Big Mango (9786167611037) (19 page)

Bar selected one of the motorcycle boys who
didn’t look overly stoned on paint thinner that evening, gave
directions, and swung onto the bike behind him. It coughed and
sputtered the first couple of times the rider tried to start it,
but on the third try it caught with a deep roar and the boy bumped
them over the curb and wedged his way into the passing traffic. The
rain was much lighter now, but the drops that were still falling
were big and heavy. Occasionally one would splatter against Bar
like a huge, well-aimed gob of spit.

He enjoyed taking motorcycle taxis most of
the time. Their seats carried a fair cross-section of the city. He
had seen them occupied by chubby, red-faced farangs clutching their
Wall Street Journals; by Thai mothers collecting their children
from school, two or three stacked up like tiny packages between her
and the rider; by deliverymen balancing improbable towers of boxes;
and even by policemen, hats pulled low, and opaque, black glasses
masking their eyes as they headed off to do whatever cops really
did in Bangkok.

Bar’s favorite sight by far, however, was the
Thai office girls. They usually rode sidesaddle, balancing on the
back of the weaving machines with breathtaking grace and perfect
nonchalance. Bar had no doubt at all that Bangkok had the best
looking office girls in the world,. Certainly the best dressed.
They never seemed to wear anything but brightly colored, cheerful
suits with straight, tight skirts that ended a few inches above
their knees. Their well-cut jackets, always buttoned, emphasized
small waists and perfect hips, and their smooth bare legs flowed
down to tiny feet clad in business-like pumps.

A pack of bikes had edged its way past the
gridlocked cars and buses to the next intersection and, when the
traffic light on Rama IX went green, they howled off in a
ear-splitting roar. That was the moment that every motorcycle taxi
rider lived for. After a traffic light changed, there was
occasionally a couple of hundred yards of open road on the other
side of the intersection. Allowing a motorcycle ridden by a Thai
onto a road without traffic was suicidal. Even showing them a few
hundred yards of it was pretty risky. Bar could never believe how
fast they got the bikes going in so little space, nor how quickly
they slowed down to squeeze back between the lanes of traffic
stalled at the next light.

But today Bar was paying less attention to
the death race than he usually did. He was still thinking about
Eddie Dare and his fanciful yarn. The whole thing worked at him,
although it wasn’t his problem and he couldn’t see for the life of
him why he was so caught up in it. This was just a little research
job on the side, wasn’t it? Whoever was trying to intimidate those
guys probably didn’t even know Bar existed. No reason to worry, he
told himself again. None at all.

Just take the ten grand and do the job, he
told himself.

Bar’s driver had managed to shoot clear of
the pack back at Rama IX and make a pretty cool little move to slip
between two lines of buses and get all the way up to the next light
before he had to stop again. When the other bikes caught up, a big
Yamaha with a passenger riding pillion pulled up alongside them.
The passenger, his face invisible behind a greasy black visor,
slowly turned his helmeted head and looked at Bar.

When he didn’t turn away after a glance, Bar
became a little wary; and when the passenger reached inside a
canvas bag slung over his shoulder, still without turning his head
away, Bar almost shit himself.

The most popular method in Thailand for
conducting a contract hit was to do business from the back of a
motorcycle. It was a handy arrangement. The rider could get the
gunman in close to the target without arousing his suspicion, and
both the rider and the shooter wore helmets that rendered them
completely unidentifiable. Motorcycle hitters usually favored .45
caliber automatics with soft point slugs rather than the much
smaller .22 revolvers used by the real professionals who preferred
to take you from behind at close quarters. The idea was to make
sure the victim was messed up enough to kill him, even if the
shooter wasn’t talented enough to get off a good shot from the back
of a motorcycle, which he almost never was.

Everything Bar had heard about contract
shootings from motorbikes, and it was a great deal during his
almost forty years in Bangkok, ran through his head in the moment
he saw the passenger on the Yamaha push his hand deep into his bag.
He had always wondered what he would do if he saw this coming, and
now he knew.

He froze.

The passenger’s hand slowly emerged from the
canvas bag, Bar’s eyes bolted to it. Bar pleaded with himself to
move, but his body was locked rigidly in position. Only his eyes
still seemed to be working. The hand continued its movement, and
Bar began to resign himself to the inevitable.

Maybe he’ll miss. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Maybe the little fucker will miss.

The hand appeared and Bar clinched his eyes
shut, bracing himself as it thrust toward him.

Nothing happened.

Bar cracked his eyes open, making tiny slits
of them. He almost laughed out loud.

The big Yamaha was still there, and the
passenger still had his arm out stretched just as Bar had thought
it would be, but his hand didn’t hold the .45 which had grown so
large in Bar’s imagination that its muzzle had taken on the
dimensions of the Lincoln Tunnel.

It held an envelope.

The passenger waved the envelope at Bar,
gesturing for him to take it. When Bar hesitated, the waving became
more frantic.

Well, what the hell? Bar reached out and took
it.

All he had time to see before the light
changed and the bikes roared away again was that it was an ordinary
airmail envelope with his name neatly printed on it in black
ink.

Just that, and nothing more.

AFTER
Eddie and Winnebago
bolted out of the lobby of the office building, they turned left on
Sukhumvit and melted into the sidewalk crowds, or at least they
melted into the crowds as well as a tall white man and an American
Indian could expect to melt into a crowd anywhere in Bangkok.

“That was great, man!” Winnebago laughed as
they sloshed through puddles left by the rain that had stopped
falling as suddenly as it had begun. “That was fuckin’ great!”

“Don’t get too excited. He won’t have any
trouble finding us again whenever he wants.”

“Any idea who—”

“Not a clue,” Eddie cut him off. “None.”

Eddie waved his hand toward a passing
tuk-tuk. It veered immediately to the curb and heeled up unsteadily
on two of its three tiny wheels as it stopped to pick them up.

“Soi 31,” Eddie told the driver. He and
Winnebago ducked under the fringed canopy that sheltered the small
passenger compartment and scrambled onto the vehicle’s orange
plastic bench.

The young Thai piloting the battered vehicle
twisted around and quickly sized up his prospects. “Hundred baht,”
he announced, holding his index finger up to Eddie to emphasize the
number. Eddie waved him on.

The tuk-tuk lurched away from the curb with
the deafening, high-pitched throb that gave the contraption its
name. Winnebago wrapped both hands around the railing to keep
himself from falling into the street, fixed his eyes straight
ahead, and hung on. Paying scant attention to the road, the driver
focused primarily on tuning the transistor radio that dangled from
the rearview mirror. Cutting off a bus, the tuk-tuk driver couldn’t
believe his luck when he looked up from the radio and found himself
in a lane that was momentarily clear of traffic. He hunched forward
and floored it. It was less than five minutes before he made a
right turn off Sukhumvit into a small soi and suddenly slowed.

“This soi 31.” The driver turned his head
back toward Eddie. “Where you go?”

“The Little Princess. Do you know where it
is?”

The driver grinned. He let the tuk-tuk coast
as he racked the engine and weighed the opportunity that had
suddenly been presented to him.

“No girl now. Close.”

Eddie nodded, but said nothing.

“I know good place. Many girl. Very nice.
Very sexy. I take you. Okay?”

“No girls. Just take us to the Little
Princess.”

“Close, boss. Little Princess close.”

“Maybe.” Eddie pulled a red banknote from his
pocket and held it up. “But we’re going there anyway.”

The boy shrugged and turned away, gunning the
tuk-tuk on down the soi. That’s another crazy
farang
story
he’ll have for his friends, Eddie thought. When the tuk-tuk boys
are drinking their beer together after work, I wonder what they
will make of the two
farangs
who insisted on going to a
closed massage parlor.

A short distance off Sukhumvit the food
vendors thinned out and the highrises became houses, largely
invisible behind high concrete walls topped with broken glass.
Sleepy looking security guards lounged in sling chairs in front of
some of the gates and flies buzzed around packs of scabby dogs
dozing in whatever shade they could find between the concrete
trench of the road and the unbroken panorama of walls.

The tuk-tuk swung out to pass a group of
young girls in identical dark blue skirts, white blouses, white
socks, and black Mary Janes. They were bunched up against a wall
near one of the gates, smoking and gossiping, ducking out early
from one of the expensive private schools in the neighborhood,
Eddie guessed. As they whined by, the girls stared at the two big
farangs
and one of the bolder ones flashed a smile and
waved. Eddie waved back, setting off a fit of giggles.

The driver suddenly cut right into a narrow
lane that was badly potholed. Water filled most of the holes and
they splashed through a few before jerking to a stop. The tuk-tuk
boy let the engine idle and pointed to his left without bothering
to turn around.

“What the fuck is that?” Winnebago leaned
across Eddie to get a better look.

An empty parking area fronted the narrow soi
where they had stopped. Across it was a large two-story concrete
building that looked like an abandoned military installation. The
mottled gray surface of the structure was cracked and pitted and
there were no windows, only regularly spaced circles that had once
been some shade of brown and which marched in ranks across the
façade like painted portholes. Strings of tiny white lights
outlined the edges of the building. Those that weren’t burned out
blinked on and off irregularly.

“Little Princess,” the boy shouted over the
engine, revving it impatiently. “Nobody here. Tell you, close.”

They climbed down and Eddie paid the driver,
who stared at them briefly then roared away.

“Nice fella,” Winnebago observed. “Real
helpful.”

They walked across the parking lot toward
what Eddie assumed to be the entrance. There was a tiny canopy over
a single door with a pile of cardboard Singha beer boxes stacked on
one side and an empty metal stool on the other. Two scrawny dogs
that had taken shelter from the sun in the tiny sliver of shade
thrown by the canopy hauled themselves up and eased away from the
approaching men. It wasn’t even midday yet and Eddie could already
feel the heat in the concrete through the soles of his shoes.

Eddie pushed at the door and rattled the
handle. Locked. He banged half-heartedly a couple of times, but the
door was heavy and the sound was too muffled to carry even if
someone had been inside. While Winnebago stood with his hands on
his hips surveying the empty parking lot, Eddie stepped back
shading his eyes with one hand and looked up. He scanned the front
of the building for a minute. When he accepted that there was
nothing to see, he dropped his hand and moved back into the
shade.

“Suppose this is it?” Winnebago asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t look like a massage parlor.”

“No, but that’s what it is. I just don’t know
if it’s the right one. What were you expecting a massage parlor to
look like?”

“I don’t know. Something a little more…you
know, sexy.”

Bangkok’s massage parlors were made for
darkness, Eddie knew, but he wasn’t sure how to explain that to
Winnebago. In the vampire hours, they were crystal palaces where
throngs of graceful, young girls, wasp-waisted in long
brightly-colored silk sarongs, smiled and giggled to each other as
they reclined on carpeted risers behind huge plate glass windows,
each wearing a small badge with a number.

In a world that spun too fast, the parlors
gave asylum to weary males. They were sanitariums of the night,
safe houses for the seriously battle-fatigued, sanctuaries for
those who had made one too many patrols into the sexual jungles of
the West, the dark places where the real massacres in the war of
the sexes took place. In daylight, however, massage parlors were
shabby structures that looked like derelict warehouses. You could
almost smell the spilled beer, stale cigarette smoke, and
industrial-strength disinfectant through the pitted concrete
walls.

Eddie scanned the street.

Could this be the same place he had seen in
the picture, the street where Harry Austin’s broken body lay in a
shallow, muddy hole? He supposed it could be, but then so could
half the streets he had seen in Bangkok. One mud hole looked pretty
much like another.

“I got an idea,” Winnebago suddenly said.
“Come on.”

Eddie watched as Winnebago set out across the
parking lot with a purposeful stride. Glancing back once at the
locked door, he followed. By the time he caught up, Winnebago had
reached the street.

“Where we going?”

“Find some folks. See what they can tell
us.”

“Even if we’re in the right place, Winnebago,
it’s been a month or two. No one’s going to know what we’re talking
about.”