Fools' River

  Also by Timothy Hallinan

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart

  The Fourth Watcher

  Breathing Water

  The Queen of Patpong

  The Fear Artist

  For the Dead

  The Hot Countries

  The Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  Herbie’s Game

  King Maybe

  Fields Where They Lay

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man with No Time

  The Bone Polisher

  Pulped

  Copyright © 2017 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallinan, Timothy.

  Fools’ river / Timothy Hallinan.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-750-6

  eISBN 978-1-61695-751-3

  1. Travel writers—Fiction. 2. Bangkok (Thailand)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A3923 F66 2017 813’.54—dc23 2017011761

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Munyin Choy . . .

  . . . now and as close to forever

  as we can get

  Part One

  THE CURRENT

  1

  French or Swiss

  The blinds are drawn the way they’ve been drawn forever, with the inside edges of the slats tilted upward to block his view of the sky and the fall of sunlight through the window, which means he has no idea what time it is. Not that knowing would do him any good.

  He had a watch once, a gold one, French or Swiss or something like that, European, but he hasn’t seen it since he got here.

  Wherever here is.

  Why are the blinds angled that way? The woman who pretends to be a nurse said it was to keep the sun from shining into his eyes and waking him up in the morning. When he asked her to open them so he could see the sky, she’d ducked her head and said, “Mmm-hmmm,” the way she always does when she means no. Her uniform has an old stain, the color of tea and shaped like a flying bird, over her right breast, and the surgical mask she always wears is smeared with dark lipstick on both sides, as though she puts it on without looking at it. Usually the edges of the red imprint curve up in a kind of smile. It’s the same mask and the same uniform day after day after day. She wears the nurse’s cap at an angle he supposes is meant to be jaunty, so far to one side that it requires a glittering little fence of bobby pins to keep it in place.

  He hasn’t seen her face since he woke up in this bed, although he saw it several times before, even knew her name, or at any rate a name she used. But now it’s the mask, the lipstick, the cap, the “Mmm-hmmm”s. So in addition to trying to track the time of day, he’s been worrying about what the mask might mean.

  She hasn’t opened the blinds. Still, a few days ago—four? six?—he’d noticed that the room gets a little brighter during the day, and he’s pretty sure that it would get dimmer if his room were on the sunrise side of the hospital. So there, his mind is still working. Despite all the shit they’re pumping into him.

  Except, he thinks, he might have realized it twice. Or even three times. It’s hard to keep track. But the most recent time the thought had presented itself, he’d marked it mentally, the way he used to do when he was in business and drowning in information; he tied it to something everyday. The client with the pointed nose was Mr. Byrd; the office suite was 321, the final countdown in that awful, unforgettable song. It always worked. So this time he chose “Sunday,” putting all the energy he could summon into chalking it on the wall in his mind. Sunday. Sun day. The sun brightens as the day goes on: Sunday.

  So now he knows she lied to him about the blinds; if the sunlight ever reached his bed, it would be in the early evening, just before it set. And there’s one other thing that she’s not aware he knows. There’s water outside. For a few hours every day, probably when the sun is highest, the ceiling just above the window ripples. It’s got to be the sun, reflected off water and bouncing up through the angled blinds.

  A klong, maybe? Bangkok is full of them, a fractal tangle of waterways, mostly brown and usually sluggish, with a thick skin of casual sewage despite recent cleanup campaigns, afloat on water from the Chao Phraya, the river that splits the city in two, like the center of a giant blighted butterfly: the river its spine, its wings the filthy city through which the klongs meander. So knowing that there’s a klong out there—if there is—doesn’t help much. Hell, it could be a swimming pool.

  His nose itches. Now that he can’t reach it, it always itches. The woman who’s not a nurse cuffed both his hands to the frame of the hospital bed the day he tried to remove the IV drip. He’d guessed that whatever mixtures of dope they were giving him, they were in the drip. So he’d crimped the tube and then given it a yank, but it had set off some kind of alarm, and she’d come in with the doctor right behind her. The doctor, who was the size of a house, enormous for a Thai, had the cuffs in his hand. That was early on the day—he’s almost certain it was the same day—that he woke up, maybe eight hours later, with a cast on his left leg. Hard as he tries, and he hasn’t got much else to do, he can’t remember breaking it.

  She put in a new drip an hour or so ago, her mask upside down today so the corners of the red lip print angle down. The room seems to be changing size: bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. His eyes close.

  What was it about Sunday?

  2

  He’s Prettier Than I Am

  Violet is her color.

  It’s taken her years to learn that. To learn—she thinks with a little tingle that’s not quite intense enough to call a thrill—that she even has a color. She never had a color before. When she was small, all her clothes had been worn to tatters in the process of being outgrown by half a dozen older kids and brutally washed hundreds of times. They’d had suds pummeled into them, they’d been pounded against the river’s unyielding stones, they’d been wrung out and then hung to fade in the sun so many times that they had no recognizable color left. If they had any hue at all, it was a pale memory of having once been red, yellow, blue, or (her least favorite) brown. She hated brown. Brown gave her goosebumps, even in the hot season. Even faded. Even now, years later.

  And, of course, the things she wore then hadn’t been very colorful even when they were new, because they’d been boys’ clothes. Boys don’t have colors. What would they do with them?

  But now she can wear pretty clothes, and in the colors she loves. Now she can wear violet.

  And there it is, her color, two small circles of it, gleaming up at her from the top of a tiny box. Even the English word “violet.”

  “Those,” she says. Pointing down through the glass top of the cabinet, she’s suddenly aware that the brassy sheen of her “gold” bracelet wouldn’t fool a twelve-year-old runaway from rural Myanmar. She yanks her hand back and smooths the sleeve of her violet-colored dress over it. She already knows that the woman behind the counter disapproves of her. No reason to flaunt her hundred-baht jewelry.

  “Which one?” the woman asks, her voice thickly frosted with patience. The saleswoman is middle-aged, not made any more attractive by a heavy layer of makeup that Lutanh mentally scrubbed off
and redid the moment she came into the store. The saleswoman is obviously unhappy about many things—maybe being ugly, for one, and certainly having to wait on Lutanh. “I can’t read your mind,” the woman says.

  “The violet ones,” Miaow says, giving the woman’s tone back to her, so pitch-perfect that Lutanh’s head snaps around to stare at her friend. “The ones she’s pointing at.” Miaow can feel Lutanh’s gaze and then her smile, but gratitude embarrasses her, so she swivels her stool to the window with its rows of dusty eyeglass frames and, beyond them, its view of the steamy Silom sidewalk. Behind her she hears the case slide open and Lutanh saying, “No, that one please,” in her Lao-inflected Thai, and then one of the kids from Miaow’s school goes by, talking animatedly into her phone.

  Miaow looks at her new watch on its wide yellow patent-leather strap. “Bus just dropped everybody off,” she says over her shoulder. “I should take a cab more often.” She checks the time again, partly because she loves the watch, which Lutanh chose for her half an hour ago from the table of a sidewalk vendor—all of them identically uninteresting until Lutanh picked up this one—and partly because the two of them have only forty minutes to get to Dr. Srisai’s acting class.

  Behind her, Lutanh says, “How do I put them in?”

  There’s no reply, just a silence that grows ruder by the second. Miaow turns to see Lutanh hunched over the optometrist’s counter, transfixed by the color on the box, her copper-dyed hair with its possibly natural curl falling around her shoulders to frame the profile Miaow desperately envies: the perfectly sculpted nose (Lutanh says the third try was the charm, after it was broken), the naturally full lips, the delicate curve of the chin. The saleswoman is leaning back in her cheap, ugly folding chair, her mouth pulled tight and her arms crossed as though to put as much distance between her and Lutanh as possible, and Miaow says, “She asked you how to put them in.”

  The saleswoman had been pleasant enough until, sitting on the other side of the counter from Lutanh, barely three feet away, she had realized that Lutanh was a ladyboy. To Miaow the woman says, “Are her hands clean?”

  Miaow gets up. “Come on, Lutanh, get your stuff.” She gestures at the knapsack with the shiny handmade wings sticking out of it. “You don’t need this person in your life, and I’m sure no one else does either.”

  “I want these,” Lutanh says, and beneath the wispy voice, insubstantial as steam, Miaow hears a note she’s learned to recognize in the past months, the steely undertone of someone who has transformed herself through sheer will from an impoverished, scrawny, miserable teenage boy in a pig-filled village in Laos into a remarkably beautiful katoey—although Lutanh thinks of herself as a woman or, more accurately, a girl—earning good, if karmically damaging, money in Bangkok.

  Switching to the rapid, almost unaccented American English she’s mastered after seven years as the adopted daughter of an American and five years in an international school, Miaow says to the woman, “You have packages of wet wipes behind the counter. Give her one.” It’s a command.

  The woman sits upright, blinking in confusion at the sound of English and the vehemence with which it’s being spoken. A teenage ladyboy with an apparently normal friend is somewhat unusual, but for the normal one, the real girl—who, the woman now realizes, is wearing a crisp, clean school uniform, obviously from a private school—to go instantly from perfect Thai to rapid-fire English, considerably better than the version the woman behind the counter has laboriously acquired . . . well, that suggests that there’s been a misreading, perhaps serious, of the relative status of the people in the room. Despite the darkness of the schoolgirl’s skin. Despite the katoey.

  So she’s up in a shot, stammering that she’ll get the wet wipes, of course, but she was afraid that the other . . . um, young lady might find the perfume offensive. “It’s a very cheap-smelling scent,” she says, getting the package of tissues, sniffing it ostentatiously, and pantomiming someone waving away a stink. Then, apologetically, she proffers it politely, with both hands, to Lutanh.

  Lutanh takes the packet and pulls one out. She inhales, wrinkles the flawless little nose, shrugs, says, “Smell okay,” and uses the tissue to wipe her hands and then, as an afterthought, her forehead. The woman actually rolls her eyes before she remembers that Miaow is looking at her, and to cover the reaction, she says to Lutanh, in a much more civil tone, “The ones in the case are just for display. I need your prescription before I can let you open a box.”

  Lutanh’s eyes come up to her so fast the woman steps back, saying, “I mean, what I mean is that I need the prescription to make sure it’s the right box.” Her eyes dart to Miaow and then back to Lutanh.

  Lutanh says, “What prescription? I not sick. Only I want blue eye.”

  “It’s . . . it’s just that these lenses, they’re . . .”

  In English, Miaow says, “I have dozens of friends who’ve bought these without a prescription.”

  “Not in here,” the woman says, drawing a line in the sand.

  Miaow was just four or five, living on the street, when she learned that the only way to deal with a line in the sand was to kick it into oblivion and cross it at top speed, pushing her aggression in front of her like a bulldozer pushing dirt. She says, “Do you have any idea who my father is?”

  “Do I . . .” the woman stammers. “D-do I . . .”

  “Where’s the owner?” Miaow says, looking around the shop as though to conjure him up. “There’s no point in talking to you. Where’s the person who matters?”

  “Not here.” The woman has raised both hands as though she’s facing a firing squad and hopes to stop the bullets with her palms. “He’s in the . . . the other shop, the . . . the one on—”

  “Call him.”

  “No, that’s not . . . We can . . . I mean, we can . . .”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Miaow says, turning away from her. In Thai she says, “Lutanh, do things look fuzzy to you up close?”

  “Do you have trouble reading?” the woman interposes helpfully, but one look at Lutanh’s face makes it clear that this is exactly the wrong way to ask the question, and she adds, “or are things . . . umm, fuzzy farther away?”

  “Away,” Lutanh says, obviously examining the question for a trap.

  “Well,” the woman says. She looks at the eye chart, with its characters that Lutanh almost certainly won’t be able to read aloud, and begins to fidget. Miaow backs away across the store and holds up two fingers. “How many?”

  Squinting so hard her eyes practically disappear, Lutanh says, “Three.”

  “Good,” Miaow says, putting her hand behind her, taking several steps closer, and bringing the hand out again. “And now?”

  “Two.”

  “She’s nearsighted,” Miaow announces. “Obviously.” More politely she adds, “Would you agree?”

  The woman pulls out a scented tissue and uses it to blot her upper lip. “Yes, yes, but . . .”

  “Do you have a pencil and some paper? Please?”

  “Surely, surely,” the woman says, and puts the requested items on the counter in front of Miaow.

  Miaow pushes them along to Lutanh and says, “See that big chart on the wall up there?”

  “I’m not blind,” Lutanh says.

  The woman says, “You mean, she can . . . ahh, ahh, yes, I understand. Please ask her to move the chair back about a meter and a half.”

  “I can hear you,” Lutanh says. “You’re allowed to talk to me.” She scoots the chair back, knocking over the knapsack with the wings protruding from it.

  “Is that good?” Miaow asks the woman deferentially.

  The woman takes a few steps back, folds her arms, assesses the distance, obviously establishing her expertise. “Just a little farther, please.”

  “Thank you,” Miaow says, shooing Lutanh with the backs of her hands. She goes to the counter, g
ets the pad and the pencil, and hands them to Lutanh. “Draw the smallest character up there that you can see clearly and then draw the one next to it. No squinting.”

  Lutanh widens her eyes, blinks twice, relaxes her face, yawns to stretch the muscles of her mouth, then scans the eye chart and starts to draw.

  “There,” Miaow says, tapping the pad and pointing at the chart. To the woman she says, “You solved it. Third line down.”

  “Yes,” the woman says. She lets a quick sigh escape. “And thank you for your help. Please, miss,” she says to Lutanh, “bring your chair back up to the counter.”

  “They more bigger than mangoes.” Lutanh is looking down at her lap, at her violet dress, and blinking fiercely. “I’ll never be able to wear them.”

  “Everyone says that at first.” The woman behind the counter has pulled her chair up close, instinctively joining the female circle as one of its members embarks on an adventure. “But in a day or two, you won’t even notice them. When I got mine—”

  “You have?” Lutanh looks up at the woman’s face, still blinking rapidly. “I can’t see . . .”

  “Look,” the woman says, leaning forward and touching her finger to the surface of her right eye, provoking a grimace from Lutanh. She slides her finger a tiny distance to the right, and beneath the perimeter of her hazel eyes, like the beginning of a tiny eclipse, the edge of a dark brown iris peeps out. Lutanh gasps.

  “You’re not supposed to know she’s wearing them,” Miaow says. She’s on the stool beside Lutanh, craning her neck to see the new color of her friend’s eyes. “Look at me,” she says.

  Lutanh closes her eyes and presses lightly on her lids, then lifts her face to Miaow.

  Without knowing she’s doing it, Miaow brings both hands, fingers interlaced, up to her heart. “They’re beautiful,” she says.

  “Aren’t they?” the woman says, as though they’d been her idea all along.