A Killing Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  “I returned to the massage parlor, picked the same girl. She had remembered me, shooting one of those tired, worn shrugs as she carried a fresh set of towels and walked ahead of me. I had discovered a new game in which sex was no longer the ultimate goal. Get me to the magazine rack. I got her to rip out pages of books, and I stood on the bed, the used condom elevated over my head and let it drop. Hitting a bull’s eye on some bad review, some bitching and moaning tirade written by a backroom goon squad of hacks bonded by their ignorance, their hatred for the truth, none of what I wrote mattered. I watched the newsprint bleed into an inky patch without any meaning, without any intelligence, and saw that before and after were really the same. That was eighteen months ago.”

  Crosby rolled his eyes and nudged his elbow into Snow’s ribs. “Every time you tell that story, I get very depressed. I would much prefer to talk about horse racing or girls or shopping. While a bit of money remains in the old pocket, my thought is to buy a girl. Maybe I’ll spring for a three, four-month contract.”

  “Like Dtoke,” said Snow. Conversations concerning women brought him back to life. He had a better memory for their names than any other hard-core at HQ. His memory extended to the names of women that Crosby and Tuttle had slept with years before and forgotten. Dtoke’s name registered a smile on Crosby’s lips.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Crosby said, the memory pleasing him. “Someone memorable.”

  “He bought Dtoke from a brothel,” Tuttle said, seeing the bewildered expression on Lawrence’s face.

  “I bought her contract out of a knock-shop on my 21st,” explained Crosby, crossing his legs, his shoulder sloped forward as if throwing off a sudden chill. “Daddy had given me quite a lot of money. I got the brothel owner down to ten thousand baht. A fair price, I thought. Of course, he made a profit. Since Dtoke didn’t have that many miles on her, I paid a bit of a premium. I made her a present to myself. It was all perfectly legal. I bloody well owned her. Then a thought crossed my mind, I could make a grand gesture. Like a good Buddhist, I could let her fly away. Like opening a caged bird in front of Wat Arun—The Temple to the Dawn. That would gain me merit. Probably a great deal of merit.

  “I had never really bought a girl for more than a night. That doesn’t feel like ownership. It’s just simply good whoring. You see, I owned all of Dtoke’s time. The long haul. Her frequency was tuned in to my station only. I was only twenty-one, but even I saw it as the major turning point of my life. If I wanted to advance the next step in Bangkok, I had the normal intelligence to understand what I was expected to do next. What maturity meant world-wide was different here than any place else. You showed you were an adult by setting up a household. I rented an apartment, bought furniture, a car, and Dtoke.” Crosby paused, like he had done in Patpong at the skull bar. He lit a cigarette. It gave Lawrence an edgy feeling as if another photographer would jump onto the table and snap pictures of him in a half-drunk stage.

  Tuttle sensed Lawrence’s discomfort; he also had known Crosby long enough to know he often employed this little piece of harmless manipulation to gauge the attention span of his audience. Unlike Lawrence, he was in the mood to wait Crosby out, let him scratch his neck with his cupped hand and watch a blue cloud of smoke rise from his own nose.

  “Come on, man. Tell them what happened to Dtoke,” said Snow after a few moments of silence. “Lawrence here is simply dying to know if you sliced her up and deep-fat-fried her.”

  “Dtoke? She wasn’t edible, I’m afraid. Two years after l bought her, I concluded my experiment had failed. I had been too clever by half. I thought I bought her, but in reality she ended up owning me. Not something I bloody well had counted on happening. I celebrated my twenty-third by buying her a beauty shop, and setting her free. I asked a monk if this might gain me merit. He decided probably not. He said, if anything she had gained merit. Since by taking the shop, she had set me free. A fancy piece of logic. The fact remained, she had what all the girls want, her own life. She still turns the occasional trick—even though she doesn’t need the money. For a couple of years she was a minor wife to a bank manager. That fell through.

  “But she’s better off than if I’d left her sweating it out on her back in the knock-shop. She was turning six, seven tricks a day. She only was getting fifteen baht a trick from the owner. She was on a pay scale not all that different from our school. But times have changed; we have come into a period of good fortune.” “That’s pretty much what Khun Kob said tonight,” added Tuttle.

  * * *

  CROSBY and Tuttle exchanged glances. Their lives had been threaded together for years. Crosby had stuck by him. For the first time in years, he had a chance to reclaim the promise of his twenty-first birthday; when he was still on speaking and financial terms with his family. Was it so bad that Crosby wanted a decent salary for a change? thought Tuttle. Or Snow, who had left newspaper reporting, and came to the school when Tuttle had been desperate and could find no one willing to work for next to nothing. He owed them both a great deal. Even cutting in Colonel Chao and Khun Kob would leave enough to pay both of them, he thought. What had Lawrence Baring ever done to deserve the money? It was a windfall, an insurance break, because his wife had killed herself.

  “You’re living in the past,” snapped Snow, puffing up his cheeks and blowing out the surface smoke. “You’re in a time warp, Crosby. Getting off in knock-shops. All the girls lined up against the wall like slave girls. You walk up and down the line like landed gentry eyeing the breeding stock herd. You’re living in a time before flush toilets and Handy-wipes. Horseshit-in-the-street times. And you’re living so far back in time you get future shock every time you light a match.”

  Number 33, ‘Shot in the Dark,’ played on the jukebox. Snow stood up from the booth, stuck his hands in his pockets, tapped his sandal buckle against the table leg. “Time to split,” he said. “Anyone for going to The Strip? ”

  Crosby gave him a knowing nod that wasn’t lost on Tuttle. They were going back for the photographs of Lawrence in the skull bar; Tuttle would have laid money on it.

  “Never figured you guys for skullers,” said Tuttle.

  Snow’s face flushed. Crosby looked at the floor, pretending to rub his eyes. “Skullers are slime, man,” said Snow.

  “You won’t get any disagreement on that,” said Tuttle, breaking the spell that Snow’s guilt had created for a moment.

  “One thing, Crosby. Before we hit Foodland, no sneaking off to eat dried cuttlefish. Like some Stone Age freak. There’s a new regulation, man. No cuttlefish street vendor within a hundred yards of go-go bars, whorehouses, Foodlands, or massage parlors. No one wants the smell of cuttlefish and the smell of sex getting confused. Then you’d really be lost in the back streets of Bangkok.

  “Crying out, with cuttlefish on your breath, ‘Any slave ships arrive from the Northeast? Say you, my good man, have you seen where are they unloading the new breeding stock from Roi Et? Yes, you might say I’m an expert, of sorts. That I’ve been to more than my fair share of slave auctions’.”

  After they left, Tuttle saw Lawrence staring at him in an odd fashion. Those lawyer’s eyes penetrating deep into his own mind might see the architecture of a master web built surrounded on all sides by an invading host of other spiders; and if Lawrence could peer into his heart, he would surely see beyond the thin protective shield straight into his fear of losing the school, his anxiety over Asanee, and his gloom over the prospect of every possibility slipping out of his hands. No one occasion, condition, or place could be hoarded as personal property like clothing or tools. Lawrence’s arrival in Bangkok was the occasion, his wealth a condition, and the place—Tuttle had chosen that carefully—had been a reunion of the past.

  “I figured out the expression from Sarah’s letter,” said Lawrence, reaching into his jacket, he pulled the letter out.

  Tuttle, holding his breath, white knuckles circling his beer bottle, watched Lawrence carefully open the letter. A narrow channel of hope o
pened. Lawrence pushed the letter across the table. Tuttle looked down as Lawrence withdrew his fingers. He had so much wanted to know what had been inside; but, that was before Lawrence had walked back into his life, and there it was, unsolicited at his fingers tips. He opened the envelope, and, without looking up at Lawrence, immediately recognized Sarah’s tight, perfect handwriting; the rows of words and sentences, tumbling off the page like objects hurled from the past.

  “Dtam Jai, koon—follow your heart,” said Lawrence.

  The dim, smoky light played games with eyes and mouths; spinning flexible expressions that were neutral. Tuttle’s face, with a grizzled, listless, down-turned mouth peered across the table. He felt his throat swell and knew he dare not try and speak. Deep inside an airship had taken flight and exploded; the bumping noise of his own heart pounded in his neck, telegraphing the image of the accident, the loss of life, the pure, tragic hopelessness of exploring the wreckage.

  “It’s not been an easy exercise,” said Lawrence, his voice breaking. Tuttle folded the letter and handed it back. “When we were rooming, I looked up to you. I don’t think I ever told you that before. I envied that you had the strength to care deeply about other people. Maybe I never quite believed it was real. And, I was jealous that you had Sarah. I pretended to be your friend, Bobby. Two months before you left, I was sleeping with Sarah. And I never had the guts to tell you that. I convinced her to cheat behind your back. Some friend. The worst part is I never really got over the shame.

  “You know how many times I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I would look at Sarah sleeping and I would feel this huge sadness. We never spoke about it. But it was always in the background. You know how the mind works, you justify things to yourself. I told myself she had a much better life with me. I played that game. She had everything any woman could dream of possessing. House, car, profession, recognition, and devoted husband. But it had never been enough. And I understand why now. If only you hadn’t come back for Asanee that night. Then I could have been right. God, I wanted to be right about you. Why do you think I came half-way around the world? But you couldn’t do it. No matter how much you hated my guts for taking Sarah, you didn’t have the stomach to use Asanee. It would have worked. I can tell you right now, Bobby, it was a brilliant plan. And I could have been destroyed by her. Just like you thought. Just as you closed in, your streak of decency stopped you. Robbed you of what you had waited for all these years. I am no Robert Tuttle. I wouldn’t have come back for her.”

  Tuttle slid across the bench, he tried to break away from the table, Lawrence, Sarah’s letter, and his own past that had come crashing through the back entrance of HQ. Lawrence grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. He felt the firm, resolute strength in Tuttle’s hand dwindling like someone fighting against being pulled over the side of the boat into a kind of uneasy trust and acceptance.

  For more than twenty years, Tuttle had seen fights, shoving matches, threats inside the laboratory of human emotions that ran from one end of HQ to another. But he had never seen a farang cry once during that entire period of time. Not a single tear, as far as he had ever known, had fallen from the eye of a farang inside HQ. A half-dozen girls sandwiched around the booth in a circular band whispered and nodded at Lawrence. Was it a mistake, a hallucination, some abnormal condition of cigarette smoke and whiskey? Or was it a truly revolutionary idea for the girls: that a farang with human emotions would arrive in their midst with a message beyond the collective agreement? A farang who was looking for some kind of rescue, just like them? The hand-to-hand combat expressions and battle-ready eyes evaporated on the faces of the girls around the table. Tears balanced on the lower lid, then spilled from a girl trying to blink them away. Soon three or four girls sniffled, heads leaning against one another.

  “Bobby, I’d like to ask if you’d forgive me.”

  Tuttle forced himself to look directly at Lawrence. “It was all a very long time ago, Larry.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Can you forgive me? I know I have made some mistakes here. The cheque to Fawn was stupid. I was trying to buy what can’t be bought. The classic mistake of my life. And I was doing the same thing in Bangkok. I understand it’s probably hard for you. But I’m asking for a pardon.”

  Lawrence let go of Tuttle’s wrist and extended his hand. Several girls assembled half a step away, watching as Tuttle, his bottom teeth sunk deep into his upper lip, grasped Lawrence’s hand.

  “If you have time tomorrow, I have a document I want to go over with you,” said Lawrence, his hand locked around Tuttle’s. “It’s for the school, Bobby. It’s what Sarah wanted in the letter.”

  The red ink box filled with the boldfaced words: ONE MILLION U.S. DOLLARS was an image that appeared in Tuttle’s mind. This was not wrapping paper for a used product of lust. This was the one chance for Asanee, and the sixty-four other girls like her; the orphans of misfortune. That piece of paper meant something to their lives.

  “Tomorrow afternoon. Make it four.”

  After Tuttle had gone, three girls walked Lawrence out to the street. Two held his hand like schoolchildren. One offered to lend him money for a taxi—she assumed he was not only sad, but broke as well. They told him in Thai not to give up; Lawrence seemed to understand this wasn’t a negotiation session. They ushered him into the back of a taxi, gave the driver Tuttle’s address and paid his fare. All the while, one girl kept saying over and over in broken English, “No trouble, no trouble. Khun Tut good man, he help you.”

  He hadn’t been invited to Tuttle’s house once since his arrival in Bangkok. As the cab pulled away from Soi 11, made a sharp U-turn against heavy traffic onto Sukhumvit, he thought about going back to his hotel. The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. Why not play it out, he thought. And as he leaned back in the seat, he remembered Tuttle’s story. ‘The Boy Who Loved Marilyn Monroe’ had been open on Sarah’s office desk the day he had entered; not one thing in her office had been touched or altered.

  16

  THE BOY WHO LOVED

  MARILYN MONROE

  A SHORT STORY

  by

  Robert Tuttle

  “Can I wear my new shirt on the plane? The one with deadly spiders? It’s brilliant,” said Andrew, aged eleven, as he climbed out of the swimming pool, took a couple of steps before flopping into a deck chair beside his mother who was reading the newspaper. From beneath a beach towel wrapped around his head, he belched.

  “Andrew!”

  “Sorry. Well, can I? ”

  “Better wear the blue shirt. Customs people dislike deadly spiders.”

  It was Andrew’s last day in Bangkok before returning to boarding school in Boston. On this last Monday of August, Andrew packed, said good-bye to friends, bicycled on the back lanes called sois, and worried. He worried about being fat. He worried about bagging a corner bed at school next to his best friend. Jeremy, his father, appeared in shorts and sandals on the pool deck with two tall drinks and a Coke on a bamboo tray.

  “Why do you swim wearing a T-shirt? ” Andrew’s father asked.

  Andrew turned, walked two steps, and dived into the pool.

  “Jeremy, you’ve hurt his feelings.”

  “His feelings? ”

  “Andrew feels fat. He wears the T-shirt because he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.”

  * * *

  THEY ate their last family dinner in an Italian restaurant on Soi 18 that had been depressingly empty. Andrew ordered a pasta with cheese and ham and a bowl of chocolate and strawberry ice-cream. Susan ate a salad and pasta; and Jeremy polished off a lobster. Andrew pushed aside his ice cream dish and looked around at the rows of unused tables with fresh linen tablecloths and the half-dozen waiters and waitresses hovering in the background.

  “Why don’t we stop in Soi Cowboy? ” Andrew suggested. “We can go to the airport from there.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Jeremy. He turned to his wife. “Our Way Bar, okay, love? ”


  “Why not,” said Susan with a half-smile.

  The old Our Way Bar had been a hole in the wall, one-shop bar. A nonsense go-go bar much like any one of thirty odd other dives that lined both sides of a small lane called Soi Cowboy. Most of the girls wore a standard bar uniform: G-strings and bikini tops. Many were peasant teenagers with dark skin, four years of education, and large families who lived in the dirt poor village found in the Northeast. These teenage girls rented their bodies to a farang—foreigner. The rental fee for the night was twenty dollars.

  A week earlier Our Way Bar—which had expanded into the adjacent shophouse—had reopened; the architectural plastic surgeon’s knife carved out the features that matched the glossy face of a Patpong styled bar.