Big Mango (9786167611037) (29 page)

“You cannot leave the lounge, sir.”

Eddie pointed toward Lek. “She’s with me. I’m
just trying to see what the problem is.”

The policeman nearest them overheard and
stepped toward Eddie, checking him out.

“Did you say you were traveling with this
woman, sir?”

“Yes.”

The cop held out his right hand, palm up.
“Your passport, please.”

“You’ve already checked it. Twice.”

Eddie slowly and deliberately folded his arms
and looked at the policeman, who was very young. A black plastic
plate pinned over the left breast pocket of his khakis spelled out
his name—Tan—in thick, white letters.

The policeman continued to hold out his hand,
his face expressionless. “Your passport, sir.”

Eddie took his time about it, but he unfolded
his arms and slowly pulled his passport from his back pocket. He
twirled it in his fingers for a moment in a modest show of defiance
and then slapped it into the young policeman’s open hand.

In return, Tan took his time about opening
the passport, and then he studied the picture with particular care.
He glanced up several times at Eddie as though comparing facial
details one at a time.

“You are an American, sir?”

“That’s how you get the passport.”

Bar winced inwardly. This wasn’t the right
place for Eddie to start lobbing wisecracks. He was in Asia now,
not San Francisco, and out here, if you didn’t lose the attitude
pretty quick, somebody would snatch it away and beat you to death
with it.

“May I ask what the problem is, officer?” Bar
cut in, attempting to defuse the growing hostility.

Tan flicked his eyes to Bar for a moment.
Wordlessly dismissing him, he pointed his forefinger at Eddie.
“Wait here.”

Eddie and Bar watched silently as the
policeman walked over to an older man in a dark business suit who
appeared to be in charge. They spoke briefly and the man turned his
head and looked at Eddie. Eddie wasn’t sure if he should smile or
not, so he didn’t.

After a moment, the man took Eddie’s passport
from Tan and walked very slowly across the boarding lounge,
appraising Eddie as he approached. He appeared to be in his
forties, with black eyes in a hard, unlined Chinese-looking face
that gave nothing away.

“What is your relationship to this woman?” he
asked Eddie.

“She’s the widow of a man who recently passed
away,” Eddie replied in his lawyer voice, playing it straight. “I’m
her attorney and I’m assisting her with the settlement of his
estate.”

Close enough for government work, Eddie
thought to himself.

“And you?” The man inclined his head toward
Bar. “Who are you?”

“He’s my assistant,” Eddie responded quickly,
and Bar nodded at the man with a serious expression.

The man looked at Bar for a long moment and
then studied Eddie’s passport some more. He folded back the first
page and held it up to the light, although what he might be looking
for completely baffled Eddie. When he finally closed the small blue
booklet, he stood tapping it against his hand as if making up his
mind about something. Suddenly he flipped it back to Eddie, who
grabbed it clumsily out of the air. The man wheeled and walked
away, gesturing at the guard at the table who immediately began
replacing Lek’s things in her bag.

“What the hell was that all about?” Bar
whispered to Eddie.

“Beats me.”

They both stood and watched while the guard
finished repacking Lek’s carry-on. The last thing he returned to
her were the two little books Eddie has noticed when the guard was
emptying her bag. She snatched both of them out of the man’s hand,
and then she grabbed up her bag and stalked away.

Lek sailed by Eddie and Bar without stopping,
her mouth fixed in a tight line. They caught up with her at the
entry to the loading bridge.

“Self-righteous little Singaporean pricks!”
She was so angry she was almost spitting.

Eddie gave her a moment and then asked
neutrally, “You going tell me what that was all about?”

“Bullshit.” Lek’s eyes were flashing. “It was
all about bullshit.”

“And the size and color of the bull were…”
Eddie made a rolling gesture with his right hand.

In spite of herself, Lek laughed. “Sorry,”
she said.

She blinked a few times and then she moved
her hand slowly across her face like a child miming a change of
expression. When she dropped her hand, she was smiling again.

“My American passport has my Western name in
it and my Thai passport has my Chinese name. My mother was very
traditional. These morons thought they’d nabbed a terrorist with a
phony passport.” Lek’s anger appeared to be burning itself out
quickly. “I’m sorry. Singaporeans just piss me off. They’re all a
bunch of damned bananas.”

“Bananas?” Eddie asked, clearly puzzled.

“Yellow on the outside,” Bar stage whispered,
“and white on the inside.”

Eddie laughed as the line shuffled closer to
the plane.

“Why did they make such a big deal out of
that?” he asked Lek when they bogged down in the crowd. “I thought
it was common for Asians to have a Western name and an ethnic
name.”

Lek cocked her head at Eddie. “An ethnic
name?”

“Well, I meant—”

“Yeah, I know what you meant, white boy,” Lek
smiled as she disappeared into the aircraft.

Eddie ducked through the door behind her,
straightened up, and looked around. The aisle was jammed with a
gathering of mismatched humanity frantically trying to shove into
the airplane’s tiny overhead lockers what might easily have been
the booty from the sacking of a good-sized city.

Lek slid into her seat and Bar and Eddie
edged on down the aisle to theirs. An elderly Chinese woman hefting
a large box improbably labeled DENTAL EQUIPMENT ran interference
for them.

When they were halted by a bemused stewardess
who tried vainly to separate the old lady from her box, Bar glanced
quickly back over his shoulder to where Lek was settling into her
seat. He nudged Eddie gently in the back. “What did you make of all
that?”

Eddie shrugged without turning around. “The
Singaporeans get carried away sometimes. Just normal petty
horseshit for them.”

Bar leaned forward until his lips were almost
brushing Eddie’s ear. “I don’t want to make something out of
nothing,” he whispered, “but I think I got a pretty good look at
Lek’s passports.”

Eddie was silent, completely transfixed by
the sight of the stewardess trying to force the elderly lady’s
four-foot box into a two-foot locker. The old woman blocked the
aisle, shrieking and flapping in near hysteria.

“I’ve seen a lot of Thai passports,” Bar
continued. “I don’t think that’s what Lek has.”

That got Eddie’s attention and he turned his
head around just as the stewardess gave a mighty heave and wedged
most of the box into the overhead bin.

“What was it?”

“I might be wrong. I don’t want to end up
with shit on my nose here, but I think it was a diplomatic
passport.”

Eddie cocked his head and thought about that.
“Lek is carrying a Thai diplomatic passport?”

Bar shook his head slowly.

“No, not Thai.” He took a deep breath. “I
think it might have been Vietnamese.”

Eddie absorbed that as the stewardess gave
the box one more shove and somehow slammed the bin door shut on it.
As the line of waiting passengers started to creep slowly through
the aircraft again, he puffed up his cheeks and cautiously
contemplated the implications of what Bar had just told him. When
he found his seat, he flopped into it and dropped his bag on the
floor. Tilting his head back, he exhaled very slowly in the
universal sigh of deep fatigue and utter exasperation.

“Well,” he murmured to himself, “fuck a
goddamned duck.”

IF
people have ever heard of
any place in Thailand other than Bangkok, and most haven’t, it is
usually Phuket.

A large limestone island set in the Andaman
Sea just off the country’s south coast, Phuket reinvented itself in
a single generation from a scarred landscape of abandoned strip
mines into a world-famous beach resort. On the other hand, after
the churning maelstrom of Bangkok and its ten million or so souls,
lost and otherwise, nowhere else in Thailand actually counts for
anything anyway so being the second best-known place in the country
doesn’t really amount to very much.

When the Silk Air plane whistled in over the
steep sea cliffs of the island’s barren north coast and taxied to a
stop at the small terminal building, the passengers were herded
quickly through a cursory immigration and customs check and then
let loose. Lek went to look for a restroom while Winnebago lit a
Camel and Bar strolled off in search of a beer. Eddie hung back and
scrutinized the other passengers as they passed through
immigration. No one was paying any attention to him, he decided
after watching for a while. That was what he had expected, of
course, but nevertheless he felt a twinge of relief to see that it
was true.

Eddie walked into the main terminal building
and glanced around to get his bearings. The structure looked fairly
new, but it was already a long way down the road to shabbiness. The
concrete floors were cracked and stained; orange plastic chairs
scattered throughout the building were bolted into the concrete;
and the only decoration were some large dead plants and a few
wooden racks with some old newspapers. There was a dreary-looking
shop of some kind, and out near the main doors a few plastic tables
seemed to harbor ambitions of becoming a coffee shop.

Eddie spotted Bar sitting alone at the back
of the waiting room, his head buried in a small book. He walked
over and put a hand on his shoulder. “So, what do you think?”

Bar looked up. “You mean about Lek?”

Eddie nodded and Bar chewed that over as he
closed his book.

“Don’t get all worked up yet,” he said. “I
may have been wrong about that passport.”

“But if you were right?”

“Maybe it still doesn’t mean anything. There
are a lot of Vietnamese in Thailand, Eddie. They’re not all out to
get you.”

“Don’t you think we had better find out for
sure whether this one is?”

“How are you going to do that?”

Eddie sat down without answering, his eyes on
the door and his back to the wall. He would have answered Bar, but
he had no idea what to say.

“What are you reading?” Eddie asked after a
moment, glancing toward the thin book Bar was holding.

“It’s a Thai phrasebook. Somebody left it in
the seat pocket on the plane.”

“I thought you spoke Thai. What do you need a
phrase book for?”

“I saved it for you. It’s pretty good. None
of that ‘Your pencil is on the table’ shit. Want to hear some of
the phrases?”

Eddie shrugged noncommittally and then looked
at his watch, losing interest. Where the hell were Winnebago and
Lek? Maybe they had wandered off for perfectly ordinary reasons,
but nothing ordinary had happened for so long that Eddie couldn’t
keep himself from worrying a little.

“It starts with, ‘Can you find me a hotel?’
That’s
Ga roo na chuay pom ha rong raem noi krap?
”

Eddie fidgeted, his eyes flicking around the
terminal, searching for Lek and Winnebago.

“Then comes, ‘Can you get me a woman?’
Ga
roo na chuay pom ha poo ying noi krap?
”

Eddie glanced at Bar.

“After that, ‘How much do you cost?’
Khun
ra ka—
”

Eddie held up his right hand, palm out. “Wait
a minute. That’s not in there. You’re making this up.”

“No shit, Eddie. It’s all right here.” Bar
tapped the book with one finger. “Then comes, ‘That is too
expensive,’ so I figure this thing was probably printed up for
Chinese tourists.”

Eddie tilted his head back and started to
chuckle. “Anything else?”

“‘I think you are beautiful,’ and ‘I love
you.’”

“Those are real useful.”

“There’s one more,” Bar added.

“I can hardly wait.”

“Want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“It’s ‘Will you marry me?’”

When Eddie saw Lek and Winnebago coming
across the terminal toward them, he stopped laughing long enough to
lean toward Bar and whisper a few words into his ear. Bar nodded,
glancing up at Lek, but then grinned again in spite of himself. By
the time Lek and Winnebago slid into two of the orange chairs near
them, Bar and Eddie were both laughing so hard they were wiping
away tears with the backs of their hands.

***

THE
flight to Bangkok left a
half hour later and, since it arrived at Bangkok’s domestic
terminal, Eddie wasn’t overly concerned about being spotted. Anyone
looking for them would have been working the international terminal
building, not domestic arrivals. Their return therefore went
unnoticed, at least as far as Eddie could tell, but just to be on
the safe side he hustled everyone outside and into a taxi as
quickly as he could.

The Forty Winks guesthouse was in Chinatown
at the end of a dimly lit lane that dead-ended at the river. There
was a small sign next to the green metal gate. It was a tiny,
yellow glass pane with one line of Thai characters and one line of
Chinese, but nothing at all in English. It wouldn’t have been an
easy place to find had Bar not hunched forward from the back seat
and given directions to the taxi driver in staccato whispers as the
little Toyota whipped through a maze of tiny, twisting streets.

When their headlights flashed across a gate
set back into a concrete wall, two white-shirted boys in dark
trousers and black bow ties leaped quickly from folding metal
chairs and pushed it open. Once they had driven inside, the boys
flicked on flashlights and, directing the taxi with frantic but
completely silent motions, led it toward a parking place like an
airport ground crew guiding in a jumbo jet.