Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Preserve Them — No Profit

Eliminate Them — No Loss

We will burn the old grass

and the new will grow

“Shall I call you Hazel?” Loke asks, sitting up, smiling.

Hazel nods. “Everyone does.”

“Would you like a drink, Hazel? Glass of wine?”

She shakes her head. His voice is clear and almost unaccented. His diction is crisp, maybe a little overprecise.

Hazel knows she should state her case simply and quietly, accept the verdict, and get out. But something about Loke’s manner tempts her to improvise.

“You’re not what I expected,” she says.

He lets a smile break and says, “For a warlord,” giving the phrase a mock seriousness.

“Do you really use words like that?”

He shrugs. “Only in the old pulps,” he says, and gestures over his shoulder with a thumb. Behind him is a small teak bookcase that matches the desk. Hazel leans to the side and sees a line of slim paperbacks with gaudy-colored spines and titles running down them like Teen-Age Mafia and The Black Leather Barbarians .

“I’ve got all the classics. Rumble. The Royal Vultures. The Amboy Dukes .”

On the shelf below the paperbacks is what looks like a small set of encyclopedias or identically bound textbooks. In gold leaf down the spines is the title The Tuol Sleng Manual .

“The first thing you’re going to need to know,” Loke says, “if we can work out”—he pauses, looks up at the ceiling—“an arrangement, is that most of your ideas about the various organizations here in Bangkok are wrong.”

Hazel nods and says, “My people and I are all ready to learn.”

Loke leans back in the chair again.

“How many people are there?”

“About a dozen.”

Loke shakes his head. “I’m going to need an exact figure.”

Hazel nods. “I can give you individual names and addresses. Backgrounds. Whatever.”

“And everyone wants to emigrate?”

“It’s unanimous.”

There are a few seconds of silence. Loke picks up a fat Mont Blanc pen that sits on the legal pad and scratches a few notes. Then he puts the pen back down and says, “Once you come over the border, you don’t go back.”

“I know that,” Hazel says.

“I need to say it anyway. I need to go through the motions here. I need to give the speech.”

He takes a breath and continues, suddenly seeming a bit annoyed. “The Canal Zone is not Bangkok Park. It never will be. You want to emigrate, fine. We’ll discuss terms. But know that the mortality rate here is higher than in Haiti. And know that when players change that fast, there’s little stability. Your status and your loyalties can be altered in an instant. And your time is taken up with things a good deal more serious than fucking up radio stations—”

She cuts him off, points to his sweater, and says, “Did you actually go to Yale?”

He stares at her with an absolutely blank expression and she thinks he’s about to whistle for his lieutenant, but instead he smiles and says, “Jesus, haven’t you got some balls.” He picks up the pen again and says, “I did three years. Never took a diploma. Annoyed the shit out of the family. They took me in the business. But the boss says I’ve got to pay some dues in middle management before I can eat at the grown-ups’ table, so …” He trails off and extends a hand palm-up as if his surroundings explained the rest.

“The boss,” Hazel says, “would be your father?”

Loke shakes his head. “My Uncle Chak. Mother’s brother. Owns the Plain Jar Cafe. He’s the bank for our people. He’s trying to buy up the Goulden Ave block. He hands out housing, jobs. Got a half brother back in Phnom Penh. You can imagine.”

Hazel leans forward over her knees. “You think it’s a good idea to tell strangers your genealogy?”

Loke gives the now-familiar smile. “We’ve done the research, Hazel. You’re not exactly informer material. And you know that if we even see you with the wrong people you’ll be gang-fucked, set on fire, and served as the lunch special down the Plain Jar.”

He says this as if he were relaying the score of a boring ball game.

Loke goes on. “We’ve got over sixty full-member Hyenas. Mainly we’re errand boys and supplemental muscle for Uncle Chak’s company. Though I’d never say that to any of my boys. We handle all the merchant payments down Voegelin and Grassman. We do security for the O dens and whorehouses in our cut of the Park. We move some smack around Goulden. But mainly we’re linemen. We watch the border for the Popes.”

“The Colombians,” Hazel says.

Loke nods. “Scumbags. Which brings us to the question—”

“Why did I come to you instead of them?”

“So why?”

“If you’ve checked, you know I’m pretty well plugged in down the Zone. I’ve got all these little tech-hoods jumping through hoops for me. They’re into the Registry of Deeds mainframe on a regular basis. Since Cortez vanished, the Colombians are scrambling. There’s no one holding it together. Rayuela Realty Trust is going Chapter 11 any day. Didn’t take a genius to know that if you wanted to emigrate, Uncle Chak was the man to see.”

“You think you can afford the”—again he pauses—“licensing fees?”

“Tell me what you need.”

Loke bites on his lip and seems to drift into thought. He pushes the sleeves of his sweater up on his arms and slowly gets out of his chair. He walks around the desk and comes to a stop behind Hazel.

When his voice comes, it’s lower.

“There’s the entrance fee itself. It’s based on a per-person setup.” He places a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see what I can do about a discount in this case.”

She tries not to let him feel her muscles tighten under his palm.

“You’ll have to clear whatever franchises you want to work through me. We’ll want forty percent of your gross the first twelve months. We’ll renegotiate after that. You’ll have some start-up costs at first and we’re not out to make you starve.”

He starts to rub at her neck lightly.

“What else?” she asks, keeping an even voice.

He slides a hand inside her T-shirt, takes hold of her right breast, runs his thumb over her nipple. She lets out a heavy breath but stays quiet.

“All organizations,” Loke says, his own breath audible, “have some initiation rites.”

He pushes himself up against the back of her chair, starts to run his free hand through her hair.

“Rites,” Hazel repeats.

“We’re going to have to see a demonstration of some sort,” he says. “Show us you mean business. Show us some skills.”

“It’s taken care of,” Hazel says. “We’ve already picked someplace to hit.”

“Then there’s only one more piece of business,” Loke says, taking his hand from her hair and grabbing the back of her T-shirt, pulling her out of the chair and down onto the floor. She rolls onto her back and he gets on his knees, straddling her at her waist.

“You have any problems taking a Hyena?” he says, starting to pull off his Yale sweater.

Hazel shakes her head.

“Very good,” Loke says. “You’re going to love this neighborhood.”

Speer’s apartment is at the southern end of Bangkok Park, down off Brinkley Boulevard, a one-room studio in the basement of a five-story red brick monster built in the early twenties. Because of the building’s location and the position of the apartment’s two tiny rectangular windows, very little sunlight ever makes it inside. Speer thinks it would be the perfect place to raise mushrooms.

He pays two fifty a month to the super, who everyone calls Corny, an Armenian guy of indeterminate age who wears a purple eye patch and never speaks except to say gaddahm welfare state . The rent does not include heat, but the apartment gets the benefit of the two enormous cast-iron furnaces on the other side of the interior wall. Once or twice a week, always in the middle of the night, one of the furnaces will start an awful banging and thrashing, often punctuated with an excruciating series of pauses to deceive the tenants into thinking it’s always about to stop. Speer doesn’t mind the racket anymore. He’s almost ready to admit to himself that he welcomes it as a signal that things haven’t changed, that he’s still where he was when he went to sleep. Usually the banging pulls him out of a nightmare.