Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"Cannot say," Kwan replies. She tries to pronounce it, but it comes out "Lote." She pushes her rump against him. "Good, no good?"

"No good. Terrible. Listen: Rose. Hear it? Now: Lote. Do they sound the same to you?"

"Not when you talking."

"Okay," Howard says. "What's the name of the fat man in the red suit who comes and gives everybody presents?"

Kwan pauses for a moment, assembling the sounds in her head before saying them. She's been working on this one for weeks. "Santa… Claut. No, no, no. Clauzzzz. Santa Clauzzz."

"Good. And when does he come? And if you say 'Chritmat,' I'll make you eat raw red meat for dinner."

"Chrizzzmazzz," she says very carefully.

"See? You can do it. Rose."

Her face tense with effort, Kwan says, "Lozzze."

"Progress," he says. "We're making progress."

She wants a cigarette, but it seems like too much work to roll over and reach for her purse, and Howard's body is the warmest thing in the room. So she heaves a nicotine-deprived sigh and says, "Why Lozzze? Why not easy name?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I don't know farang name."

"Vicki," Howard suggests.

Rose says, "Wicki."

"Okay, no good. Tallulah."

Rose is laughing even before she tries it. "Tarrurrurru." She reaches back and slaps his thigh. "Not real name."

"Owww. Of course it's a real name. But Rose is better."

"Lozzze."

"The middle of your tongue," Howard says. "Not the end of your tongue. Just bring the middle of your tongue partway up. Not all the way, not so it touches, just partway. Rrrrrrrrrose."

"Rrrrrote," Kwan says. "Cannot. Why… that name? Why that name good?"

"Hold it," Howard says.

Kwan says, "Hold what? I no see it."

"Oh, great, now you're funny in English." He gets up, the bed creaking as his weight leaves it, and goes to the coffee table. The room they're in is the one he always brings her to, an enormous, overfurnished space with a king-size bed, two televisions-one on each side of the carved wooden partition that almost divides the room in two-a work desk, and a couch and coffee table. There's a refrigerator full of little drinks at prices that horrified Kwan when Howard read them to her. The room's longest wall is covered with floor-to-ceiling curtains that can be pulled back to reveal Bangkok sparkling all the way to the edge of the earth. The room is much bigger than the two rooms Kwan shares with Fon and her friends.

She's been keeping some of her clothes in the closet for weeks.

Howard leans down and grabs a magazine from the coffee table, its cover shiny and vibrant with color. Rose has leafed through it several times, checking the pictures and puzzling out some of the simpler English words. It's a magazine for farang tourists that pretends to tell them something about Thailand as an excuse to print advertisements for jewelry stores where the stones are artificially colored and Indian tailors whose clothes, Kwan has been told, never fit. He leafs through it. "Here," he says. "In Chiang Mai." He folds the magazine back and carries it over to her.

"Oh," she says, looking at the picture. "Dawk goolap."

"In English, rose," Howard says. "Rose. It's the queen of flowers. That's what farang people say. And you're the queen of-"

"Of what?"

Howard leans down and kisses her on the lips, very lightly. "Of everything."

"Pahk waan," she says. "Sweet mouth."

"You're Rose to me. You can be anyone you want when I'm not around, but for me you're Rose."

Kwan says, "Rrrrozzzzze." She looks up at him, and he grins and nods. "Okay. In the bar, everywhere. I Rrrrrozzze."

Howard says, "What would you like to eat, Rose? You can have anything in Bangkok."

Rose says, "We in Bangkok, na? We eat Thai food, okay? Phet maak maak." Very spicy, which Howard hates.

Howard goes to the closet to get a clean shirt. He changes his clothes all the time. He says, "What a surprise."

She tries, not very hard, to reach her purse and comes up short. "Can I have coat?"

"It's not cold."

"Have cigarette in coat."

"Make a deal. You can smoke a cigarette if I can eat American."

"No problem. You eat American, I eat Thai."

"You win." He takes the jacket off the hanger and says, "Why so heavy?"

"Oh," Rose says, remembering. "Nothing. You just bring, okay?"

But he already has his hand in the pocket. "What in the world is this?" He holds up a smooth, dark stone.

She looks at it in his hand, remembers picking it up that morning. She says, "For luck."

"Fine," Howard says. "I suppose it's lighter than a horseshoe." He starts to put the stone back in the pocket.

"Throw away," Rose says.

He stands there, jacket in one hand and stone in the other. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." She gets off the bed and goes to him, takes the stone, and drops it with a thunk into the wastebasket. "Now I Rrrozzze. I no need luck." THE RAIN PELTS down outside, and the fluorescents are flickering, suggesting a power failure in the near future. Thai music stutters through the speaker system. Every few minutes a sopping farang opens the curtains over the doorway, peers in, sees the women smoking and putting on makeup, and backs out again. "I'm just saying it, that's all. Oom ran away from him. Maybe she knew something you don't."

Fon helps herself to some dried squid, a heap of which is creating a spreading grease spot on a fold of paper towels. All over the club, girls look into mirrors as they apply makeup or sit still with their eyes closed as their friends do it for them.

"You don't know what happened with Oom," Rose says. Unlike the others she is neither made up nor making up. She won't be working tonight, because Howard has paid the bar fine for weeks to come. She just stopped by to talk with Fon.

Fon nips off a length of squid and says, "And neither do you."

"They had a fight, just before he left the country. He didn't think it was important, but when he came back, Oom wasn't anywhere he could find her."

"A fight about what?"

"About nothing. Howard wanted to take her to Singapore, and Oom didn't want to go."

Fon regards the squid skeptically. "Why wouldn't she want to go?"

"How would I know? He'd helped her get a passport. He said she never argued about getting the passport, just about using it."

"Right. She didn't want to go to Singapore."

"You saw him. You saw how upset he was."

"I saw how fast he took you out, too."

Rose surprises herself by bringing a flat hand down on the tabletop with a crack that snaps every head in the bar toward her. Fon jerks back a few inches, blinking. "We didn't do anything," Rose says. "Not for months. He just wanted to talk. He bought me out and took me to dinner and talked, and then he gave me money and I went home. You should know, I was always home before you got there. It was eight or nine months before we even kissed each other. We just talked."

"Talked about what? About Oom?" This is the first time Fon has ever gotten angry at Rose. "What is there to say about Oom for all those months? 'Oh, no, she's gone. I looked everywhere. I miss her. I don't know why she left.' How long did that take? Five seconds? And she was pretty, Oom was, but nobody would call her interesting. So what was there to talk about all that time?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"I don't like it, that's all." Fon snatches another piece of squid as though she expects the paper towel to be yanked away at any moment. "How do we know what happened to her? She's here one night and then she's gone forever."

"They fought," Rose says patiently. "She didn't want to see him. So she didn't come back to the bar. She went someplace where he wouldn't find her."

"He loves Oom so much and then, bang, he loves you."

Rose looks away and sees rainwater seeping in beneath the curtained doorway. Drunk men will slip and fall later. She draws a slow, long breath. "One more time. Oom left him. What's he supposed to do, cry for the rest of his life?"