A Killing Smile Read online

  Tuttle wasn’t clear where to begin; or if he should even bother explaining. It had taken him years before he understood the attraction of HQ— nearly a generation of back-to-back nights of spending time at HQ before the realization hit home. The attraction that made him get out of bed in the morning, and put one foot in front of the other all through the day, so that when midnight came, he had cleared away the debris and obstructions of the day. He knew what to expect; inside were two generations of exiles, Thai and farang fragments of the same whole, resting against one another, finding themselves in each other and with no other place left.

  In all of Southeast Asia, this was the one place that drew him back, forced him to return; and in that space between choice and no choice he found himself sweeping the room. He had long ago stopped expecting to find a surprise inside HQ. What he found was a time chamber in the heart of Bangkok where on a given night the clocks and calendars appeared to have stopped in 1968. On another night-time locked into 1975, and yet another in the misty future of 2050. HQ was a spiritual transport system that travelled in excess of the emotional speed of light. Inside that time lock Tuttle searched for something he had missed before; something hidden away from sight, in his own past, in one of the girls . . . and then, he had spotted her.

  A girl who fell outside any formula. Although Thai society did everything in its power to seal off all avenues of surprise; they were possible to find. Because such women—ones like Sarah—were so rare, they possessed great personal value for those tired to death with the formula. They possessed great power in a world of sameness, of patterns that repeated, of words that said nothing. Tuttle knew the hard-core mind ultimately drifted away from the whole to the individual part; those were the small details that kept the memory from turning into a vast still gray ocean; the girls a large pod of silver marine mammals turning as one large shiny wave deep below the surface.

  He nodded toward the jukebox. “Larry, see the girl in the red running shoes dancing between the jukebox and the bar? I’m particularly interested in the region two inches to the right of her belly button. To the right heading toward her crotch. What does that look like to you? ”

  Lawrence strained his eyes in the bad light. He shrugged his shoulders. “Some kind of scar.” He guessed, twisting his mouth at the hard moment of decision.

  “Looks like a shadow hole that an old bullet wound leaves. A .38 police special slug makes a punctuation mark like that.”

  Lawrence looked closer. “Christ, you are joking? ” From Tuttle’s expression, though, it was evident that he was serious. Lawrence recovered, shaking his head. “Who would shoot a girl like that? ”

  “You never forget the look of bullet holes in a body. Every coup and bush war throws out bodies like hers. Maybe her secondary navel was created by a freak accident or by a bullet. Every old hand in Asia has their own story of strange scars on the bodies on the girls.”

  Sarah’s shattered face loomed before Lawrence. His hands began trembling, and the color drained from his face. A freak accident, Lawrence thought. The fat slob of a graduate student had stopped. The result was no different than if he had shot Sarah through the head.

  “You okay? ” asked Tuttle.

  “Bullets. Bullets. Bobby, you ever take a girl who’d been shot? ” Lawrence tried to smile, keeping his trembling hands beneath the table, out of sight from those who would judge him.

  “Only on one live girl. Bullets in the dead don’t count. Because those holes never heal up. Only bullet holes rich with scar tissue are ever discussed in polite company at HQ. We have our standards; our traditions and values to uphold. My bullet hole victim was an HQ girl nicknamed Nop. About seven years ago I booked her for a home appointment after the usual five-minute interview. A power center interview near the jukebox. Nop came into HQ alone. First rule of the night is to find out what peu-un pod the girl belongs to. The girls run in packs of three to five in number. peu-un pods. Thai-English which translates roughly as friendship groups. The hard-core girls travelled inside a peu-un pod with the navigational skill of dolphins. But Nop was a straggler. She was smart; she knew strategic location straight off. She came in like she owned the place. No one intimidated her. She stood her ground near the best location in the place—beside the jukebox. The regular girls huddled in their peu-un pod grumbling about Nop; she was an invader in their territory, someone pretty enough to snatch a purple from their clutched hand. All those eyes watched as I ran her through the regulation interview.

  “Nop was not just another strikingly beautiful girl. The kind you forget six months down the road as if she had never entered your life. Was she ever in my bed? Immediately there was something different about her. She had come from Jakarta, and was no more than twenty, though she tried to pass herself off as seventeen.”

  * * *

  IN the bedroom, Nop faced Tuttle as she undressed by candlelight. Thai girls were reasonably shy about removing their clothes in front of a stranger. They hated men staring at their nakedness. But this girl seemed to invite Tuttle’s eyes on her breasts. She had been born in Jakarta and she spoke some English. Tuttle put her boldness down to her background. Just as he had made up his mind, she made a half turn to hang up her blouse. Tuttle saw her scar. Halfway between her shoulder blades was a depression large enough to insert a tongue tip. The depression of flesh in her back looked like an empty eye socket in the shadows crisscrossing the room.

  The surprise caused Tuttle to shift his mental gears. One minute earlier, he had been stripped naked, arms stretched out, and ready to pull her onto the bed. Instead, Tuttle found himself sitting on his knees, his erection gone, inspecting this weird hole in her back. She looked like she’d stepped in front of a rocket launcher sometime in the not too-distant past.

  Tuttle asked her, “When were you wounded? ” Perhaps one of the most strange questions ever to be asked in the realm of sexual foreplay.

  The question didn’t seem the slightest bit odd to her; he obviously had not been the first to ask. If she had wanted to hide the scar, that would have been possible with an artful combination of darkness and dressing gowns. Nop had displayed the scar because she had wanted it to be noticed; because she wanted to talk about it.

  The scar had come from a spear. Nop had been in the army.

  “The army? No way,” Tuttle had said. What was she, a time traveller? Out of some Blade Runner territory? “Spear? No one has been speared for five hundred years.” A statement he knew was not literally true; but he couldn’t bring himself to believe that this tender, young, beautiful girl had been speared. Raped, yes.

  She had heard that tone of disbelief before. Nop disappeared out of the bedroom and into the living room where she had left her hand bag. A couple of minutes earlier, Tuttle had slipped into a pair of red jogging shorts. And Nop had climbed into a matching pair. They sat next to each other on Tuttle’s queen-sized bed. Half a dozen candles continued to burn though every available light had been switched on. Together they looked through an incredible series of photographs. There was Nop in picture after picture. She was dressed in a camouflage army uniform and holding a rifle. Her black eyes stared straight into the camera. In another she was on a shooting range; another in a bar. The last photos were of Nop in the hospital bed, turned on her side, the bandages pulled back and the large, red hole stitched with a reel of thread. Beside the bed was a spear. A long wood spear with a metal tip. Tuttle glanced over at Nop who lay on her stomach, legs raised, ankles hooked behind and then back at the photograph.

  “You got speared? ” Tuttle pressed his thumb against the spear in the photo.

  “Ambushed by a bullshit tribe,” she replied.

  “A hellava lot more interesting than a bullet hole,” Tuttle said, turning her around and inspecting the spear hole again. Bullet holes are a dime a dozen compared with spear wounds. You’ve got it documented. You got speared in the army. Must have hurt like hell.”

  “Got out of the army. No so bad,” she said.

&nbs
p; “You’re a veteran. In America they’d have given you a Purple Heart and a pension. Here all you get is a purple.” Tuttle fell back on the bed and wrapped a pillow over his face. From beneath he asked her in a muffled voice to leave. He rose up and gave her a thousand baht.

  During the rainy season, Nop was one of the women he thought about when flood waters turned his soi into a river filled with snakes and shit and garbage; and soi dogs and fruit bats disappeared for days at a time. And he would say to himself, things aren’t so fucked up. It could be worse. He could have been speared. He found himself using her explanation whenever something bad had happened: Ambushed by a bullshit tribe.

  It had crossed his mind that she was smart enough to pay a doctor to engrave the scar; like the beggars who had limbs amputated to increase sympathy. He had given her a thousand baht; she had left without doing anything more than show her wound, tell her story, and flip through a book of old photographs. Whenever those doubts filled his mind, he remembered the photograph of the spear near her hospital bed. She had deserved a Purple Heart. Like all combat veterans, Nop was a true survivor; and that was the lesson she had brought to the bedroom. Wear your scars out in the open, carry your past into the light, and never forget your feeling at the moment the tip of the spear enters your flesh.

  * * *

  TUTTLE pointed out the arrival of a regular customer named Pablo. He was a pale, thin Spaniard, with a pockmarked, narrow face, sallow except around the eyes where the folds of skin had turned a lumpy grayish color. Pablo fondled a girl sitting on his right; he had brought her into Zeno’s. His nickname was the Ratman of Bangkok. For more than ten years he had owned bars in Soi Cowboy. Each time, though, the Ratman became too visible in his success; he was always around the bar, bragging about his profits and how many girls he took back to his apartment each night.

  The Ratman couldn’t keep his hands off his talents. They had no respect for him; they gossiped behind his back that he was a lousy lover. Tensions built up. The girls stopped listening to him. Around the same time some influential person would learn of the Ratman’s success and his personnel problems. The Ratman never paid attention. Not until someone would come to the bar one night and inform him that he was selling.

  “But I don’t want to sell.” And the progression was always the same.

  “You stay Thailand long time. You know it wise to sell if right man make you offer. I that right man, Khun Pablo.” The speech was not difficult for the Ratman to decode. He had been in Thailand long enough to understand how threats were made. But the Ratman had never learned from his mistake; and he repeated the same one over and over. His next question was always the same. Standing on one foot, leaning over the bar as the Chinese businessmen in the tailored suit reached into his jacket pocket.

  “How much am I selling for? ”

  And the buyer would hand him a cheque.

  “This amount.” And the transaction was done.

  * * *

  “THAT’S duress,” said Lawrence. “He could have the transaction set aside. Don’t people use lawyers here? ”

  “They have found that a gunman is cheaper and more efficient.” Tuttle waved at Pablo, who bent over and whispered something to the girl at his side. He began making his way through the crowd to their booth. “He’s coming over. Maybe you can give him some legal advice.”

  The first thing out of Pablo’s mouth was his usual story that he had forever abandoned go-go bar ownership. This time he had found the right business. He had become an exporter, selling expensive clothes to wealthy Latinos in Miami, New York, and LA. He shook Lawrence’s hand, his eyes falling on Lawrence’s Rolex and moving over to the label on the suit jacket draped over the booth.

  “Noi was getting her fortune told,” the Ratman said, glancing over at Tuttle. “All bullshit. Didn’t you once know her? ”

  Noi slid into the booth and pressed her thigh against Tuttle.

  “We’ve met,” said Tuttle, putting his hand on Noi’s knee.

  “I warn you about Tuttle, sir. Do not ever let him around any woman of yours. He can’t be trusted. I know from bitter experience. Ever since the days of the three sisters of Sukhumvit, he’s always been first. He’s the only man in Bangkok who had all three sisters.” Pablo’s rodent eyes, watery and bloodshot, blinked several times, as he slowly shook his head.

  “That was a long time ago, Pablo.”

  “I never forget,” the Ratman said.

  Tuttle had turned his attention to Noi. “Where you working now? ” Tuttle asked Noi in English.

  “Tilac Bar. Soi Cowboy.”

  “Long time since I see you,” Tuttle said.

  “Your friend buy me out.”

  “Quality goes early,” said Pablo. “And she’s new. Less than a month on the game.”

  This was the first time in almost a year since Tuttle had seen her. He had first met Noi several years earlier in Nana Plaza in another go-go bar. At that time she was a dancer only; she refused to go out with the farang. Tuttle had been her first man ever. In twenty-one years, his second virgin. He hired her as his maid so she could quit the bar. Noi had fallen deeply in love with him. She owed him obligation; for taking her out of the bar; for taking her into his house; for giving her money, clothes, and affection. Yet something about her had frightened Tuttle. Her passion, or intensity, or basic decency. She was a rare commodity: a nice kid who had been no more than eighteen when he took her virginity.

  There had been a trial separation. She had gone to the Philippines to stay with her sister for almost four months. When she returned, Tuttle shipped her off to Chiang Mai; she stayed with her family. Then less than a month ago she had drifted back to Bangkok. Taking a go-go dancer’s job at Tilac. The one in the low-cut bikini with the sad eyes and big breasts. She had been bought out every other night.

  In HQ as she laid her head against Tuttle’s shoulder, she began to cry. Lawrence took a white handkerchief from his jacket and offered it to Noi. The Ratman rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette. He had bought her. There was his purchase crying her eyes out against the one man who had always been first around the corner.

  “I love your friend too, too much,” she said, turning to Lawrence, blowing her nose in his handkerchief. “But he no love me. I cannot forget him. Try and try but cannot. Maybe you talk your friend you for me.”

  Tuttle, with a frozen smile on his face, clutched his hand in a fist and pretended to pull on his heart and throw it on the floor. Emotions clouded Lawrence’s face as he looked between Noi and Tuttle. If only Sarah could be alive this moment, he thought. She had put this man on some kind of pedestal, and he had almost fallen for Tuttle’s myth as well, offering him a job. Lawrence felt like a fool; his face flushed, and then he felt angry.

  Noi fought that wave of desolation as it rolled over her, knocking the wind from her; she had trouble holding her head up, looking at Tuttle’s eyes. Pablo reached out with his tiny, bony hands and pulled Noi’s wrist tight in a vise grip. She clutched onto Tuttle’s leg and rested her head against his shoulder as if to say, “Please help me, don’t let this feeling suck me down—rob me of my smile—rob me of my dignity.” She was hurting so much.

  “Ambushed by bullshit tribe,” said Tuttle softly to Lawrence as Noi and the Ratman had a tug-of-war inside the booth. Tuttle had left a wide, deep scar. Did she deserve this? Did anyone ever deserve to be ambushed in life? But it happened every day and night in every bar, city, and bullshit country. Noi’s wound would heal and she would toughen up on her way down the hard-core path. Down a road where the sad, lonely, and abandoned pressed forward with lives that no longer dreamed. Pablo finally levered Noi out of the booth as Tuttle simply stared straight ahead pretending not to notice. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Perhaps he couldn’t.

  “How can you do that to another human being? ” Lawrence asked, losing his sense of speech; he started another sentence but couldn’t find the words to complete it.

  “You mean I didn’t offer her a title and six
ty thousand a year? ” Tuttle was addled by the confrontation. He leaned back, legs stretched out. “Instead, I speared her, right, Larry? You look for the still point, and that’s where the dance is. And when you find it, out of time and out of space, that’s non-space where you choose your weapons. Where you find and discard your partners. It is the non-time and non-space where you have the chance to find and discard the self. Her self. Your self.”