The Queen of Patpong (2 page)

THE TALL MAN
goes down the stairs first, with Toy trailing a few steps behind. He can smell her, a damp, sweetish mixture of makeup and perspiration. When he’d put his arm around her shoulders after the mama-san accepted the five-hundred-baht bar fine—worth about fourteen dollars in California, where the tall man used to live—she’d shrunk back. She hadn’t met his eyes since she stepped off the stage.

At the bottom of the stairs, he turns and watches her come, now wearing a T-shirt, a bright orange skirt that ends midthigh, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. He gives her a smile, but she’s got her eyes on the stairway, as though she’s never gone down one before.

“Here we go,” he says. “I hope you’re ready.”

He opens the door.

THE POLICEMAN’S SUNGLASSES
reflect the words
LAP BAR
. The words are written in fuchsia neon set into the center of a bright heart, a cheap electric valentine sizzling fifteen feet above the Patpong sidewalk. He takes a final look at his watch and then leans against a metal pole that once had some sort of sign atop it, now amputated. The crowd, sweating, wrinkled, and ripe-smelling, divides on either side and flows by.

The boy who has been assigned to watch the door to the Lap Bar looks at the policeman and fails to recognize him. Patpong is a very profitable beat, and the police assigned to it have paid dearly for the pleasure. They know the rules. A new cop means trouble. The boy abandons his post and does a discreet fade, stopping a few yards away to watch. From that vantage point, he sees the policeman climb two of the four steps to the door. The door swings open, pulled from the inside, and a tall man comes out, followed by the youngest and newest of the girls in the bar—what was her name?—Toy.

And the policeman puts an arm up, resting his hand against the edge of the door, to block Toy and the tall man from coming all the way outside. Toy makes a scrabbling move backward, but the policeman snakes his other arm out and grabs her wrist. This is completely outside the boy’s frame of reference: a policeman interfering with a customer and a bar girl at the door the boy is supposed to be guarding.

The boy decides it is time to go home.

THE POLICEMAN LOOKS
past the
farang,
directly at Toy. “How old are you?”

“She’s eighteen,” the tall man says.

“Shut up,” says the policeman in English. “I asked her.”

“Hey, listen,” the foreigner begins, but the policeman stops him with a look. Then, deliberately, he reaches down with his free hand and unsnaps his holster.

“No problem,” the customer says immediately, bringing his hands up in front of him, palms out. “You want her, she’s yours.”

“Come out here,” the policeman says. With one hand resting on the butt of his pistol, he backs slowly down the steps leading up to the door, dragging Toy with him, and waits on the sidewalk. After a long moment, during which his eyes remain locked on the policeman’s face, the tall man comes down the steps.

“This is ridiculous,” he says, but his voice is thin.

“I told you to shut up,” says the policeman. “Put out your hand.” A crowd has begun to form about them, mostly Thais drawn by the spectacle of a policeman actually enforcing some sort of law on Patpong
.
His eyes darting around the circle of faces, the tall man puts out his right hand, and the policeman snaps a cuff on it, a chilly metallic click in the tropical air. The other end of the cuff closes around the metal pole against which the policeman had been leaning. The tall man stands as though dumbfounded, and a murmur runs through the group of Thais.

“I asked how old you were,” the policeman says in Thai.

“Eighteen,” Toy says. She seems even more disoriented than the customer by the turn of events.

“Give me your card,” the policeman says in Thai. Each bar girl who is legally employed must carry an identification card.

Toy looks for support at the circle of faces on the pavement—surely nothing very terrible can happen with so many people watching. Her tongue explores her lower lip. “I left it at home.”

“You don’t have one,” says the policeman. “You don’t have one because you’re not old enough to have one. Do you know what the penalty is?”

“I don’t care,” she says, but it’s almost a question.

“Two years in the reformatory. Up-country. No Bangkok, no movies, no discos, no bright lights, just big paddies for you to work in. Full of leeches. Nowhere to hide from the sun. Snakes everywhere. Spiders as big as dogs. They’ll cut your hair off, like a boy’s. No cosmetics. No pretty dresses. Rotten meat and rocks in the rice. There are girls there who will bother you. If you don’t do what they want, they’ll beat you up. Do you understand me?”

She starts to say yes, swallows, and then says it.

“Two years from now, you’ll be black as a boot and your gums will bleed when you smile. You’ll have wrinkles around your eyes. No one will even recognize you. You’ll be lucky to make two hundred fifty baht a trick.”

“I’m eighteen,” Toy protests faintly. Her eyes go to the faces of the people gathered on the sidewalk, seeking help.

“Look at this man,” the policeman commands, indicating the handcuffed customer. “What do you know about him?”

This is a safer topic. “He bought me out for the night,” she says, eager to please. She glances at the handcuffed man, who is regarding the crowd uneasily. “He lives at the Tower.” She lapses, her fund of knowledge exhausted.

“Look at him,” the policeman says. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Oh, no,” Toy says. “Mama-san told me I should always leave my shoes by the door so—”

“He hurts girls like you.” The tall man stops trying to worry his wrist out of the cuff and begins to listen. “Last month he bought out a massage girl, almost as young as you. He took her to an apartment in Thonburi, and he used a razor to cut her face. From here,” he says, letting go of her arm and placing a finger below her right eye and drawing it straight down to her chin, “down to here. You could see her teeth through her cheek.”

Toy has forgotten the crowd; her eyes, on the policeman, fill half her face. “
This
man?”

“And then he cut her throat.” His throat-slashing gesture, operatic in scale, draws appreciative gasps from the crowd. “He would have killed her, but she jumped though the window. She’s not pretty anymore, but she’s alive. You’re a lucky girl.” He lifts her chin with his fingertips and studies her face. “Now, get out of here. Go home. And I mean all the way home. If I ever see you in Patpong again, I’ll make sure you’re in the monkey house until you’re a twenty-year-old farm girl with feet like shoe boxes.”

The girl takes a step back.

The tall man handcuffed to the sign clears his throat. “Fifty thousand baht,” he says.

“Wait,” the policeman says. He reaches out and takes Toy’s wrist again. Then he turns to the crowd. “Go, go. There’s nothing to see here. You have things to do.” The group backs up a few steps, and he advances on them, pulling the girl in his wake, and they retreat several paces more. When the policeman is sure he cannot be heard, he says to the American, “For what?”

“For letting me go,” the customer says. His eyes travel to Toy. “And for letting me keep her.”

The policeman knots Toy’s T-shirt in his fist and forces her several steps in the tall man’s direction. “You are insulting me,” he says.

“You have me confused with someone else,” the tall man says. “It’s not surprising. Many men look like me. The salary of a policeman is small, and the hours are long. You’re probably very tired. It was my fault that I have embarrassed you by taking this girl when you were on duty.”

“You apologize,” says the policeman thoughtfully. “And yet you offer so little.”

The tall man doesn’t even blink. “One hundred thousand baht,” he says.

“No,” says Toy, straining against the hand that holds her shirt. “Please.”

“One hundred thousand baht,” the policeman repeats. He shakes the girl like a puppy. “Stop it.”

“Now,” says the customer with some urgency. “In cash.”

“Suppose you hurt her,” the policeman says conversationally. He winds Toy’s T-shirt tightly around his fist. “Suppose you hurt her and she reports it. It could interrupt the upward movement of my career. You understand, of course, that I could never seriously entertain a request such as this one.”

“Hundred twenty,” the tall man says.

“There is still the problem of the girl,” the policeman says. “Not that I care personally what happens to her. You would have to guarantee she would not complain.”

The American looks at Toy. “I do.”

The policeman turns his head to regard the watching crowd. “How will you get her out of here?”

“You help me walk her to the corner. Handcuff her if you have to. I have a car waiting there.”

“But, but . . .” Toy says.

The policeman swats her on the head. “Let me see the money.”

Toy begins to scream. As people in the street stare, she twists against the hand grasping her shirt, striking out with both fists, hammering at the policeman’s wrist and forearm, and then the nails come out and she rakes his skin. He grabs at her with the other hand, and she raises one of her heavy, steel-tipped cowboy boots and kicks his shin with all the force she possesses, so hard she staggers back after the kick lands. The policeman releases her and grabs his shin in both hands, hopping up and down and swearing a blue streak in both English and Thai, and Toy leaps backward, bolts into the crowd, and disappears from view. A ripple in the movement of the heads, visible down the bright street, tracks her path. Some of the people who are watching from a safe distance applaud approvingly.

The policeman ignores them, focusing instead on the man handcuffed to the pole.

“Spiders as big as dogs,” says the tall man.

The policeman straightens. “Are you giving me a problem?”

“Feet like shoe boxes.” The handcuffed man makes a sound that could be mistaken for a snort. “The girls will
bother
you.”

“Everybody’s a critic,” the policeman says, bending to rub his shin again. “Goddamn Bangkok cowboy boots. Steel tips. They should be outlawed. I’m going to have a lump the size of an egg.” He gives the tall man a severe glance. “I’ve got half a mind to leave you here. Nobody told me I was going to get kicked.”

“Yeah, and nobody told me I was going to be Jack the Ripper. ‘Her teeth through her cheek.’ Jesus.”

“She’s scared, right? Wasn’t that the point? Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

“Well, I think you succeeded,” says the tall man, rattling the cuff against the signpost. He yanks at it a couple of times. “Arthit,” he says, “tell me you haven’t lost the key to these things.”

Chapter 2
All the Devils Are Here

M
iaow looks up from her plate. “Hell is empty,” she says in English, “and all the devils are here.”

“Hello to you, too,” Rafferty says. He looks at the half-eaten dinner spread across the table. “Thanks for waiting.”

“We were going to,” Rose says in Thai. She puts down her ever-present cup of Nescafé and adds in careful English, “But we are hungry.” She’s been studying English six hours a week, trying to leave bar-girl Thaiglish behind, but the past tense is a problem, since the Thai language lacks it. Then she says to Miaow, in Thai, “What was that you said?”

“It’s from the play,” Miaow says. “The first act. I get to say it.”

Rose says, “What are ‘devils’?”

Over the noise of the restaurant, Miaow launches into an energetic explanation in Thai that involves one of the more baroque Buddhist visions of hell, and Rafferty squeezes past his adopted daughter’s chair to get into the banquette so he can reach under the table and put a proprietary hand on Rose’s leg. She pats his hand and then laces her fingers through his, listening to Miaow, who finally has to pause for breath.

“Not a nice thing to say about Poke,” Rose says.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “Compared to some of the things Arthit just said about me, it’s a birthday card.”

“He didn’t come back with you?” Rose asks. She glances around the restaurant, an American steakhouse on Silom, as though she’s worried she might have missed him. The mention of Arthit puts her into anxiety mode, as it has for the past eight months, since his wife, Noi, died.

“He wanted to go home,” Rafferty says. “I tried to talk him into joining us, but . . . well, you know. He’s going to get through this alone. If it kills him.”

Miaow says,
“Guys
,” in a world-weary tone that almost makes Rafferty sit up straighter.

Rose apparently doesn’t see anything precocious in the remark. “I wish I knew someone I could introduce him to,” she says. “My girls wouldn’t work.” Rose’s “girls” are former dancers from the Patpong bars who have left the life to work with the agency Rose co-owns, which finds them jobs as housekeepers. And Rose is right, Rafferty thinks; they’d be disastrous matches for Arthit.

“Speaking of your girls,” he says, “you can tell your friend Fon that Toy is probably still running. Arthit scared her silly.”

“Serves her right.” Rose pushes a full water glass toward Miaow and makes a “drink up” gesture. Miaow rolls her eyes but picks up the glass. In keeping with some health advisory she read somewhere, Rose has the two of them drinking more water than they want, although she herself continues to subsist on the instant coffee Rafferty loathes with such intensity. “The little idiot,” she continues. “I’ve never seen Fon so angry. Here she is, slaving in other people’s houses all day,
not
working the bars but still sending money home every month, and her stupid little sister decides to come to the big city and give it a try. Probably thought it was all cell phones and fancy clothes, gold jewelry, going out to dinner with foreign gentlemen. When what it really is, is dancing around dressed in almost nothing and letting fat men grunt on top of you a couple of times every night.”

Miaow darts a look at Rose and then looks away.

“Toy didn’t seem happy,” Rafferty says.

“I’m sure she didn’t,” Rose says. “And to make things worse, she decided to work in an upstairs bar.”

“Why does that matter?” Miaow asks. “What happens in upstairs bars?”

Rafferty says, “Nothing that you need to—”

Rose says, “Upstairs the girls dance naked.”

Miaow says, “Oh.” For at least the third time since Rafferty sat down, she runs her hand through her hair, which is now chopped to within four inches of her scalp and bleached a sort of margarine yellow with a slight orange cast at the roots, the stubborn remnant of the midnight black that’s her natural color. The haircut cost all of Miaow’s allowance for five weeks and looks like it was done with a broken glass. She came home with it ten days ago and announced that it was for the play, her school’s production of Shakespeare’s
The
Tempest,
in which she’s been cast as the spirit Ariel. Ever since the time, four years earlier, that Rafferty had first seen her selling chewing gum on a Patpong sidewalk, she’d worn her hair severely parted in the center and pasted down, a hairstyle he’d come to think of as unchangeable, quintessentially Miaow. And now she looks, he privately thinks, like a very short Sid Vicious. He’s still startled every time he sees her. She gives her new hair a tug and says to Rose, “Why would they want to dance naked?”

Rose says, “Money. They get paid a little more.”

Miaow absorbs it for a moment. “You never did that.” It’s not a question, but it is.

“I didn’t have to,” Rose says. “I was beautiful.”

“You still are,” Rafferty says.

Rose leans in his direction and says, “What did you say?”

“I said—”

“Oh, I heard you.” She shakes her head. “I’m ashamed for wanting to hear it again. Poor, dumb little Toy.”

“She believed every word Arthit said. She’ll probably run all the way to the train station.”

“Just like my sister, Lek, when you and Arthit chased her away,” Rose says.

Rafferty says, “We’re thinking of opening a business.”

“I was that innocent,” Rose says. Her eyes roam the restaurant, as though she’s surprised to find herself there. “When I first came down to Bangkok, I believed everything. I had no idea how things worked. If it hadn’t been for Fon, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I was frightened, I was sad, I was stupid. I did everything anyone told me to do. A girl would take me over to a customer—a customer who’d
asked
for me—and then she’d tell me I owed her ten percent for introducing me. Girls borrowed money they never paid back. One of them stole my shoes, and I had to go out barefoot and buy some flip-flops on the sidewalk. I stepped on a burning cigarette butt.”

Miaow says, “I did that, too, once.”

“And you were just a kid,” Rafferty says. “Both of you.”

“I was seventeen,” Rose says. “And that’s
village
seventeen, about as sophisticated as a Bangkok ten-year-old. I remember the first time I went shopping with my own money. I’d never owned anything except T-shirts and shorts, and those were secondhand. And here I was, in Bangkok, on my own, with money in my pockets, more money than I’d ever had in my life. And there were stores
everywhere.
I bought toys, stuffed animals, little plastic pins that lit up. A Santa hat, a ring with a big red plastic jewel in it that I thought looked like a ruby, and a bracelet made of little plastic fruit. The most terrible things—blouses with big buttons and hearts all over them, teddy-bear hair ornaments, brand-new, stiff, dark blue jeans that were loose and too short to be stylish. I was so proud of them. I got all dressed up to go to the bar that night, and the girls just laughed. Everybody except Fon. Well, she laughed a little, but not the same way. She’s the one who taught me that you were supposed to spend ten times as much money for a pair of jeans that look like a whole village wore them for a year and that are so long you’re walking on the cuffs. That you have to wear real rubies if you’re a Bangkok girl. I was a hick. I didn’t fit in at all. And some of the girls just hated me because I stood out.”

“You certainly stood out when I came in,” Rafferty says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Miaow fidget. For the past eight or nine months, Rose’s past, which she’d previously taken for granted as part of the family landscape, has become an object of both interest and a certain amount of embarrassment. In the relatively exclusive private international school Miaow now attends, a former street child whose adopted mother was a prostitute is conspicuous in all the wrong ways. Eight months ago she’d had Rose lighten her hair to a dark red, and she’d bought skin-lightening cream. Next was her name. She’s already told them that the play’s program will inform the audience that Ariel is played by Mia Rafferty.

Rafferty has to face the fact that his daughter is turning into a petit bourgeois. Surrounded every day at school by kids from middle-class and upper-middle-class families from all over the world, Miaow has been looking for the magic that would transform her into one of them. And she seems to hope that the play will help her make the transition.

“Sir?”

Rafferty looks up to see a waiter, maybe eighteen years old, with a carefully trained flop of reddish hair over his forehead, fine high cheekbones, and a waist narrower than Scarlett O’Hara’s. His eyes go to Miaow’s hair, widen for a split second, and then bounce back to Rafferty.

“Do you need a menu?”

“No,” Rafferty says. “Miaow, what did you have?” Miaow is more a red-meat expert than Rose, who thinks all beef should be cooked gray the whole way through, and then cooked again. And served to someone else.

“The rib eye,” Miaow says, pushing the remains toward him for inspection, although there’s not much left. “It was good.”

“The same,” Rafferty says to the waiter. “Medium rare. With some french fries. Cook the french fries until they scream.”

The waiter says, “Sorry?”

“I want them very crisp. Burned, even. And a Singha.”

“Rib eye medium rare and a Singha, and french fries that scream,” the waiter says. His English is much better than Rafferty expected it to be, yet another sign of the ways in which Bangkok is changing. When he first got here, most people’s English was rudimentary at best. “Do you want them to scream in French?”

“If you can arrange it, I’d like them to scream
‘Sacre bleu.
’ ”

“Of course, sir. Singha, coming up.” He leaves.

Watching him go, Miaow says, “He’s cute.”

“He’s an old man,” Rafferty says.

“He liked your hair,” Rose says. For the first couple of days, she’d looked at Miaow’s blond chop with horror, but lately her gaze has grown speculative.

Rafferty says, “Don’t even think about it.”

Rose puts both hands at the nape of her neck and lifts the long, heavy fall of hair, then lets it drop again. “Do you have any idea how long all this takes to dry?”

“To the second. I’ve spent some of my happiest hours waiting for it to dry.”

“Look at Miaow,” Rose says. “She washes it, dries it with a towel, and then messes it up with her fingers. How long, Miaow?”

“Three or four minutes,” Miaow says. “But then I have to keep messing it up all day.”

“Of course,” Rose says, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“It has to be messed up
right,
” Miaow says.

Rafferty says, with some nostalgia, “It’s amazing how your part’s disappeared.”

“It hasn’t,” Miaow says. “That’s why I have to keep messing it up. Andy says it’s—”

Whatever Andy said it was, Miaow decides not to share it. She clamps her mouth closed and starts pushing around the remnant of her steak.

“Who’s Andy?” Rafferty says, exchanging a glance with Rose.

“This guy,” Miaow says. Nobody says anything, so she adds, “He’s in the play.”

“When the play’s over—” Rafferty begins.

“No.” Miaow ruffles her hair. “I won’t keep it blond, but I’m not going to start parting it again. I looked like a baby.” As long as she’s ruffling it, she grabs a tuft and tugs, as though she’s hoping to get another half inch of growth. “What do you think about it for the play?”

“I think it’s great,” Rafferty says truthfully. “For the play.”

“Since Ariel’s sort of a he,” Miaow says.

“I guess so,” Rafferty says. As the only professional writer among the school’s parent population, he’d been asked by Mrs. Shin, the Korean drama teacher who’s directing the play, to cut it down to seventy minutes or so, mainly to get the roles to a length the kids could memorize. As a result he’s spent several months immersed in
The Tempest.
“But Ariel’s a spirit, not a person,” he says, “so I think it’s right for the character to be, you know, not really a girl or a boy. The costume and the hair—I think they’re going to be great.”

“Caliban, though,” Miaow says, “Caliban has to be a boy, right? Even though he’s kind of magic, too. Because he tried to mess around with Miranda, and Prospero is pissed—I mean, angry—at him.”

“Miaow,”
Rose snaps.

“Sorry,” Miaow says. “The kids all talk English, and they say that all the time.”

“Well,
you
don’t.”

Miaow changes the subject, asking Rafferty, “What’s an anagram?”

“It’s a word that has the same letters as another word but in a different order. Like ‘eat’ and ‘ate.’ Or ‘life’ and ‘file.’ ” Rafferty watches Miaow visualize the words in her head and move the letters around. “Or ‘vile’ and ‘live’ and ‘evil.’ Is this about Caliban?”

“Yes. Mrs. Shin says it’s an anagram for . . . for—”

“ ‘Cannibal,’ ” Rafferty says. “It isn’t exactly, not the way we spell it now. But the Elizabethans were kind of adventurous about spelling.”

“But if he meant ‘cannibal,’ it means he didn’t like Caliban, right?” Miaow says.

“When Shakespeare wrote the play, new kinds of people were being discovered all the time,” Rafferty says. “There were all sorts of ideas about them. Some Europeans didn’t think the savages, as they called them, were human. The English were snobs, and as you know, a snob is someone who dislikes anyone who’s not like him.” He’s trying clumsily to make a point about Miaow’s school, but it sails past her. “Mrs. Shin is interpreting the play so it’s about colonialism. Remember, we talked about interpretation, how people at different times find different meanings in Shakespeare’s work. From a modern point of view—one point of view anyway—Caliban is the original inhabitant of the island, and whether he’s evil or not—”

Rose drops her fork with a clatter on top of her cup, which tips over and spreads coffee across the tablecloth.

A man’s deep voice says, “Well, well.
Rosie.
”

Rafferty looks up to see a tall, very solid-looking white man looming over their table. He’s at least six-two, mannequin handsome, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a jawline so square it looks like a caricature. His pale hair is perhaps half an inch long and has been allowed to grow in front of his ears in squared-off sideburns. It looks like a helmet.