Big Mango (9786167611037) (15 page)

Eddie spent the time wondering what to do
about the general’s pitch. Winnebago shrugged off the whole thing
as none of his concern and invested his afternoon in chain smoking
Camels and ogling three busty Scandinavian tourists in string
bikinis who were ogling the pool boys. The pool boys kept the
drinks coming and ogled each other.

Shortly after nine that night, Eddie’s
message having drawn no response, they headed out from the Oriental
to take another shot at finding Bar Phillips. Sprinting across New
Road through a break in the traffic, they walked up Silom toward
the center of town. Although it had been dark for almost three
hours, heat and humidity still smothered the city. Eddie could feel
the night all over him, a heavy liquid thing that pressed against
his body from every direction at once. Pools of moisture formed in
his hair and sweat was dripping down his neck before they had
walked more than a couple of blocks.

The street around them pulsed with life. It
was all sound and smell: sizzling cooking fires on street vendor
carts; drifting clouds of bus exhaust; pirated CDs pounding from
loudspeakers; and the mingling odors of hundreds of slowly
shuffling bodies.

They turned onto a broken-up sidewalk and
edged their way through the narrow space between the vendors
crowding both sides of it. Ranks of carts faced each other like two
tiny freight trains stuck on parallel sidings, each loaded down
with fake Rolexes, homemade copies of DVDs, plastic Louis Vuitton
luggage, T-shirts, belts, socks, and stuffed animals. There was
food, too: sliced fruit, rice wrapped in banana leaves, grilled
chicken on wooden sticks, and other things that neither Eddie nor
Winnebago recognized. Some neon tubing dangling from a T-shirt
vendor’s cart caught Eddie’s attention and he traced the patterns
it threw against the mirrored surfaces of a sleek office tower.
Nearby a street vendor swirled a huge wok filled with roasting
chestnuts over a charcoal fire built right on the sidewalk. It
might be almost the twenty-first century for everyone else, Eddie
thought, but Bangkok didn’t seem entirely sold on the concept.

Eddie and Winnebago were swimming in a sea of
people: street-hardened touts, school children in blue uniforms,
sweating tourists, office workers in suits, saggy-faced drunks,
chubby Chinese housewives, and
farangs
with embarrassed
grins and half-naked teenage girls hanging from their arms. It was
a loud, smelly, sweaty mess, but no one pushed or shoved and the
crowd bubbled and throbbed with an internal rhythm that was both
graceful and amicable.

There was something about it all that cast a
kind of spell over Eddie. The sounds, the odors, and the heat all
combined to brew up a kind of magic potion, one that left him
feeling a little drunk, nearly overwhelmed, and staggering in a
swirl of possibilities. Somehow, in a way he didn’t really
understand, it all came together to make him feel strangely
innocent and young again. It even, he had to honestly admit, gave
him something like half a hard-on. But then everyone got wised up
in Bangkok eventually, he figured, even when they were half hard;
and he doubted that anyone stayed young there for very long.

“Where are we going, Eddie?”

“The Pong.” Eddie pointed through the crowd
up Silom Road. “It’s just up there, I think.”

The Pong was what the American soldiers on
R&R in Bangkok during the sixties and seventies had christened
Soi Patpong, undoubtedly the most famous street in Bangkok. Patpong
had been little more than a narrow, bumpy alley that ran for a
couple of hundred yards between Silom and Suriwong Road until
somebody opened a tiny bar there and hired a few Thai girls to
go-go dance to American rock and roll. Within weeks, there were
thirty other bars just like it and the street was wall-to-wall with
lithe, beautiful young girls. None of them were very good dancers,
but they were all gorgeous and wore very small bikinis and very
high-heeled shoes, so nobody cared much.

In the eighties and nineties, however, it had
all been downhill for the Pong. The American military went home and
left nothing behind but a motley band of sad and bedraggled
misfits: burned-out Peace Corps types, drunken old Air America
pilots, glue sniffers, thinner addicts, leftover hippies trying to
score cheap dope, and hordes of German and Scandinavian tourists in
baggy shorts, leather sandals and nylon socks. The Pong had a
slightly wistful air about it now, Eddie thought; a sense of time
having passed too quickly, and for too small a purpose.

“Is this a joke or something, Eddie?”

Eddie glanced over his shoulder. Winnebago
had stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant and was reading some
menu pages that had been photocopied and stuck to the inside of the
front window.

“Do they really eat this stuff? Fried chicken
knuckles? Chicken feet salad? Fish sauce? What the fuck is fish
sauce? You squeeze the fish and the shit that comes out of it is
sauce? You think maybe that’s fish sauce?”

Winnebago read on.

“Oh, man, I don’t believe it. Sliced bull’s
penis?”

“The Chinese believe it’s good for your
virility.”

“It didn’t do much for the poor, fucking
bull’s, did it?” Winnebago muttered.

***

THE
man watching Eddie and
Winnebago was caught out in the open when they walked away from the
restaurant’s window more quickly than he expected. He scrambled
back into the crowd, suddenly conspicuous, and then watched from
the shadows as Eddie grabbed Winnebago’s elbow and pointed up
Silom. It looked as if Eddie was pointing a long way up, so the man
doubted it had anything to do with him, but then Winnebago nodded
vigorously and they began walking straight toward him.

He looked around quickly for some place to
disappear. This part of Silom Road was a canyon of darkened office
towers, none offering much promise to a man seeking to blend
unnoticed into the background, so he took a chance. He stepped off
the sidewalk and, while pretending to search for a taxi, examined
his prospects further up the road.

Almost immediately he spotted a 7-Eleven. It
was just a few doors past the next cross street and its façade
glistened so whitely among the dim gray buildings lining Silom that
it almost hurt his eyes.

The man lowered his head, stepped back onto
the sidewalk, and made for the 7-Eleven at what he hoped was an
inconspicuous pace. Once there, he slipped inside and pretended to
browse the shelves while he kept an eye on the street through the
big window at the front. Sure enough, as he lingered over a display
of flashlight batteries, he saw Eddie and Winnebago walk past.

He edged carefully back outside to see where
they were going. Before they had covered another fifty yards, he
had worked it out.

***

POPEYE’S
Fried Chicken
appeared to Eddie out of the Bangkok night like a hallucination. It
was outlined with tubes of neon—red, blue and yellow streaks of
color—and the light from the spotless dining room flooded out onto
the Silom sidewalk through a glittering curtain of glass. Several
dozen people, mostly
farangs
, sat scattered among its fifty
or more red, plastic-topped tables benignly watched over by a
six-foot effigy of the man himself, yellow corncob pipe clinched in
his teeth and a sailor cap cocked rakishly on his head.

After they spotted Popeye’s, Eddie and
Winnebago quickly hit a half dozen of the bigger go-go bars in
Patpong. Eddie put some cash around among the waitresses and
bartenders and accompanied it with a promise of more for anyone who
sent Bar Phillips to meet them at Popeye’s within the next hour.
Crossing back over Silom, they grabbed a table and loaded it down
with food.

“This is a hell of a lot more like it,”
Winnebago said, biting into a greasy drumstick. “I’m still so
fucked up from the flight I could eat a horse.”

“That can be arranged, I imagine,” Eddie
said.

Winnebago gave Eddie a dead-eyed stare and
changed the subject. “What are you going to do if you find this
newspaper guy?”

“Ask him what he knows about Captain Austin.
Bar’s probably met every Westerner in Bangkok at one time or
another. Maybe he can tell us what the captain was doing here. At
least that would give us a place to start.”

“So you’re going to do it? To look for the
money for this general guy?”

“I don’t know.” Eddie poked a french fry into
a smear of catsup. “I figure we’re here and he’s paying for it. It
couldn’t hurt to ask around a little.”

“You’re actually going to tell a newspaper
reporter about all this shit?

Eddie tilted his head toward Winnebago and
raised his eyebrows.

“I didn’t think you were completely stupid,”
Winnebago said. He tossed a chicken bone onto a paper plate and
grabbed a fresh piece. “Then what
are
you going to tell
him?”

“I’m just going to say that Harry Austin’s
family hired me to find out what really happened to him. I think
that ought to fly.”

“Is this reporter some big buddy of
yours?”

“No, not really. I met him when I was down
here on a case once for the Bank of America. He wrote a magazine
piece about some dentists from San Diego who ripped off the bank
and spent the money building a porno movie studio in Bangkok. It
was great human interest stuff.”

Winnebago gave Eddie another long look, but
he ignored it and went on.

“Anyway, he’s a smart guy, tough and mean as
hell, and as far as I know he’s fairly honest. At least for a
reporter.”

“If he’s not a buddy, why would he go to any
trouble to help you find out about Austin?”

“I doubt it’ll be any trouble. Bar can
probably tell us what Austin was doing and who he hung out with
right off the top of his head.”

“And if he can’t?”

“I’ll offer him $10,000 to find out.”

Winnebago chewed pensively at the bone of his
third drumstick while he examined a man standing out on the
sidewalk who appeared to be eyeing the crowd inside Popeye’s. If it
was Bar Phillips, he figured they were in real trouble. The guy
looked to Winnebago like some geezer from a Tallahassee retirement
home who had fled to Bangkok to draw his final breaths in mostly
imagined debauchery. He must have been at least sixty, and wore a
black shirt and pants, white belt and shoes, and a bicycle helmet
with a skull and cross-bones stenciled on the front. Maybe he
wasn’t really sixty, it occurred to Winnebago. Maybe he was closer
to thirty and Bangkok just did that kind of thing to you.

Then Bar Phillips did something that put an
end to Winnebago’s speculations. He came inside, walked directly to
their table, and sat down.

“Hey, man,” he greeted Eddie. “I would’ve
known you anywhere. You still look exactly like—”

“Don’t start,” Eddie interrupted.

“This is the guy?” Winnebago asked, cutting
his eyes back and forth between Bar and Eddie.

Eddie nodded.

“You got a problem of some kind, friend?” Bar
glanced at Winnebago without moving his head.

“I was just wondering what the helmet was
for.”

“You haven’t been in town very long, have
you?”

Winnebago rolled his eyes and went back to
his fried chicken.

“So,” Eddie said, looking Bar over. “I see
you’re still writing for the Post.”

Bar didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he
leaned forward and helped himself to a large cup of Pepsi sitting
in front of Eddie, sloshing it around slightly to make sure it
wasn’t empty.

“You mind?” he asked, holding it up. “It’s
hotter than hell out there tonight.”

“I saw your column in a paper back at the
hotel,” Winnebago spoke up.

“You liked it, huh?”

“I said I saw it.”

Bar finished the Pepsi and returned the cup
to the table. “Okay, so much for all the happy talk shit,” he said.
“Was that you asking around the Crown Royal for me last night?”

“Yeah,” Eddie answered.

“And tonight you’ve been waving money around
and leaving messages for me all over the Pong?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus, man. Subtlety still counts for
something. Even in Bangkok.”

“ I need your help. I’m looking for someone
who used to live here.”

“Who is it?”

“A guy I served under in the marines. Harry
Austin.”

“Never heard of him. You say he used to live
here?”

“That’s right.”

“He’s left Bangkok now?”

“He’s left everywhere now. He’s dead.”

While Bar went back to playing with the empty
Pepsi cup, Eddie told him about the newspaper clipping and
ad-libbed a story about Austin’s family hiring him to find out what
had really happened, which he thought sounded pretty good even if
he did say so himself.

“You got a picture of this guy?”

Eddie pulled a copy of the clipping out of
his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and put it on the table.

Bar glanced at the photograph and Eddie
noticed he didn’t flinch at the blood.

“Don’t know him. He was probably never here
or I would.”

“He was here all right, for a while at least.
I don’t know exactly how long.”

Bar gave a shrug and Eddie thought he seemed
to be losing interest in the conversation.

So Eddie brought up the $10,000.

“Let me get this straight. You’re going to
pay me $10,000 just to help you find out about some clown who got
himself run over somewhere in Bangkok?” Bar didn’t even try to keep
the skepticism out of his voice.

“Uh-huh.”

“You going to tell me the rest of it now? Or
do I have to wait a while?”

“There’s nothing else. You know everything I
know.”

“Bullshit.” Bar said it without inflection,
like a man counting trees. “If that was all there was to it, you
wouldn’t have some guy outside following your ass around town.”