The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  “What did he do?”

  Fon drags on the cigarette, squinting against the smoke. “If he’d been smart, he would have left right then, but he couldn’t let me see that I’d chased him out, so he waited until my shift was over and I’d left the stage, and then he threw down some money and almost ran out. By then I’d put a wrapper over my dancing clothes, and I counted to ten or something and then went out and watched him go into the Play Pen. I gave him a few minutes, just to make sure he was staying, and then I followed him in and told the manager—” She breaks off, looking doubtfully at Kwan. “Have you been into the Play Pen?”

  “I’ve never been to any of the bars except the Candy Cane.”

  “I’ll take you around some night when we’re off. Well, the thing about the Play Pen is that about half the girls are ladyboys. So I told the manager that he’d walked out of my bar complaining because it only had girls, so he should tell the ladyboys to go to work on him. There were four of them hanging on to him when I left.”

  Kwan starts to laugh. Fon watches her solemnly, and then she stubs out her cigarette. “Once in a million years, it works. Getting married to a customer, I mean. Out of maybe five hundred girls I know, two of them have done it and made it last. One of them is here, one’s in America. But it’s nothing you should think about. This is not about love. When you finally get up on that stage, just remember, it’s a market and you’re the best-looking cut of meat. Get every penny you can and forget the rest of it. What time is it?”

  Kwan looks at Nana’s watch. “Four o’clock.”

  “We’ve got two hours before work, then,” Fon says, “and I can’t look another minute at that schoolgirl haircut.”

  Chapter 14

  Silk That Thinks It’s Cotton

  Oh, no.” The ladyboy in front of the mirror clutches his heart as though it’s stopped in midbeat. He or she is broad-shouldered and heavyset beneath the flowered gown and the cloud of scarves, and wears shoulder-length hair, dyed midnight black, curled under at the ends, 1940s style. So much black makeup surrounds his eyes that Kwan thinks he looks like he’s wearing a mask. Five-o’clock shadow prickles its way through a thick layer of pancake, but his voice is a flute. “Darling,” the ladyboy says in English, “what did they cut it with? A lawn mower?”

  Kwan decides to think of the ladyboy as “she,” since it seems polite to let her be what she wants to be. In English she replies, “Not understand.”

  “That hair.” The ladyboy raises both hands chest high, palms out and fingers curved in, shaking them in mock terror, like a starlet confronted by the half-eaten corpse that’s always lurching out of the closet in Thai movies. The gesture rattles the beads on the twelve or so bracelets that circle each wrist. “My God, my God—that’s English, by the way,” she tells Kwan in Thai, in a matter-of-fact tone, “and you should learn it. When anyone says something surprising or when you want to pretend some customer has impressed you by, for example, the size of his equipment, you say ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

  Kwan carefully repeats, “Oh, my God,” and gets a nod of approval. Then she says, “Equipment?”

  “Later.” The ladyboy lifts Kwan’s hair and drops it. “Terrible, terrible. Who did this to you, your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well, excuse me. I’m sure she meant well. But look at you, just look at you.” She puts her hands on the sides of Kwan’s head and swivels her face toward the mirror. Kwan tries to look at herself but sees Fon reflected behind her, laughing, and she laughs, too.

  “I don’t want to hear any laughing at all,” the ladyboy says. “This is serious, even tragic. There isn’t enough beauty in the world to waste it this way. You may not be responsible for the fact that you’re beautiful, but you are responsible for taking care of it. It makes people feel better, seeing something beautiful. Don’t you want people to feel better, don’t you want to lift them out of their gray, muffled, boxed-in lives for a minute or two and put a silvery little sliver of light in their souls? That’s what beauty is, you know—it’s tiny glimmers of light left over from the Creation. You’re Buddhist, of course, but in the farang holy book, which is called the Bible, practically the first words out of God’s lips, and I’m sure they were very nice lips, are ‘Let there be light.’ There was probably quite a lot of it, too, Him being God and all. Most of it’s gone, now, of course—the light, I mean, we’ve pissed on the flame by living such dreary, cowardly lives—but there are still bits of it here and there. Sunsets, music, really good jewelry. A face like yours. Don’t you want to share it?”

  “I don’t—” Kwan begins, and stops.

  “What is her problem?” the ladyboy asks Fon.

  Fon says, “She doesn’t know she’s beautiful.”

  “Ohhh.” The ladyboy puts the tips of four straight fingers over her mouth as though warning herself not to say something unseemly. “How very unusual. Most of the time, I work on cotton that wants to be silk, and here I am working on silk that thinks it’s cotton.” She laces her fingers together and holds them in front of her chest, palms touching, like someone about to beg a favor. “Let’s go slowly, shall we? Sit down, please.” She turns the chair toward Kwan and makes a show of dusting the seat with her longest scarf.

  “The hair first,” Fon says, sitting on a plastic chair against the wall and picking up a magazine with a girl’s face on the cover. “And, Kwan, this is Tra-La. Like singing.”

  “Of course the hair first,” Tra-La says severely. “Do I come to your bar and tell you how to dance?” To Kwan she says, “But you are going to have to sit. I can’t cut you on tiptoe.”

  “Sorry,” Kwan says. She eases herself into the seat. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is.” Tra-La swings the chair around to face the mirror. She puts her fingertips lightly on Kwan’s cheekbones and tilts her head right and left, then up and down. “It really isn’t fair,” she says. “No bad angles at all. What’s your name?”

  “Kwan.”

  “Well, you’ll have to do something about that, won’t you?” She’s taking out one pair of scissors after another, snipping the air with them once or twice, then replacing them in a black metal cylinder that’s bristling with them.

  “Why? It’s my name.”

  “And it’s a pretty name, but not for a bar.” She finally chooses a very slender, very silvery pair and holds it, point upward, while she musses Kwan’s hair with her other hand. She ruffles it, lifts it, and lets it fall. “It’s the Kwan that means ‘spirit,’ right? Not exactly the world’s sexiest name.”

  “I’m not sexy.”

  “Just look how your hair falls. Like it was blow-dried by angels before you were born. Darling, if you’re not sexy, I’m an army sergeant. You just give me half an hour here and we’ll discuss it further. Oh, my goodness, I’m so distracted I forgot to cover you up. Can’t have you getting hair all over your awful clothes.” Tra-La puts down the scissors and grabs a length of white cloth, which she tosses over Kwan’s shoulders and fastens at the neck with a hair clip. Then she picks up a spray bottle, says, “Close your eyes,” and begins to mist Kwan’s hair.

  “Smells nice.”

  “Lavender,” Tra-La says. “I make it myself. One must do the little things, you know. Otherwise we might as well live in holes and eat roots. Have you honestly never looked at your hair and thought, ‘What does my mother have against me?’ ”

  “Never.” Kwan feels a surge of loyalty toward her mother. “At school everybody’s hair looks like this.”

  “Yes, but I was at school, too, as hard as that may be for you to accept, and believe me, darling, most of your classmates deserve hair like this. Oh, I wish I had another five or six inches to work with, but we’ll do what we can, and then later we’ll play with it some more.” She begins to snip, and bits of cold, wet hair land on Kwan’s cheeks.

  She opens her eyes and sees herself staring back from the mirror beyond Tra-La’s busy hands. “I don’t want to look.”

/>   “Whyever not?”

  “I don’t like to look at myself.”

  “Fine with me.” Tra-La turns the chair ninety degrees so Kwan is facing the window. “The light is better this way.”

  From her chair against the wall, Fon says, “Didn’t they have any mirrors in your village?”

  “Yes,” Kwan says. “I just didn’t look in them.” To Tra-La, who seems sympathetic, she says, “Everybody called me Stork.”

  “Well, honey, fuck all of them and the dirt they sit on. You’re in Bangkok now, where people can tell diamonds from dung. Lift your chin.” Tra-La is snipping, very quickly, the hair that falls over Kwan’s forehead, holding the scissors almost vertical, and a fine rain of hair sifts down past Kwan’s eyes. “This works,” Tra-La says, nodding agreement with herself. She backs up and cocks her head with her eyes narrowed and her lips tight, then wields the scissors again. “This works just fine.”

  As Tra-La busies herself, Kwan watches people go past the window, which faces onto Patpong. Here and there she sees groups of bar girls dart through the crowd, their hair wet and gleaming from their afternoon showers, shiny as fish, all talking at once as they go to one of the neighboring restaurants for food to take to the bar. They’ll eat as they put on their makeup, and discuss last night’s dreams and the lottery numbers they’re playing, and say awful things about the women who haven’t arrived yet. The metal pipes that frame the night-market booths have been clamped together, lights are snapping on in bar doorways, and neon is beginning to add its acid sizzle to the night. Kwan feels Fon’s eyes on her and realizes that her friend has lowered the magazine and is watching with fascination as Tra-La works.

  Tra-La turns and follows Kwan’s gaze, and when her eyes meet Fon’s, Fon smiles. “Oh, yes,” Tra-La says, eyebrows arched. “I’m exactly that good.”

  Kwan says, “What? What does that mean?”

  “You just sit there, Miss Thailand, and let me do my magic.” The scissors snick near Kwan’s ears, and the short, straight snips of hair accumulate in her lap, and after fifteen minutes or so Tra-La steps back and says, “Hmmmm.” She lowers the hand with the scissors in it, takes several more steps back, then tosses the scissors onto the table in front of the mirror, where they land with a clatter. She attacks Kwan’s hair with both hands, fluffing it, tugging it, yanking it on top so vigorously that Kwan feels her eyebrows lift. Tra-La keeps toying with Kwan’s hair as she circles the chair, and Kwan realizes that the ladyboy is humming. Tra-La leans across Kwan to get the scissors, moving so fast she bumps the back of Kwan’s head without even noticing, and waves the scissors around until she finds a spot to improve, just a snip here and a snip there, while Fon watches the process, not even noticing when the magazine slips from her lap. Finally Tra-La gets a dryer and spends a minute or two grabbing hold of bits of hair, stretching them out, curling them around her finger, hitting them with the hot air, shaping Kwan’s head in a way that reminds Kwan of the way she patted her bag of treasure back into its teardrop shape.

  Then Tra-La puts down the dryer and says, “Indulge me.” She grabs a shoe box full of little jars and bottles, opens one, and spreads something soft and fragrant over the skin on Kwan’s face. Kwan sees Fon get up and come closer, but Tra-La says, “Eyes closed, please,” so Kwan closes her eyes, and for what seems like a long time she gives herself over to this stranger’s fingers on her face, smoothing, patting, massaging, whisking soft brushes across her cheekbones and spreading a moistened thumb beneath them, toying with her hair again, and then doing something with a creamy-feeling pencil to her eyebrows and upper eyelids. “Open your eyes and look up,” Tra-La says, and when she does, Kwan sees Fon leaning in, no more than a foot or two from her face, the tip of her tongue trapped between her teeth, as Tra-La draws a line on Kwan’s lower lid. “Look at these lashes,” Tra-La says to Fon. “Long as palm fronds. It’d be a sin to put goop on them.” She purses her mouth, studying Kwan’s eyes in a way that seems completely impersonal and doesn’t make her uncomfortable at all. “Maybe just a little shine, what do you think?”

  Fon says, “Yes,” and Tra-La opens a slender tube that has a tiny brush in it and tells Kwan once again to look up. The brush barely touches Kwan’s lower lashes before she’s ordered to look down, and she feels the strokes, almost as soft as Tra-La’s breath, on her upper lashes. Tra-La screws the brush back into the tube, and she and Fon move away. Tra-La says, “Yes, yes, yes,” and drapes an arm comfortably over Fon’s shoulders, and the two of them stare at Kwan as though she were a photo in a magazine.

  Then Fon starts to laugh, and after a surprised pause Tra-La joins in. Fon is laughing so hard that she bends forward and rests her hands on her knees, and Tra-La wipes her eyes and smears black makeup over the bridge of her nose.

  Kwan feels the heat mounting in her face. With an abrupt jerk, she swivels the chair to the mirror, looks, and stops breathing.

  There is no one in the mirror who looks familiar. The once-blunt, geometrical hair is jagged and spiky, no two locks the same length, and the longest ones, on the sides, have been swept forward to frame a pair of cheekbones that have been highlighted and shaded until they almost dominate Kwan’s face. Her eyes are lined in a darkness that makes them seem brighter than ever before, and her mouth has been redefined in a pale pink so that its fullness is apparent. The way her hair tapers down above her shoulders makes her neck look a yard long, and she thinks, Stork’s neck, and then instantly, Swan’s neck, and the words strike her like lightning. She instinctively lifts her chin to make her neck even longer and pulls open the cloth Tra-La wrapped around her, to see the way her collarbones wing out on either side at the base of her throat. She has no idea how long she has been looking at herself when she says, at last, “Is this really me?”

  Fon says, “It is now.”

  “Darling,” Tra-La says, leaning on Fon as though she’s exhausted. “You are going to make a fortune.”

  “YOU ARE, YOU know. Do the job right and you’ll earn so much money you can buy your whole village. If you want it, I mean.” Fon pours herself an inch of white wine and offers the glass to Kwan, but Kwan shakes her head yet again, and Fon drains it. The half bottle at Fon’s right hand is mostly gone, and the dishes that litter the table are empty on Fon’s side and almost full on Kwan’s. The food was strange to her, and anyway, she’s too unsettled to eat and she doesn’t want to ruin her lipstick. She feels like she’s been turned into something new, like she just woke up in someone else’s life.

  She forces herself to remember what Fon just said. “Before I make money,” she says, “I have to decide to work.” Without thinking, she takes a rambutan from a pile of them in front of her and peels it by feel, her eyes roaming the room in which they sit, a room unlike any she has ever been in, although it seems familiar.

  “You will,” Fon says. She leans back in her chair and picks up her cigarettes.

  The restaurant is a geometrical landscape of crisp, square white tablecloths and dark corners. At odd intervals, spotlighted on the walls, hang paintings of—Kwan supposes—Europe. They depict farang people in odd, old-looking clothes, and horses, dogs, and dark, hazy forests. Here and there, usually glimpsed in the bluish distance, is a house big enough to be a palace. One of the horses is white and has a horn coming out of its forehead, and dogs are leaping at it. She has seen pictures of paintings like these in school, but she never thought she’d see the real thing.

  In the center of each table is a small golden lamp with a pale pink shade, and Kwan thinks the light makes Fon look younger and softer, her cute face restored to the freshness it probably had when she was sixteen. Waiters in white shirts and black slacks stand idly by; it’s early still, and only a few of the tables are occupied. She and Fon have walked just a few blocks from the noise and glare of Patpong, but it could be a hundred miles. This is a different Bangkok. And then she knows why the room seems familiar: It makes her feels like she’s in one of the television programs she watched in the village.
She’s at the edge of the life in which people have things.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” she says.

  Fon says, “You can. You have to.” She starts to light her cigarette, but a waiter is suddenly there with a lighter outstretched. Fon nods and smiles thanks as though it happens every day and says, “You’re never going to make enough money to send some home until you start going with customers.”

  Kwan waits, her eyes on the tablecloth, until the waiter is gone. “It doesn’t . . . bother you, talking about that in front of . . . I don’t know, people like him?”

  Fon laughs. “He knows what we do. How else could a couple of girls dressed in jeans and T-shirts afford a place like this?”

  Kwan thinks, What you do, but doesn’t say it. What she says is, “Why are we here? We’ve never gone anywhere like this.”

  “It’s your Bangkok birthday,” Fon says. “Today, for the first time, you look like you belong here.”

  “I’ll pay you back,” Kwan says. “For all of it. For Tra-La, for dinner, for everything.”

  “Really.” Fon picks up the small crystal ashtray and hefts it, as though surprised at its weight. “With money you earn from what?”

  Kwan says, “I should tell Nana I want some of what the mama-san paid her.”

  “She’s spent it by now,” Fon says. “She sold you. I wasn’t sure you realized it.”

  “But she helped me, too. My father was going to sell me. And it would have been a lot worse than the bar.”

  Fon pours the last of the wine, hoists the glass, and eyes Kwan through it. “She wouldn’t have lifted a finger if there hadn’t been something in it for her. She’d have let them grab you without even thinking about it. Nana doesn’t do favors.”

  Kwan pulls back her newly cut hair. “She’s not so bad.” She turns her head to display the earrings. “She gave me these.”