The Queen of Patpong Read online

  THE QUEEN

  of

  PATPONG

  TIMOTHY HALLINAN

  To my first listener,

  Munyin Choy-Hallinan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PART I - CALIBAN

  Chapter 1 - Temporary Honeys

  Chapter 2 - All the Devils Are Here

  Chapter 3 - The Black Lake

  Chapter 4 - Wampire

  Chapter 5 - Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes

  Chapter 6 - Beer Garden

  Chapter 7 - Nam Pla Prik

  PART II - 1997: THE SEA CHANGE

  Chapter 8 - The Shoes

  Chapter 9 - The Broad Black Door

  Chapter 10 - The Moon Below

  Chapter 11 - Nowhere in Particular

  Chapter 12 - Candy Cane

  Chapter 13 - The Best-Looking Cut of Meat

  Chapter 14 - Silk That Thinks It’s Cotton

  Chapter 15 - Whether She’s Done It Yet or Not

  Chapter 16 - Dog Tricks

  Chapter 17 - A List of Won’ts

  Chapter 18 - Rose

  Chapter 19 - The Rocks

  Chapter 20 - Ordinary Feels Very Good

  PART III - THE STORM

  Chapter 21 - I Was Wondering Where I Wasn’t

  Chapter 22 - Generic Pictures of a White Male

  Chapter 23 - An Indigestible Lump of Exposition

  Chapter 24 - Little Designs Here and There

  Chapter 25 - The Continent of Red

  Chapter 26 - No Commonly Accepted Index for Improbability

  Chapter 27 - We’re Going to Create a Storm

  Chapter 28 - It Used to Be a Good-Natured Sewer

  Chapter 29 - Perfume, Hair Spray, Dance Sweat

  Chapter 30 - The Final Curtain

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Timothy Hallinan

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  CALIBAN

  Chapter 1

  Temporary Honeys

  Old cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, sweat. The proven architecture of soft pink light on soft brown skin. Bad rock and roll, some mercifully forgotten tight-pants, stadium-rock anthem from the 1980s, still being played in Bangkok, the town where bad songs last forever. Shredded speakers, probably blown for fifteen years. The bass notes like tearing paper.

  The girls on the stage.

  And there she is: Number 27.

  The tall man sees her the moment he reaches the top of the stairway, the symbolic barrier that prevents Bangkok’s finest from enforcing Thailand’s strict anti-nudity law, news of which has clearly not reached this room. Thanks to an elaborate, almost courtly, system of graft, the cops pause downstairs long enough to let the doorman slip them a couple thousand baht as he pushes a buzzer, and then they shuffle slowly upward while the girls onstage wrap themselves in the cheap taffeta slips that are normally knotted around their upper arms to display the merchandise.

  They’re almost all naked now, four of the five on the stage and most of the eight or so who sit on customers’ laps, arms languidly draped around the suckers’ necks. The girls dazzle their temporary honeys with honest, open Thai smiles and whatever lie will open a pocket. The tall man at the top of the stairs does a quick scan of the room, making sure no one he knows is there. Then he returns his gaze to Number 27.

  She’s tiny, plump-cheeked, sullen-mouthed, with cupcake breasts, a child’s round tummy, and straight black hair in a blunt schoolgirl cut that’s grown out just enough to brush her shoulders. Of the five women on the platform in the center of the room, she is the youngest by at least five years, and the only one who isn’t naked.

  The tall man stares at her long enough to draw a glance, but she quickly turns her back. He crosses the dark, narrow room to the banquette in front of the mirrored wall. Once he’s seated, with little squares of light from the revolving mirrored ball above the stage chasing each other across his shirt, he glances down. The photo in his hand is a smudged photocopy of a high-school identification card. The girl in the picture faces the camera with the hopeful insecurity of adolescence. She had risen to the occasion with a smile.

  She isn’t smiling now. She dances as though she is underwater, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on her reflection in the mirror. She might be stoned, drunk, suicidal, or just exhausted. Her short, salmon-colored slip, a loop of elastic holding up a yard of some cheap synthetic, has been tugged down below her baby’s belly to bare the upper half of her body almost to the pubic area. The round LAP BAR button with the number 27 on it is pinned to the elastic band of the slip, directly over her right hip bone. The number is her only identification, but the tall man knows her name, which is Toy.

  In the six months since the photo was taken, she has grown the schoolgirl hair an inch or more and plastered her face with makeup so she looks older, but no matter. The tall man knows her age. The tall man is here, in the Lap Bar on Bangkok’s Patpong Road, because of her age.

  Today is Saturday, the twenty-fourth of April. Two days ago Number 27 turned sixteen.

  IN THE STREET below, the short, crowded road called Patpong 1, the street market has sprung into noisy life. Beneath the smoky half glow of the night sky, two straggling lines of overilluminated stalls offer curios, jewelry, eel-skin and leather goods, preserved tarantulas and scorpions, and an impressive variety of forgeries: watches, sunglasses, fountain pens, computer software, games, compact discs, mislabeled designer clothes, acrylic amber, and plastic ivory that’s been buried in water-buffalo manure for that convincing patina of age. In a few booths, less brightly illuminated, the discerning shopper can pick through an assortment of Tasers, flick knives, brass knuckles, switchblades, and other instruments of intimate aggression.

  They’re mostly male, the florid horde for whom these treasures gleam. Ranging from half drunk to barely ambulatory, grim-faced and dripping sweat, they push their way between the stands, checking the rows of counterfeits with one eye and keeping the other eye on the open doors to the bars. Patpong Road at night is almost all bars: Kiss, Lipstick, Safari, King’s Castle, Supergirls, Pussy Galore. Through the open doors, chilly air pours into the streets, pumped by the heartbeat rhythms of trance and techno. Bar girls in cheap, fake-satin wraps stand in the doorways and call out cheerful, indiscriminate Thai greetings to the nameless darlings in the street, pushing the paradise inside.

  At the end of the road, where Patpong empties into Silom Road, a man wearing reflective Ray-Bans and the tight-fitting brown paramilitary uniform of the Bangkok police lounges against the window of a nondescript restaurant. The uniform sets off broad shoulders and narrow hips while also making way, with a certain amount of strain, for a small but ambitious potbelly. There is nothing soft about the potbelly: it looks like something to avoid bumping your head on. He glances at a heavy steel watch on a too-large band, flips it around from the front of his wrist to the back, and then checks it again as he realizes he’s forgotten to look at the time. Satisfied, he folds his hands over the round belly—a practiced, comfortable gesture.

  The policeman has a hairline receding on either side of a stubborn widow’s peak, medium-dark skin, a disappointed mouth that turns down at the ends, and broad, almost muscular nostrils. Behind the mirrored Ray-Bans—genuine—he lazily scans the crowd, straightening only when he catches sight of a heavyset white man in a loose shirt, patched with sweat, who roughly tows a young Thai girl through the throng. The girl—dark-complected, tangle-haired, flat-nosed, dressed in a knotted T-shirt and cutoff jeans—pulls back, distracted by a bright row of bootleg DVDs, and the heavyset man gives her hand a yank that almost jerks her o
ff her feet. Feeling the policeman’s eyes on her, the girl turns and frowns at him before breaking into a smile. After a moment the policeman smiles back. The heavyset white man snags a tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled open-air taxi, and hauls the girl onto the backseat behind him. He doesn’t barter the fare, so he’s in for at least one unpleasant surprise during the evening. The tuk-tuk driver swerves into traffic with a fine disregard for the possibility of death. The policeman leans back against the window of the restaurant and looks at his watch again.

  “THANK YOU,” SAYS the young woman with the wandering eye. She’s in her middle twenties, plain and plump, with a wide Isaan nose. A fall of red-dyed hair has been combed forward over the left side of her face to mask the errant eye. She has tugged the elasticized slip modestly up to her armpits. A thin gold chain around her neck disappears into the slip. The tall man knows there will be a Buddhist amulet at the end of it, which the woman will drag around to hang against her back when she dances, so as not to expose it to the goings-on in the bar. She will also remove it when she services a customer.

  She puts the cola the man bought her on the round table in front of him and gives him an expert glance. There is an Asian smoothness to his features. He has straight black Asian hair and uptilted eyes that are almost black, the color of dangerous ice.

  He says, “What’s the baby’s name?” He indicates Toy with a lift of his chin. One of the other dancers leans over, laughing, and yanks the girl’s slip down, and now she dances with the slip pooled at her ankles and her hands folded protectively over her shadowy pudenda. She seems miles away.

  “Toy,” says the plump girl grudgingly. She leans forward and puts a hand on his wrist as a demand for attention. “You no good for her. She too young for here. You have good heart, you give me thousand baht, I give five hundred to mama-san for bar fine and five hundred to Mai, and she go home. You take other girl, I help you find pretty girl, not like me. She baby, you unnerstan’?”

  “Yes. Tell Toy I want to talk to her.”

  The plump girl has picked up the cola, but now she puts it down and pulls the hair back from the wandering eye. It searches the mirror behind the tall man as the other eye studies his face. Whatever she sees there, she lowers the hair over her face again and turns her back on him, heading for three very drunk Japanese men who have just staggered in, their bright red faces upturned toward the stage. They brush past the plump woman as though she isn’t there, and she stands where they’ve left her, hands hanging loose at her sides, looking at a spot on the floor. One of them points at Toy and says something, and the others laugh.

  The tall man checks his watch, sits back, and smiles at Toy.

  AT 9:22 by the policeman’s watch, two beer-sodden Australians begin to clobber each other in the street in front of a stand selling fake amber beads. The Aussies throw their punches slowly and deliberately, as if rehearsing for a fight that will be filmed later, but the blows land with a flat, heavy sound, like cuts of meat falling to the floor. The prize over which they are fighting—a slight, narrow-shouldered, heavily tattooed Thai female of twenty or so—chews thoughtfully on a hangnail as the larger of the two men grabs the smaller by the hair and slams his head against the edge of the booth. The small man starts to bleed immediately, even before the beads hit the pavement and begin bouncing among the feet of the onlookers. The girl scratches her shoulder, snags the offending fingernail on her T-shirt, and looks down at it with irritation.

  The bleeding man emits a high, reedy, choked sound. He rips off his football jacket and hands it to the girl and then leaps forward, wrapping his fingers around his friend’s neck. The two of them begin to topple over. The policeman steps forward, arms spread wide, thoughtfully clearing a space in the crowd for the struggling men to fall through. He steps over the fighters without a downward glance and begins to help the vendor pick up her beads. The girl takes a quick look at the fighting men and rifles the pockets of the jacket. Whatever she finds there, she slips it into the pocket of her jeans. She drops the jacket onto the street, and her eyes meet the policeman’s. He gives her a shrug, and she melts into the crowd.

  HE SITS BACK, watching her not look at him. Her glazed fascination with her own reflection has been broken. She’s even picking up her feet a little, although she’s turned her back to him, almost shyly. But he can still see her face in the mirror on the opposite wall, and her eyes come back to him again and again, and then they slide away and search the room as if she’s looking for an ally.

  He orders a Singha beer from the mama-san, a thickset, brightly dressed woman with gold on her wrists and fingers and nothing merry about her. The Lap Bar is a typical upstairs joint. The bar is at one end of the room, the women dance on a raised platform in the middle of the space, and the customers sit either at stools pulled directly up to the stage or on a long, cigarette-scarred bench against the mirrored walls, with a small table every few feet to hold their drinks. The tall man is on the couch, and he keeps his eyes on Number 27.

  Chased by his gaze, the girl has worked her way down the stage until she’s directly in front of the three drunk Japanese. One of them calls out to her, placing both hands over his heart in a gesture of exaggerated romanticism and then forming a circle with his right thumb and forefinger and pushing his left index finger in and out of it. His companions burst into raucous laughter, an explosion of sound that the tall man can hear even over the loud music. The girl misses a step, as if she’s tripped on the laugh. She stands still for a long moment, not looking at the Japanese men, not looking at the tall man who watches her, and then she turns and trudges the length of the stage until she is in front of the tall man again. She walks as though she weighs five hundred pounds.

  The three Japanese men are drumming their hands on the bar, a rolling rhythm over the music, to call the girl back down to them. They flash fingers in the red light, playing a game of rock-paper-scissors to see who will have her first, and Number 27 makes her decision. She turns and forces a smile at the tall man.

  It isn’t much of a smile.

  THE AUSTRALIANS HAVE their arms wrapped tightly around each other’s shoulders. Their anger has been redirected.

  “Bloody hell,” says the smaller one. He wears the blood on his face like a veil, like a disguise. “She buggered off and took my money.”

  “Is that so?” says the policeman, clutching a fistful of fake amber like a talisman.

  “You’re wasting your time,” the larger one tells his bleeding friend belligerently. “You think he’s going to help you? He probably gets a cut of everything she steals.” He leans down toward the policeman, bringing his big red face so close that he can see his own eyes in the policeman’s Ray-Bans. “ ’At’s right, innit, mate? You pocketing the proceeds?”

  “Bangkok police are very honest,” the policeman says, not wasting much conviction on it. “Fortunately, finding her will be easy.” He releases a smile into the night air to show how easy it’s going to be. “You remember her name, of course.”

  “Name?” asks the larger man. He takes a drunken, involuntary step backward, dragging his bleeding friend with him.

  “Her name.” The policeman looks from the larger to the smaller man, his eyebrows high and querying. “You know. What everybody called her.” He waits. “The short, one- or two-syllable sound to which she answered when others spoke it.” The policeman has developed a faint British accent. “Name,” he says again, and smiles encouragingly.

  “Who the fuck knows?” asks the bleeding man.

  “I see,” the policeman says. “Listen. Let me give you a tip.” The policeman lowers his voice confidentially. “In case this happens again.”

  “I’m bleeding,” the smaller man says.

  “We are poor in Thailand, compared to you,” the policeman says, dropping his voice even further. They lean in to hear him. “There are many things you take for granted that we do not have. But all of us—” He reaches out and taps the larger man on the chest. “Every one of us—even the poores
t, even the destitute, even the beggars, even the girls who work in the bars—every one of us has a name.” He places the false amber beads on the counter from which they have fallen and catches sight of his watch. “Oh, my,” the policeman says. “Look at the time.”

  THE TALL MAN goes down the stairs first, with Toy trailing a few steps behind. He can smell her, a damp, sweetish mixture of makeup and perspiration. When he’d put his arm around her shoulders after the mama-san accepted the five-hundred-baht bar fine—worth about fourteen dollars in California, where the tall man used to live—she’d shrunk back. She hadn’t met his eyes since she stepped off the stage.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he turns and watches her come, now wearing a T-shirt, a bright orange skirt that ends midthigh, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. He gives her a smile, but she’s got her eyes on the stairway, as though she’s never gone down one before.

  “Here we go,” he says. “I hope you’re ready.”

  He opens the door.

  THE POLICEMAN’S SUNGLASSES reflect the words LAP BAR. The words are written in fuchsia neon set into the center of a bright heart, a cheap electric valentine sizzling fifteen feet above the Patpong sidewalk. He takes a final look at his watch and then leans against a metal pole that once had some sort of sign atop it, now amputated. The crowd, sweating, wrinkled, and ripe-smelling, divides on either side and flows by.