Bangkok Knights (15 page)

I waited for him to tell me how he’d shagged her back to
normalcy, and how she’d begged him to stay with her for ever after. What he
told me was she’d been doped up most of the time, and he’d only met her for
meals and helped out through the hassle with the police.

He hadn’ t seen much of Sandy and Jerry. Jerry was a
flippin’ bull dyke, anyway, in his opinion.

He told me how shit-scared he’d been, and how ashamed he’d
been he couldn’ t do anything to help the girls. I told him I knew exactly what
he meant.

Stanley and his damn-fool camera. It was hard to say what
would’ve happened if Stanley hadn’t gone and gotten himself shot just when he
did. Things could’ve turned very nasty, indeed.

Robbo said the cops gave Ellen back the camera and the
slides, only she hadn’t wanted the camera. “Gave it to me. I didn’t want it;
give me an automatic any day. I flogged the thing on the train coming down
here.”

“What about that film?” I asked. “The one in the camera —
did they find anything on it?”

“Naw. Nothing — just a blur. Camera shake and
underexposure, both. In fact, none of the pictures was worth looking at.”

“When I think of the story I could’ve written to go with
that shot — ‘A Split Second Away From Death: Man Photographs His Own Killer’.”

“Yeah; what a drongo. His wife was right: that guy just
couldn’t take pictures.”

I never did get that story I’d been after, I told Robbo.
When I finally got up to my contact point, nobody ever showed. I got a little
background, maybe, but nothing I really had to go all the way up there for. A
wasted trip. And I hadn’ t had a good story in months.

“Try the omer-ette... Try the omer-ette...” Meow was
standing at one of the five cages that hung about the alfresco dining area
behind the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse. She was talking to the resident of that cage,
an obviously depraved mynah bird.

“Try the omer-ette,” Meow said.

“There,” Eddie told me, almost loudly enough for Meow to
hear. “She’s just about got it right. As soon as she can say ‘omelet’, Nixon’ll
teach her something else.”

Nixon was the chief linguist and undisputed leader of the
gang of five mynah birds, while Meow was Eddie’s sister-in-law.

Eddie’s wife considered his birds a pain in the neck: they
were noisy, they were unhygienic and, most damning, they did nothing to earn
their keep. Evidently, she had assigned Meow the task of turning them into
speaking menus, touting breakfast specials to the guests.

“How’s business?” I asked Eddie.

Not much happening, he told me. There was a Marco Polo
from Canada with Kodiak boots and a compass wristwatch. Then we had a couple of
Siddharthas from Frankfurt with about eight weeks left to find enlightenment
before going back to sell insurance in Germany. “Oh, yeah. And Trevor. You
remember Trevor? From Kuwait?”

Who could forget? Trevor Perry was the traffic engineer
who’d been in Bangkok several months before shopping for a wife.

“What? You mean he’s actually
staying
here?” I
asked. You come out of the Gulf staggering under the weight of your ill-gotten
loot and looking for a good time, you don’t generally stay in the Cheri-Tone.

“Yeah, well, as a matter of fact he was at the Sheraton,
but it turns out you still can’t leave the young scallywag to his own devices.”

This much Trevor had amply demonstrated during his last
visit First of all, he’d come up with various bruises and abrasions while
showing us how best not to open a champagne bottle. Next, he ‘d pretty well
conclusively indicated he couldn’t tell a virgin from a star dancer (retired)
from Shaky Jake’s Gogo Bar. He’d arrived in Bangkok with a computer print-out
scheduling fifty-five dates (interviews, he’d called them) with prospective
life’s companions — twenty-five here and thirty in Manila. He’d left without
consummating even one of these appointments. And he’d never gotten to Manila. But now, I gathered, he was back for another try.

“You wouldn’t believe it. I get this phone-call, and it’s
Trevor telling me he’s back in town and he’s got this girl in his room that he
doesn’t know what to do with. He had to start interviewing wifely candidates,
but this girl is in his hotel room and she won’ t go away. All she does is lie
around watching TV and eating.

“She’s a nice girl, he tells me, but he’s afraid she’s not
exactly what he’s looking for. He’s afraid she may be a trifle common, you
know, but nice of course, for all of that.

“I ask him where he met her, and he says in some park —
Sanam Luang, probably — while he’s watching the kite-fighting; she comes up, as
friendly as can be, and says what’s his name and where does he come from, she’s
always been a sucker for blond
farangs
and which hotel does he stay in?
A very friendly girl, Trevor tells me.

“Would I like to have lunch with them, he wants to know,
and maybe give him some advice?”

Eddie told me Trevor’s companion had been a nice woman,
with a heart of gold, he had no doubt, and most of her teeth, too, but his
first impression was that this was not what Trevor had come shopping for. His
second impression didn’t do much to change the picture.

“At one point in the meal, ever the perfect gentleman,
Trevor says to this lady, * And wheah did you learn your English, my deah?’
probably expecting her to say Cheltenham Ladies College. ‘G.I.,’ she answers.
‘You know — Sattaheep; many G.I. Many year ago, many year. Many G.I.’

“Now she’s saying all this real fast, and it sounds more
like Thai than English. Trevor’s really just making small talk, anyway, so he
smiles fondly and says ‘Ah, yes. Um-hm. Yes, I see.’

“Only he didn’t see, of course. When I got him alone, a
little later, I’m telling him how I’d almost busted out laughing when she’d
told him where she’d picked up her English. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘I
mean when she told you how she’d learned it from the G.I.’s,’ I answer him.

‘”G.I.’s! You mean American soldiers? You mean... R and R
from Vietnam, and all that? Good Lord, that was back in the60’s!’

“Well, the 1960’s don’t seem so long ago to some of us,
though anybody would have to admit it wasn’t exactly yesterday. And I’d say the
lady in question had already been around some even back then. Anyway, it wasn’t
so bad, maybe, I told him; there were still G.I.’s around here in the early
70’s.

‘”How can I get rid of her?’ he wanted to know. You could
try giving her some money and saying good-bye, I told him. ‘Money?’ he asks.
‘Do you think she wants money?’ You try it, I suggested.

“Next day he phones to say she’s gone. When I ask him how
much he gave her, he says 500
baht a
day; did I think that was enough?

“Enough? The lady probably figured it was a miracle. Young
again. You have to imagine she asked some Thai construction worker for 500
baht
the very next day, and got her jaw broken for her trouble.

“You know, I’m starting to think Trevor isn’t as swift as
you’d like your average traffic engineer to be.”

It did seem Trevor lacked a certain
savoir faire,
even
if you allowed for his youth and a measure of bad luck. This was the second
time he’d come out of Kuwait to Bangkok with his computerized shopping list
only to find high-tech planning and scheduling betrayed by his weakness for
first targets of opportunity. It was something hormonal, probably. Trevor could
fall victim to propinquity and a friendly smile in less time than it takes to
say ‘What yo’ name?’

On his last visit it had been the legendary Long Tall Lek,
formerly the star dancer at Shaky Jake’s Gogo Bar and more recently a
born-again virgin, who had been the bug in the program. She’d laid waste to
months of planning and dreaming, not to mention meters of computer print-out,
simply by nailing the lad with a winsome smile and the suggestion they should
probably get married. By the time he had worked it out that she in no way
qualified for a white wedding and besides that wouldn’t excel as hostess at any
tea party for the vicar back in Norwich, it had been too late to operationalize
the fifty-five assignations his computer had lined up in Bangkok and Manila.

Trevor had put a good face on it all, though, and had
thanked Eddie and me for helping him avoid an unfortunate entanglement. He’d
learned his lesson, he’d said. Indeed, you could see he’d been tested in the
fire of experience and come out all the harder and smarter for it You could see
it in the way his ears had flared red with earnest resolve and in the way his
upper lip had quivered with manly emotion.

And here he was again. He emerged from the back of the
Cheri-Tone all decked out in a new safari suit, big red ears arrayed like radar
dishes, ever alert to new opportunities for trauma. I noticed he’d more or less
covered the aforementioned lip with a blond moustache once again. (It had been
his almost affianced Long Tall Lek who’d inspired its removal last trip.) He
was also sporting a goatee. At least there were some wispy things stuck to his
chin.

He did cut quite a figure, and it was easy to see why both
Eddie’s wife Lek and her sister Meow had been left with fond memories of this
young man who had a set of ears and a nice British accent that would’ve done
Prince Charlie proud.

I told him he was looking well, and Trevor said he was
happy to see me again. I asked him how the shopping was going this time, and he
told me there’d been a few set-backs, but that he still had four weeks left.
He’d scheduled some of the more promising wifely prospects for later in the
trip, anyhow. I still hadn’t heard why it was he had moved into the Cheri-Tone,
and now he told me himself.

It seems he went into a decline, immediately following his
affair with the woman who had learned her English from the G.I.’s. It was hard
to say what had been ailing him, he said. In any case his vital forces had been
at a low ebb, and he was prescribed a spell of good old-fashioned mothering,
with lots of hot soup and stroking of the fevered brow by gentle ladies. He had
canceled three days of interviews, moved into the guesthouse, and submitted to
the tender ministrations of Lek and Meow.

“I feel super, now,” Trevor said, briskly stroking his
sort-of moustache with a forefinger. “Tomorrow I can get back to my
interviews.”

“And seeing as how he’s back in the land of the living,”
said Eddie, “we’ve decided to celebrate by introducing him to a genuine Bangkok gogo bar, even though he’s heard all about these joints back in Kuwait and knows he won’t like them. We’re meeting Leary at Boon Doc’s in half an hour and then
heading for Shaky Jake’s. Want to come along?”

This sounded like a good idea to me, but I noticed Meow,
who had reappeared in time to hear Eddie’s proposition, was not registering
approval. Far from it. Displaying a remarkable dexterity when it came to
non-verbal communication, she managed to caress Trevor with a look of sweet
concern while at the same time she gave Eddie a glare that should’ve set his
sideburns on fire. Meow probably figured Trevor wasn’t strong enough for a
night on the town with the boys. Not yet, anyway. And maybe never, come to
that. Something in her eyes made me think she’d like to go on nursing this
specimen even when he wasn’t sick. But perhaps it was merely a trick of the
light.

There was no mistaking the import of his wife Lek’s abrupt
attack on the patio with a mop, however. Even Nixon was caught up in the sudden
alarm, and he shrieked “Omer-ette!” in a futile attempt at placating this Fury.

Shaky Jake’s was already rattlin’ and rollin’ by the time
we got there. A lithesome young lady was winding up her star set in the cage
behind the bar, and another was preparing to step into the breach. She walked
to the little shrine high on the wall opposite the bar, bowing with hands held
together up to her forehead, and then she mounted a stool to add a garland to
the strings of fragrant blossoms which already festooned the shelf and its
plaster figurines. Early as it was, a miniature forest of joss sticks still
smoked and smoldered, burned down to stubs. She
wai-ed
again, climbed down, and dropped her oversize motorcycle jacket, revealing
the lean athletic body underneath. She swung up onto the bar and across to the
tiny dance floor, effortless, oiled limbs gleaming in the flashing lights. She
nodded in passing to the other dancer and then turned to flash a smile of
unaffected pleasure at the whole place as she began to move to a funky beat.

Trevor tried to give the impression he was interested in
everything except the gogo cage and those creatures which inhabited it. Of course,
what with the four dancers on the other stage, behind us, their reflections in
the mirrors behind the>bar, and the off-duty dancers in various stages of
undress hanging about the place, that left Trevor pretty well nowhere to look
but at us or at his glass. As one consequence of this narrowing of his
universe, he was drinking quite a bit faster than he was accustomed to doing.

“Crunch, my boy, if you want a woman, you don’t got to
look too far, you know? Gosh!” Leary’s bellow easily carried over the throb and
din of the music. Leary looked at the young man with real concern.

“Please, my name is Trevor, and...”

“Trevor is a gosh-darned sissified name. I got nothing
against Brits, don’t get me wrong, but it sounds too English, you know what I
mean?”

Earlier, at Boon Doc’s, Leary had been introduced to both
Trevor and to the story of that individual’ s computerized campaign to find a
wife he could bring back to Kuwait. Leary had been most appreciative of this
modern romantic epic. He’d also been most impressed with the obvious
resourcefulness of this likely young fellow. But he didn’t like his name.

To Leary, those members of the human race who were
computer literate were ’number crunchers’; Trevor, then, had become ‘Crunch’,
so far as Leary was concerned. “Crunch is a man’s name. And poontang’s a man’s
game. Haw! That’s
right.
And you see that girl up there, just a-dancin’
her fine little heart out to make you happy, and you won’t even look at her?”
Leary grinned up at this philanthropic maiden, who was indeed putting more of
herself than usual into her performance that evening. “Whooee!” he hollered,
waving his San Miguel Beer baseball cap, and with his other hand he took
Trevor’s shoulder in a grip that commanded his attention and, no doubt,
paralyzed his arm right down to the fingertips.