Read The Queen of Patpong Online
Authors: Timothy Hallinan
Twelve hours later, around 5:00 in the evening, she gets off a bus in Fon’s village in Isaan, where she will stay for nearly four years. She pays a small amount every month to Fon’s parents and mails a little money to her own. She calls Fon every week to see whether Howard has come into the bar. She asks her mother in letters to tell her whether he ever comes to her village.
He never does.
After four years, Fon calls to say she’s moved to the King’s Castle. When Rose returns to Bangkok, she joins her friend on the stage of the biggest bar in Patpong. Three years later Poke Rafferty walks into the place.
I
t’s been light for a couple of hours. The apartment is getting hot.
At some point—he has no idea when—Rafferty apparently pushed the glass coffee table away from the couch so he could sit at Rose’s feet and lean back against her knees; her words seemed to flow more freely when she couldn’t see his face. So he’s facing away from her now, in the long moments after she’s finished talking, and across the room he sees the morning light picking out glittering splinters of glass in the carpet near the sliding door.
Eight stories above the morning traffic, all he can hear is breathing.
He twists around, getting a message from his lower back to slow down. He ignores it and rises to his knees, then turns to face Rose, accidentally bending the injured elbow and sucking breath through his teeth.
She is sitting limply, sunk into the cushions, with her head tilted back and her eyes closed. He wants to put his arms around her, but it would be awkward with her sitting as she is, and he’s also reluctant to break in on her, wherever she may be. Her face looks bleached out and tissue-thin, as though it’s been scoured from the inside and one more pass will bare the muscles beneath the skin. Miaow lies on her right side, her knees jackknifed almost to her chest and her head on Rose’s lap. Her eyes are wide open, looking directly at him. He reaches over and musses the yellowish chop of hair, and for the first time he can remember since he met her, she doesn’t protest.
Leaning against Rose on the other side, her eyes partly closed and her forearm thrown across Rose’s lap so she’s touching Miaow’s shoulder, is Pim. She has the half-drowsy, half-abstracted air of someone reciting silently something she memorized long ago. Her eyes flick to him and then back down, and she rubs her cheek against Rose’s shoulder.
His cell phone rings across the room, on the kitchen counter.
“That’s twice,” Rose says. She opens her eyes but keeps them on the ceiling.
“And it can ring until the sun goes down.” Rafferty looks up at his wife, but the moment their eyes meet, she drops her gaze, and the gesture ties a small knot in Rafferty’s gut. He thinks,
What else?
But what he says is, “Coffee? Nescafé?”
“I think I’ll try to sleep for an hour or two,” Rose says. “If that’s okay with you, I mean.”
“If it’s
okay
—” Rafferty begins.
Miaow interrupts him. “That’s all you want to say?
‘Coffee?’
”
Rafferty rises, his back cracking like a bag full of knuckles. “I want to say a lot of things, but some of them are things I only want to say to Rose. And some of them are things I don’t know how to say. Coffee will help.”
“Well,” Rose says, disentangling herself from the two girls and putting her feet under her to get up, “you can say them to me later.”
Rafferty says, “I love you.”
“That,” Rose says, standing and meeting his eyes for the first time, “
that
you can say now.”
Miaow says, “Me, too.”
Pim says, “You were so brave.”
“I was stupid,” Rose says. She stretches, arms up, then presses her fists against her lower back, and bends backward. “But no stupider than you. Find something else to do.”
Pim pulls up her knees and rests her forehead on them. Then she wraps her arms around her shins, sealing herself into a ball.
Miaow says, “I want a Coke.”
“That’s all you have to say?” Rafferty mimics. “ ‘I want a Coke’?”
“Phoo,” Miaow says. She gets up with no effort, as though she’d been on the couch for only a few minutes rather than hours. Rafferty is watching with a certain amount of envy when he feels Rose’s eyes on him. When he looks at her, one corner of her mouth is up in an almost-smile.
“Remember?” she says. “Remember when everything worked like that?”
“Everything still works,” he says. “It just needs a little coaxing.”
“Well, since you’re so limber,” Rose says, “I’ll have some Nescafé.”
Rafferty nods. “I’ll make it.”
“I know,” she says. “And, Pim? As long as Poke is up and proving he’s flexible, is there anything you’d like?”
Pim just stares up at her, mouth half open, looking as if the world exploded in her face.
“Right.” Rose sits back down and wraps her arms around the girl. “Nothing for Pim just now,” she says.
From the kitchen, safely out of sight, Miaow asks her question. “So you changed? From when you were in the village. When you were in the village, that’s who you really were. The way you were in Bangkok, that wasn’t.” A pause. “Was it?”
Rose, her arms entwined around Pim, says, “Of course not.”
“How? How did you change?”
“Slowly,” Rose says. “One bone at a time.” She rubs Pim’s shoulders with her right hand. “Like that thing you say in the play. About the king under the sea.”
“ ‘Of his bones are coral made—’ ” Miaow starts, coming into the room.
“In Thai,” Rose says.
“Mmmm.” Miaow squints up at a corner of the ceiling and changes languages. “His bones are made of coral now, and his eyes have turned to pearls. Everything’s changing because of the sea, because he’s underwater.”
“Like that,” Rose says. “One bone at a time. Because I was underwater.”
Pim says, “Like I am now,” and burrows her forehead into Rose’s shoulder.
“And after,” Miaow says. “You changed again, into who you are now.” It’s more a challenge than a question. “Why? How?”
“I met Poke,” Rose says. “We found you.” She glances at Rafferty and then back to Miaow. “You were the big one.”
Miaow returns her stepmother’s gaze and then looks over to Rafferty. “Oh,” she says, and she goes back into the kitchen.
RAFFERTY’S BEEN EXPERIMENTING
lately with what he likes to think of as domestic time management, trying to work out the best order for different chores, so one thing can process itself while he does another. It feels good to turn his attention to the coffee-making routine he’s worked out: putting Rose’s water on to boil while he grinds his coffee and pours it into the filter and adds a shot of cinnamon—a new touch—measuring and then pouring the cold water for his own coffee into the reservoir of the coffeemaker as Rose’s water comes to a boil, then spooning out the powdered Nescafé, half a teaspoon extra, and filling Rose’s cup with boiling water, stirring the Nescafé into something that resembles coffee’s highly challenged third cousin, while the real thing drips from the pot into the carafe behind him.
The whole procedure—the boiling, the grinding and stirring, the smells, the narrowly avoided collisions with Miaow as she barges around the tiny kitchen washing her hands, popping the top on her Coke, going on tiptoe to grab an orange—makes him aware how blessed he was yesterday, when all this was unremarkable, normal, everyday procedure, nothing that needed thought beyond boil the water first or grind the coffee first?
Ordinary,
he thinks. Ordinary feels very good.
He carries Rose’s cup in and puts it on the table. She gives him the sliver of a smile, her arms still around Pim. Miaow pulls a stool up to the counter and starts to peel her orange. Rafferty stops in the middle of the living room, flexes the sore elbow a couple of times, and says, “I just want to go on record. I love all this. I may not say so every day, but I do anyway.”
Miaow looks up from her orange. “That’s a lot better than
‘Coffee?’
”
“I even love you,” Rafferty says. “It’s like loving a cactus, but I do.”
Miaow gives the orange all her attention, but he can see the color bloom in her cheeks.
He goes into the kitchen, feeling light-headed, and pours his own coffee into the mug he uses every day of his life. Every wonderful day of his life. Leaning against the cool of the refrigerator door, he inhales the aroma. Out in the living room, Rose murmurs something, probably to Pim, and the couch squeaks as someone gets up, and then the air conditioner cranks into life. Rose says to the world as a whole, “Time for a cigarette,” and he hears the rasp of a match.
“Maybe,” Miaow says, her mouth full of orange, “maybe you ought to check the voice mail.”
“Me, me, me,” Rafferty says happily. Despite the chain of horrors in Rose’s story, he feels almost exhilarated. He knows what’s wrong now; they can begin to fix it. He downs about a third of his coffee, scalding the roof of his mouth, and then tops up the cup from the pot. “Fuel first,” he says to Miaow, toasting her with the mug and slopping some on his fingers.
She says, “Bean drink,” with the special scorn she reserves for coffee.
“The phone, the phone.” Rafferty gulps and burns his mouth again, puts the cup on the counter, wipes his burned fingers on his pants, and speed-dials his voice mail. The first call is a hang-up. Then Arthit’s voice comes on the line. He sounds like someone five thousand years old who hasn’t slept since the turn of the century.
“Your guy, Horner,” he says. “He hasn’t left the kingdom. He’s in Thailand.”
R
afferty says, “Pack. Everything you’ll need for three or four days.” He’s tugging at the hem of a new T-shirt, water dripping onto it from the tip of his chin, which he missed with the towel after splashing his face. His hair is damp from his having clawed through it with wet fingers.
Rose says, “Where are we going?”
“Later. For now, pack.” To Pim he says, “This isn’t the safest place in Bangkok. You should probably go.”
Pim looks at Rose and then Miaow. “Can I help?”
Rose says, “I’ll pack for me and tell you what to pack for Poke.”
“Don’t forget the Glock,” Rafferty says, and Miaow swivels to stare at him. “Both clips.”
“Where are you going?”
“Arthit’s not in his office, and no one is answering at home. So I’m going to his house.”
Miaow says, “With no one answering? Maybe he doesn’t want to see anybody.”
“Of course he doesn’t want to see anybody. I should have gone over days ago.”
HE HAS
to knock three times.
Standing there with the morning sun beating down on his shoulders, he has more time than he needs to see things he doesn’t want to see: The tiny dead lawn, the stunted line of brown scrub where the flowers used to be. Three yellowing copies of the
Bangkok Sun,
lying any which way on the fried, brittle grass. When Arthit’s wife, Noi, was alive, this little yard was as green and as immaculately tended as a Scottish golf course. Even after she got too sick to care for it herself, she would sit on the porch and direct Arthit as he planted and trimmed and raked and swept, grumbling happily the whole time.
It’s been only eight months.
He’s knocking again, harder this time, when the door opens. Arthit stands dead center in the doorway, blocking access. The house is dim behind him, the curtains apparently drawn. He does not smile at Rafferty. He glances at the graying bandage on Rafferty’s elbow and the one on his thumb and says, “What?”
“You’re not at the office.”
“Thank you,” Arthit says. “I was wondering where I wasn’t.” He hasn’t shaved or combed his hair, and he’s wearing a dirty T-shirt and a pair of wrinkled shorts. The circles beneath his eyes have an actual depth; they look like they’ve been pressed there with the bottom of a glass. The smell from the house is as sour and musty as a bad secret.
“Well, I mean, you’ve been working time and a half since—”
“And today I’m not.” He looks past Rafferty as though making sure that no one else is coming. “You got my message.”
Rafferty smells alcohol on his friend’s breath. It’s 10:30
A.M.
“Are you anything at all like okay?”
Arthit continues to look past Rafferty. “Did you come here to talk about me?”
“Not really.”
“Good. Then let me start over. You got my message.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I left it,” Arthit says. “Anything else?”
“What is it, Arthit?” Rafferty says, concern receding to make room for anger. “Is solitude calling? Do you have plans or something? Is this an intrusion?”
Arthit’s eyelids droop and then close for a moment. He leans against the side of the door. When he opens his eyes, he says, “This isn’t a good day for company.”
“Sitting around drinking in the dark isn’t going to make it any better.”
“Poke,” Arthit says. “Fuck you.” He starts to close the door.
“Wait.” Rafferty puts a hand against the door, expecting to have to push back, but the door just floats free of Arthit’s hand and swings all the way open again. Arthit stands there, arms hanging down, hands loose at his sides, looking like a man who’s just used all the strength he’s been hoarding.
The pose is so naked that Rafferty can barely look at it. He looks down instead, at the porch between his feet. When it becomes clear that Arthit isn’t going to spend any more energy trying to throw him out, he says, “Horner killed a girl. He tried to kill Rose. For all I know, he’s killed a dozen of them.”
Arthit doesn’t say anything.
“I’m not expecting a rescue,” Rafferty says. “But I could use some more information.” He looks back at Arthit and says, “And you need to be doing something other than this.”
“All you
farang,
” Arthit says. He shakes his head. “You lack delicacy. No Thai would criticize me like that. Not at this time.”
“I can’t afford delicacy. And I have to tell you, Arthit, I’d probably be here kicking your door in even if I didn’t have a problem.”
Arthit says, “Precisely the point I was making. No Thai would.”
“But I do have a problem.”
“Wait,” Arthit says. He squeezes his eyes shut and lets his head fall forward until his chin hits his chest. He takes a long breath and fills his cheeks and blows it out like someone surfacing from the deep, then lifts his head and shakes it back and forth quickly, the way a sleepy driver does when he needs to clear his head and refocus on the road. When he’s finished, he grabs another breath, heaves a whiskey-laced sigh, and looks straight at Rafferty. “Tried to kill her.”
“And did kill another one, another bar girl.”
“Any chance at all she’s wrong about him trying to kill her? Maybe he was just—”
“No.”
Arthit steps back. “I suppose you should come in.”
“PROBABLY,” ARTHIT SAYS.
He’s sitting on the couch, next to a confused pile of clothes and magazines and DVD cases he’d swept out of his way before he sat down. “The pieces aren’t hard to assemble. Immigration has the dates he was in the country, assuming he’s using only one passport. And the cops down south actually do keep records of bodies that wash ashore, although probably not for more than, say, ten years. The problem is that nobody bothers about missing bar girls.”
“No. Really?”
“It’s not what you think.” Arthit looks at the table in front of him, jumbled high with unopened mail, plastic utensils, and used paper plates, and then he says, “Well, it’s not
only
what you think.”
“What else is it?”
He rubs his eyes with his palms, almost grinding at them. “It’s partly the girls. You know how it works. They go home. They go off with men. They get married to someone they just met. They move to a bar in Soi Cowboy or Nana Plaza. They decide it would be nice to work in Pattaya or Phuket and live at the beach. They get hired by a private club or an outcall service. They get sent to Singapore or Japan. They get a positive HIV test and don’t want to scare their friends. They disappear all the time.”
Rafferty says, to his knees, “Still.” He’s trying to keep from looking at the house, which is filthy.
“Yes,” Arthit says. “It stinks. But that’s how it is.”
“Makes them ideal victims.”
“Prostitutes everywhere. Half the serials in the world focus on them.”
“No reason,” Rafferty says, “for the Land of Smiles to be an exception.”
“No. Because you’re right. The other part of the problem, here and everywhere else, is that the cops don’t care.”
“Fine. So we forget asking about disappearing bar girls and concentrate on whether there’s a pattern of women washing up around Phuket during or just after Horner’s visits.”
“You’re assuming that he’d go back to the same place to do the girls.”
“Can you suggest another assumption that gives us somewhere to start?
“You know,” Arthit says, leaning back and lifting a bare foot. There’s nowhere on the table to put it, so he uses the foot to sweep some of the junk onto the floor. Then he rests the foot on the table, the sole angled politely away from Rafferty. “I have to observe that this is suicidal behavior for a serial killer.”
“What is? And why is this place so dark?”
“Because I like it dark. Coming back to the bar like that. He takes this girl—what’s her name?”
“Oom.”
“He takes Oom and does what he does to her, and a few months later he’s back looking at Rose.”
Rafferty says, “And?”
“And that can’t be his pattern. No matter how lazy the cops are, someone, even if it’s only the mama-san, is going to notice that every time this guy shows up, some girl vanishes.”
“Lot of bars in a lot of places,” Rafferty says. “Hundreds in Bangkok, God knows how many in Pattaya and Chiang Mai and Phuket, and who knows where else. He could snatch one per bar for years and years without ever repeating, without even getting within miles of a place he’s hit before.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Poke.” Arthit looks at the foot on the table and flexes his toes. “After Oom, why would he go back to the Candy Cane?”
“I don’t know, Arthit,” Rafferty says, feeling his face heat up. “Maybe Rose was special.”
Arthit winces as though he’s been hit, then lets his head fall forward so he can rub the back of his neck. “Of course. It’s
Rose,
isn’t it? Of course he came back.”
Rafferty breathes deeply a couple of times to slow himself down. “Rose says the other one, Oom, was a real beauty.”
“Cherry-picking,” Arthit says. His face brightens a shade. “That should make the bar end of it a little easier. We don’t need them to remember everybody who disappeared, only the most beautiful ones.”
“I guess that helps.”
“But like I just said, the girls move around. You’d figure he’d bump into some who remembered him.”
Rafferty says, “I just spent six or seven hours inside a bar girl’s life, and you have to remember that they see hundreds of thousands of men a year. Say they work three hundred fifty days and eight hundred men come into the bar each night. I can’t do the math, but that’s more than a quarter of a million. Unless Horner took one, she’s going to forget about him in a week or two. They focus on the ones who give them money. The others are just scenery.”
“The place for us to start,” Arthit says, “is Phuket on one end and the Bangkok bars on the other.”
“Not we,” Rafferty says. “Me. And whoever else I can strong-arm. You lean on immigration, and I do the rest. You’re working ten days a week as it is.”
“I can do what I want,” Arthit says. “I’m a public hero, remember?”
Arthit’s been milking this ever since national television showed video of him killing someone who had just murdered a much-loved Thai millionaire.
Rafferty says, “Yes, but I mean—”
Arthit lifts a hand. “So I’ll make the time.”
Rafferty says, by way of preface, “Listen. And don’t get mad at me.”
Arthit shoots a glance toward the front door as though he’s thinking about escaping through it. “I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?”
“Look around.”
“I don’t have to. I see it every day.”
“I mean, if you can make all this time, why don’t you clean the damn house? It’s not good for you, living like this.”
Arthit says, “I don’t want to move anything.”
“Fine, fine. Don’t move anything Noi touched. But this other junk, this
crap
. . . my mother, who has some good qualities, always says that even an angel can’t live in a pigpen without turning into a pig.”
“Does she,” Arthit says. His eyes click on Rafferty’s for a moment and then dart away.
“Well, no,” Rafferty says. “I made that up. But you know what I mean.”
Arthit nods slowly. “A moment ago we were talking about something important.”
“This is important,” Rafferty says.
They’re both silent for a minute or two. Finally Rafferty reaches behind him and pulls the curtain open a couple of inches. The sunlight is merciless, and he lets it drop. “Jesus,” he says. “At least ask Rose to get you a maid or something.”
“I don’t want a maid.”
“Get a live-in. Her agency has a lot of women who need the work. You shouldn’t be alone like this.”
“This is exactly what I mean about
farang.
No Thai would be so presumptuous.”
“That’s what you get for making friends with me. Rose would be horrified to see this.”
“But she’d have the sensitivity to leave me alone.”
“Maybe, but this house didn’t belong just to you.”
A blink, almost heavy enough to be audible. “Your point?”
“It was Noi’s house, too. It should be honored. What kind of way is this to honor her?”
“Poke.” Arthit’s tone is a warning.
“This isn’t just sad, although Christ knows it’s sad. This is the same as turning your back on her.”
“That’s enough.”
“Who’s going to say this if I don’t?”
“Nobody.” Arthit gets up. “And that’ll be fine with me.” He heads for the hallway. “I’ll get all the dates from immigration. I’ll get the picture, if they’ve got one, although all those pictures look like everyone. And I’ll talk to the guys on the force in Phuket. I imagine you want this fast.”
“Sure.” Rafferty is still sitting. “He’s here somewhere. He knows where we live. Rose and Miaow are home packing, scared half out of their minds.”
Arthit stops walking, but he doesn’t turn. “Where are you going to put them?”
“I don’t know. Like I told Rose, the first thing is to get them ready to go. Some hotel in some obscure neighborhood.”
Arthit says, “I’ll be back.”
Rafferty listens to his friend’s footsteps, slow and heavy, the shuffle of a much older man, going down the hallway toward the kitchen. Then they stop. Without allowing himself to think about anything, Rafferty looks around. The dining room, always polished and immaculate when Noi was here, is a dim chiaroscuro, the table piled with dirty clothes, unopened newspapers, folded towels from the laundry, take-out cartons from restaurants, a few books, and several empty bottles labeled Johnnie Walker Black. Even the floor has junk on it, little islands of homeless uselessness, the kind of litter that’s barely worth the effort of picking up and throwing away, the kind of stuff drunk people trip over. He can actually smell the dust in the air. It’s impossible not to remember the bright, soft luster the place had eight or nine months ago—flowers, buffed surfaces, a gleam on the pale hardwood floors.
He comes to the present, realizing it’s been a couple of minutes and he hasn’t heard anything at all from the kitchen. No cupboards opening, no rattle of china, no running water. The house is so quiet he might as well be alone. A little foam of anxiety curdles in his stomach.
He gets up. “Arthit?”