Big Mango (9786167611037) (12 page)

In some places a man’s past could foretell
his future, but in Bangkok the rules were different. The world was
all future. The past didn’t exist. All kinds of people regularly
disappeared into Bangkok and emerged entirely recreated. The place
was a sort of Bermuda Triangle for discarded lives. Growing old
anywhere was shit, but drifting along Sukhumvit Road on a sticky
Bangkok Saturday night with a graceful young Thai girl on their
arm, a lot of middle-aged men suddenly saw life from an entirely
new perspective. When they had been stuck back in Fresno spending
their weekends at the Red Lobster, the future hadn’t looked nearly
so promising.

The door to the Crown Royal swung open and
six Japanese wearing nearly identical gray suits tumbled in. They
took seats around the one empty table, carefully organizing
themselves in what Bar surmised was the appropriate order of rank.
The bargirls moved quickly to stake out the newcomers, wary eyes
flashing warnings at potential competitors.

Noi glared resentfully at Sidney as she
slammed his beer down. Since she had been behind the bar getting
it, she had lost out on grabbing one of the Japanese for
herself.

“I stay with you. I no butterfly. I luv you,”
she said to Bar as she slid back into the booth next to him, but
she knew it didn’t matter what she said because Bar was never good
for a touch. Not only had he heard all the bargirl stories before,
he had helped make most of them up.

“Look at that, Bar.” Sidney stared with hard
eyes at the table of Japanese. “Fucking Nips think they own
Asia.”

“They do own Asia, Sidney.”

“They don’t own my part of it, mate. Fuck
‘em.”

Sidney shook his head, but his heart wasn’t
in it. He and Bar had been having the same conversation for nearly
twenty years, and it just wasn’t any fun crapping on the Japs,
Sidney had noticed, unless he was totally shit-faced. Then he could
really do a number on the little bastards. Somehow, stone cold
sober, he found the whole subject way too depressing to get
into.

They sat in silence for a while, Sidney
shooting hostile glances at the Japanese every time he heard
anything that suggested one of them might be having a good time and
Bar sipping slowly at his Carlsberg.

Suddenly Sidney brightened. “I almost forgot,
Bar. A guy was in here looking for you. Must have been about an
hour ago.”

“Who was it?”

“I dunno. Just some guy. A Yank, I
reckon.”

“You didn’t know him?”

Sidney looked disgusted. “If I knew him, Bar,
I’d have fucking told you who he was, wouldn’t I?”

“Did he know me?”

“Seemed to.”

“What did he want?”

“Didn’t say. Just asked if you were coming in
tonight.”

“And you told him…” Bar prompted
patiently.

“I told him I didn’t know. Sometimes you did,
sometimes you didn’t.” Sidney shrugged. “Probably just some fucking
tourist wants you to autograph your column and tell him where to
get laid cheap.”

Maybe, Bar thought. And maybe not.

When you worked the night scene in Bangkok,
you always kept one ear open for footsteps. You never knew who you
might have pissed off, and when you pissed off people in Bangkok
they didn’t have their lawyer call your lawyer.

The going rate for a hit in Bangkok was
usually no more than five thousand baht, about a hundred and fifty
American dollars. Sometimes, of course,
farangs
cost a
little more to do since foreigners could be messy and conspicuous,
but the price seldom went over ten thousand baht regardless, unless
it was during an election and all the hit men were booked up.

Bar couldn’t think of anything he had written
recently that might cause anyone to want him popped, and he was
even pretty sure he hadn’t been dinking the mistress of any Chinese
drug peddler lately either, at least not that he knew of for sure.
Maybe he was getting old, he reflected briefly. He really wasn’t
much of a candidate anymore for a double tap behind the ear with
one of those little .22 revolvers the local pros favored for
close-in work. That thought left him with strangely mixed
feelings.

“Was the guy a Thai?” Bar asked Sidney.

“No, a
farang
I already told you.
Probably just some tourist looking for a bit of action.”

Bar let it go. “Yeah, probably,” he said and
took another pull from the Carlsberg.

But he made a mental note of everything
Sidney had said and filed it carefully away.

When you had been around Bangkok for as long
as Bar had, you lived by local rules. One of the most important of
those was this: you were seldom interested in being found by anyone
who was looking for you.

Bar figured he had better watch his step for
a few days, just to be on the safe side.

THEY
walked out of customs
into the airport arrival hall and stood blinking in the harsh
fluorescent lights trying to get their bearings. Winnebago nudged
Eddie, pointing to the crowd waiting for arriving passengers behind
a low chrome railing. A man wearing a crisp white uniform with
brass buttons and dark shoulder boards was holding up a large card
on which was printed in block letters, WELCOME TO MR. RUPERT DARE,
ESQ.

Eddie dragged his luggage trolley over to the
railing and gave the man a weary smile. “That’s me, admiral.”

“Welcome to Bangkok, Mr. Dare. I am here to
drive you to the Oriental Hotel.” The man slipped under the railing
and collected Eddie’s suitcase from the luggage cart, bowing
slightly as he did. “Please follow me, Mr. Dare.”

“I got a bag, too,” Winnebago said. “You only
work for certain races or what, little buddy?”

The man stopped walking and turned around. He
glanced quickly at Winnebago, then looked at Eddie, his face a
question mark.

“Winnebago is with me,” Eddie explained.
“He’s an Indian, but it’s not his fault.”

“Native American,” Winnebago corrected.

“Are you still on that kick?”

“I think I’ll just try it on for size while
we’re here. See how it goes.”

“I don’t know.” Eddie looked at the driver.
He was still punchy from the 22-hour flight and knew he wasn’t
making much sense, but it didn’t particularly matter to him. “What
do you think?” he asked the man.

The driver was starting to wonder what he’d
gotten into. Who
were
these deranged morons? His wife always
said that white guys were crazy. He put on the blandest expression
he could manage and switched switched on his humble coolie
routine.

“I just driver, sir. I no understand.”

Winnebago held out his suitcase. “Just take
it away, man, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

The driver quickly grabbed Winnebago’s bag
with his free hand and, giving a little bob with his head, scuttled
away.

***

THE
dark blue Mercedes edged
out of the airport and turned its three-pointed star toward central
Bangkok. Within minutes it was grinding slowly through the worst
traffic Eddie had ever seen.

The road from the airport looked like a
freeway inexplicably converted to a temporary parking lot. It was
marked with four lanes, but no one seemed particularly impressed.
Vehicles of every possible kind jostled for space and added up to
at least six lanes, if not more. Calling this a traffic jam, Eddie
thought, was like calling a lump of coal a dead plant.

Even inside the big Mercedes chilled down to
the temperature of a berserk Frigidaire, Eddie could smell Bangkok,
a mix of automobile exhaust, jasmine blossoms, burned grease,
drifting incense, and raw sewage that was like the smell of no
other city he had ever known. It was something that the strongest
rain would never wash away, an odor that even the hot, heavy
Bangkok air could never smother.

The massed assault on his senses was starting
to kick-start Eddie into a second wind. He knew a place where Bar
Phillips hung out most evenings and had thought during the flight
about stopping there on the way in from the airport. He could
always call
The Bangkok Post
and leave a message, of course,
but Bar wasn’t a guy who put much effort into returning calls and
Eddie thought the sooner he could find him the better. Maybe he
would get lucky if they just dropped by the Crown Royal.

“You feel like making a stop on the way in?”
He glanced sideways at Winnebago.

“Fuck.” Winnebago tilted his head back
against the seat and closed his eyes. “What I feel like is hammered
sheep shit on a flat rock.”

Visibility was terrible through the gathering
darkness and the rancid air, but Eddie could just make out lines of
shophouses along the roadside, street stalls with dented aluminum
pots of food stacked on wooden tables, and junkyards piled with
greasy automobile parts. In one place, a bunch of kids and dogs
were just standing by the freeway watching the traffic not move.
They looked to Eddie like fishermen gathered on a riverbank,
waiting to cast a line out into the traffic and haul in an old tire
or maybe a whole Toyota.

The car’s windows were tinted so darkly that
no one could see in. Eddie looked straight into the eyes of people
outside without them knowing he was there. It was a creepy feeling,
watching people that way as they crawled along, but there was
something oddly familiar about it, too. It was like being on a ride
at Disneyland, he decided, sitting with the other tourists in a car
being towed slowly through Third World Land, a place of chaos and
squalor, but boasting stunningly life-like animatronics.

The Mercedes edged along until they came upon
a pack of street kids wearing shorts without shirts and working the
roadway selling garlands of flowers. Suddenly an old man leaned up
against the window and Eddie jumped in spite of himself. The man
was a skinny, shrunken fellow wearing a baggy Oakland Raiders
T-shirt and he thrust out a rooster that looked even more skinny
and shrunken than he did. Jesus, Eddie wondered, who would buy a
rooster in the middle of a traffic jam? But then the car began to
edge forward, the old man fell behind, and Eddie never found
out.

They didn’t have any trouble locating the
Crown Royal, but Bar Phillips wasn’t around and no one seemed to
know whether he was coming in any time soon. Eddie briefly
considered waiting, but he was beaten up from the long flight and
told the driver just to take them on to the hotel. Besides, there
really wasn’t all that much of a rush, he told himself. He would
get some sleep and see what the next day brought.

An assistant manager dressed in a frock coat
and gray striped trousers was waiting when their car finally pulled
up to the Oriental and he gave Winnebago the same kind of look that
the driver had. Followed by two uniformed porters, each carrying
one suitcase, he escorted Eddie and Winnebago to a suite facing the
river near the top of the hotel. After assuring them that the
formalities of registration had already been taken care of and
politely wishing them a pleasant stay, he bowed his way out of the
suite.

“That was real nice,” Winnebago said. “All
except the part when he asked if you needed a small room for ‘your
man’ here.”

Eddie stood at the big windows and looked at
the Chao Phraya River down below. It was a lazy looking bastard,
wide and still, twisting aimlessly back and forth through the city.
Here and there lights winked on small boats dodging through the
darkness, darting like water bugs in shifting patterns that made no
more sense to Eddie than the meandering of the big river
itself.

When he heard the two sharp taps, he walked
over and opened the door. For a moment he wasn’t able to decide if
the figure standing there was a small boy or a midget with weird
dress sense. Decked out in a spotless white uniform with a pillbox
hat tilted to the side and tied under his chin with a red ribbon,
the caller wordlessly thrust out a silver tray containing nothing
but a single white envelope. Eddie took the envelope and the
apparition wheeled sharply and vanished through some almost
invisible door in the hotel corridor. With a shrug, Eddie closed
the door and tore open the envelope.

“Who was that?” Winnebago asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to tell you.”

Eddie scanned the single sheet of paper.

“According to this,” he told Winnebago, “we
won’t be seeing our benefactor until noon tomorrow. Thank God. What
I need is a shower and about twelve hours of sleep in a real
bed.”

Winnebago couldn’t believe what he was
hearing. “What? We’re in Bangkok, man! Sleep? Let’s get some
action!”

“I thought you were all done in, Sitting
Bull. If that’s what you have in mind, you’re going to need more
energy than either of us has left tonight. You’re a lot older than
you were the last time you were here.”

“Maybe you, white man,” Winnebago snapped,
slapping an open palm against his chest, “but not
this
Native American.”

Eddie responded with a sound that was
appropriately ambiguous, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on
the couch. There was a copy of the Bangkok Post on the coffee table
and he picked it up, idly flipping the pages.

Winnebago lit a Camel and examined the tray
of crystal glasses on top of a large teak cabinet under the
windows. “Nice glasses, but why so many?”

“They go with the bar.” Eddie lowered the
newspaper and pointed toward the cabinet’s double doors. “Probably
in there.”

Winnebago ditched his cigarette in an ashtray
and opened the cabinet doors.

“Wow! Look at this, Eddie! There’s even an
ice box in here!” He pulled on the handle and the little
refrigerator rattled open. “You want something?”

Eddie shook his head. “Neither will you when
you find out how much that stuff costs in a place like this.”

“Isn’t our bill being paid by this guy who
gave you the ticket?”