Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

It'll have to do. The stub street is mostly empty, just a few men heading somewhere, some bar. Not looking at other men. Going from bar to bar as though the women were different from place to place. They are identical: stupid, greedy, dishonest, parasitical. Pick one, pick any of them. As identical as dolls.

Entering the teeming brightness of Patpong 1, he makes a left and keeps his head down as he pushes his way onto the sidewalk. He stays away from the vendors, who are, in any case, either bargaining a sale or trying to snag a passing customer. A couple of girls trolling the crowd at the entrance to the Throne Room look at him and then exchange wide-eyed glances, but he doesn't know them, and even if he did, he doesn't think they'd recognize him. What they see is a tall man wearing dark sunglasses to hide a black eye, a man whose nose is sheathed in a stiff white bandage. His upper lip has been stitched closed where Rafferty tore it with the haft of the knife, and it is swollen out almost an inch above the upper. He doesn't look like himself.

One of the women says something in Thai, and the other laughs.

All he wants to do is get off the sidewalk and into the Kit-Kat to wait for John. He hasn't heard from John since the debacle on Sukhumvit, and Stupid's cell phone seems to be out of order. They've been partners for years. They have their systems, whether they're in the firing zone or on vacation, and part of those systems is a series of fallback meeting points. The Kit-Kat is the third and last of the fallback points. John didn't show at the first two. If he doesn't show here within fifteen minutes, Howard will have to assume that they got him. Only after three fails can you abandon a partner. It will be time to run for his life.

The next bar he passes has no women working outside, and he turns into the next, which is the Kit-Kat. The usual crap music, the usual losers sitting on the benches nursing the usual beers. The usual whores on the stage, the usual demi-whores serving drinks. He's absorbed in locating an empty table, so he doesn't notice when one of the women on the stage checks him out as he comes in, her eyes doubling in size. She turns her back on him and scans the club for the mama-san but doesn't see her. One of the girls behind the bar looks at her expression and arches her eyebrows, and the first girl turns her head about a quarter of an inch over her left shoulder. The second girl glances over and gasps, although the gasp doesn't carry above the music.

Horner stares down at three fatsos who are taking up two tables, and without a word from him they snuggle up to free the table directly before Horner, a small table in front of the long upholstered bench that runs the length of the club's right wall. He eases himself down, looking for a waitress, not paying attention to the women on the stage. Across the room he catches a girl staring at him, her jaw slack, and he tilts his head down, embarrassed by his injuries. With his face downturned, the first thing he sees of the waitress is her feet. He lifts the eyes behind the sunglasses to her and says, "Singha."

Obviously ill at ease, she stammers a reply he can't catch over the music and wheels away from him, walking quickly, her back straight and stiff. He watches her go with a preliminary tickle of anxiety. She heads for the bar, but she seems to be looking all over the club for someone. Horner glances at her again and settles back to wait. He takes his first look at the women on the stage. Many of them glance away.

He sees the one he'd been buying Cokes for before he found Wan, and he tilts his head to her, just a hello, and she takes a step back, so fast she bumps the girl behind her. The girl she bumped doesn't turn around, but when Horner looks in the mirror on the other side of the room, he finds her eyes wide, aimed at his reflection.

In fact, all the girls in the row that's facing away from him are watching him in the mirror.

At the bar the waitress who took Horner's order is told that the mama-san has gone down the street to Superstar to chat with that bar's mama-san. The waitress turns and runs out of the bar as though ghosts are after her.

Horner watches her go and sits well forward on the bench. He surveys his surroundings, slowly and meticulously, and then he looks at his watch. Ten-twelve. In three minutes he'll know they got John.

He lifts his eyes from the watch and, one at a time, examines every face in the room. There is no one who seems familiar. The customers are the invariable ragtag assortment of big-gut assholes, most of them half tanked. Almost all of the women are now assiduously avoiding his face, as though some telepathic public-address system has just made an announcement. When he feels eyes on him and looks to check, the woman turns away.

The skin on the back of his neck prickles.

Outside, the waitress who took his order barrels out of the King's Corner and fights her way through the crowd to run into a bar across the street. She's followed a moment later by a girl and a ladyboy, who have left the King's Corner so fast they haven't even pulled on the wraps they usually wear over their dancing costumes. They split up, one running toward Surawong and the other heading toward Silom. People in the street jump aside and watch them go.

A song by Hall and Oates, an act Horner detests, blares through the speakers. Keeping his face expressionless, he pulls his feet, which he'd extended beneath the table, toward him and watches the women's eyes go to the movement. He stretches out an arm and feels the weight of gazes from all over the room. Then, very deliberately, he bends his elbow and looks at his watch again.

Ten-fourteen.

Slowly and loosely, keeping his gaze wide and unfocused to see anything that moves, he stands.

Once, years ago, Horner had been on a plane that was struck by lighting, and an actual bolt of electricity had rocketed through the cabin. That's what the bar feels like right now. He can almost smell the ozone. Some of the girls on the stage stop dancing, just hang on their poles and stare at him.

Hall and Oates give way to a snarl of static, and then a woman's voice, louder than the music, says something in Thai on the disc jockey's microphone. Two girls jump off their customers' laps and go out the door, moving fast.

Horner lets his eyes wander the room behind the sunglasses, without turning his head. There's movement everywhere. A dozen women stream toward the door and through it. Another eight or ten stop at the curtain. They turn to face him, avoiding his eyes, clearly terrified, but sharing a kind of group bravado.

Not good. And no John.

He takes two steps, and half the girls on the stage jump down and scoot past him to join the women at the door. They stand there, maybe twenty-five of them, five or six deep, blocking his way.

The disc jockey kills the music.

For a moment the silence seems even stranger to Horner than the band of women between him and the sidewalk. He's never been in a go-go bar when the music wasn't blaring. Somehow its absence makes the place smaller and shabbier, brings into sharp relief the cracks in the mirrors and the cobwebs above the speakers, the pieces of tape covering the rips in the fake leather upholstery on the benches.

The other customers are looking around as though they're not sure what has changed. One by one they turn their gazes to Horner, the only man standing in the bar. He dismisses them; there's no one there who worries him, but there are too many pairs of eyes. He says to the women at the door, his voice the sole sound in the room, "Get out of my way."

None of them move. A few of them raise their eyes to his face.

He takes a step forward, and they step back in time with him, forcing the ones farthest from him through the curtain and onto the sidewalk. Two more steps push more of them out of the bar until there are only five in front of him, in an arc only one girl deep and all of them looking at him, and when he makes his final move, those melt away outside, too, and no one is between him and the door.