by James Newman
“Ahia!” Joe’s driver swore.
“Drive faster.”
The driver put his foot to the floor. He squeezed through a gap between a ten-wheeler and a tourist bus. The gap closed as the driver took the outer lane on the highway. The speedometer read one hundred and twenty and the engine had more to spare. The driver put his foot to the boards. The needle reached for the sky. Joe held onto the back of the seat.
Joe checked the road map. He found their position on the outer-ring-road. “Take the highway and drop off at soi sixty two,” Joe instructed the driver. They sped past the Bang Na exit. The red corolla was somewhere behind the traffic. Joe relaxed and looked out the side window, skyscrapers and billboard posters, empty lots and factories. David Beckham advertised motor oil with a confused regal expression.
The Bang Jak exit was approaching. Joe saw the corolla in the rear view mirror. It had gained distance. He looked at the roadmap. The car was two lengths behind.
“Make it look like you are going straight, but take the exit at the last second,” Joe told the driver. “Swerve, if you have to.” The driver nodded and kept his speed. The red taxi was now a few feet behind. Joe could make out the gold rings on the driver’s fingers. Behind him a figure wearing a baseball cap peered between the two front seats.
“Now!” The driver swerved onto the exit lane inside the path of a black Mercedes SL. The Merc hit the horn. The corolla had missed the exit. Joe saw the passenger wave a fist at them before they flashed by.
“Good driving S. Take a left and onto Sukhumvit and it’s a hotel on soi eleven.” The taxi driver smiled. Joe folded the map, clicked open his Samsonite and put it inside. They drove over a bridge and into Prakanong. Indian-Thais stood waiting for buses. Traders bought and sold goods on the streets, business schools, temples and high rise condominiums. The Emporium stood tall and proud before. Asoke, Terminal 21. Downtown restaurants, tailor-shops, hotels, bars, massage-shops, pharmacies. The taxi u-turned, took a tiny sub-soi. Pulled up outside the Business Inn. Joe grabbed his case and opened the door. He gave the driver the price on the meter.
“You have tip for me? Your friend break my car.”
“Sure,” Joe handed him a thousand and got out of the car. The driver stood smiling at him. Not a word. Only a smile. Joe wasn’t sure if he had given the man too much cash or not enough. He walked towards the hotel. He would never know. A bellboy opened a door and he walked into a cluttered lobby. Joe guessed it doubled as a travel agency. There were papers and documents everywhere. Accountancy books piled up on chairs and tables. Women pecked away on computers. Talked on telephones. Joe walked up to the desk and handed over his passport to a fat Chinese-Thai who eyed him suspiciously. She gave him the key and he signed the book.
Upstairs he placed his Samsonite on the bed. A twenty dollar room. Dark. Dingy. The smell of decay. He located the air-conditioning control and turned it on. It rumbled to attention. A television set. Wooden casing. A window looked down onto the street below. A small vanity with a chair. He opened his case. He took out his Sony netbook and placed it on the vanity. He also placed there a MP3 recorder, a pinhole camera and a small stack of memory-cards held together with an elastic band. There was also a small external hard-drive for back-up and a good old fashioned hard-back notebook and ball-point pen. He tried the bed. He took off his clothes and wrapped a towel around his waist. He ran water into the bathroom tub and returned to the main room. The coordinator had booked him into a larger more expensive hotel the other side of town but Joe had a habit of changing his accommodations at the last minute. He shaved, bathed, dressed. Beige pants and a Hawaiian shirt. He rode the elevator down to the lobby. He gave his key to reception. The receptionist smiled at him. What was it with the Thai smile? Joe figured it meant more than a simple smile most of the time and wondered why they hadn’t invented the frown.
“Your friend called to ask which room you are in.”
“I don’t have any friends. What did he look like?”
“He was foreigner, same you, old, fifty year old more, smell bad, same dog, smell bad same dog.”
“Change my room. Have the boy move my things. I’ll be back this evening. If my friend comes back tell him that I’ve checked out.” Joe walked through the travel agency and onto Sukhumvit road.
He found Cheap Charlie’s bar and sat down on a wobbly stool. It was a dive. An open-air bar that did exactly what it said on the coconut shell. The time was a little after six pm. He ordered a bottle of coke. Sweet, wet, sobering. The tourists on their way to the bars and the clubs. A middle aged man walked past with a sachet of Viagra in his mitt. The tourist opened the packet and ate the jelly there on the street. Joe’s stomach turned. Shameless. He drank the coke and ordered another. There was a faint urge to order alcohol, but he kept it at bay. What the steps and the meetings had taught him was to not try to resist. To resist meant that defeat was an obvious outcome.
The trick was to not try to try to stop.
The evening fell purple over the polluted city. Dust-masked tuk-tuk drivers steered their little blue and yellow toy taxis through the confused traffic. He watched a legless beggar pushing himself along with his hands on a primitive skateboard.
He thought about the case.
How to solve it?
Gain the confidence of a player and record a confession with video and audio footage. The legality of the evidence in a Thai court of law was a grey area. He had a hunch that those involved were unlikely to be singing. He sat on the problem. It didn’t go away. He had managed to kill off the second bottle of coke in slightly under an hour. The sugar livened his senses. He thought about ordering a real drink, nobody would know, but he would and that was the problem.
Whatever you do never pick up. The coordinator had told him those words. In Bangkok there was nothing else to do but pick up. Women. Bottles. Vice. Picking up was the city’s mantra. There was more stuff to pick up than there were hands to do the picking.
He paid the bill and hit the street.
The dusk-lit pavements were awash with the buyers and the sellers. The street vendors and the tourists rubbed against each other with the vibrant hum of commerce. Arabs in Abaya, drunken Brits in jeans and stripy shirts, Germans waddling in tight-fitting shorts, money belts strapped to their waists and gross moustaches sprouting from their top lips. West African’s in loose-fitting garments. Americans in ten gallon Cowboy hats, Australians in Bermuda shorts and flip flops, Japanese and Koreans in light cotton trousers, golfing shirts. The tourists were a migratory herd passing through the Serengeti. Prostitutes were poised on the sidewalk like lionesses leering at the migration, seeking out a weak or injured animal. The lionesses were Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, Burmese, Russian, Nigerian, Ghanaian and Ukrainian. They sat down at shop entrances and eyeballed the passing herd. The Russians lounged around in coffee shops making one cup last several hours hoping a passing John would break from the herd and join her table. The Africans sauntered straight up to the herd and grabbed the weaker ones by the limb, pulling them away from the safety of numbers.
The trick was not to catch their eye.
Don’t pick up.
Joe walked into a pharmacy and was greeted by three generations of Thai behind the counter. He asked the eldest for Valium and he nodded knowingly. The pharmacist pulled out a giant plastic container from a shelf below the counter.
“How many you need?”
“One hundred.” He told him. The old pharmacist’s eyes lit up like street lights on a Piccadilly whore.
“One thousand Baht.” He said measuring out the blue tablets.
Joe gave him the money and as an afterthought bought a can of coke that sat in a rumbling refrigerator by the door.
Only in the East.
“You no need Viagra?” The second eldest asked with a boyish smile.
“I no need.” Joe told him “I need norgesic.”
“Yes. Have,” He said. Norgestic was a muscular relaxant, opposite to Viagra; useful in small
doses but lethal on higher dosage. The human body relies on muscles, the heart, the diaphragm.
It was good to feel prepared.
Joe wandered back through the market streets. Oil paintings on silk cloth, butterflies in glass cases, silk pyjamas, electric lanterns, samurai swords. He walked past massage parlours and cathouses. He reached the Asoke interchange road and made it over to Soi Cowboy. He stood for a moment at the mouth of the soi dazzled by the neon lights. An Indian nut-seller with a sad smile approached him and Joe brushed him away saying something about an allergy. The neon lights shone above bargirls, cash-carriers and money-boys. Their eyes were wide and predatory. The shape of an elephant trundled along the end of the street.
Joe walked into a bar on Soi Cowboy with neon blue lighting and a beer box pool table inside. A stage with two hopeful bargirls dancing to sad progressive rock. The hooker at the bar had been there since 1986. He played pool and lost money to a girl with cool brown eyes and hands as steady as a surgeon. She shot ball after ball and toyed on the black before shooting it into the top far corner pocket. She probably made a living hustling tourists for money, Joe thought. She probably made a living in other ways too. However she made it. She made it well.
Joe sat at the bar on a stool next to a character that may or may not of been breathing. He wore a full-length raincoat and a panama hat. He was painfully thin with an aristocratic face. He reminded Joe of a photograph of an old CIA man. He guessed there was one or two agents rotting away in every city in every dirty corner of the world. Joe finished his drink. There were some bars in the world where he walked in feeling clean and walked out feeling dirty. This was one of those bars. Outside the streets were beginning to fill with water coming from both directions, rain from the sky, sewage water up from the drains. His feet led him up Asoke road.
Joe found himself in a dark alley.
There were cats everywhere, jumping up and running along the pavements. These cats were acrobatic; they ran up walls and moved fast. They were brown in colour. One brushed past and its hairless tail slapped his calf. Rats. He heard a sound and turned around to see the silhouette of a bear-sized man wearing a baseball cap. Joe stood his ground as the man walked up to him. The man spoke English with a German or Swiss accent. As he got closer Joe could see that his teeth were broken and his breath was a cloud of whiskey and cheap tobacco.
“This alley is a dead-end. There is nothing to see here,” the man said.
“Excuse me?”
“I only came here to relieve myself.” The man smiled. “Bangkok is a dangerous city. Where are you staying?”
“What...”
Joe looked at the man’s hand. They were open and empty. His shoulders dropped as he told the man the name of a road that wasn’t important.
“Go back to the main road, turn left and keep walking. Bangkok don’t take prisoners in the back streets, stick to where the lights are.”
“Thanks.”
The man nodded and Joe watched him face the wall and then heard the sound of a zipper opening. Just a harmless old drunk taking a leak, he thought, and walked to the mouth of the alley.
The sound came from nowhere.
The first gunshot sounded like a sudden handclap. The bullet ricochets off the wall. Joe slung his back to the wall and looked along the alley. Another shot. The next one was closer. Joe felt the impact. He couldn’t see the man. Joe slinked to the edge of the road and back onto Sukhumvit. His shirt was torn and damp with blood. He took a deep breath and swore.
Stick to where the lights are.
Joe’s head hit the wall as he glanced up the alley. The man had disappeared into the shadows. Hiding with the rats. He touched his shoulder. The wound pulsed. He stumbled back onto the road. A tuk-tuk driver was smoking a cigarette at the mouth of the alley.
“What you do?” He asked.
“Get me to a hospital, will you,” Joe said calmly. “I’m bleeding.”
The driver looked at Joe and smiled.
The drivers smile was wide.
His teeth were white.
“Five hundred baht,” The driver said, smiling.
THIRTEEN
A connection for junk and iron
THE GUNSHOT only scratched. The nurse cleaned it up at the police hospital. Joe had garnered similar warnings across the globe. A death threat in Lagos and a close call with a pistolero in a Mexican dive bar. Joe figured if anyone wanted him killed then they would have done the job. The next morning he took a trip to China town and picked up a piece of iron for three hundred dollars. The pocket Glock was sold to him by a Chinese named Chow. The weapon and the seller were recommended by the coordinator. There was a connection for junk and iron in every town around the rock. The connection was always Chinese.
The gun slipped easily into the inside pocket of the dark blue three button suit but it weighed enough to be conspicuous. He checked into the Landmark Hotel while keeping the room across the road.
A Bluegreen representative had agreed to meet at a Japanese restaurant. Dylan took the skytrain five stops. He whistled above the Red Zone huddled together with the commuters. He found the restaurant near the mouth of the soi. He walked inside and chose a table in the far corner. Near the bar with a view across the restaurant. A clear path to the exit onto the street or out back through the kitchens. A dozen teak tables were evenly spaced. Two of the tables were occupied by Japanese businessmen. Butterflies and exotic birds decorated all four walls. Joe ordered a coke from a waitress and watched her gracefully pour the liquid into the frosted glass before inaudibly floating back to the kitchen.
A man entered the restaurant. He had a face like a surprised kitten. He spoke briefly with the waitress. She led him to Joe’s table. He was a little shy of thirty wearing a grey two-button suit with plum colour shirt and tie. Silver rimmed spectacles. Short jet black slick-backed hair. His eyebrows were high. His lips thin. Joe stood up and waied with his palms pressed together and his fingertips level with the bridge of the nose.
“It’s not often, Khun Joe, that Europeans visiting us for the first time wai,” he said with a smile. “It almost makes me nervous.”
“No need to be nervous, sir.” Joe said.
They both sat down and looked at each other across the table. “Have you been to our kingdom before?”
“Yes, a long time ago. I am fascinated by your country. The locals seem friendly enough. Always smiling.” Joe glanced at the menu.
“Yes, the land of smiles. I studied in England, Bristol. I won a scholarship from a provincial Thai government school. Quite something for the family, you understand. But can you imagine a shy eighteen year old Thai boy going to study in England?”
“I can imagine the lack of smiles would kick like a mule on steroids.”
“The first winter I sat inside the dormitory questioning my sanity? How could people stand this weather? How could people eat this food? I made friends slowly. My English in Thailand was better than any other student I knew. And then my English in England was nothing.”
The waitress floated over to the table. Boss spoke to her in sharp snaps of Thai ordering the food. Joe felt a shot of anger that he hadn’t been given the chance to order. He began mentally counting the steps.
“So you came to Bangkok straight after University?” Joe asked.
“No I worked in London for a short time. But I couldn’t afford to live there. My family are not poor, but London prices you understand.”
Joe understood.
They made small talk until the food arrived; grilled asparagus, king prawns, Kobe steak, sushi, sashimi, octopus, squid.
“You know the Japanese have their cattle drink rice wine. They have beautiful women massage the cows,” Joe said.
“Is that so?”
“They are civilised people,” Joe said.
“Yes,” Boss took a drink.
“Yes, but ultimately they are having these animals slaughtered. They are killing them for money. It isn’t very civilised to kill for money
, is it now?”
“It is against the laws of karma.”
“Sure,” Joe said. “I’m interested in the divers deal,” he picked up his chop-sticks. “It’s an interesting piece of business. I represent the London insurance office. Your insurers have retained my services to investigate these fatality claims. The last time Bangkok coughed London caught a cold. I’m here to see that no more cows get massaged.”
“And?” Boss said.
“We have some questions. First one. How did this insurance come about?”
“There’s a freelance broker named Hale. He wanted to place the business direct to London. In Thailand we have to go through the appropriate channels which meant finding a Bangkok underwriter. But Hale said he could save money by doing a direct deal. The hotel can book adventure holidays for tourists and if they sign up we provide the insurance. The poor girl that died was a guest at Bluegreen before she went to the island. She signed up for the diving course.” Boss went for the tuna sashimi and dipped it in wasabi.
“Tell me about Hale?”
“A live wire. Ungrounded. Risky. But he gets the business through the door and he knows how it all fits together. It was a nice piece of business. He provided the whole insurance package for half the price of the other quotes we had.”
“Very nice at first,” Joe picked up a piece of Kobe and dipped it into soy. “I need to speak with this Hale.”
“Sure.” Boss reached into his breast pocket and took out a crocodile-skin wallet. He looked through it and then pulled out a card and handed it to Joe.
“That’s most helpful.”
“Mr Dylan, you are our guest in this country.” Joe noticed that his smile was not unfriendly.
“Sure. So where do you go for entertainment in this town?”
“You are the guest Kuhn Joe, what would you like to see?”
“All I need is water, Mr Boss, and perhaps some light entertainment.”
“The Plaza it is then,” he smiled.
“The Plaza?”
“Yes, The Plaza, surely you have heard of it?”
“No,” Joe said.
