had. I made a difference in her life. I think I was the first professional woman she had ever known. I talked to her all summer about literature, writing, Thailand, about helping her own people at Robert’s school. Tuttle doesn’t know how close she had come to quitting the school. She was making no money. As you would expect, Tuttle runs the school on a shoestring. It’s located in a slum, he doesn’t have decent books, or classrooms, and his staff of teachers are a crew of oddballs named Snow, Crosby, and Old Bill. There is a weird Thai named Kob who Tuttle gave the title headmaster in lieu of much pay. The whole set-up sounds pretty desperate. But Tuttle is trying to do something important.

  “Outside of Tuttle and my mother, no one ever knew I had been an addict at university. God, how I hate the look of that word on the page! Addict! It’s so dirty, awful, filled with gloom and dead ends. The thing with an old junkie is they never really kick it. One day, one night, it might be years later, it creeps back and grabs you in the middle of the night. I had gone back on heroin before I met Asanee. Here was a young girl looking up to me as a mentor, a role model, this tower of strength. And I was shooting up. Asanee is the only person I ever rescued. I made a real difference in her life, and taught her to treasure the future. If she ever knew . . . the truth, it would undo everything.

  “I am so tired, Larry. I can’t keep up the game. I should be stronger, I know. But you don’t know what an addiction can do. You have no idea. Checking out isn’t such a big thing. Funny thing, that if I hadn’t met Asanee, I would have done it before. She lengthened my life by three months! Three wonderful, incredible months.

  “I would request that you set aside the $1 million insurance money in a trust fund and use it to establish a fund for Tuttle’s school in Bangkok. It will secure the school’s future, Asanee’s future, and give her a chance to make a difference in other people’s lives. By the time you read this letter, you will probably have the money. I know that it always bothered you that Tuttle seemed to be in control and have the power when we first met. This time your dealings with him can be different.

  “He will never know about my request unless you choose to tell him. What I’m asking isn’t for Tuttle. But for his daughter. You have the upper hand now. Please don’t let the past between the three of us get in the way of the school or Asanee’s future. I made my moral choice; now it’s your turn, Larry. You choose the right thing. There is a Thai expression that Asanee taught me. Dtam! jai!, koon. It means follow your own heart; or, it’s up to you. Sorry for the hurt, your pain. Sarah.”

  * * *

  LAWRENCE looked up from the letter, his face tight, drawn. From outside he could hear Snow’s voice.

  “Man, there ain’t any such thing as ‘up-and-coming’ bar girls. Wandos like Dan keep them on the down escalator.

  “From the first day, from the first trick, they’re doomed. There’s no turning back. I think we are wasting our time trying to teach them English. No one’s buying these girls to talk to.”

  Lawrence felt as if he were walled up in a tomb; caught in a dimension of disembodied voices, where the disfigured, entangled, and concealed past had flown apart and reconstituted itself as something not only different from what he had believed, but had displaced his central role. He glanced at the end of Sarah’s letter again. Follow his heart, she had written. Her message gave him a sudden chill, making him shudder. She wasn’t there to question, and it was impossible to pull her back into space and time. She was gone. His mind filled with contradictory thoughts. He paced in front of the window, rereading passages of the letter. The core of his marriage had been formed from substances he no longer knew how to name. They had had a perfect marriage. Everyone had said so. He was a senior partner in a major law firm; she was a distinguished professor at UCLA. They were the American dream. They had purpose, dreams, amused one another, lived in comfort, travelled together; they had shared the same state of mind, one of tranquillity, Lawrence had thought.

  How could he have been so inattentive, then, that he didn’t know his own wife was a junkie? He had been working at night. The big deals, the closing party with the client she never attended, the red-eye flights back and forth to New York or Washington on behalf of clients. If only he hadn’t been so busy, maybe he would have noticed. Sarah might still be alive, sitting in her university office, preparing a lecture, talking with a student, or writing in her diaries. Everywhere he turned, some new secret hiding place of her life popped open; each one stuffed with unsettling surprises; each a deliberately created, self-contained world that provided her a vehicle for escape. And, in the end, she left Lawrence to collect the pieces and to put them end to end, forming a grand puzzle.

  The police report had contained the same words the officer had used at the hospital emergency room. “She must not have seen the ’88 Olds. She left no skid marks. The deceased was not wearing her seat belt at the time of impact.” It had been a bright, clear day. What the report omitted was that Sarah had accelerated at the point of impact. She had made it look like an accident. His law firm’s insurance company, and UCLA’s carrier, had paid the double indemnity proceeds under each policy. Suic
ide would have voided any payment. Sarah had made a conscious choice. Accidental death, said Lawrence to himself, putting the letter back in the envelope.

  What to say to Tuttle? Or his daughter, Asanee? No one spoke as he stood there, resting his forehead against the frame. He had never felt so alone, abandoned, or distracted. Sarah wanted him to distribute a million dollars to what? This miserable excuse of a school. Maybe Snow’s overheard conversation summed the real truth. The entire enterprise was a horrible waste of time, money, resources.

  Each time Lawrence tried to dismiss Sarah’s idea as misguided, the Thai expression she had used, Dtam! Jai! koon echoed through his thoughts. Hadn’t Crosby argued that the heart was the key to the Thai language; and then Tuttle had countered with Mai Pen Rai—never mind, no problem, that’s life. Lawrence slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket, glanced out the window again. His driver was inside, the windows of the Mercedes rolled up, air conditioner obviously on full blast, reading a newspaper spread over the wheel.