A Killing Smile Page 23

  “And what does Fawn say when I tell her the story? She says upcountry the plumbing can’t take the tissue. So they’re taught to throw their ass-wipe in the wastebasket. But this ain’t goddamn Korat or Surin, I said to her. It’s fucking Bangkok. Fawn was born with a silver spoon in her mouth or up her ass; she knows ass-wipe goes in the toilet. My plumbing takes their shit and tissue.

  “I have a meeting at six o’clock at night. Before I’ve taken a single drink; before any girl had turned a trick or shot up. I stand them up shoulder to shoulder. I get Fawn to translate every last goddamn word I’m saying. I’m holding the fuckin’ wastebasket in my hand, Tuttle. This is a speech with visual aids. There can be no confusion. Fawn tells ‘em that. You think they can fuckin’ change? Not on your life. Ten o’clock I check the toilet and what do I find in the wastebasket? A wad of shit-covered tissue.

  “I was raised on a farm. I know something about country life. No one in my fucking family ever wiped their asshole with tissue and left it in a wastebasket. How do I get through to these people? And they have this idea in their head—even Fawn—and she speaks English—they think there’s a ghost in the toilet. Jerry’s ghost. So I tell Fawn, ‘Tell them that Jerry’s ghost is gonna pull out their guts if he finds any ass-wipe in the wastebasket. farang ghost will go straight up their asshole if he sees a tiny brown stain on any tissue in that basket.’

  “And it goddamn worked. Well, for the last week, it’s worked.

  “It’s a question of their attitude. Take my two most popular dancers. Every night they get bought out by customers. That’s good for the bar; and good for them. One is a goddamn lady-boy. In seven months, no one’s ever come back complaining they got themselves a gender-bender. Probably too damn embarrassed or they simply didn’t know. Ignorance is the problem, Tuttle. Ignorance is throwing shitloaded tissue in a wastebasket. Ignorance is screwing a lady-boy and thinking you’re humping a Thai girl with a tight pussy.

  “So she had the big operation on the other side of the river. She paid twenty thousand baht to have her dick cut off. My girlfriend threatens to do it for free. Makes no fucking sense. Now this ladyboy’s got an attitude. Thinks she’s hot shit.

  “That bitch, she don’t dance.

  “I said to my partner, ‘Bobby, it don’t dance. And if it don’t dance, I don’t give a fuck if it gets taken out. That’s fine. Good for the bar. But if it don’t dance, then I cut her.’

  “She says, ‘Honey, I get bought out every night, why you cut me.’

  “And I say, ‘You get your ass bought out, that’s real good. But you ain’t no better than the rest. You get your ass dancing, or I cut your pay again.’

  “She just stands leaning against the pole. And I just cut her. Fuck that bitch. She ain’t gettin’ special treatment from Riche. She ain’t no bigshot. Even if she does get her ass bought out every fuckin’ night of the week. You getting the idea of what I mean by the Thai attitude? You can’t fuckin’ change them. Not on your life.”

  Lawrence reached inside his jacket and removed his wallet. The wall of plastic credit cards inside caught Riche’s eye. “How much does it cost to buy out Fawn? ” he asked.

  Riche raised an eyebrow, and shook the ice in the bottom of his glass. “Seeing you’re a friend of Tuttle’s, it’s two hundred baht.”

  “It’s two hundred baht if you’re not a friend of mine, too,” said Tuttle, spinning around on the stool.

  Lawrence handed Riche a purple Thai note—five hundred baht. “Keep the change,” Lawrence said.

  Riche’s eyes lit up like a slot machine when three watermelons come up in a row. He turned and addressed Tuttle. “You should tell your friend to be careful flashing around large amounts of money.”

  “Use the money to make a sign in Thai and put it beside the toilet,” offered Lawrence, leaning back against the bar, making a sideways glance over at Fawn.

  “Now there’s a goddamn good idea. Only one problem, half of them can’t fuckin’ read.”

  Only Lawrence wasn’t listening. He was thinking that for the first time in his life he had bought another human being in a cold, hard cash transaction. All those years as a pension lawyer in the merging and acquisition business, he had structured deals that had bought and sold the lives of hundreds, and sometimes thousands of employees and their families; it had been like high-level bombing raids in a bomber at thirty thousand feet. He had never witnessed the smaller, street-level game, where the object of acquisition possessed a face, a pulse, the attributes of a human being like any other, except she hired herself as a mount.

  “Is she the first one you bought out? ” asked Tuttle.

  “Does it show? ”

  “The convention is you talk to the girl before you buy her out. Tell her she’s beautiful, that you like her, and let her size you up with the standard bar girl questions. Where you from? How old are you? Are you married? How long you stay in Bangkok? Where you stay? Lawyer-to-lawyer transactions might be different,” Tuttle said, nodding over at Fawn.

  Riche had leaned over and whispered in Fawn’s ear, pointing his finger in Lawrence’s direction. Fawn nodded, covered her mouth in an embarrassed gesture, and then leaned over and whispered something to Asanee, who cupped her mouth as she answered her.

  “And what you’re seeing is Asanee answering all the questions you were supposed to answer,” added Tuttle, smiling at his daughter, and giving her the thumbs-up.

  The old mamasan with the bad nose job rose from her stool, a couple of two-baht gold chains dangling around her neck as she walked over to a shiny whiteboard hanging on the wall. The board contained columns of numbers separated by a black dividing line. The kind of display that looked out of place in any Bangkok bar. How was Lawrence to judge, having never entered more than a couple? She looked like a stockbroker or schoolteacher as she took the small eraser from the lip of the board, and erased number 27 from the left-hand side and carefully wrote the number in the righthand margin. The left side was the dance order of the girls; the right side the number of the girls bought out for the night. Number 27 had been sold like pork bellies. Only this wasn’t a future market. This was the present, now, here and forever in the moment market, where the numbers on the right signified the transition from a girl smiling at a customer from the stage of a go-go bar to smiling at him inside his hotel room.

  Tuttle pointed at the mamasan writing with the black Magic Marker on the board. “The sale’s complete,” said Tuttle. “You’ve bought something you can’t put a name to. A girl in Bangkok. Her time for the night. It belongs to you.”

  “To talk to . . . about the school,” protested Lawrence.

  “To talk to,” said Tuttle, nodding with a wan smile.

  * * *

  FAWN had disappeared to the back and changed into her street clothes. When she reappeared she did not resemble the same girl who had walked across the room in a G-string and high-heel shoes. She had transformed herself back into a respectable twenty-two year-old law student at the open university. She’s seen pictures of American women lawyers in magazines, and with some major Thai modifications, altered the professional outfit to her own liking. She came out dressed in white high heels, nylons, a tight white skirt, and blouse with hundreds of sequins. Lawrence had never seen an American lawyer dressed like that. No client would ever remember his legal problem, or care about a solution, in her presence.

  Fawn arrived at the table with a black leather handbag slung over one shoulder and an English law book in her right hand. Lawrence read the title on the spine: Introduction to English Contract Law. She plunked down beside Lawrence, laid the book on the table, and offered her hand to him as she nodded to Tuttle.

  “You always carry a contract book with you? ” asked Lawrence, as he picked up the book. “When you go out? ”

  “Why not? Sometimes a lawyer buys me out. And we talk about law. Asanee never believes me when I tell her I’m going to New York City to practice. My father was a New Yorker.”

  “La
rry knows the story,” said Tuttle, looking around for Asanee. She had not returned from the back with Fawn.

  “You talk too much about me, I think,” said Fawn with a nervous frown. She turned back to Lawrence, pressed her hand on his wrist and playfully pulled at the hair. “I like to touch farang hair.”

  “The school,” whispered Tuttle across the table. “Don’t let her distract you. She’s very good at that.”

  Lawrence’s chin snapped up, he looked wide-eyed and guilty. Slowly he removed his hand from Fawn’s grasp. She looked slightly rejected and folded her arms around her chest; a stubborn, heavy expression ruffled her smoothskinned brow with whorls.

  “Robert, you are just like my mother,” she snapped. “You are always trying to make me feel guilty. Maybe you think I’m a stupid girl because I failed two courses. But I know why you keep coming here. And why you bring your friend? And why did he buy me out? ”

  “I come because I think you could help. Help other girls just like you who come to the school,” said Tuttle, rising from his stool. He strolled off searching for his daughter.

  Fawn cupped her hands around the corners of her mouth. “I’m a bar girl. I don’t think I’m better than the others,” she cried after him. “Not like some people I know.”

  But she was working up to a larger question that she wanted to ask Lawrence.

  “If you were me, would you tell your mother that you worked in a bar? ” She was testing him; she had that ability to scatter those around her with unexpected questions and asides. Like an investigative reporter she plunged right into the thick of the controversy. Lawrence understood why both Tuttle and Asanee thought she would make an excellent addition to the teaching staff.

  The first question she asked him was about personal honor, or the Thai variation called loss of face. “Did your mother ever tell her mother she worked in a club? ” He answered her question with his own. A lawyer’s delaying tactic, he knew. But he wanted to see how quick her reaction really was.

  “No way,” she said swiftly.

  “Because your mother would have lost face.” Lawrence thought he had hit the marrow, finding the precise answer.

  She shook her head, brushing her fingers through her long hair. Her eyes saw his disappointment. Again she grabbed his hand, and he didn’t resist. Then she offered him the key to the relative quality of truth in Thailand. “Not that reason. I don’t tell my mother because of my own face. Same, same. She don’t tell her mother for same reason.”

  In Thailand a person’s own face always came first. Her father had died because he didn’t understand that one driving force that pressed people to rewire the control panels of truth in their own lives. Each person’s face came first in his or her life. And beyond face was the need to earn merit. Because with each breath, he was travelling toward the next life. Face and merit: the two legs that carried one forward from one life to the next. Everything he did, each act, had consequences. Everywhere one moved, in every word, action, and thought, ripples were spreading out, carrying him higher or driving him lower.

  Lawrence listened to Fawn talk, thinking he was listening to a law student, but what he heard was a bar girl talking in code that defined the night. And if she broke that code, she would be sucked under and emerge alone in a void of fear. And it wouldn’t stop there. She would continue to tumble, falling from the earth to some alien surface, coming back in some lower form. She was unsure of her rebirth in this cycle. Had she come back as a bar girl or lawyer? Whatever her decision, there was a price in the rebirth from this form and this life to the next.

  Inside that bundle of ironies called face, she and her mother had worked as prostitutes, her father had been killed, and as Lawrence turned sharply, hearing Tuttle’s voice raised in anger, he saw Asanee wearing Fawn’s G-string, high heels, and bikini top. Asanee had met Fawn’s challenge: “You think you’re better than me, Asanee. That you’re better than a dirty bar girl. You try and pretend you never worked the bar. So you think you’re better than me. Why should I want to work with a girl who looks down on me? ”

  The demons had been unleashed, the worst of Tuttle’s fears twisting to the music. He was in no condition to be reasoned with. He chased after his daughter, knocking over stools and chairs, jumping over the bar. Riche struggled to pull Tuttle down from behind, but he had drunk too much, and was too slow to duck as Tuttle caught him square on the chin. Riche stumbled back half a step and fell backwards, taking down a bar girl and chair with him. Tuttle leaped onto the stage, swept Asanee, her feet kicking, into his arms, and carried her straight out the door and into the night.

  She screamed in Thai. “Let me go, she say,” was Fawn’s translation. “I not little girl. Leave me make my own life.”

  Had Asanee gone on stage for his benefit, Lawrence wondered? This strange, exotic, innocent creature who had entered the hotel lobby less than twenty-four hours earlier had transformed herself into a person he couldn’t recognize. “I’m sorry for Tuttle,” he said softly.

  “Robert stay in Thailand long time,” said Fawn. “He lose face and he act just like a Thai.”

  Lawrence remembered how Tuttle had lost face twenty years earlier; how he had tried to rescue Sarah from her parents, from herself; how he had broken into his hotel suite on the same mission. Each time he seemed to fail. Each time he had undertaken the most difficult rescue mission: to rescue a person from themselves.

  * * *

  AT the foot of the Oriental Hotel, Lawrence hired a boat on the Chao Phraya River. A high-rise tower of luxury condos occupied the site where the Parrot Club had once stood. Lights shone from the windows facing the river. Fawn pointed at the white concrete tower honeycombed with balconies as the boat passed. She sat opposite Lawrence, her lap covered with orchids Lawrence had bought from a soft-spoken hunchbacked dwarf, who had stopped them just outside the bar.

  “Riche didn’t tell you about Jerry’s ghost? ” asked Fawn. “I can’t believe him sometimes. He didn’t tell you? You want I tell you? Okay, no problem. Mr. K’s was run by Jerry and his wife. She’s a Thai girl. Jerry’s from Scotland. He find his wife fucking around on him. Some girl goes to him and says, ‘Your wife she fuck with Thai man.’ Jerry ask her about it. She lies and says, ‘No fuck around on you.’ But he lays a trap and catches her with Thai man fucking her in short-time hotel. He drinks half bottle of Mekhong and locks himself in bar toilet. Takes off his belt and hangs himself. Everyone know that is a bad way to die. Monks come and sprinkled water. Burnt incense. But everyone still talk about Jerry’s spirit. Riche and Bobby buy bar. No problem. People start to forget about Jerry.

  “Since Jerry killed himself his pee—his ghost—is still haunting the bar. He’s become the living dead. How do I know? Easy to explain. We start getting strange electrical problems. Every four minutes power stops. The lights go off. It’s completely dark. Riche’s Thai girlfriend says, ‘That’s Jerry’s ghost. He very unhappy still about fuck-around wife. And something else maybe he want.’

  “Then she gets brilliant idea that Jerry wants to smoke. He doesn’t have his cigarettes. And Riche says, ‘Don’t tell me that a goddamn ghost is having a nicotine fit in the spirit world.’ She found out Jerry’s favorite brand of cigarettes was Benson and Hedges. She buys a pack. Lights a cigarette and takes it back to the toilet on an ashtray. Ten minutes the power goes on. No more problem that night. Every night, one of the girls lights a Benson and Hedges cigarette and take it back to the toilet in an ashtray for Jerry’s ghost. Sometime she get so scared inside that she forgets what Riche said about shitpaper in the basket. She does just like home. Wipes ass and gets out before ghost grabs her between the legs.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts? ” asked Lawrence, leaning back and looking at the night sky.

  “You think I’m a stupid girl if I say yes? ”

  Lawrence laughed and shook his head, letting his hand touch the water over the side of the boat. Lawrence wondered if anyone ever died of natural consequences in Thailand; he wo
ndered about Sarah’s spirit—was it drifting across time and space, waiting for him at HQ, the school, Mr. K’s Bar, on the river, at the hotel? And he remembered how she had written the letter so that he wouldn’t lose face. But could her ghost ever rest after this night? He thought of Tuttle tearing out of the bar, cradling his little Asanee like a baby in his arms, the baby he had never caressed or known. Wouldn’t Sarah’s ghost always be a step away from Asanee watching over her? He liked to think that was so.

  * * *

  “WHY can’t girl who studies law absolutely believe in the spirit world? No problem for me,” Fawn said, challenging Lawrence later after they had returned to shore and sipped drinks in the Oriental Hotel’s restaurant. “I tell you something else, you go north, you look out for black magic or voodoo. I don’t like very much. It’s dirty. A corruption. Black magic is for dirty people. One girl might get mad at another because she steals her boyfriend. So she makes a black magic against her. She takes a pubic hair and puts it on that girl’s head. And the man thinks she’s ugly and won’t go near her. Not only just him. But all men avoid her. She’s no good any more. Of course, I think it’s bullshit. Yet, it’s very interesting bullshit.