Big Mango (9786167611037) (35 page)

“You think she’s telling the truth about
Captain Austin?”

“Yeah. And Richard Nixon was just
misunderstood.”

They looked at Short Time some more, but
there wasn’t very much to see, so they turned back to the bar and
leaned on their elbows, resting their chins on their clasped
hands.

There was a long, uneasy silence until
Winnebago finally broke it.

“What the fuck are we doing here, Eddie?” he
asked. “We’re stuck in some broken-ass, third-world crap hole
10,000 miles from home; we’re drinking shitty beer in a whorehouse
with no whores; and we’re running away from a bunch of people who
would kill us in a second for something we haven’t got and don’t
know how to find. Does this make
any
sense to you?”

“Did you ever hear the old saying about
having to be there when your ship comes in?”

“Yeah, but I’ve also heard the one about it
not being over until the fat lady sings and the bitch is doing
scales in my ear right now.”

“Well,” Eddie shrugged, “there you have it.
That’s exactly what life generally comes down to: a choice between
clichés.”

Bar shook his head and climbed off his stool.
“This is getting us nowhere. I’m going to take a leak.”

“Me, too,” Winnebago said.

Winnebago followed Bar across the room and
into what he gathered was the bathroom. When he got inside, he saw
it was the kind of toilet that just begged people to piss on the
floor. In fact that was the only option, since it was nothing but
an empty room with three holes in the stained concrete, each hole
surrounded by what looked like a broken toilet seat stuck to the
floor.

“What the fuck is this?” Winnebago asked.

Bar unzipped and began relieving himself into
one of the holes.

“They’re called squat toilets,” he said.

Winnebago followed Bar’s example and relieved
himself in the nearest hole. It felt a little weird to piss into a
hole in the floor, but then he supposed a piss was a piss.
Something else bothered him though.

“You mean you have to sit on the floor to
take a dump?” he asked.

Bar shook off and zipped up. “See those
little footrests?”

Now that Bar mentioned it, Winnebago noticed
that there were indeed tiny footprints imprinted on the seats, like
the kind children made with their feet in drying concrete.

“You squat with one foot on each side and let
go,” Bar said.

Winnebago watched his urine splashing into
one of the little footrests and shook his head in disgust.
Finishing up, he zipped his pants and he had just turned around to
leave when he saw that Bar looking at him with an odd
expression.

Holding one finger over his lips for silence,
Bar cracked open the door and nodded toward it. Winnebago squinted
out and, although his field of vision was limited, it was easy
enough to see what had spooked Bar.

Two very large men were right up in Eddie’s
face, their back toward the toilet door. Both were wearing leather
jackets even though it must have been ninety degrees outside and,
while Bar and Winnebago couldn’t see either man’s hands, their
postures left little doubt that they were holding weapons in front
of them.

Bar nudged Winnebago and gestured with his
head to the opposite side of the room. Short Time had risen from
the table where she had been slumped with her head down and was
edging slowly toward the corner of the bar furthest away from Eddie
and the two men. At first Winnebago thought she was just getting
her little butt out of there, but then he saw the beer bottle she
had down out of sight against her leg.

When she reached the other side of the bar,
she leaned against it for a moment as if paying no attention to
anyone. One of the leather jackets glanced toward her briefly, but
quickly dismissed her and returned his full attention to Eddie who
was talking and gesturing vigorously.

After the man had turned completely away from
her, Short Time flipped the beer bottle very deliberately across
the room. It crashed against a wall and both men pivoted
immediately toward the sound. When they came around, Bar and
Winnebago could see that they were both holding AK-47s with long
banana clips curling gracefully away from the polished wood of
their stocks.

“Oh fuck,” Winnebago breathed. “I thought
that spook said the Vietnamese used knives.”

“They’re not Vietnamese,” Bar whispered.
“They’re locals. Thai-Chinese.”

“Locals? Then exactly who the fuck is after
our ass now?”

Bar just grunted, but he didn’t say anything.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Short Time’s hands dart under
the counter while the two men were distracted. When they
reappeared, to his surprise they cradled a pump-action 12-gauge
sawed off just in front of the slide. In a single, fluid motion
Short Time took a few quick strides down the bar, dropped out of
sight beneath it, and racked the weapon’s action to chamber a
round.

The ragged
clack-clack
of a shotgun’s
pump is an unmistakable sound to anyone who has ever heard it. The
leather jackets apparently had. They reacted instinctively, knowing
now that the crash had been only a distraction. Spinning toward the
sound, they split apart and crouched low, painting the room with
their weapons looking for the real threat.

When the man closest to Eddie turned, his
feet shifted automatically into a wide stance, both knees slightly
bent and his body ready to roll in either direction. It wasn’t the
best posture for defending himself and Eddie reacted quickly. He
gripped the sides of his stool with his hands, cocked his right
leg, and drove his heel into the back of the man’s exposed knee. As
the man lost his balance and toppled sideways, Eddie sprang from
the stool, clasped his hands together, and clubbed him hard behind
his left ear. The cracking of hands against bone and Eddie’s
screech of pain came almost simultaneously, followed soon after by
the thump of the man’s heavy body hitting the floor.

Winnebago and Bar were out the toilet door
and hurtling across the room as soon as Eddie made his move.
Scattering tables and chairs, Bar broke for the man Eddie had put
on the ground, and Winnebago launched himself at the other one, but
he need not have bothered. Short Time had already popped up from
behind the bar and the muzzle of her sawed-off shotgun was poking
him in the belly.

The man looked Short Time over, weighing his
chances, but her eyes left no room for doubt. Slowly he lowered his
gun, placed it on the floor, and clasped his hands on top of his
head. Short Time came around the bar, kicked the AK across the
room, and slammed the barrel of the shotgun across the side of the
man’s face. He evidently knew the drill, because he quickly went
flat on the floor, his hands behind his back.

The first man was beginning to push himself
up off the floor and Bar hurled himself through the air directly at
him. Eddie’s foot quickly lashed out and caught the man squarely in
the head; and by the time Bar landed, there was nothing left to hit
except the floor. Bar howled in pain as his kneecaps smashed into
the hardwood.

Eddie bent over and grabbed the AK.

“Serves you right,” he said as he
straightened up. “Was that the world’s longest piss you were taking
out there or what? Even I was starting to run out of bullshit.”

Bar got off the floor and looked at the man
lying crumpled next to where he had hit. He rubbed at his knees and
then kicked the guy in the head just for the hell of it.

“You come with me.” Short Time tugged
insistently at Eddie’s elbow. “All you. Come with me.”

Eddie shook his head. “We’re going to get
some straight answers from these clowns first.”

“No! Now! With me.”

She whispered something in Thai to the girl
in the shapeless dress who was tending bar and handed her the
sawed-off shotgun. Motioning urgently for Eddie to follow, she
trotted across the room and disappeared through a back door.

Bar and Winnebago followed her with their
eyes and then turned to Eddie.

“What do we do?” Winnebago asked.

Eddie thought for only a second, maybe two.
“We go,” he said.

They followed Short Time through the door and
found themselves in a narrow alley behind the Little Princess.
Garbage was strewn everywhere and water from an outlet pipe dripped
into an open sewer. Short Time was waiting for them, sitting
astride a red Suzuki with the engine already idling. She revved the
motor and pointed toward another motorcycle propped against a
dumpster piled with Singha boxes. The bike was muddy and the make
unidentifiable, but it looked serviceable.

“Who drive that one?”

The three of them looked at each other until
Winnebago shrugged, climbed on, and kicked it over. Eddie settled
himself on the Suzuki behind Short Time and they all looked at Bar,
who didn’t seem all that happy.

“I should have taken my chances with the guys
inside,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” Eddie said. “That’s still an
option.”

“Oh fuck!’ Bar sighed. “The bag is still in
there. I got to go back for the artillery.”

“No! Go now!” Short Time began to edge the
Suzuki out of the alley toward the main road.

“Forget it,” Eddie shook his head at Bar.
“She’s right.”

Looking miserable, Bar slipped onto the back
of Winnebago’s bike. He wedged one hand as tightly as he could into
the small handle behind the seat and wrapped his other arm around
Winnebago’s waist.

Winnebago racked the motor a couple of times
and grinned over his shoulder. “Hold on tight, baby.”

“I can see it all now,” Bar sighed, tilting
his head back and closing his eyes. “After forty years of beautiful
Thai women, I’m going to die with my arms around a Indian named
after a fucking motor home.”

“You crazy bastards,” Short Time said.

Then she gunned the Suzuki hard and squealed
down the alley blasting brown fountains of water to both sides as
she crossed a sewer. Looking neither left nor right, she shot
straight across traffic, dodged a slow-moving bus jammed with
school children, and screamed into a hard right turn. A small army
of Korean tourists wearing nametags filed through a crosswalk just
ahead of her and Short Time aimed the big Suzuki right at them.
Eddie was wondering whether the nametags would help in identifying
the bodies when the Koreans scattered in terror.

Winnebago and Bar roared off right behind
Lek, and then they just did their best to stick as close as they
could.

THE
outer wall was old and
cracked. Some of the large sandstone blocks that had been locked
together to form it on a day long forgotten had given up entirely
and yielded gracefully, perhaps even gratefully, to time and
gravity’s pull and turned back into piles of loose sand once again.
The breaches they had left in the wall were of no real importance
since the structure only marked a boundary of sorts. It had never
been meant to keep anyone in or out.

The compound’s outer courtyard was outlined
with seated Buddha figures, every face frozen eternally in benign
tranquility. The images were larger than life, and the bright
saffron of the cloth sashes draped around them was luminescent
against the cool white of the stone. Deeper inside there were
walled pathways over which other ranks of Buddha images stood
watch. These pathways were arranged geometrically, forming a series
of concentric boxes. It was exactly at the center of those boxes,
at the very core of the compound, that something extraordinary
stood.

The Buddhist temple, the
wat
, looked
nothing at all like the dour edifices with which Western religions
browbeat the docile. It was more like something straight out of a
child’s drawing of heaven. Its golden spires sparkled with light;
its roof was tiled in vivid orange and green; its lines arched
steeply to an impossible peak; and its blindingly white-washed
walls seemed to pulse against the glazed cobalt of the sky.

Behind the flamboyance of the
wat
were
the simple wooden huts where the Buddhist monks lived. They were
arranged in modest rows, each structure raised above the ground on
short stilts and bare inside except for a sleeping mat and a small
chest. Every
wat
had a complement of monks who lived in huts
such as these caring for the temple and its grounds and
occasionally conducting funeral rites or dispensing blessings. Some
of the men had been monks since they were children. Others had
chosen later in life to flee the terrors of the world and retreat
to a
wat
to live for a few months or sometimes even a few
years.

The afternoon, like most afternoons, was hot.
There was little movement in the compound other than freshly
laundered saffron robes of the monks flapping from laundry lines
and a few scrawny dogs searching for shade. There would have been
no other sign of life at all had a nondescript man, thin and
stooped, not begun slowly, even painfully, edging his way down a
short ladder that led from one of the huts to the ground. The man
did not wear the cloak of a monk. He was dressed instead in the
drab clothes of a Thai peasant with a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled
low over his face. From his size and build and the deep tan of his
skin, he looked like a farmer on his way to the rice fields.

When the man reached the ground, he stood
absolutely motionless for a moment and raised his head like an
animal sniffing the breeze for danger. If that was what he was
doing, he evidently found nothing to make him uneasy because he
soon lowered his head and began to shuffle slowly across the
courtyard. When he reached a gap in the wall between two of the
stone Buddhas, he paused respectfully. His hands formed a
wai
, a graceful gesture in which the palms of the hands are
pressed together almost as if in prayer, and he bowed his head
briefly to each of the images. Then, displaying an agility he had
not before appeared to possess, he slipped through the wall and was
gone.