A Killing Smile Read online

  “Have you? ” repeated Tuttle.

  “Have I what? ”

  “Had a girl? ”

  Lawrence looked away through the gray cloud of smoke that hung over a row of old tables with scuffed metal legs. A slender man in a straw hat leaned forward kissing an eighteen-year-old hilltribe girl who sat with her friends in the opposite booth.

  “A young lawyer. She’s an associate in my office. I’ve seen Kelly a few times,” said Lawrence, watching for some reaction from Tuttle. Kelly’s name had an alien warp inside HQ; and using her name with Tuttle seemed like an infringement of her privacy.

  Tuttle sat with his arms stretched out batlike on the upholstered booth. He smiled. “How old is she? ”

  “Thirty, thirty-one.”

  “That’s what you call a young lawyer? ” asked Tuttle, increasing his grin until his moustache was a straight line across his face.

  “Is that supposed to be a joke? ”

  “It depends on your sense of humor.”

  Lawrence’s hands closed into fists; his jaw set tight, and the slight nodding of the head began that signalled anger. “This is getting highly personal, Robert.”

  “It’s a highly personal kind of world. Or have you forgotten? ” Tuttle’s smile vanished. A second later, as if he had caught himself, pulled himself away from an edge, he recovered, bounced on his seat, moved his head to the music.

  “Thirty years of erosion on a woman’s body can be bad. That’s why I asked. Maybe your girlfriend’s an exception to the rule.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” said Lawrence.

  Lawrence made a gesture to the waiter to bring him another drink. “She’s Stanford Law Review,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. The kind of remark he might drop inside his own club.

  “You gotta be the first farang in HQ to brag that he scored with a woman who made Stanford Law Review. She’s an institution. She’s a label, old buddy. I had forgotten how much labels impress you. Now it comes back to me. Sarah’s father was a federal judge. Her mother lived from Dupont trust funds. And what was my label? Draft dodger.”

  Lawrence’s drink arrived and he took a long time counting out the money for the waiter. “This was a mistake,” said Lawrence and he began to push out from the booth. Tuttle grabbed his arm.

  “Do you want my help or not? ” asked Tuttle.

  A long silence swept between them. A long sigh came from Lawrence; he laid back his head touching the upholstered bench and laughed. Bangkok had suddenly become the place where he was knee-deep in the past; together, they had shoved up enough dirt for one night. But neither one seemed able to stop digging, ripping up the pavement of the present with the wild jackhammering of old memories. Tuttle knew the truth. Lawrence needed him. He believed that Tuttle could help him. Why was it that the one person on earth he wished to avoid was the only person he trusted to point him in the right direction? He had been sending metaphysical roadmaps to Sarah through his stories for years. What he loathed the most was that Tuttle had the upper hand. Tuttle had always had the advantage. He was like a man who had tapped into inside information at every stage in his life. Only this time there was a difference; one that had registered on Lawrence from the moment he had received Tuttle’s wire. Tuttle had wanted something from him. He had desire to confront him, to confess to him, to destroy him—the desire continued to shift until desire shifted to obsession.

  Lawrence decided to stay; to continue the game, to let Tuttle play out his hand through the balance of the evening.

  “She has a good body,” said Lawrence.

  Tuttle broke into a grin and tapped Lawrence’s arm. “She has planted the hook. Next she starts reeling you in, Larry. You’re vulnerable. She can see that. After twenty-two years with Sarah you’re not exactly cut out for dating or whoring. So pretend you’re shopping for a luxury item. This is my BMW, my Rolex, and my Stanford Law Review girlfriend.”

  “And you’ve found truth, right, and wisdom living in Bangkok flesh palaces? Spare me, Bobby. In your own way, you’re just as hard-core—to use your own word—fucked up as anyone. Look down on the rest of us. Remember as you sit up there, you’re no different—you only thought you were different. Pretended to be; put on a great act. And where is this place you’re looking down from? HQ? You’re forty-six years old and you spend your nights in a broken down whorehouse.”

  Lawrence surprised himself with his outburst of emotion. The feeling had been running wild through his mind ever since he had discovered Sarah’s diaries. He had promised himself to remain in control; that any loss of temper would simply play into Tuttle’s hands. Tuttle’s reaction wasn’t anger or hurt; he smiled, and let out a long sigh.

  “Sorry, Bobby,” Lawrence said.

  “Sorry for what? For some genuine honesty? Before you put a deposit down on your Stanford Law Review, just hear what I’m saying tonight. Keep an open mind. There might be a woman in this coffee shop; in this city waiting for you.”

  “A woman who sells herself? ” asked Lawrence, the words rolling off his tongue with a sense of disgust. “A whore? ”

  “Interesting word, whore. A cruel, mean word. A western word that distorts who these girls are. When all we really want to talk about is cost. Miss Stanford Law Review has her cost. And she has you paying one way or another. Emotional funds or dollars, whatever currency works on your psycho balance sheet. Does that make her a whore? And when Sarah and I were together in ’68 before you came along.”

  Lawrence raised his hand, making a fist. “I don’t want to talk about Sarah now. Not in this way. Okay? ”

  “Forget about dividing good girls from bad girls; rich ones from poor ones. Whether she loves you or fucks your brains out.”

  Tuttle had Lawrence’s full attention like a prize-fighter who had landed a series of punches to the face. Lawrence shifted uneasily. He nodded slowly as Tuttle waited for a second. “It’s a question of her sense of obligation to you. That’s the only virtue that matters; the only virtue worth acquiring in another. That separates a lot of Thai women from most farang women. The Thai woman’s perspective doesn’t stop at—what do I want from you? What can you give me? There’s another part to the equation—what do I owe you, and how can I repay my debt to you? ”

  Lawrence thought for a second, then turned to Tuttle.

  “What is it I owe you, Bobby? ”

  “What did you owe Sarah? ”

  From across the room, the young hilltribe girl had begun screaming at the middle-aged man in the straw hat. Suddenly she picked up a green Kloster beer bottle by the neck and broke off the end. Two girlfriends restrained her as the man backed away, edged up the stairs and disappeared.

  “She would have killed that guy,” said Lawrence, looking back at Tuttle who raised an eyebrow and smiled.

  “She lost face.” The drama with the broken bottle ended as quickly as it had begun. A flash of violent anger, the shattering of glass, the retreat of the offending party, and the restoration of passive, smiling faces around the floor.

  “I can understand something about Bangkok.” There was a smug tone creeping into his voice. “The constant drama appeals to you,” said Lawrence.

  “You’ve figured out Bangkok after three days, Larry.”

  “I’ve seen barroom fights before. Tempers flare. Bottles get broken. So you call it face in Bangkok. In LA we call it hurt feelings. It all amounts to the same thing.”

  Lawrence protected himself like most Americans freshly arrived in the city; his emotional reflex translated every experience into an American counterpart. The American and the Thai version were simply different expressions of the same hidden stream bubbling under the surface. The problem was breaking through those automatic defence layers. Tuttle fell silent for several minutes, lost in thought as more women continued to enter the room. Lawrence was forcing him to refine his own thoughts; rewrite the script for the evening as they were in actual progress.

  Weren’t there degrees by which face could be lost, Tut
tle thought. Once a Thai woman lost face with a man she really liked, the emotional reconstructive surgery was expensive, painful, and a long-draw-out ordeal. farangs wandered in twos and threes into Headquarters, and most of them didn’t have any idea that, over there, that beautiful girl in the corner walked a tightrope, and at any moment her face could fall from her head and land on the floor before the only people who mattered in her world: her friends.

  Tuttle explained as the waiter swept up the glass the man in the straw hat was paying the price for causing her to lose face. That made the farang dangerous, wild, unpredictable creatures; barbarians who woke up in the morning and realized that they had gone hard-core. They were like the Emperor wearing no clothes. The farang looked in the mirror and didn’t see what every Thai girl who knew him saw clearly: his face had gone, vanished, and along with his face, his personal sense of dignity, respect, and honor. All had disappeared, dooming him to spend his life haunting Headquarters, one among all the other faceless souls, whose lives had been washed away in a flood of purples.

  “Purple? ” asked Lawrence.

  Tuttle pulled a five-hundred-baht note from his wallet and laid it on the table. “The color of what it costs to take a girl for the entire night. A purple. One of these.”

  Of course I don’t understand, thought Lawrence. He’s right, after three days in Bangkok, I still haven’t figured out Thai money. What do I know about Thailand? Or about any place in Southeast Asia? Two months ago I would have had trouble finding it on the map. So maybe I’m not ready for all of this. I still think a girl with a college education who works in a bar is an aspiring actress. What if Kelly were a secretary with a high school education, would I still feel the same about her? Maybe Tuttle’s right, about this Stanford Law Review thing.

  If only I could reach this guy, thought Tuttle. He’s no different now than he was twenty-odd years ago; press him and he dives inside his opinions as if they were an underground bunker. Most nights for twenty-one years I’ve seen the Americans, Canadian, Swiss, Germans, French . . . with their tightly wrapped farang egos, fashioned out of paper mache, looking at these girls as if they were Western women with brown skin and slanted eyes. Lawrence proved to be no different. These women lost their public faces when they became service workers of the night.

  They shared the gift of illusion with each other. No people were more difficult to separate from their new reality. What they had lost was far beyond the walls of HQ, they needed to believe that their new face would survive; that this new face had replaced the old one; that this new face would last even though they saw face destroyed every day of their lives.

  “Face has a spiritual dimension,” said Tuttle. “The one perspective every working girl, tuk-tuk driver, merchant, and prince understands, believes, and would die or kill for. A couple of times a month the newspaper reports a traffic accident. A bus, a truck, a tuk-tuk crashes head-on with a ten-wheeler or smashes against a bridge, pole, or drives into a ditch. Four, eight, ten people are killed. Fill in the blank. A grainy photograph of the burnt-out bus dipped on one side is printed on page one. The last line of the story has two possible endings. Bus driver was among the dead—a rare occurrence; or the driver fled the scene of the accident.

  “The sentence, ‘The driver fled the scene’ is standard boiler plate. It’s a computer macro; hit F1 and it automatically puts the sentence at the end of the story. You’ll see it more often than any by-line. The driver’s gone because he’s made a mistake, he has failed. The Thai can’t tolerate that he’s failed. There is no stand-and-deliver attitude; there is a take-off and run and never show your face. Bury it far away. It comes out of China. There is no shame in running away, only in getting caught and shown in public.”

  Lawrence watched as two waiters began laying down plates of rice, noodles, and soup on the table. “Is that why you ran in ’68, Bobby? Is that why you never came back. Because Sarah let you go. You didn’t believe that was possible; that she wouldn’t run with you. Bobby, if you want to come home, I can find you a job. If that’s what you want, all you have to do is say. It’s no loss of face to say you need help.”

  “Come to think of it, there may be something you can do for me,” said Tuttle, turning his spoon into a plate of beef with oyster sauce.

  “I thought there might be,” said Lawrence, feeling back in control of the situation again.

  * * *

  AN almond-eyed ex-bar-girl named Lek squeezed into the booth between Lawrence and Tuttle. She helped herself to a plate of shrimp, chilli, hot peppers, and rice. Lek explained why Toom had broken the green Kloster beer bottle and tried to kill the farang in the straw hat. The guy who had bought her two nights in a row had negotiated to take out another girl. Toom had shouted at the top of her lungs the ultimate insult: butterfly. With rage and anger, the word—butterfly—echoed across the room. Her little fists clenched. She threatened murder. After the farang left, Toom threatened to kill herself in true Thai style: slitting each wrist. This was a drama for her friends at the table; an acting out of pain.

  Not that she particularly cared about the farang—she probably didn’t—but his rejection of her for another girl, a stranger, a younger girl, in such a public way, had caused her to lose face in front of all friends. The only people in the world she cared about had looked on as the farang rejected her. He had treated her with contempt; as an interchangeable commodity that mattered no more than a bottle of beer. Her face had been lost. If a person lived and died on account of face, the first thing she did was to adopt proven formulas for self-protection. Thais were obsessed by formula; everywhere one looked—at hairstyles, clothes, gold jewels, go-go bars, business, commerce, education, the military, the formula defined, shaped, and controlled the surface: within each sphere was a cage of unwritten rules to measure every action.

  There was a formula for selling daughters to brothels. Another formula for being a night worker. Even the names followed a formula. There were about a dozen common names for girls—Cheu len—or nickname. The men all had nicknames, too. When you met the girls in a go-go bar at first you had the idea they were mixing up the names. Being coy, or playing social games, or trying to hide their true identity. Nothing could be further from the case. All the Nois, Leks, and Guys, were using their real Thai formula names. Names tagged on them at birth. Usually the name came from a physical attribute or a feeling the mother has about the baby.

  “Bun.” Tuttle sighed as a twenty-year-old in tight jeans slowly passed their table, surveying the food. “How do you like that for a girl’s nickname. Bun means merit. Her arrival into this world was merit-making for her mom. Except now Bun makes her merit working at HQ.”

  “Will you think about coming back to LA? “ said Lawrence, sipping his soup. “I’m serious.”

  “I’ve lost the template for doing business in America. Or maybe I never had it. In Thailand I know the framework. What you look for at Headquarters is what you look for anywhere else in Thailand: the template of business. Every shop in the country that sells gold is painted red on the outside. Every restaurant that serves non-Thai kinds of soup always delivers it to the table with a cover over the top; but never with a Thai soup.”

  “This place is like a K-Mart restroom in East LA. Look at that smudged, cracked mirror.” Lawrence said, running his finger over a small mirrored panel directly behind his head. “God, it’s patched with electrician’s tape. Fingerprints. Smeared lipstick.”

  “That’s their secret!” Tuttle was waving his hands and talking in Thai to Lek about the black electrician’s tape. “The Thais are an extremely practical people. The world is to be patched not recreated.”

  The mirrors, though, had a purpose; they were like rear-view mirrors on a cross-country ten-wheel rig, where the entire traffic pattern of the night was captured; a half-step there, a relay of signals between one group of girls and another, a dramatic gesture; Tuttle used the rim of mirrors that circled each booth. He knew they were more than a system of mirrors, they were t
he communal lens that reflected the tone, image, and mood of everyone who passed, stood, or raced down the narrow ramp of the long, lonely night.

  It had taken Tuttle nearly five years of hitting his head against the wall before he understood the Thais’ mistrust of anyone who suggested a technique or plan that hadn’t been tested. There was almost no curiosity about being the first to try something new just to see if it might work. Something new existed only as a concept and far outside the horizon of a known formula, and the center might not hold. This became “bus driver flees the scene” territory.

  If everyone knew precisely the rules, what was expected, what was forbidden, and how things worked, how people reacted, then the chance of losing face was reduced to nearly zero. If you wanted to make an HQ girl happy, you let her know you were aware of the formula, believed in the formula, would honor the formula, and because you had given her a solid guarantee, she could relax and know that her face was safe with you.