The Hot Countries Read online

  Copyright © 2015 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.

  The hot countries / Timothy Hallinan.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-446-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-447-5

  I. Title.

  PS3558.A3923H68 2015

  813’.54—dc23 2015020054

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  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 Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  Herbie’s Game

  King Maybe

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man with No Name

  The Bone Polisher

  In memory of

  Marvin Klotz, Ph.D.

  Some people actually do change your life.

  Part One

  MONOLOGUES

  1

  The Cave of the Ancients

  The dusty braid of Christmas lights in the tiny window has been there for decades and has been plugged in all year round. The original bulbs are long burned out, but not even the occasional, irregular replacements, glowing in faded red and green, can compete with the prisms of light and color created by the big beads of rain on the outside of the glass. Rafferty is looking at the prisms, intentionally facing away from the man who’s talking, and trying not to check his watch.

  “You just hop on the equator,” Arthur Varney is saying. “Ride it like a train.” Standing next to his stool at the far end of the bar, one foot hitched up on its rail, he gives the impression of a man who’s about to mount a horse, but by contrast with the other men in the room, most of whom seem to have been welded to their stools for decades, it’s not difficult to look energetic.

  Varney allows the pause to stretch long enough for him to take a pull on his beer. He’s a wide, but not fat, olive-skinned man of medium height in his late forties with a square face, heavy eyebrows, and a bandit’s bushy mustache. His medium-length black hair is straight and parted on the left, so badly that it looks experimental. Despite an incipient gut, he gives the physical impression of a hard, shiny, almost insectlike solidity, with the overdeveloped chest and shoulders of a vain gym rat. When he puts down the mug, his blue eyes roaming the room, there’s a line of foam, like frosting, like Christmas-tree snow, on the bottom half of his dark mustache.

  No one fills the silence. No one leaps in to interrupt. The men in the Expat Bar have been telling one another the same stories, complaining about the same weather, comparing the same assets of the local female professionals, for forty years and more. There are no conversational surprises waiting to be flourished, no unheard punch lines. The group is thinning as its members burn out, although it—unlike the Christmas lights—has seen few replacements: Patpong’s most lurid days are long past, and the younger sex tourists have taken their small talk—and very small it is, too, Rafferty thinks—over to Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza, offering the same stale goods in brighter boxes. Here in the Expat Bar on Patpong Road, Arthur Varney is the flavor of the month. Nine days here, according to the regulars, and he’s hardly stopped talking except to take a drink.

  “Like a train,” he repeats, wiping his mustache with a broad, tan hand. “Look out the left window, look out the right. What do you see?”

  “Lot of water,” mutters Bob Campeau from his immemorial stool near the bar’s end. Campeau’s been a fixture there for so many years that he fancies his longevity has made him a sort of all-purpose nightlife expert, a sage with a specialty. His wide, thin-lipped mouth is downturned at the corners, and he’s barely spoken all night. Poke thinks he might be sulking.

  From his stool near the door—the only stool with a silvery plate bearing its occupant’s name—Leon Hofstedler drives a nail into Campeau’s self-regard by saying, in the German accent that invests even his simplest sentences with the threat of blitzkrieg, “Don’t interrupt, Bob.”

  “No, no, please,” Varney says, swiveling on his stool to turn his bright, interested blue eyes on Campeau. It reminds Rafferty of the reaction of a fan at a dull baseball game when the pitcher hits a triple. “You were saying?”

  “Uh.” Campeau balls a fist loosely and bounces it lightly on the bar. “Nothing. Just there’s . . . you know, a lot of water. That you’d see.” He nods at the surface of the bar. “From your train.”

  “Absolutely.” Varney beams approvingly at Campeau, watching the muscles at the hinges of Campeau’s jaws bunch and relax as though he’s chewing rocks. “Lot of water. Let’s see, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Molucca Sea.” He closes his eyes and touches the tip of his index finger to an invisible map in front of him. “Lake Victoria in Africa, the Karimata Strait, the Makassar Strait, Gulf of Tomini.” His eyes open. “Might be a couple more. I disremember. As you say, Bob, lot of water.”

  “The Halmahera Sea,” Rafferty says, with a satisfying twinge of malice. He’s been listening to Varney for three days now, escaping the marathon of Brits in costumes whose stiff upper lips have filled his new wide-screen TV night after night. “You know. Between Malaku and West Papua.”

  The flicker in Arthur Varney’s eyes would be enough to make a timid man take a step back, but he smiles and says, “Good catch. Thought I’d said that.”

  “Maybe you did,” Rafferty says. They hold each other’s gaze just a little too long to be polite.

  “But water is water,” Varney says, once again addressing the room. He squares the big shoulders as though he’s readjusting their weight. “When you get to land, what do you see? Holes in the ground where the gold and diamonds and tin and oil used to be, the crumbling ruins of colonialism and empire, grand buildings where people now make campfires on the floors and dig holes for toilets. Straits and beaches seized and armed and bristling with new cities to protect and multiply the plunder. The spices taken, the rubber taken, the hardwoods taken, the mountains scalped to make mahogany coffee tables for liberals in Greenwich Village.” He shaves an imaginary mountain slope upward with the edge of his palm. “Brown- or black-skinned hot-country people living under the thumb of light-skinned cold-country people. The equator,” he says, drawing a big horizontal circle in the air, “is a trench of destruction all the way around the globe. The burial trench of the hot countries. Except, Bob, for the water. Hard to dig a trench through water.”

  “You’re talking about colonialism,” Campeau says with new confidence; he’s recognized something he’s heard of. He throws a Watch this look at the Growing Younger Man, Hofstedler, Rafferty, and a silver-haired guy whose name might or might not be Ron. “Thailand was never conquered, never colonized. That mean it’s not hot?”

  “No, no, no, no,” Varney says with a froth of delight in his tone that says this is the very question he was hoping for. “I could be pedantic and point out that Thailand, hot as it is, isn’t on the equator, but actually, if you want, you could broaden that swath of devastation from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn
, all the way around the globe. You’d get most of Southeast Asia that way, more of India and Africa, too. But then, to examine your specific question, who runs Thailand?”

  Campeau looks for the hook, fails to see it, and says, “The Thais?”

  “The people who actually run Thailand, Bob”—Varney deepens his voice very slightly each time he speaks Campeau’s name, an inflection that might be either unintentional or ironic—“are the same people who run Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore—the Asian whites: the Chinese. Everywhere you look here, paleface Thai-Chinese lord it over darker-skinned people. The Chinese own everything in Southeast Asia while the people who were here first fight over crumbs and the rockier bits of the back forty. Light over dark, it holds true all across the tropics: when people from the cold countries come to the hot countries, they rarely mean to do anyone any good.”

  “Really,” Rafferty says. “And what brings you here?”

  “The travel writer,” Arthur Varney says, showing a row of big square teeth, so yellow that Rafferty wonders if he grew the black mustache to make them appear whiter. “Always looking for a story.”

  It’s been a couple of minutes since Varney checked his watch—one of the thick, heavy steel ones that would probably still be ticking after the asteroid hit—and left, at about the same time he seems to leave every night, around ten. Rafferty checks his own watch, and from her station in front of the bourbon the barmaid, Toots, who has been pouring these men’s drinks since the late 1960s, says, “Why you not home? Kwan have baby, yes?”

  Kwan is Rose’s Thai name, which, like Toots’s, has receded so far into the mists of time that it takes Poke a second to understand the question. “Not yet,” he says. “Six months more.”

  With the air of someone forced to state the obvious, Toots curves her arms a few inches from her stomach and says, “Have in here.”

  “Yes, right. We’re at the throwing-up stage.”

  “Three month,” Toots says. She pokes the inside of her right cheek with her tongue, searching for something, and sucks at a tooth. “Should stop now.”

  “She’ll throw up as long as she can,” Rafferty says. “She’s hanging on to every phase. This may be the world’s first two-year pregnancy.”

  Toots shakes her head, and her hair, graying, permed into thick, Brillo-stiff curls—black when Rafferty met her—wobbles a tiny bit, like molded Jell-O. “So why you come here? Should be at your house. Taking care.”

  “I’m hiding from the television,” Rafferty says. “She and Miaow have bought bootlegs of every DVD the BBC ever made about English people who live in big houses and hate each other. Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, The Forsyte Saga, Pride and Prejudice, practically the complete works of Anthony Trollope. Just one well-bred snub after another.”

  “Yes?” Leon Hofstedler says, his eyebrows tied in a knot of puzzlement. “For what purpose? This is not what Thai girls watch. Thai girls, they want to see that . . . that doll with the knife—”

  “Chucky.” Campeau accompanies the information with an apparently involuntary glance at the door, as though he’s afraid Arthur Varney will barge in from the street to contradict him.

  “Not my Thai girls,” Rafferty says. “What they like is servants and people with titles and huge dinners with eight courses and gowns and big, clunky jewelry and feathered hats. And Colin Firth, can’t forget Colin Firth.”

  “Be a great setting for the next Chucky,” the man who might be named Ron says. “Chucky Abbey.” He runs his fingers self-appreciatively through the silver waves of his hair, something he does often. The hair, Hofstedler said once to Poke, is all the man has left.

  “Anything would be an improvement,” Rafferty says. “The people in these shows are asleep when they’re awake. They sneer at their own reflections. Rose is developing a British accent.”

  “But yes,” Hofstedler says, nodding as he catches up to the conversation. “This is true. Rose is with child, and Miaow is in school. What year she is in now?”

  “Eighth,” Rafferty says.

  There’s a silence while these men, who have been on the edges of Rafferty’s life for more than seven years, consider the implications. Rafferty uses the time to look, without much nostalgia, around the room. It’s shaped like an ambitious bowling lane, no more than fourteen feet across and about fifty deep, its shape dictated by the fact that it was wedged by a voracious developer into what had been a sliver of space between two go-go bars, My Big Honey and Yellow Bellies, both long gone. One of them is still offering go-go, now under the name Miles of Smiles, while the other sells plastic leather goods to the easily fooled. The room is so narrow there’s barely room for the stained, battered bar with Toots behind it, plus the usual mirrored display of mislabeled whiskeys, the beer and soft-drink taps, a small sink, and a blender that’s used almost exclusively for the Growing Younger Man’s complicated smoothies, mostly uneasy mixes of alcohol and health-preserving algae. The place smells of old beer, neglected dentistry, and, thanks to the rain, wet wool.

  Eight stools crowd the bar. Shoved against the opposite wall are four tiny tables that have been turned into booths by the addition of high-backed, plastic-covered, pumpkin-colored banquette seats of conspicuous cheapness. When Rafferty arrived in Bangkok, one of the booths was essentially reserved for a guy named Mac, the only openly gay member of the Expat Bar regulars, but Mac has been dead for three years now. Just as Rafferty thinks of Mac, whom he had liked, Bob Campeau puts into words the thought that was triggered in many of them by the information that Miaow is an eighth-grader.

  Campeau says, “Goddamn, I’m old.” He carefully pats his baroque comb-over as Ron, if that’s his name, rakes his gleaming silver locks again and Hofstedler picks up a giant brandy snifter with a loose scattering of paper money in it and slides it down the bar with a grunt. He’s been putting on weight again, which, for someone with his medical history, is dangerous.

  “Five hundred baht,” Hofstedler says. “Two-fifty for the swearword and two-fifty for talking about age.”

  Campeau says, and it’s close to a snarl, “You were thinking the same thing I was. And ‘goddamn’ isn’t fucking swearing. There, now I said something you can fucking fine me for.” He pulls out some paper money and drops it into the snifter. It looks short even from where Rafferty’s sitting, but nobody calls Campeau on it. These men, who once considered themselves the kings of Bangkok, are running out of money.

  “Eighth grade,” the Growing Younger Man says. He takes a drink of something that’s way too green for everyone else’s comfort. “Hard to believe.”

  Rafferty hoists his own glass and drains the warm beer it contains, gone flat now. “I know. I still think of her as four feet tall with a part in her hair, and there she is, sitting at home watching Debrett’s Peerage on Ice and planning to be an actress.”

  “That’s a rough life for a kid, acting,” the guy with the hair says, and the solemnity of his tone suggests that the thought has never before been put into words. “There’s a lot of rejection.”

  “Yeah, well, we give her a lot of acceptance. In fact, she’s got a play coming up.”

  “When?” This is Hofstedler, who actually sounds interested.

  “I don’t know. What day is this?”

  “Thursday?” the man who might be named Ron suggests.

  No one disagrees, so Rafferty says, “A week from tomorrow. At her school. It plays Friday through Sunday.”

  “This play is named what?” Hofstedler asks.

  “It’s an old one. Small Town.”

  “But I know this play,” Hofstedler says. “The girl dies at the end, yes? So sad.”

  “Well, that’s who Miaow’s playing,” Rafferty says. “The girl who dies. Julie.”

  “I seen it, too,” Campeau says. “A million years ago.”

  “We should go,” Hofstedler says. “Show our supp
ort for Miaow. An actress, she is. You must be very proud.”

  “I’d go,” the Growing Younger Man says. The guy with the hair who might be named Ron emits a syllable of enthusiasm, and Campeau mutters something.

  Hauling the denizens of the Expat Bar to Miaow’s play is not on Rafferty’s bucket list. He says, “We’ll talk about it next week, see who still wants to go,” and raps his knuckles on the bar. “Can I have a check, Toots? It’s about time for me to be allowed into the living room again.”

  “Raining,” Campeau says without looking out the window.

  Rafferty gets up, pulling baht out of his jeans. “I’ve been wet before, and I’m still here.”

  The door opens, announced by a bell on a string, and Pinky Holland tentatively looks in, most of him remaining outside in case a retreat is in order. “Is he gone? Did I miss him?”

  “Gone,” Hofstedler says, lifting his personal stein. “Toots, please? Another, yes?”

  “What was the topic tonight?” Pinky says, coming the rest of the way in. He’s a small, narrow-shouldered, professionally tan man of seventy or so with deeply creased laugh lines and a smooth bald head that Rafferty suspects he polishes. “No, lemme guess. Was it voting out every American politician and electing—who were they?—hair dressers and street mimes? Or the great Tulip Mania? Or was it—”

  “Something new,” Campeau said. “The equatorial trench, I think. Exploitation in the tropics.”

  “Sounds like a pip,” Pinky says. “Has he said where he comes from yet?”

  “One can only ask so many times,” Hofstedler says, watching Toots fill his stein. “Then it becomes rude, yes?”

  “What’s rude,” Pinky says, mopping his shining head, “is not answering the question.”

  “He’s got something to hide,” Campeau says grimly.