Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"Why aren't you with him? Why are you working tonight?"

"It's my job," she says defiantly. "I work at the Office Bar."

"Wan," Rafferty says in Thai, "Howard is a killer."

"Don't know Howard," she says in English. "I go."

"My wife used to work in a bar. He tried to kill her."

She's shaking her head. "Don't know-"

"He killed a friend of hers. He killed at least five-"

"Why you no listen? Don't know Howard."

"His wife," Nit says, leaning in, "is one of my best friends. She's helped every girl at this table. Howard took her out into the Andaman-"

Nit breaks off because Wan has whipped her head around to face her at the word "Andaman."

Rafferty jumps on her. "Phuket. He was going to take you to Phuket. Wasn't he?"

The girl is shaking her head again, but the certainty in her face is softening.

"He took her-my wife, I mean-to the Andaman," Rafferty says mercilessly, "to Phuket. He told her he was going to marry her."

Wan says, "No," but the word has little behind it except breath.

"Phuket was the first stop," Rafferty says. "After that he promised her they were going to her village so he could meet her parents and he could-"

She says, "No, no, no."

"— so he could pay the dowry. But instead he took her out in a boat and tried to kill her with a knife."

Wan says, "Not Howard. Not Howard."

"Where is he?"

Her lower lip is moving as though she's going to say something, but she shakes her head and sits back. "Don't know."

"Where is he staying?"

She shakes her head again, and it's clear to Rafferty that she won't tell him.

"Is he coming to the Office later?"

A pause, then, "No."

"Why not?" No answer, and Rafferty stands, leaning on his knuckles on the tabletop. "Why aren't you with him? Why are you working tonight?"

"He… he doesn't want me."

"Why not?" He leans toward her. "Why not?"

Everyone in the restaurant is staring at them.

Nit says, "Poke." She puts a reassuring hand on the girl's shoulder. "Come on, little sister. It's not going to hurt anyone if you just tell us why he's not with you. Why he won't come to the bar tonight. And you know what? If we're wrong about him, you might help us get things right."

With no transition Wan bursts into tears, not genteel sobbing but big, openmouthed, gulping howls. She cups her face in her hands and then pulls them away and slams her forehead against the table, so hard that all the silverware jumps. She lifts her head to do it again, but Rafferty slips his hand in, palm up, in the spot her forehead hit. She stares down at his hand, and the sobs deepen. She says to Nit, although Rafferty can barely understand the words, "I have my period. He doesn't like it when-"

The restaurant door opens with a bang. Anand looks in, finds them, and says, "Something's happening. Patpong 1. Everybody's running."

Less than a minute later, having bulled his way through a dense crowd on the stub road with Arthit a step behind him, Rafferty enters the throng on Patpong 1 and sees hundreds of heads, all craning to see something to Rafferty's left. Rafferty, who is taller than most of the crowd, turns to look, and says to Arthit, "Holy Jesus Christ."

He's walking in the center of a red whirlwind, a whirlwind of rage and self-loathing. His bandaged nose and mouth hurt, and he raises his right hand and slams it open-palmed against his nose, sending an electric burst of pain vaulting through the circuits of his nervous system. His eyes watering, he's about to do it again-God knows he deserves it-but he realizes that it will start his nose bleeding again.

He looks freakish enough already, without blood all over his chin and shirt.

It's about two minutes to ten. He's chosen to come into the area through the Silom end of Patpong 2, the first block of which is always dark. Sidewalk vendors, closed at that hour, own the first segment of the road, so there is no one to see him there. A go-go bar scatters its neon into the night on the right, but he keeps to the left, hands jammed into his pockets, shoulders rigid with fury. John had been right. They should have killed Rose and the others that first night, just minced them where they slept. But they'd seemed so harmless, the wispy little half-breed husband and that ugly brown kid. And he was busy setting up the last act with Wan, and he'd thought he could have his fun with her and then have a little more fun with Rose and that patched-together, pathetic little family.

After all, it was about fun. It had always been about fun.

It humiliates him that John had been right. The accomplice, the sidekick, the guy Howard had always thought of as Tonto-even called him Tonto out loud a few times, knowing that John wasn't aware that tonto was Spanish for "stupid." Well, Stupid had been right.

And where the hell is Stupid? Did the cops get him? If they did, then he and Stupid are both as good as dead unless he moves right now. Faced with a bunch of Thai uniformed muscle in a concrete room, John will talk. Ten minutes later Howard's passport will be radioactive. No legal way out of the country.

And then, just to make everything perfect, that idiot Wan got her period. The day before the flight to Phuket and the dance on the rocks, the bitch got the curse.

Mistake after mistake, piled on the lethal sin of underestimating the opposition. Letting that wuss writer slap him around in the street, jam the handle of his own knife up his nose. No, he and John couldn't just follow them from the kid's school, the way John had wanted to, and then kill them wherever they were hiding. (John was right again.) No, let's get the kid, he hears himself say. It'll paralyze Rose. She'll come to us on her hands and knees. We'll make her call the hubby and bring him to us, we'll make her open her own blouse to the knife, as long as she thinks the kid will come out of it okay.

Right. Who's stupid?

He shakes his head and reorients himself. He can't let his alertness lapse. Patpong is no place for him to be right now. If he had a choice, he'd be on a bus heading for the Cambodian border. Find a place where he can walk across, rely on the fact that the Cambodian government hates the Thai government and will probably ignore any watch notice with his name on it. Fly out of Phnom Penh to Hong Kong, connect to Kabul. Get back to work. Put this behind him.

In a couple of years, he'll be able to come back. These people have no memories.

On his left is a massage parlor with no tout in front of it-there's never a tout in front of it, so at least he's right about one thing. Opposite it, brightening that side of the street, he sees a Foodland grocery store, blazing away like noon, full of squat little brown people buying their awful food. Bugs and peppers. Coming up ahead of him on the left, on his side of the street, is a large, dimly lighted hostess bar called the Presidential Club that he's never gone into. And lounging around in front of it on high stools, smoking and babbling at each other, are six or eight girls. Sucker bait. He heads for the far edge of the sidewalk, giving them as much space as possible, eyes on the pavement.

But one of them says, "Ow, honey, look like hurt. Me kiss it okay." He doesn't slow, but the hatred in his eyes when he glances at her pushes her halfway off her stool. The girl next to her grabs her friend's arm to hold her up and says to Horner, "Keep going. You no come here."

Half a block ahead on the left is the stub road that leads to Patpong 1. Patpong 1 will be much brighter. He puts on his sunglasses to hide the developing black eye and finds that they sit too high on the thick bandages over the bridge of his nose. He stops and forces the little pads farther apart, and one of them breaks off. He stares down at it for a moment, feeling the red heat at his center send out wires of rage, and then he deliberately breaks off the other one. He puts the glasses on again, and this time they sit almost low enough.