Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

One afternoon Tra-La lowered her scissors, stepped back, and said, "You know what you need?"

Kwan looked up from her fashion magazine. "Can I have a hint?"

"Hair to the bottom of your butt, blunt-cut straight across."

Kwan looked in the mirror and slowly turned her head and shoulders. Her hair reached about a third of the way down her back, black as a crow's wing, slightly fringed on the sides. "Do you think so?"

"Look at your height," Tra-La said. "And you've got the hair for it. Hardly any split ends, and it's got such good weight. Think of it. A river of hair flowing as you dance."

She looked again, visualizing it. Mirrors no longer bothered her. She was prettier than before, she thought, but she didn't know what all the fuss was about. "Hard to take care of."

"Oh, and you have so much to do," Tra-La said. "Wash it, let the air dry it, brush it a hundred times a day."

"That's what I said. Hard to take care of."

"You want to know what I think?"

"Always," Kwan said. "Any girl who doesn't want to know what you think is stupid."

"I think it could make you the queen of Patpong."

Kwan looked at Tra-La's eyes in the mirror and held them. Tra-La returned the gaze steadily.

Kwan broke the contact and picked up the small hand mirror Tra-La used. Then she swiveled the chair so her back was to the big mirror, and she looked into the hand mirror to study her back, to look at the way her hair fell. Without moving her head, she flicked her eyes to Tra-La.

"Really," Kwan said.

Oom never came back.

About nine months after the night Oom had leaped from the stage into the arms of the big man, he came into the bar, obviously expecting to see her. He stopped just inside the curtained door, staring up in surprise at Kwan, dancing where Oom usually did. Looking puzzled, he shouldered his way between the customers to the back of the bar, to the room with the lockers where Oom always sat between sets. Kwan saw him again a few minutes later, talking with the mama-san, who was shaking her head. The big man's eyes darkened as the mama-san talked, and when she held up a hand, palm up, and moved it side to side, indicating the girls on the stage, he wheeled around and stalked out. The mama-san watched him go and then shrugged her shoulders.

"Well," Fon said into Kwan's ear, "I guess they didn't run away together." When Oom failed to return, the talk in the bar had been that the big man had paid her bar fine for four weeks and then they'd probably made some sort of permanent arrangement: married or almost married was the consensus. They were living in Bangkok, or in Chiang Mai, or in some small town, Nakhorn Nowhere, or maybe he'd even taken her out of the country with him. Oom was beautiful enough for something like that to have happened.

Three weeks later he came in again. This time he talked to several of the girls. Afterward they told Kwan he'd been asking them whether they'd heard anything about Oom. He said he'd been to every bar he knew of, all the way down to Pattaya, looking for her. He seemed worried, even frightened that something had happened to her.

That night Kwan left the bar around ten with a man who had taken her out three nights in a row. They turned right, heading for an Italian restaurant on Surawong. They were most of the way there when Kwan heard someone call her name. She turned, gasped, and grabbed the man's arm.

The woman behind her had two black eyes, a broken nose that was at least twice its usual width, and an upper lip swollen almost all the way up to her nostrils. When she tried to smile, she revealed a chipped front tooth. The man Kwan was with began to step between the two women, but Kwan tugged on his arm and said, "Nana?"

"Hello, Kwan." Nana put a hand up over her mouth as she talked, probably trying to mask the broken tooth. She said in Thai, "You've gotten pretty, haven't you?"

"What happened to you?"

"Nothing," Nana said. She looked up at the man Kwan was with, who was eyeing her uncertainly, as though assessing her potential risk to Kwan. "Tell your dog here that you know me. He looks like he's about to rip out my throat."

Kwan said to the man, "No problem," and paused as she tried to think of the man's name. "Steven," she said, finding it, "this is Nana."

Steven nodded, and Nana gave him a tenth-of-a-second glance.

"I need money," Nana said. "Have you got five thousand baht?"

Kwan said, "I want to know what happened."

Nana turned away in frustration, giving Kwan a quick view of a jagged cut on her right jaw. "Some man. He thought I was trying to steal from him, and he went crazy. Just hit me and hit me."

"Were you?"

Nana said, "What? What are you asking?"

"Were you stealing?"

Nana glanced up at Steven as though she were considering abandoning Kwan and asking him for the money, but Steven avoided her gaze and stared down at his feet, his face tight with distaste. "Of course not. I was looking for change. I only had thousand-baht bills, and I was looking in his wallet to see whether he had any five-hundreds so I could swap them."

"Where was he?"

"What do you care?"

"Up to you," Kwan said. She took Steven's arm. "Steven and I are going to dinner."

"He was in the shower," Nana said.

"That's what I thought. Did the bar fire you?"

Nana's damaged mouth tightened, and for a moment Kwan thought the girl was going to spit at her. But instead she said, "Until he's gone." Her voice was rigid with control, but Kwan could hear the lie. It was going to be difficult for Nana to find a bar that would take her. Nobody wanted customers coming in and making a scene about thieves.

Kwan said, "I see." She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a fold of money. "I can give you three thousand," she said.

"Ask him for the rest." Nana's eyes were on the money.

"No, I won't. I like him. I want him to keep taking me." She peeled off two thousands and a pair of five-hundreds and held them out.

Nana made no move to take the money. "You've got a lot more."

"Yes," Kwan said. "I do."

"You wouldn't have anything if I hadn't brought you here." Her voice had risen, and Steven stepped forward.

In English he asked Kwan, "Is everything all right?"

Kwan said in slow English, "No problem. She want money." To Nana she said, "Are you going to take it or not?"

Nana snatched the bills from her hand. "Fucking Stork," she said. "Give me back my watch."

Kwan said, "Your what? Oh, that. It stopped working months ago. I threw it away and bought a good one." She held up her left wrist to show Nana the genuine Omega that someone-Robert, his name was Robert-had bought her after four days together. "Look, you can even get it wet."

Nana leaned in to her. "You think you're a queen," she said, her voice strung tight although the words were indistinct through swollen lips. "But you can end up in the street, too."

Kwan said, "I know." She put the rest of the money back into her pocket and said, "We go, Steven, okay?" and the two of them left Nana on the sidewalk. As they neared Surawong, as Kwan tried to find some satisfaction in what she had just done, she felt the pressure of eyes on her and looked over to see the big man who'd been searching for Oom. He nodded at her, but she avoided his gaze and snuggled up to… to Steven.

The man who was staring at her-what was his name? The girls he talked to had told her.

So many names.

Howard. His name was Howard.

"Rose," Howard announces. "Your name should be Rose."

They're curled up, Howard pressed against her back, on the endless bed in his hotel room, which he keeps so cold that Kwan always puts on a shirt before she goes to sleep. They're both fully clothed: This is one of the nights when Howard just buys her out and gives her, as he says, a vacation.