The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  It humiliates him that John had been right. The accomplice, the sidekick, the guy Howard had always thought of as Tonto—even called him Tonto out loud a few times, knowing that John wasn’t aware that tonto was Spanish for “stupid.” Well, Stupid had been right.

  And where the hell is Stupid? Did the cops get him? If they did, then he and Stupid are both as good as dead unless he moves right now. Faced with a bunch of Thai uniformed muscle in a concrete room, John will talk. Ten minutes later Howard’s passport will be radioactive. No legal way out of the country.

  And then, just to make everything perfect, that idiot Wan got her period. The day before the flight to Phuket and the dance on the rocks, the bitch got the curse.

  Mistake after mistake, piled on the lethal sin of underestimating the opposition. Letting that wuss writer slap him around in the street, jam the handle of his own knife up his nose. No, he and John couldn’t just follow them from the kid’s school, the way John had wanted to, and then kill them wherever they were hiding. (John was right again.) No, let’s get the kid, he hears himself say. It’ll paralyze Rose. She’ll come to us on her hands and knees. We’ll make her call the hubby and bring him to us, we’ll make her open her own blouse to the knife, as long as she thinks the kid will come out of it okay.

  Right. Who’s stupid?

  He shakes his head and reorients himself. He can’t let his alertness lapse. Patpong is no place for him to be right now. If he had a choice, he’d be on a bus heading for the Cambodian border. Find a place where he can walk across, rely on the fact that the Cambodian government hates the Thai government and will probably ignore any watch notice with his name on it. Fly out of Phnom Penh to Hong Kong, connect to Kabul. Get back to work. Put this behind him.

  In a couple of years, he’ll be able to come back. These people have no memories.

  On his left is a massage parlor with no tout in front of it—there’s never a tout in front of it, so at least he’s right about one thing. Opposite it, brightening that side of the street, he sees a Foodland grocery store, blazing away like noon, full of squat little brown people buying their awful food. Bugs and peppers. Coming up ahead of him on the left, on his side of the street, is a large, dimly lighted hostess bar called the Presidential Club that he’s never gone into. And lounging around in front of it on high stools, smoking and babbling at each other, are six or eight girls. Sucker bait. He heads for the far edge of the sidewalk, giving them as much space as possible, eyes on the pavement.

  But one of them says, “Ow, honey, look like hurt. Me kiss it okay.” He doesn’t slow, but the hatred in his eyes when he glances at her pushes her halfway off her stool. The girl next to her grabs her friend’s arm to hold her up and says to Horner, “Keep going. You no come here.”

  Half a block ahead on the left is the stub road that leads to Patpong 1. Patpong 1 will be much brighter. He puts on his sunglasses to hide the developing black eye and finds that they sit too high on the thick bandages over the bridge of his nose. He stops and forces the little pads farther apart, and one of them breaks off. He stares down at it for a moment, feeling the red heat at his center send out wires of rage, and then he deliberately breaks off the other one. He puts the glasses on again, and this time they sit almost low enough.

  It’ll have to do. The stub street is mostly empty, just a few men heading somewhere, some bar. Not looking at other men. Going from bar to bar as though the women were different from place to place. They are identical: stupid, greedy, dishonest, parasitical. Pick one, pick any of them. As identical as dolls.

  Entering the teeming brightness of Patpong 1, he makes a left and keeps his head down as he pushes his way onto the sidewalk. He stays away from the vendors, who are, in any case, either bargaining a sale or trying to snag a passing customer. A couple of girls trolling the crowd at the entrance to the Throne Room look at him and then exchange wide-eyed glances, but he doesn’t know them, and even if he did, he doesn’t think they’d recognize him. What they see is a tall man wearing dark sunglasses to hide a black eye, a man whose nose is sheathed in a stiff white bandage. His upper lip has been stitched closed where Rafferty tore it with the haft of the knife, and it is swollen out almost an inch above the upper. He doesn’t look like himself.

  One of the women says something in Thai, and the other laughs.

  All he wants to do is get off the sidewalk and into the Kit-Kat to wait for John. He hasn’t heard from John since the debacle on Sukhumvit, and Stupid’s cell phone seems to be out of order. They’ve been partners for years. They have their systems, whether they’re in the firing zone or on vacation, and part of those systems is a series of fallback meeting points. The Kit-Kat is the third and last of the fallback points. John didn’t show at the first two. If he doesn’t show here within fifteen minutes, Howard will have to assume that they got him. Only after three fails can you abandon a partner. It will be time to run for his life.

  The next bar he passes has no women working outside, and he turns into the next, which is the Kit-Kat. The usual crap music, the usual losers sitting on the benches nursing the usual beers. The usual whores on the stage, the usual demi-whores serving drinks. He’s absorbed in locating an empty table, so he doesn’t notice when one of the women on the stage checks him out as he comes in, her eyes doubling in size. She turns her back on him and scans the club for the mama-san but doesn’t see her. One of the girls behind the bar looks at her expression and arches her eyebrows, and the first girl turns her head about a quarter of an inch over her left shoulder. The second girl glances over and gasps, although the gasp doesn’t carry above the music.

  Horner stares down at three fatsos who are taking up two tables, and without a word from him they snuggle up to free the table directly before Horner, a small table in front of the long upholstered bench that runs the length of the club’s right wall. He eases himself down, looking for a waitress, not paying attention to the women on the stage. Across the room he catches a girl staring at him, her jaw slack, and he tilts his head down, embarrassed by his injuries. With his face downturned, the first thing he sees of the waitress is her feet. He lifts the eyes behind the sunglasses to her and says, “Singha.”

  Obviously ill at ease, she stammers a reply he can’t catch over the music and wheels away from him, walking quickly, her back straight and stiff. He watches her go with a preliminary tickle of anxiety. She heads for the bar, but she seems to be looking all over the club for someone. Horner glances at her again and settles back to wait. He takes his first look at the women on the stage. Many of them glance away.

  He sees the one he’d been buying Cokes for before he found Wan, and he tilts his head to her, just a hello, and she takes a step back, so fast she bumps the girl behind her. The girl she bumped doesn’t turn around, but when Horner looks in the mirror on the other side of the room, he finds her eyes wide, aimed at his reflection.

  In fact, all the girls in the row that’s facing away from him are watching him in the mirror.

  At the bar the waitress who took Horner’s order is told that the mama-san has gone down the street to Superstar to chat with that bar’s mama-san. The waitress turns and runs out of the bar as though ghosts are after her.

  Horner watches her go and sits well forward on the bench. He surveys his surroundings, slowly and meticulously, and then he looks at his watch. Ten-twelve. In three minutes he’ll know they got John.

  He lifts his eyes from the watch and, one at a time, examines every face in the room. There is no one who seems familiar. The customers are the invariable ragtag assortment of big-gut assholes, most of them half tanked. Almost all of the women are now assiduously avoiding his face, as though some telepathic public-address system has just made an announcement. When he feels eyes on him and looks to check, the woman turns away.

  The skin on the back of his neck prickles.

  Outside, the waitress who took his order barrels out of the King’s Corner and fights her way through the crowd to run into a bar across the st
reet. She’s followed a moment later by a girl and a ladyboy, who have left the King’s Corner so fast they haven’t even pulled on the wraps they usually wear over their dancing costumes. They split up, one running toward Surawong and the other heading toward Silom. People in the street jump aside and watch them go.

  A song by Hall and Oates, an act Horner detests, blares through the speakers. Keeping his face expressionless, he pulls his feet, which he’d extended beneath the table, toward him and watches the women’s eyes go to the movement. He stretches out an arm and feels the weight of gazes from all over the room. Then, very deliberately, he bends his elbow and looks at his watch again.

  Ten-fourteen.

  Slowly and loosely, keeping his gaze wide and unfocused to see anything that moves, he stands.

  Once, years ago, Horner had been on a plane that was struck by lighting, and an actual bolt of electricity had rocketed through the cabin. That’s what the bar feels like right now. He can almost smell the ozone. Some of the girls on the stage stop dancing, just hang on their poles and stare at him.

  Hall and Oates give way to a snarl of static, and then a woman’s voice, louder than the music, says something in Thai on the disc jockey’s microphone. Two girls jump off their customers’ laps and go out the door, moving fast.

  Horner lets his eyes wander the room behind the sunglasses, without turning his head. There’s movement everywhere. A dozen women stream toward the door and through it. Another eight or ten stop at the curtain. They turn to face him, avoiding his eyes, clearly terrified, but sharing a kind of group bravado.

  Not good. And no John.

  He takes two steps, and half the girls on the stage jump down and scoot past him to join the women at the door. They stand there, maybe twenty-five of them, five or six deep, blocking his way.

  The disc jockey kills the music.

  For a moment the silence seems even stranger to Horner than the band of women between him and the sidewalk. He’s never been in a go-go bar when the music wasn’t blaring. Somehow its absence makes the place smaller and shabbier, brings into sharp relief the cracks in the mirrors and the cobwebs above the speakers, the pieces of tape covering the rips in the fake leather upholstery on the benches.

  The other customers are looking around as though they’re not sure what has changed. One by one they turn their gazes to Horner, the only man standing in the bar. He dismisses them; there’s no one there who worries him, but there are too many pairs of eyes. He says to the women at the door, his voice the sole sound in the room, “Get out of my way.”

  None of them move. A few of them raise their eyes to his face.

  He takes a step forward, and they step back in time with him, forcing the ones farthest from him through the curtain and onto the sidewalk. Two more steps push more of them out of the bar until there are only five in front of him, in an arc only one girl deep and all of them looking at him, and when he makes his final move, those melt away outside, too, and no one is between him and the door.

  He goes to the curtain. For a moment he fingers the cloth, and then he takes one final look at his watch. Ten-fifteen. Good-bye, John.

  As he steps through, Horner looks behind him to make sure no one in the bar is coming at his back. When he’s through the door, he drops the curtain and turns to the street. He has to blink to make sense of what he sees.

  At least sixty girls stand there, shoulder to shoulder, looking silently at him. They’ve cleared a half circle with a radius of about six feet around the door to the Kit-Kat, so they’re all just out of arm’s length. He stands there, weighing options for a moment, and over their heads he sees a girl run into a bar three or four doors down. Twenty seconds later she comes out at the head of a stream of girls, maybe another twenty or twenty-five.

  The Kit-Kat’s door is opposite one of the little passages between the night-market booths that make it possible for customers to cross the street without having to go all the way down the block A large group of bar girls, all in their dancing costumes, are running through the passage, shoving their way toward him through the tourists.

  Maybe forty of them. In all, he thinks a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty.

  The shortest way out is to his right, back to the stub road and then through that to Patpong 2. It’s a distance of thirty or forty yards. He looks right and sees the sidewalk packed solid with women, with more of them pushing their way out of the two clubs he’d passed. Neon light bounces off bare shoulders and shining hair, glinting from the spangles and sequins on their costumes. He smells perfume, hair spray, dance sweat.

  He can hear them breathe.

  There are fewer girls in front of him, between him and the vendors’ booths, so he takes a step in that direction, and the girls fade back, toward the booths. He grins, feeling the sharp tug of pain from the stitch in his lip, and takes two more steps, the women moving with him, maintaining their distance, and the fourth or fifth step takes him off the sidewalk and into the street.

  Piece of cake. All he has to do is walk at them.

  And he hears the curtains over the Kit-Kat’s entrance rustle behind him, and he turns his head to see the remaining girls from the Kit-Kat come through it. Sees still more women from both sides of the entrance close in to join them until they’re six or eight deep. He is at the center of a circle of women, and the circle continues to thicken in all directions.

  Nobody says a word.

  But he can hear the tourists complaining, their way blocked, until the oddness of the sight strikes them and they, too, fall silent. He sees a hand go up beyond the circle, now at least twenty women thick, and hold up a cell phone. It flashes as the tourist snaps his picture.

  Horner stands absolutely still, his eyes roving over the crowd. He takes off the sunglasses to show them his eyes, drops them to the road, and steps on them.

  In the silence the crunch of glass and plastic underfoot seems amplified.

  When he’s surveyed the women in front of him and on either side, he lets his head fall forward and he studies the surface of the road. He lifts his foot and looks at the shards and the twisted frame of his sunglasses for a long moment, seeing the tips of the dancing shoes and boots less than three yards away. He counts to eight, takes a long slow breath, and jumps.

  He covers the ground to the nearest girls before anyone can make a sound. He slaps his hands on the shoulders of the woman directly in front of him and starts to pivot her so he can get an arm around her throat, but she reaches up and backhands his broken nose and then balls up a fist and hits him square on the stitched lip. His eyes fill with tears, and he lets go of her and brings both hands to his bleeding face, bending forward against the pain, and a searing flash of heat erupts in his lower back. When he grabs at it, he feels the hard shape of a knife. He tries to yank it out, but it’s already being pulled away, and his fingers close on the moving blade.

  He straightens, amazed, and stares at the ribbon of blood flowing from his hand. Fury seizes him and twists him around to find the woman with the knife, but he doesn’t see a knife, just women backing away from him, stone-faced, and then something slams against the base of his skull, hard enough to jolt his vision, and he whirls to see a woman dressed like an idiot’s erotic dream of a cowgirl backpedaling, with a set of brass knuckles on her right fist.

  His lunge in her direction is brought up short by a stab in the back of his right thigh, and then a long burning river of pain down his back, a long swipe with the edge of a blade. When he turns this time, the woman with the knife is right there, and he wraps his fingers around her throat, ignoring her slashes to the backs of his hands, but then he feels a deep slice behind his right knee, severing one of the tendons, and he sags to the right and lets go of her and puts a hand down to break his fall, but he recovers his balance and stands there, his weight on his left leg, swaying slightly and starting to feel little sparkles in his head, a kind of fizziness that he knows means he is losing blood.

  He lets his eyes rove over the line of
women in front of him. There are knives everywhere, cheap switchblades and gravity knives, crap shiny Chinese steel that he knows will be sharp only once, will never take an edge after it’s dulled, and he thinks a complete sentence: It’s sharp enough now.

  He pulls himself to his full height, leaning left. There’s a scuttle on the asphalt behind him, and something else penetrates his skin, near his spine this time, the blow feeling dull rather than sharp, but he doesn’t even turn. He just stares across the tops of the bar girls’ heads to the tallest woman he sees, a full head above them, looking back at him. Looking at him as though he were already dead.

  As the knife behind him seeks his spine again, she smiles at him.

  RAFFERTY SEES HIM go down, sees the center of the circle narrow and almost close, like the iris of a camera lens. Women grunt and pant with effort, and there’s a roiling at the center, heads darting in and then drifting back, replaced immediately by others. For a moment, out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees his wife, but then she’s gone, and he and Arthit are plunging into the crowd of women with Kosit beside them, both cops shouting “Police! Police!” and tossing the women aside. The women in front of them turn back to face them, and then, slowly, reluctantly, jostling one another, they part.

  In the center of the circle, Horner is on his back on the pavement. His arms are thrown out, and one knee is drawn up. His head lolls to one side, and his eyelids are half closed, but Rafferty thinks he can feel the man’s gaze.

  Arthit says, loudly enough to be heard to the circle’s far edge, “None of you move. There are police coming from all directions. Anyone who tries to run will go straight to jail.”

  The women stay where they are, watching Rafferty and Arthit come. Rafferty sees the glint of steel in hands on all sides, and then, as the row of women in front of the night-market booths thins, he sees the unbroken expanse of white cloth where the knives and brass knuckles had gleamed in the light.