“I misplaced something,” said Bardin. “I thought you might have it.”
“Why—would I—have it?” Robert spoke between deep slow breaths, trying to bring his pulse rate down. “If you wanted something, you could have asked me. I was here all day.”
“I thought it might have got mixed into some of the papers that were sent your way.” This was news. Bardin saw materials before they came to Robert? “I was hoping to undo the damage, no one the wiser.” Bardin pulled the desk chair out, sat. “And no one would have been the wiser if I had exerted just a shade more self-control.” He shook his head, rueful. “My mother always warned me about the consequences of impatience.”
“What are you talking about?” Robert sat in the chair across from the desk.
“I know you always come back once,” said Bardin. “You often come back twice. I thought I was being exceptionally cautious, waiting you out for the third time. But tonight—four times! A personal record.” He pinned Robert with a frank gaze. “You seem to have extra trouble leaving the office tonight. Problems at home?”
“Stop it,” said Robert. His legs were still trembling from the adrenaline burst, but his heart was finally slowing down.
“Can you just forget I was here?” Bardin said. He reached up to slide the file cabinet drawer closed, held up his empty hands. “I’ve done no damage. I’m not carrying anything away.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Robert.
“It’s not as if anything very important would be in this office.” Bardin must have realized how it sounded, for he added, “Not with these worthless locks.” He continued smoothly, “Even so, you deserve an explanation, and I shall give you one. But not here,” he said. “Ears in the walls.” Robert had never considered the possibility. “Let’s go for a drink.”
Robert looked at his watch.
“Are you allowed?” said Bardin, seeing the gesture.
“Don’t be an ass,” said Robert, picking up the phone receiver and dialing, pushing the wheel round and listening to the clicks. Three rings, and then the fourth ring cut off abruptly, but there was no greeting. “It’s Mr. Preston, Daeng, don’t hang up,” he said into the emptiness. “Is Madame there?” Of course she was there, he thought after he’d said it. Where else would she be?
More emptiness, then “I get,” and the clatter of the phone being put down on the hall table.
Under Bardin’s amused eye, he waited. By the time Genevieve finally spoke “Hello?” into the phone, he felt snappish.
“I’ll be late coming home tonight,” he said. “A bit of a snag at the office.”
Was there disappointment or curiosity in the short silence? “All right,” she said. “I’ll telephone the Whitmans and beg off.”
“Damn it, I forgot about them.”
“It’s all right if we miss,” she said. “It’s only cocktails.”
“I won’t be too late,” he said.
“All right,” she said.
“I’ll see you later then,” he said, but she’d already put the telephone down.
Bardin was leaning against the wall watching, hands in his trouser pockets.
“Haven’t you lied to her before?” he asked with something like sympathy. Then he shoved himself away from the wall with a short bark of laughter. “Of course you have. Let’s go.”
As they were leaving, Robert looked back into his office. From the doorway, everything looked in order. The file cabinet lock twinkled innocently as though it had never allowed itself to be picked. He pulled the door shut and locked up again, switched off the light.
They walked in silence together down the stairwell, Robert fighting the usual impulses tugging him back into the building. I locked the door, he told himself, I shut the window.
“Was that the reason for that stupid story before?” said Robert when they reached the street. He remembered that feeling he’d had, that Bardin was peeking at the papers on his desk. “You were spinning that tale to distract me?”
“Knew you’d figure it out,” said Bardin.
Robert presumed they’d go to the small bar on the corner, and when they came to its entrance he slowed, but Bardin kept walking.
“Not there,” said Bardin over his shoulder.
Robert quickened his gait to catch up and they walked together, too far apart for companions, too close for strangers, down the long dark street and around the corner. Robert felt like an idiot, carrying his briefcase. He should have left it in the office, or put it into the car.
They turned another corner and were confronted by a carnival of neon, signs blinking asynchronously on all sides, people spilling from doorways onto sidewalks, from sidewalks into the street. The crowds were mostly men, and judging from their haircuts, mostly soldiers. Thai girls stood in doorways calling to them sweetly, Hello hello. This was the red-light district, which Robert had heard about but had never visited. He suspected that many of his colleagues had come here, but they hadn’t told him about it. Other men didn’t tend to confide their salacious exploits to Robert. Not that he wanted them to.
Bardin threaded through the crowd; following, Robert nearly bumped into a girl who stepped in front of him. “Pardon me,” he said automatically.
“Hello, big honey,” she said, smiling, looking up into his face. “Come have drink with me?”
“No, thank you.” Scanning the street: Where was Bardin?
“Nice place very nice,” insisted the girl, reaching for his arm.
There! Half a block ahead, the cowlicked head was unmistakable among the surrounding crew cuts. It plunged through a doorway under the looping neon script Baby Lotus. Robert shook the girl off and followed.
Inside was a damp fug of smoke, a surging tide of bodies, a throb of rock and roll music. A glowing jukebox squatted in a corner and a skimpily clad girl stood in front of it, plucking coins from the open palm of the man beside her. Couples were dancing. A line of tall stools along one side of the bar counter held girls laughing and chatting together, fixing their lipstick, all the while keeping an eye on the door. Like a cabstand, thought Robert. They looked just like cabbies, waiting for a fare.
A woman stood in front of him, wearing a top that tied around her neck and a brief pair of shorts. There was a white flower in her hair.
“I’m Tami,” she said. “What you drinking?”
“No thank you,” he said, scanning the crowd behind her. Was Bardin somewhere else now, laughing at having given Robert the slip?
“Whiskey soda?” Tami said, as though she hadn’t heard him. “Green Spot?”
“No thank you,” he said again.
“Bar special,” she said. “Good very good drink.”
“Will you leave me alone?” Robert said.
He didn’t expect her tears, although perhaps he should have done; certainly a girl like her had learnt long ago how to cultivate a useful semblance of grief.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that—I’m looking for someone.”
“Girl?” she said, her tears drying at their source.
“No,” he said.
Her expression didn’t change as she said, “Boy?”
Robert pushed away from her, holding the briefcase in front of him and using it as a kind of prow to part the crowd, making his way to the bar. He snaked his arm between the mass of bodies and placed his hand on the sticky wooden counter.
“What you like,” said the bartender, who was uncapping two bottles of Coke at once by shoving them down against a flange of metal that protruded from the edge of the counter. He poured the soda into four glasses, added a measure of clear liquid from an unlabeled bottle to each, and slid the glasses away down the bar.
“I’m looking for my friend,” said Robert, speaking loudly over the clamor as a crowd of young women pressed up around him, calling to the bartender in Thai. “He just came in here.”
The bartender was rapidly uncapping beers, gathering bottlenecks between the fingers of one hand. He held the hand up and col
lected money thrust at him over the bar as one by one the bottles were plucked from his grasp. He did this twice more and then turned to a cash register behind him and pressed some keys; the drawer shot open.
“My friend has red hair,” said Robert to the man’s back.
The man paid no attention, separating the bills by denomination and smoothing the stacks before laying them into the drawer. When he was done, he slammed the drawer shut and turned around.
“What you drinking?” he said.
“I don’t want a drink,” said Robert. “My friend. Tall. Red hair. Did you see which way he went?”
“Scotch whiskey, Coke, rum, gin. Green Spot.”
“I don’t want a drink,” repeated Robert.
“You buy drink,” said the bartender, making the words slow. “Find your friend.”
Robert understood: he was expected to pay for the information.
“Whiskey, then,” he said. The bartender reached beneath the counter and brought up an unlabeled bottle, glugged a measure of tea-colored liquid into a glass clouded with fingerprints.
“Fifty baht,” said the bartender, putting the drink down in front of Robert. His accent made it fip-ty. “Special price for find your red hair friend.”
Fifty baht was ridiculous, more than two dollars. Robert pried the notes from his wallet and the bartender pushed the glass across the bar toward him, jerking his head to Robert’s right as he did so. Robert looked over in that direction but saw no sign of Bardin.
“Special room,” said the bartender, and immediately returned to uncapping beers.
Robert looked again, craning his neck to look around a raucous knot of humanity that was gathering in front of him. He could just make out the edges of a closed door in what had appeared at first glance to be unbroken wall. Special room. Clutching his drink in one hand and the idiotic briefcase in the other, he headed toward it, trying to divert around the cluster of people, but it surged outward and ingested him and he found himself in a clearing, where a girl was standing on a table.
She was totally naked except for a headband with a tall upright pink feather in it; the smooth V between her legs was almost at his eye level. Her body was like a child’s, hairless and neat. Robert had seen girlie magazines, but not many, and he’d seen only one nude woman in the flesh. Genevieve would look like an alabaster Amazon beside this girl. He shuddered at the thought of Genevieve in this room.
The crowd closed in front of him again, and the feather sank out of sight. The girl must have lowered herself to sit on the table; what she was doing there Robert could not see. Men were going up to the table for a moment, doing something there, then moving back. Robert was transfixed: What were they doing to the girl? How could this be legal? A space cleared again in front of him and Robert shouldered into it, whiskey slopping from his glass onto his sleeve.
The woman with the pink feather was getting to her feet again on the tabletop; two grinning men stood on either side, gripping the table to hold it steady. Jump, called a man. With her knees tight together, the girl hopped in her high heels. The crowd booed and called, Higher. She jumped again, another feeble effort. A man came forward from the crowd and thrust his hand between her knees, levering them apart. A few coins clattered onto the table. Jump, the crowd called in a rhythm. Jump. Jump. Jump. With each jump, more coins fell. The men laughed like crazy.
“She gets to keep whatever doesn’t drop out,” said a voice close to Robert’s ear. He turned: Bardin. “But of course she keeps all of it. No one wants those coins back.” Bardin laughed at Robert’s expression. “How is it you’ve never been to Patpong? Genevieve has you on a short leash, my friend.”
“Where the hell did you go?” Robert asked. His hand clenched on the glass he was still holding; he wanted to punch the name of his wife from the smiling mouth. “This place is disgusting.”
“This place is safe,” said Bardin. He circled a finger, indicating the chaos, the noise. “We can talk here. Come on.”
He led Robert around the fringe of the dance floor to a collection of empty tables. As they sat down at one of them, a girl appeared.
“Bring us two closed beers,” Bardin said, holding up a bill. She took it and went away. He indicated Robert’s whiskey glass. “Don’t drink that bile.”
“I didn’t come here for a drink,” said Robert. He put the glass down on the table, pushed it away from himself. After a moment’s deliberation—lap or empty chair or sticky table or sticky floor—he put the briefcase across his thighs. “What were you doing in my office?”
“I think the Harch took something off my desk by mistake.” Robert had seen the messy piles on Bardin’s desk; it would be no wonder if things got misplaced there. “Ah, khob khun khrap.” The girl was back with two bottles of beer. Bardin uncapped them with a gadget from his pocket and placed one in front of Robert, vapor misting from its mouth. “Cheers,” Bardin said.
“You buy my bar?” the girl asked Robert.
“He already paid,” Robert told the girl, nodding at Bardin, who choked with laughter, midswallow.
“She wants you to buy her company for the evening,” he explained. “It’s a good deal at seven dollars.” He rummaged in his pocket, brought out a handful of coins. “Go play the jukebox, darling,” he said, holding them out to the girl.
“Why burgle my office?” said Robert when she was gone. “Why not just ask me about—whatever it is?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Obviously,” said Robert.
Bardin dropped the flippancy. He leaned forward, his mouth a grim line. “It was a personal item,” he said. “A photograph.”
“Oh,” said Robert, understanding what happened to photographs that came to him in the envelopes Miss Harch brought. “But even if I did use it, that wouldn’t matter. No one would see it.” No one meant no one but the enemy.
“You’re right, of course,” said Bardin. But he didn’t sound reassured.
A girl with her hair in two high ponytails was wandering through the place, a small bunch of balloons drifting jerkily above her. Now and then she stopped at a table, detached one balloon from the others and wound its string around a GI wrist, tied a bow. When she approached their table, Bardin waved her away. She pout-smiled and moved on.
“Tell me if you recognize this,” said Bardin. Robert looked back and saw that Bardin had his hand out, a photo cupped inside it. He recognized it immediately: the striped shirt, the blurred boyish face. Nguyen Tran.
Bardin’s face was intent, questioning: Yes or no?
Robert recalled the man’s statement earlier that evening: It’s not as if anything very important would be in this office. He’d meant it as it had first sounded. Nothing to do with the terrible locks on the office doors; he had meant that Robert’s office specifically would not contain anything important.
Staring into Bardin’s anxious eyes, Robert felt his head move as if someone were moving it for him, dragging around on its axis, to signify no. He watched relief spread across the other man’s face.
“Master?” said a high voice, very close. Both men looked up.
It was the coin dance girl, the pink feather still bobbing on her head. She was wearing a brief orange dress now, with a plunging neckline.
Robert looked back at Bardin. His hand was empty now, the photograph back in his pocket.
“Sawadee-kha, Master,” the girl said to Robert, with a wai so deep that her thumbs touched her hairline. Master. The word called up the house where his wife and children were waiting, only a couple of miles away.
“Preston, you have untold depths,” murmured Bardin into his beer.
A loud bang from across the room, followed by whoops and hollers of laughter. Robert could see a soldier holding up a hand, as if he were in class asking to be called on; from between his fingers dangled a string, at its end the tatters of a balloon.
The pink-feather girl put a hand flat on her chest. “Root,” she said.
“Erm,” said Robert. Root
? It was impossible to look at her without remembering her nakedness, the coins falling as she jumped.
“Root,” she repeated, nodding harder, the feather ducking and waving. “Nine Soi Nine.”
And then it came to him.
“Ruth?” he said. Her lips burst into a smile and she nodded even more ferociously, the feather whipping about.
Ruth. Genevieve had christened one of their early Number Threes with that name. Robert studied the girl’s face without a particle of recognition.
“Ruth,” he said. “Well. How are you?”
“I am fine,” Ruth said. “How is Madame?” She told Bardin, “Madame very beautifun,” with that Thai vocal quirk of turning a word’s terminal L into an N.
“She certainly is,” said Bardin. His anxiety had vanished after Robert’s lie; he appeared to be enjoying this enormously.
Robert had a mental flash of Ruth, decently skirted and bloused, reaching to unpin clothing from a line. She’d bathed his children, made his bed, and laid out his pajamas. She’d probably scrubbed his underwear. Was she a prostitute now? Was this what happened to the girls who were dismissed from the Preston household?
“Incoming!” someone yelled. An injured howl followed, and a chorus of boos.
“This one’s aim is not spectacular,” said Bardin, around the beer bottle at his lips.
It was abruptly intolerable, all of it: the music, the naked girls, the staccato fanfare of bursting balloons, the raucous whoops of laughter, Ruth’s friendly face, the redhead’s smirk.
“I have to leave,” said Robert. “It was very nice to see you again, Ruth.” Nodding at her deep wai.
As Robert shouldered through the crowd, he saw the ponytailed balloon woman, now clad only in her bikini top, lying back on her elbows on the bar with legs apart and pelvis tilted upward. As he watched, she flexed her thighs and something, incredibly, shot out of her and across the room. There was a bang, and a round of cheering. He fled.
What Could Be Saved Page 19
