Timothy Hallinan: The Queen of Patpong

Old cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, sweat. The proven architecture of soft pink light on soft brown skin. Bad rock and roll, some mercifully forgotten tight-pants, stadium-rock anthem from the 1980s, still being played in Bangkok, the town where bad songs last forever. Shredded speakers, probably blown for fifteen years. The bass notes like tearing paper.

The girls on the stage.

And there she is: Number 27.

The tall man sees her the moment he reaches the top of the stairway, the symbolic barrier that prevents Bangkok's finest from enforcing Thailand's strict anti-nudity law, news of which has clearly not reached this room. Thanks to an elaborate, almost courtly, system of graft, the cops pause downstairs long enough to let the doorman slip them a couple thousand baht as he pushes a buzzer, and then they shuffle slowly upward while the girls onstage wrap themselves in the cheap taffeta slips that are normally knotted around their upper arms to display the merchandise.

They're almost all naked now, four of the five on the stage and most of the eight or so who sit on customers' laps, arms languidly draped around the suckers' necks. The girls dazzle their temporary honeys with honest, open Thai smiles and whatever lie will open a pocket. The tall man at the top of the stairs does a quick scan of the room, making sure no one he knows is there. Then he returns his gaze to Number 27.

She's tiny, plump-cheeked, sullen-mouthed, with cupcake breasts, a child's round tummy, and straight black hair in a blunt schoolgirl cut that's grown out just enough to brush her shoulders. Of the five women on the platform in the center of the room, she is the youngest by at least five years, and the only one who isn't naked.

The tall man stares at her long enough to draw a glance, but she quickly turns her back. He crosses the dark, narrow room to the banquette in front of the mirrored wall. Once he's seated, with little squares of light from the revolving mirrored ball above the stage chasing each other across his shirt, he glances down. The photo in his hand is a smudged photocopy of a high-school identification card. The girl in the picture faces the camera with the hopeful insecurity of adolescence. She had risen to the occasion with a smile.

She isn't smiling now. She dances as though she is underwater, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on her reflection in the mirror. She might be stoned, drunk, suicidal, or just exhausted. Her short, salmon-colored slip, a loop of elastic holding up a yard of some cheap synthetic, has been tugged down below her baby's belly to bare the upper half of her body almost to the pubic area. The round LAP BAR button with the number 27 on it is pinned to the elastic band of the slip, directly over her right hip bone. The number is her only identification, but the tall man knows her name, which is Toy.

In the six months since the photo was taken, she has grown the schoolgirl hair an inch or more and plastered her face with makeup so she looks older, but no matter. The tall man knows her age. The tall man is here, in the Lap Bar on Bangkok's Patpong Road, because of her age.

Today is Saturday, the twenty-fourth of April. Two days ago Number 27 turned sixteen.

In the street below, the short, crowded road called Patpong 1, the street market has sprung into noisy life. Beneath the smoky half glow of the night sky, two straggling lines of overilluminated stalls offer curios, jewelry, eel-skin and leather goods, preserved tarantulas and scorpions, and an impressive variety of forgeries: watches, sunglasses, fountain pens, computer software, games, compact discs, mislabeled designer clothes, acrylic amber, and plastic ivory that's been buried in water-buffalo manure for that convincing patina of age. In a few booths, less brightly illuminated, the discerning shopper can pick through an assortment of Tasers, flick knives, brass knuckles, switchblades, and other instruments of intimate aggression.

They're mostly male, the florid horde for whom these treasures gleam. Ranging from half drunk to barely ambulatory, grim-faced and dripping sweat, they push their way between the stands, checking the rows of counterfeits with one eye and keeping the other eye on the open doors to the bars. Patpong Road at night is almost all bars: Kiss, Lipstick, Safari, King's Castle, Supergirls, Pussy Galore. Through the open doors, chilly air pours into the streets, pumped by the heartbeat rhythms of trance and techno. Bar girls in cheap, fake-satin wraps stand in the doorways and call out cheerful, indiscriminate Thai greetings to the nameless darlings in the street, pushing the paradise inside.

At the end of the road, where Patpong empties into Silom Road, a man wearing reflective Ray-Bans and the tight-fitting brown paramilitary uniform of the Bangkok police lounges against the window of a nondescript restaurant. The uniform sets off broad shoulders and narrow hips while also making way, with a certain amount of strain, for a small but ambitious potbelly. There is nothing soft about the potbelly: it looks like something to avoid bumping your head on. He glances at a heavy steel watch on a too-large band, flips it around from the front of his wrist to the back, and then checks it again as he realizes he's forgotten to look at the time. Satisfied, he folds his hands over the round belly-a practiced, comfortable gesture.

The policeman has a hairline receding on either side of a stubborn widow's peak, medium-dark skin, a disappointed mouth that turns down at the ends, and broad, almost muscular nostrils. Behind the mirrored Ray-Bans-genuine-he lazily scans the crowd, straightening only when he catches sight of a heavyset white man in a loose shirt, patched with sweat, who roughly tows a young Thai girl through the throng. The girl-dark-complected, tangle-haired, flat-nosed, dressed in a knotted T-shirt and cutoff jeans-pulls back, distracted by a bright row of bootleg DVDs, and the heavyset man gives her hand a yank that almost jerks her off her feet. Feeling the policeman's eyes on her, the girl turns and frowns at him before breaking into a smile. After a moment the policeman smiles back. The heavyset white man snags a tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled open-air taxi, and hauls the girl onto the backseat behind him. He doesn't barter the fare, so he's in for at least one unpleasant surprise during the evening. The tuk-tuk driver swerves into traffic with a fine disregard for the possibility of death. The policeman leans back against the window of the restaurant and looks at his watch again.

"Thank you," says the young woman with the wandering eye. She's in her middle twenties, plain and plump, with a wide Isaan nose. A fall of red-dyed hair has been combed forward over the left side of her face to mask the errant eye. She has tugged the elasticized slip modestly up to her armpits. A thin gold chain around her neck disappears into the slip. The tall man knows there will be a Buddhist amulet at the end of it, which the woman will drag around to hang against her back when she dances, so as not to expose it to the goings-on in the bar. She will also remove it when she services a customer.

She puts the cola the man bought her on the round table in front of him and gives him an expert glance. There is an Asian smoothness to his features. He has straight black Asian hair and uptilted eyes that are almost black, the color of dangerous ice.

He says, "What's the baby's name?" He indicates Toy with a lift of his chin. One of the other dancers leans over, laughing, and yanks the girl's slip down, and now she dances with the slip pooled at her ankles and her hands folded protectively over her shadowy pudenda. She seems miles away.