The Queen of Patpong Read online

  “Friend you?”

  “No. He’s not your friend either. If he comes out, don’t get near him. Just watch where he goes, so you can tell me. And keep walking, okay?”

  He waits until she starts to limp in a tight circle, toting her shoes in her hands and squeaking like a chipmunk, and then he turns and jogs to Sukhumvit. The pharmacy is about half a block to the right, exactly where he remembered it. He comes out a couple of minutes later, dry-chewing four aspirin and carrying a plastic bag containing some more loose pills, a roll of gauze, some bandages, and a tube of antibiotic cream. The young woman behind the counter had wanted to treat him right there, but he’d fought her off, although he was unable to prevent her from soaking some tissues in water and pressing the sopping wad into his hand. It drips down his bloody arm and onto his shirt as he works his way back through the crowd on the sidewalk, making pink stalactite-shaped stains on the front of his T-shirt like a souvenir of the Cave of Blood.

  When he reenters the soi, the girl is at a table with a can of Coke in front of her, the can sweating in the humidity, and she’s holding her left foot in both hands, turning it this way and that. She gives a little start when she sees his ruined shirt and then holds out both hands for the bag and the tissues. Even before he’s fully seated, she’s gently wiping his forearm with the wet tissues, folding them to get a clean surface and wiping some more, then patting the skin dry with napkins.

  “Ankle better?”

  “Small ow,” she says. She places a hand on his upper arm, and with the other she takes his wrist. With a practiced air, she bends the arm at the elbow and then straightens it, taking it through the full range of motion and ignoring Rafferty’s grunt of pain.

  “Him not come,” she says, indicating the Beer Garden with her chin. She returns her attention to his arm, pushing it so the elbow forms an acute angle. “This okay. Not break.” To prove it she yanks the arm open and then closes it again, bringing Rafferty three or four inches into the air. “Baby,” she says. “All man baby.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks for the help.” He reclaims his arm and opens and closes it gingerly, the pain slowing him like rust on the joint, and then he rotates it for a look at the elbow. He’s got a swelling the size of a tomato, and the skin is torn in a jagged three-inch pattern that looks like lightning.

  “No problem,” she says. “Only dirty. I clean.”

  “Wiggle your foot around,” Rafferty says. “I mean, as long as we’re playing doctor.”

  “Foot okay. Ow, but okay. Same you.” With considerable precision she inverts the cap on the tube of ointment to puncture the top, lays a thin line of cream along the zigzag of the tear, and uses a small piece of gauze to spread the ointment on either side. She examines her work and then takes the roll of gauze and begins to mummify his elbow with it.

  He says, “Not so tight.”

  She tugs the gauze a bit tighter and passes it under his arm again. Without looking up she says, “Name you?”

  “Poke,” he says. “And you?”

  “Pim.” She rolls the gauze around his arm four more times, nips the edge with small white teeth, and rips it neatly across. Then she folds the end under once, so no loose threads are exposed, smooths it flat across the mound of gauze swathing Rafferty’s elbow, and expertly tapes it in place with two elastic Band-Aids. She eyes her work critically, smooths it again, and drops everything back into the bag. “You no die,” she says.

  “You’ve done this before,” he says.

  “Have,” she says without meeting his eyes. “Have many baby, my house.”

  “In the bag,” he says. “Three aspirin for your ankle.”

  “Not like.”

  “Nobody likes. But they’ll keep it from swelling. Take them.”

  She grimaces in protest but scrounges in the bag until she comes up with the pills. Then she gives them a dubious glance, looks at the Coke in her hand, fills her mouth with Coke, and drops the pills in. Then she swallows convulsively and immediately burps, her free hand splayed out over her sternum.

  “There,” Rafferty says. “You did great, but don’t make it a habit.”

  Pim puts the can down, blinking fast, and picks up the roll of gauze.

  “I’ll do it,” Rafferty says. “Give me your foot.” She puts her foot in his lap, and he starts to wrap the ankle.

  “More harder,” she says, and he tightens the spiral of cloth.

  “Friend you, in there—” She jerks her head back, toward the entrance to the Beer Garden.

  “Not a friend,” Rafferty says.

  She says, “No good?”

  “No good.” He tugs on the roll, passing it under and over her ankle. “I don’t want him to see me, but I need to know where he goes.”

  “Short hair,” Pim says. “Shirt same-same . . .” She draws vertical stripes down Rafferty’s T-shirt, then burps again. “Old, not old?”

  “Not old,” Rafferty says, and puts in the little barbed clamps to hold the gauze in place. “But I don’t think you should—”

  “I look,” Pim says. She gets up and then squeaks, both hands grabbing at the back of her chair. Says, “Oooo.”

  “Skip it,” Rafferty says. “Not a good idea.”

  “You say I walking, yes?” Pim says. “So okay, I walk.”

  “Look.” He gets up. “If you’re going in there, make me a promise. Don’t get anywhere near him. Go in, look around like you’re supposed to meet somebody and he’s not there. If you don’t see him, come out and tell me. If you do see him—” He breaks off. “You’ve got a cell phone, right?”

  “Sure,” she says, slightly affronted. “Have.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Her lower lip pops out, and for a moment he thinks she will refuse. She has no jewelry yet, no expensive clothes, just cheap, badly sewn junk from the vendors out at Chatuchak Market. At this stage of her life in Bangkok, her phone—the symbol of freedom, the first thing every girl buys—is the only trophy of her new career. She makes a sour face, forces a hand into a pocket in her hot pants, and brings up a thin silvery cell phone that Rafferty recognizes at once as the one Miaow’s been asking for.

  He has to tug on it twice before she releases it. He keys in his number, then hands it back. “This is me,” he says. He puts a hand on her shoulder, a bid for full attention. “If you see him, just turn your back to him and push ‘send.’ I won’t answer—just let it ring once or twice and then hang up. That way you don’t have to go right back out again, or get anywhere near me, or talk on the phone, or do anything that might catch his attention. Don’t get close to him, don’t talk to him, don’t do anything that makes him notice you. You go in, look around, and if he’s there, you press ‘send’ and you hang up, understand?”

  “Go in, look around, press ‘send,’ ” she says with exaggerated patience, reminding Rafferty that she’s just a kid. It’s gotten darker now, and her makeup doesn’t look quite so garish. He can see the mildly pretty, still-developing face beneath it. Not beautiful, not unforgettable, just the sweet, unassuming transitional prettiness so many young women share. She reaches up and pats the hand on her shoulder, then twists away and out from under it. “I go.”

  “Hold it,” he says. “You had any customers today?”

  She opens her mouth, closes it, and then says, “No.”

  “Okay.” He pulls a fold of money out of his jeans and peels off a reddish note. “Here’s five hundred baht.”

  She avoids looking at the money and shakes her head.

  “It’s for taking care of me. And for checking it out in there. Why should you do all that for free?”

  She raises her upper lip and sucks air through her teeth, making a little squealing sound. Then she takes the bill and says, “Thanks.”

  “Tell me what you’re going to do when you get in there.”

  She shakes her head, fills her cheeks with air, and puffs out. “You same-same my mama. I go in. I look like I want find somebody. If I see, I call you. Hang up. N
ot go close. Not look him. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He fights down the urge to tell her again to be careful and stands there watching her limp barefoot across the street, shoes dangling from her left hand, a girl from the northeast who’d been a village teenager six or eight weeks ago. Now she’s been cast on the surface of the Bangkok ocean like chum. Food for sharks.

  She’s inside, and Rafferty fights off a wave of uneasiness. He picks up her can of Coke and finishes it without tasting it, his eyes on the entrance. Without looking down he puts his phone on the table so he’ll see it light up in his peripheral vision. It doesn’t, and he knows he’s got to move or he’ll jump out of his skin.

  She’ll be fine, he thinks, crossing the street. The Beer Garden is full of people. She’ll be one girl among a couple of hundred. She’s not going anywhere near him. Go in, look for somebody, push a button. It’s simple. And even if everything goes wrong, even if John has somehow seen them together outside the Beer Garden, what could he do to her with all those people around?

  Rafferty positions himself about half a block to the right of the door, on the Beer Garden’s side of the street. He figures John will head right, toward Sukhumvit, once he comes out. He’ll be able to get a cab more easily there. Rafferty settles in to wait.

  The phone doesn’t ring. He has an irrational impulse to shake it.

  And then it does.

  He checks it and sees UNKNOWN NUMBER, which is what he expects, so he puts it in his pocket and prepares to settle in and wait for John. But it rings again, and again.

  He fishes it out of his pocket, but it stops. Then, just as he starts to put it back, it rings again. He opens it and hears nothing, then a high, thin “Oooooo” and a choking sound, and then a clatter like the phone hitting a hard floor. Then it disconnects.

  Chapter 7

  Nam Pla Prik

  He’s already running when the phone vibrates and then rings again, and he stops and answers, but no one is there. Instead he gets one of those twirling barber-pole lines that means something is downloading, and a moment later he’s staring at an out-of-focus close-up of Pim, her eyes taking up half her face, looking like someone who’s just opened the door to death.

  He runs across the soi and jumps up the steps to the open-air restaurant where he and Pim had sat. The woman who waited on them looks apprehensive as she watches him come, moving behind her counter just in case.

  “Nam soda,” Rafferty gasps. “Soda water. In the bottle. Orange juice to go. Hurry.”

  “You take bottle? Extra baht if you take—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Here.” He throws another hundred-baht note on the counter and shifts helplessly from foot to foot as the woman opens the cooler at Thai speed and pulls out a bottle of soda.

  “Not so cold,” she says doubtfully.

  “I don’t care. Open it and give it to me. Get the orange juice.”

  The woman pops the cap, releasing a spurt of soda, a sure sign that it’s warm. Rafferty snatches it from her right hand and plucks the cap from the counter. As she prepares the orange juice, he pours out about a third of the soda, making a bubbling puddle at his feet. He snaps the bent cap back on as tightly as he can, shoves the bottle into the center of the back of his pants, against the gully of his spine, and tugs the T-shirt free so it hangs loose over his jeans. In the meantime the woman has taken a clear plastic bag and filled it halfway with orange juice, then stuck a straw into it, twisted the bag around the straw, and with expert quickness wrapped a rubber band around the bag to create a tight seal. She hands it to him and watches openmouthed as he undoes the rubber band, pulls the straw out, and pours the orange juice onto the concrete floor. Then he turns to the selection of condiments and picks up a clear glass bowl of nam pla prik, fish sauce with hundreds of tiny, fiery red and green peppers floating in it. He upends the bowl of chili sauce into the bag, replaces the straw, and reseals the bag with the rubber band. He wraps his right hand loosely around the bag and takes off at a dead run toward the Beer Garden.

  He veers left, into the alley. John and his friends, if he has any with him, will be watching the entrance. If Rafferty goes in through the entrance, he’ll have no options at all.

  As he tears around the corner of the second alley to the right, he finds himself at the base of the eight-foot wall at the back of the Beer Garden. The Beer Garden is essentially open-air, although a roof has been built over the central area, covering the bar and the restaurant booths to the right of the door. But the roof is raised on poles; it doesn’t join the walls in most places, and back here, where the kitchen and the restrooms are, there’s a gap between the top of the wall and the roof, to let out heat and odors.

  If Rafferty can get in here, he’ll be at the back of the establishment, near the kitchen and the restrooms and behind everyone in the main room who’s facing the doorway.

  But the wall rises eight feet, and eight feet is too high. He could jump and get his hands on top of the wall, but there’s no way he could hold on, much less climb up.

  The area at the base of the wall is shaded by the umbrellas of vendors—a shoeshine man, a guy who repairs disposable lighters for a few pennies, a barber, complete with chair and mirror. About five feet from the wall, a woman carefully sews the hem of a skirt that’s apparently been plucked from an overflowing basket beside her. She’s using an antique sewing machine powered by a foot treadle. It’s a heavy machine, and the old oak table it rests on looks like it’s supported its burden for decades without so much as a creak of protest. Rafferty grips the bag of nam pla prik between his teeth, setting the tip of his tongue on fire, says “Shorry,” grabs the table, and drags it to the base of the wall.

  The woman calls after him, but by the time anyone has registered what he’s doing, Rafferty is balanced on the table, feet on either side of the sewing machine. The table is a little more than three feet high, so he can get both arms over the top of the wall and haul himself up. The woman is still yelling at him and drawing a crowd, so he extracts yet another hundred-baht bill and lets it flutter down.

  Because of the bottle tucked into the back of his pants, he has to go over the wall on his stomach. He hears women’s voices, indignant and scolding, behind him, and when he turns, he sees a group of eight or ten Beer Garden regulars, women of various ages and shapes, tightly clustered around an open door. They look angry and upset, and some of them are trying to push others forward, through the door. The women at the front hold back, obviously unwilling or afraid to go in.

  One of the women at the rear spots Rafferty and waves him to hurry. He palms the bag of chili sauce and covers the distance at a run. The women part, and he’s looking into the men’s room.

  It’s not much—a row of urinals with those round pink cakes in them that somebody somewhere thinks smell better than piss, a filthy once-white tile floor, a couple of sinks to the left of the door, and three toilet cubicles with a great many words scratched into them.

  John is standing with his back against the wall of the center cubicle. He’s sweating heavily, and there’s a mean-looking six-inch knife in his hand, which he’s using to try to get the crowd of women to back up. Crumpled on the floor beside him, leaning against the door of the right-hand cubicle, her face a twist of pain and her left arm hanging uselessly in her lap, is Pim. Her shoes lie on their sides next to her, and the bandage around her ankle is soiled from the floor. Tears have eroded deep, wet tracks through her cakey makeup from her eyes to her jawline. A teardrop dangles from her chin.

  Rafferty eases the last woman aside and says to John, “Get away from her.”

  “The hero,” John says. “Send in a girl. What an asswipe. Come on in here, asswipe.”

  “You’re fucked,” Rafferty says. “I don’t think Howard is going to like this at all.”

  “The hell with Howard,” John says, but he sounds less certain. “Get in here.”

  “Yeah? What do you think you’re going to do? Cut me in front of all these ladies? Fight your way out of here wit
h me bleeding in the bathroom? Howard will love that, his fifth-rate jerkwater backup in jail, charged with stupidity. What were you supposed to do? Follow me. Find out where I went. Get a little information. Report back to Howard, wherever Howard is. Instead here you are, stuck in a toilet with a knife in your hand.” Rafferty comes just inside the door. “Where’s Howard?”

  John says, “Fuck yourself,” and flourishes the knife, doing a gleaming, professional-looking, little back-and-forth razzle-dazzle, but Rafferty ignores it. Either the man will use it or he won’t.

  “I asked you a question.”

  John puts the tip of his tongue to his upper lip and then retracts it. “And I told you what you can do, if your dick is long enough to stick it up your ass.”

  “I also told you to get away from her.”

  “Man,” John says, “you are so not listening.”

  Rafferty’s got no moves that will protect him from a blade. What he can do, if he can work up the courage, is to offer John another target. He takes a longer look at Pim, who is staring up at him wet-eyed, slumped slightly to the side to try to ease the weight of her damaged left arm. He flips a mental coin, and it comes up heads: John would prefer not to use the knife. So Rafferty grabs a deep breath and brushes past the man as though he’s not there, barely bothering to sidestep the knife, and bends down over Pim, practically waving in John’s face the freshly bandaged left elbow.

  John seizes the advantage, grabs the bandages, and squeezes for all he’s worth, with explosive results. Rafferty lets out a bellow of pain, straightens convulsively, and through a sort of red haze he brings his right hand, with the plastic bag in it, up into John’s face. When the straw is pointed at the other man’s eyes, Rafferty squeezes the bag.

  His own cry is still ragged in his throat, but even so he can hear John howl. John yanks his head back, slamming it against the wall of the toilet cubicle and scrubbing at his eyes with his forearm as Rafferty reaches back, lifts his T-shirt, and brings out the heavy soda bottle, clutching it by the neck. With an effort that begins at the soles of his feet, he slams the bottle against the side of John’s head, so hard that the bottle almost flies out of his hand. There’s a surprising crack, a sound that nearly persuades Rafferty he’s broken the man’s skull. John’s knees accordion outward like he’s doing a dance step, and he goes down. Rafferty whacks him again for insurance as he drops, hitting his ear this time. John crumples on the floor like a loose sack, looking as though he has no muscles in his body.