The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

At the bottom of the stairs, he turns and watches her come, now wearing a T-shirt, a bright orange skirt that ends midthigh, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. He gives her a smile, but she’s got her eyes on the stairway, as though she’s never gone down one before.

  “Here we go,” he says. “I hope you’re ready.”

  He opens the door.

  THE POLICEMAN’S SUNGLASSES reflect the words LAP BAR. The words are written in fuchsia neon set into the center of a bright heart, a cheap electric valentine sizzling fifteen feet above the Patpong sidewalk. He takes a final look at his watch and then leans against a metal pole that once had some sort of sign atop it, now amputated. The crowd, sweating, wrinkled, and ripe-smelling, divides on either side and flows by.

  The boy who has been assigned to watch the door to the Lap Bar looks at the policeman and fails to recognize him. Patpong is a very profitable beat, and the police assigned to it have paid dearly for the pleasure. They know the rules. A new cop means trouble. The boy abandons his post and does a discreet fade, stopping a few yards away to watch. From that vantage point, he sees the policeman climb two of the four steps to the door. The door swings open, pulled from the inside, and a tall man comes out, followed by the youngest and newest of the girls in the bar—what was her name?—Toy.

  And the policeman puts an arm up, resting his hand against the edge of the door, to block Toy and the tall man from coming all the way outside. Toy makes a scrabbling move backward, but the policeman snakes his other arm out and grabs her wrist. This is completely outside the boy’s frame of reference: a policeman interfering with a customer and a bar girl at the door the boy is supposed to be guarding.

  The boy decides it is time to go home.

  THE POLICEMAN LOOKS past the farang, directly at Toy. “How old are you?”

  “She’s eighteen,” the tall man says.

  “Shut up,” says the policeman in English. “I asked her.”

  “Hey, listen,” the foreigner begins, but the policeman stops him with a look. Then, deliberately, he reaches down with his free hand and unsnaps his holster.

  “No problem,” the customer says immediately, bringing his hands up in front of him, palms out. “You want her, she’s yours.”

  “Come out here,” the policeman says. With one hand resting on the butt of his pistol, he backs slowly down the steps leading up to the door, dragging Toy with him, and waits on the sidewalk. After a long moment, during which his eyes remain locked on the policeman’s face, the tall man comes down the steps.

  “This is ridiculous,” he says, but his voice is thin.

  “I told you to shut up,” says the policeman. “Put out your hand.” A crowd has begun to form about them, mostly Thais drawn by the spectacle of a policeman actually enforcing some sort of law on Patpong. His eyes darting around the circle of faces, the tall man puts out his right hand, and the policeman snaps a cuff on it, a chilly metallic click in the tropical air. The other end of the cuff closes around the metal pole against which the policeman had been leaning. The tall man stands as though dumbfounded, and a murmur runs through the group of Thais.

  “I asked how old you were,” the policeman says in Thai.

  “Eighteen,” Toy says. She seems even more disoriented than the customer by the turn of events.

  “Give me your card,” the policeman says in Thai. Each bar girl who is legally employed must carry an identification card.

  Toy looks for support at the circle of faces on the pavement—surely nothing very terrible can happen with so many people watching. Her tongue explores her lower lip. “I left it at home.”

  “You don’t have one,” says the policeman. “You don’t have one because you’re not old enough to have one. Do you know what the penalty is?”

  “I don’t care,” she says, but it’s almost a question.

  “Two years in the reformatory. Up-country. No Bangkok, no movies, no discos, no bright lights, just big paddies for you to work in. Full of leeches. Nowhere to hide from the sun. Snakes everywhere. Spiders as big as dogs. They’ll cut your hair off, like a boy’s. No cosmetics. No pretty dresses. Rotten meat and rocks in the rice. There are girls there who will bother you. If you don’t do what they want, they’ll beat you up. Do you understand me?”

  She starts to say yes, swallows, and then says it.

  “Two years from now, you’ll be black as a boot and your gums will bleed when you smile. You’ll have wrinkles around your eyes. No one will even recognize you. You’ll be lucky to make two hundred fifty baht a trick.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Toy protests faintly. Her eyes go to the faces of the people gathered on the sidewalk, seeking help.

  “Look at this man,” the policeman commands, indicating the handcuffed customer. “What do you know about him?”

  This is a safer topic. “He bought me out for the night,” she says, eager to please. She glances at the handcuffed man, who is regarding the crowd uneasily. “He lives at the Tower.” She lapses, her fund of knowledge exhausted.

  “Look at him,” the policeman says. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Oh, no,” Toy says. “Mama-san told me I should always leave my shoes by the door so—”

  “He hurts girls like you.” The tall man stops trying to worry his wrist out of the cuff and begins to listen. “Last month he bought out a massage girl, almost as young as you. He took her to an apartment in Thonburi, and he used a razor to cut her face. From here,” he says, letting go of her arm and placing a finger below her right eye and drawing it straight down to her chin, “down to here. You could see her teeth through her cheek.”

  Toy has forgotten the crowd; her eyes, on the policeman, fill half her face. “This man?”

  “And then he cut her throat.” His throat-slashing gesture, operatic in scale, draws appreciative gasps from the crowd. “He would have killed her, but she jumped though the window. She’s not pretty anymore, but she’s alive. You’re a lucky girl.” He lifts her chin with his fingertips and studies her face. “Now, get out of here. Go home. And I mean all the way home. If I ever see you in Patpong again, I’ll make sure you’re in the monkey house until you’re a twenty-year-old farm girl with feet like shoe boxes.”

  The girl takes a step back.

  The tall man handcuffed to the sign clears his throat. “Fifty thousand baht,” he says.

  “Wait,” the policeman says. He reaches out and takes Toy’s wrist again. Then he turns to the crowd. “Go, go. There’s nothing to see here. You have things to do.” The group backs up a few steps, and he advances on them, pulling the girl in his wake, and they retreat several paces more. When the policeman is sure he cannot be heard, he says to the American, “For what?”

  “For letting me go,” the customer says. His eyes travel to Toy. “And for letting me keep her.”

  The policeman knots Toy’s T-shirt in his fist and forces her several steps in the tall man’s direction. “You are insulting me,” he says.

  “You have me confused with someone else,” the tall man says. “It’s not surprising. Many men look like me. The salary of a policeman is small, and the hours are long. You’re probably very tired. It was my fault that I have embarrassed you by taking this girl when you were on duty.”

  “You apologize,” says the policeman thoughtfully. “And yet you offer so little.”

  The tall man doesn’t even blink. “One hundred thousand baht,” he says.

  “No,” says Toy, straining against the hand that holds her shirt. “Please.”

  “One hundred thousand baht,” the policeman repeats. He shakes the girl like a puppy. “Stop it.”

  “Now,” says the customer with some urgency. “In cash.”

  “Suppose you hurt her,” the policeman says conversationally. He winds Toy’s T-shirt tightly around his fist. “Suppose you hurt her and she reports it. It could interrupt the upward movement of my career. You understand, of course, that I could never seriously entertain a request such as this one.”

  “Hundr
ed twenty,” the tall man says.

  “There is still the problem of the girl,” the policeman says. “Not that I care personally what happens to her. You would have to guarantee she would not complain.”

  The American looks at Toy. “I do.”

  The policeman turns his head to regard the watching crowd. “How will you get her out of here?”

  “You help me walk her to the corner. Handcuff her if you have to. I have a car waiting there.”

  “But, but . . .” Toy says.

  The policeman swats her on the head. “Let me see the money.”

  Toy begins to scream. As people in the street stare, she twists against the hand grasping her shirt, striking out with both fists, hammering at the policeman’s wrist and forearm, and then the nails come out and she rakes his skin. He grabs at her with the other hand, and she raises one of her heavy, steel-tipped cowboy boots and kicks his shin with all the force she possesses, so hard she staggers back after the kick lands. The policeman releases her and grabs his shin in both hands, hopping up and down and swearing a blue streak in both English and Thai, and Toy leaps backward, bolts into the crowd, and disappears from view. A ripple in the movement of the heads, visible down the bright street, tracks her path. Some of the people who are watching from a safe distance applaud approvingly.

  The policeman ignores them, focusing instead on the man handcuffed to the pole.

  “Spiders as big as dogs,” says the tall man.

  The policeman straightens. “Are you giving me a problem?”

  “Feet like shoe boxes.” The handcuffed man makes a sound that could be mistaken for a snort. “The girls will bother you.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” the policeman says, bending to rub his shin again. “Goddamn Bangkok cowboy boots. Steel tips. They should be outlawed. I’m going to have a lump the size of an egg.” He gives the tall man a severe glance. “I’ve got half a mind to leave you here. Nobody told me I was going to get kicked.”

  “Yeah, and nobody told me I was going to be Jack the Ripper. ‘Her teeth through her cheek.’ Jesus.”

  “She’s scared, right? Wasn’t that the point? Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

  “Well, I think you succeeded,” says the tall man, rattling the cuff against the signpost. He yanks at it a couple of times. “Arthit,” he says, “tell me you haven’t lost the key to these things.”

  Chapter 2

  All the Devils Are Here

  Miaow looks up from her plate. “Hell is empty,” she says in English, “and all the devils are here.”

  “Hello to you, too,” Rafferty says. He looks at the half-eaten dinner spread across the table. “Thanks for waiting.”

  “We were going to,” Rose says in Thai. She puts down her ever-present cup of Nescafé and adds in careful English, “But we are hungry.” She’s been studying English six hours a week, trying to leave bar-girl Thaiglish behind, but the past tense is a problem, since the Thai language lacks it. Then she says to Miaow, in Thai, “What was that you said?”

  “It’s from the play,” Miaow says. “The first act. I get to say it.”

  Rose says, “What are ‘devils’?”

  Over the noise of the restaurant, Miaow launches into an energetic explanation in Thai that involves one of the more baroque Buddhist visions of hell, and Rafferty squeezes past his adopted daughter’s chair to get into the banquette so he can reach under the table and put a proprietary hand on Rose’s leg. She pats his hand and then laces her fingers through his, listening to Miaow, who finally has to pause for breath.

  “Not a nice thing to say about Poke,” Rose says.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “Compared to some of the things Arthit just said about me, it’s a birthday card.”

  “He didn’t come back with you?” Rose asks. She glances around the restaurant, an American steakhouse on Silom, as though she’s worried she might have missed him. The mention of Arthit puts her into anxiety mode, as it has for the past eight months, since his wife, Noi, died.

  “He wanted to go home,” Rafferty says. “I tried to talk him into joining us, but . . . well, you know. He’s going to get through this alone. If it kills him.”

  Miaow says, “Guys,” in a world-weary tone that almost makes Rafferty sit up straighter.

  Rose apparently doesn’t see anything precocious in the remark. “I wish I knew someone I could introduce him to,” she says. “My girls wouldn’t work.” Rose’s “girls” are former dancers from the Patpong bars who have left the life to work with the agency Rose co-owns, which finds them jobs as housekeepers. And Rose is right, Rafferty thinks; they’d be disastrous matches for Arthit.

  “Speaking of your girls,” he says, “you can tell your friend Fon that Toy is probably still running. Arthit scared her silly.”

  “Serves her right.” Rose pushes a full water glass toward Miaow and makes a “drink up” gesture. Miaow rolls her eyes but picks up the glass. In keeping with some health advisory she read somewhere, Rose has the two of them drinking more water than they want, although she herself continues to subsist on the instant coffee Rafferty loathes with such intensity. “The little idiot,” she continues. “I’ve never seen Fon so angry. Here she is, slaving in other people’s houses all day, not working the bars but still sending money home every month, and her stupid little sister decides to come to the big city and give it a try. Probably thought it was all cell phones and fancy clothes, gold jewelry, going out to dinner with foreign gentlemen. When what it really is, is dancing around dressed in almost nothing and letting fat men grunt on top of you a couple of times every night.”

  Miaow darts a look at Rose and then looks away.

  “Toy didn’t seem happy,” Rafferty says.

  “I’m sure she didn’t,” Rose says. “And to make things worse, she decided to work in an upstairs bar.”

  “Why does that matter?” Miaow asks. “What happens in upstairs bars?”

  Rafferty says, “Nothing that you need to—”

  Rose says, “Upstairs the girls dance naked.”

  Miaow says, “Oh.” For at least the third time since Rafferty sat down, she runs her hand through her hair, which is now chopped to within four inches of her scalp and bleached a sort of margarine yellow with a slight orange cast at the roots, the stubborn remnant of the midnight black that’s her natural color. The haircut cost all of Miaow’s allowance for five weeks and looks like it was done with a broken glass. She came home with it ten days ago and announced that it was for the play, her school’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which she’s been cast as the spirit Ariel. Ever since the time, four years earlier, that Rafferty had first seen her selling chewing gum on a Patpong sidewalk, she’d worn her hair severely parted in the center and pasted down, a hairstyle he’d come to think of as unchangeable, quintessentially Miaow. And now she looks, he privately thinks, like a very short Sid Vicious. He’s still startled every time he sees her. She gives her new hair a tug and says to Rose, “Why would they want to dance naked?”

  Rose says, “Money. They get paid a little more.”

  Miaow absorbs it for a moment. “You never did that.” It’s not a question, but it is.

  “I didn’t have to,” Rose says. “I was beautiful.”

  “You still are,” Rafferty says.

  Rose leans in his direction and says, “What did you say?”

  “I said—”

  “Oh, I heard you.” She shakes her head. “I’m ashamed for wanting to hear it again. Poor, dumb little Toy.”

  “She believed every word Arthit said. She’ll probably run all the way to the train station.”

  “Just like my sister, Lek, when you and Arthit chased her away,” Rose says.

  Rafferty says, “We’re thinking of opening a business.”

  “I was that innocent,” Rose says. Her eyes roam the restaurant, as though she’s surprised to find herself there. “When I first came down to Bangkok, I believed everything. I had no ide
a how things worked. If it hadn’t been for Fon, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I was frightened, I was sad, I was stupid. I did everything anyone told me to do. A girl would take me over to a customer—a customer who’d asked for me—and then she’d tell me I owed her ten percent for introducing me. Girls borrowed money they never paid back. One of them stole my shoes, and I had to go out barefoot and buy some flip-flops on the sidewalk. I stepped on a burning cigarette butt.”

  Miaow says, “I did that, too, once.”

  “And you were just a kid,” Rafferty says. “Both of you.”

  “I was seventeen,” Rose says. “And that’s village seventeen, about as sophisticated as a Bangkok ten-year-old. I remember the first time I went shopping with my own money. I’d never owned anything except T-shirts and shorts, and those were secondhand. And here I was, in Bangkok, on my own, with money in my pockets, more money than I’d ever had in my life. And there were stores everywhere. I bought toys, stuffed animals, little plastic pins that lit up. A Santa hat, a ring with a big red plastic jewel in it that I thought looked like a ruby, and a bracelet made of little plastic fruit. The most terrible things—blouses with big buttons and hearts all over them, teddy-bear hair ornaments, brand-new, stiff, dark blue jeans that were loose and too short to be stylish. I was so proud of them. I got all dressed up to go to the bar that night, and the girls just laughed. Everybody except Fon. Well, she laughed a little, but not the same way. She’s the one who taught me that you were supposed to spend ten times as much money for a pair of jeans that look like a whole village wore them for a year and that are so long you’re walking on the cuffs. That you have to wear real rubies if you’re a Bangkok girl. I was a hick. I didn’t fit in at all. And some of the girls just hated me because I stood out.”

  “You certainly stood out when I came in,” Rafferty says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Miaow fidget. For the past eight or nine months, Rose’s past, which she’d previously taken for granted as part of the family landscape, has become an object of both interest and a certain amount of embarrassment. In the relatively exclusive private international school Miaow now attends, a former street child whose adopted mother was a prostitute is conspicuous in all the wrong ways. Eight months ago she’d had Rose lighten her hair to a dark red, and she’d bought skin-lightening cream. Next was her name. She’s already told them that the play’s program will inform the audience that Ariel is played by Mia Rafferty.