Part 18 (1/2)
”What kind of farang is he? German? English? Dutch?”
The Mama San shrugged. What was the difference? Henry pressed her. But a farang who brings his woman to the brothel and pushes drinks about while she goes with other men, he insisted, and then takes her home again to his bed? This must be quite some girl! ”She is number nineteen,” said the Mama San, with a shrug. ”Her house name is Amanda. Would you like her?”
But Henry was too excited by his journalistic coup to be sidetracked. ”But the farang, what is his name? What is his history?” he cried in great amus.e.m.e.nt.
”He is called Ham Sin. He speaks Thai with us and Khmer with the girl but you must not put him in your magazine, because he is illegal.”
”I can disguise him. I can make it all disguised. Does the girl love him in return?”
”She prefers to be here at The Sea of Happiness with her friends,” the Mama San said primly.
Henry could not resist taking a look. The girls who were not with clients lounged on plush benches behind a gla.s.s wall, wearing numbers round their necks and nothing else, while they chatted to each other or tended their fingernails or stared vacuously at an ill-tuned television set. As Henry watched, number i9 stood up in response to a summons, picked up her little handbag and a wrap and walked from the room. She was very young. Many girls lied about their age in order to defeat the regulations-penniless Cambodians particularly. But this girl, said Henry, had looked no more than fifteen.
It was here that Henry's excess of zeal began to lead him astray. He said his goodbyes to the Mama San and drove his car into an alley opposite the rear entrance, where he settled down to wait. Soon after one o'clock the staff began leaving, among them Hansen, twice the height of anyone else, leading number i9 on his arm. In the square, Hansen and the girl looked round for a cab and Henry had the temerity to pull up his car beside them. Pimps and illegal cab drivers thrive at that hour of night, and Henry in his time had been both, so perhaps the move came naturally to him.
”Where you want to go, sir?” he called to Hansen in English. ”You want me to drive you?”
Hansen gave an address in a poor suburb five miles north. A price was agreed, Hansen and his girl got into the back of the car; they set off.
Now Henry began to lose his head in earnest. Flushed by his success, he decided for no reason he could afterwards explain that his best course of action would be to deliver his quarry and the girl to Rumbelow's house, which lay not north but west. He had not of course prepared Rumbelow for this bold manoeuvre; he had hardly prepared himself for it. He had no a.s.surance that Rumbelow was at home, or in any condition, at one-thirty in the morning, to conduct a conversation with a former spy who had disappeared off the map for eighteen months. But reason, at that moment, did not predominate in Henry's mind. He was a joe, and there is not a joe in the world who does not, at one time or another in his life, do something totally daft.
”You like Bangkok?” Henry asked Hansen gaily, hoping to distract his pa.s.sengers from the route he was taking.
No answer.
”You been here long?”
No answer.
”That's a nice girl. Very young. Very pretty. She your regular girl?”
The girl had her head on Hansen's shoulder. From what Henry could see in the mirror, she was already asleep. For some reason, this knowledge excited Henry further.
”You want a tailor, sir? All-night tailor, very good? I take you there. Good tailor.”
And he drove wildly into a sidestreet, pretending to look for his wretched tailor while he hurried towards Rumbelow's house.
”Why are you going west?” said Hansen, speaking for the first time. ”I don't want to go this way. I don't want a tailor. Get back on the main road.”
The last of Henry's commonsense deserted him. He was suddenly terrified by Hansen's size and Hansen's tactical advantage in sitting behind him. What if Hansen was armed? Henry jammed on the brakes and stopped the car.
”Mr. Hansen, sir, I am your friend!” he cried in Thai, much as he might plead for mercy. ”Mr. Rumbelow is your friend too. He's proud of you! He wants to give you a lot of money. You come with me, please. No problem. Mr. Rumbelow will be very happy to see you!”
That was the last speech Henry made that night, for the next thing he knew, Hansen had pushed the back of Henry's driving seat so hard that Henry's head nearly went through the windscreen. Hansen got out of the car and hauled Henry into the street. After that, Hansen lifted Henry to his feet and flung him across the road, to the dismay of a group of sleeping beggars, who began whimpering and clamouring while Hansen strode to where Henry lay and glared down at him.
”You tell Rumbelow, if he comes for me, I'll kill him,” he said in Thai.
Then he led the girl up the road in search of a better cab, one arm round her waist while she dozed.
By the time I had heard the two men's story to the end, I was suddenly dreadfully tired.
I sent them away, telling Rumbelow to call me next morning. I said that before I did anything else I was going to sleep off my jet-lag. I lay down and was at once wide awake. An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the pa.s.sive, much painted features of girl number i9.
She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy j.a.panese style make-up covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny b.r.e.a.s.t.s poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me ”darling” and saying ”please.”
She flung herself away from me so that I could admire her back view, keeping her legs apart in invitation.
”Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her.
”Put on your wrap,” I said.
When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. ”I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. ”I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.”
I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht.
”As an old friend of Father Vernon,” I had written, using the wordcode familiar to him, ”I must advise you that you are in breach of your contract with our company. You have a.s.saulted a Thai citizen and your girlfriend is an illegal Cambodian immigrant. We may have no alternative but to pa.s.s this information to the authorities. My car is parked across the street. Give the enclosed money to the Mama San as payment to release you for the night, and join me in ten minutes.”
She left the cubicle, taking the letter with her. I had not realised till then how much noise there was in the corridor: the Jangling music, the tinny laughter, the grumbles of desire, the swish of water down the ramshackle pipes.
I had left the car unlocked and he was sitting in the back, the girl beside him. Somehow I had not doubted he would bring the girl. He was big and powerful, which I knew already, and haggard. In the half darkness, with his black beard and hollowed eyes and his flattened hands curled tensely over the back of the pa.s.senger seat, he resembled one of the saints he had once wors.h.i.+pped, rather than the photographs on his file. The girl sat slumped and close to him, sheltering against his body. We had not gone a hundred metres before a rainburst crashed on us like a waterfall. I pulled in to the kerb while each of us stared through the drenched windscreen, watching the torrents of water swarm over the gutters and potholes.
”How did you get to Thailand?” I yelled in Dutch. The rain was thundering on the roof.
”I walked,” Hansen replied in English.
”Where did you come over?” I yelled, in English also.
He mentioned a town. It sounded like ”Orania Prathet.”
The downpour ended and I drove for three hours while the girl dozed and Hansen sat guard over her, alert as a cat, and as silent. I had selected a beach hotel advertised in the Bangkok Nation. I wanted to get him out of his own setting, into one that I controlled. I drew the key and paid a night's lodging in advance. Hansen and the girl followed me down a concrete path to the beach. The bungalows stood in a half ring facing the sea. Mine was at one end. I unlocked the door and went ahead of them. Hansen followed, after him the girl. I switched on the light and the air-conditioning. The girl hovered near the door, but Hansen kicked off his shoes and placed himself at the centre of the room, casting round him with his hollowed eyes.
”Sit down,” I said. I pulled open the refrigerator door. ”Does she want a drink?” I asked.
”Give her a Coca-Cola,” said Hansen. ”Ice. Got any limes in there?”
”No.”
He watched me on my knees in front of the refrigerator.
”How about you?” I asked.
”Water.”
I searched again: gla.s.ses, mineral water, ice. As I did so, I heard Hansen say something tender to the girl in Khmer. She protested and he overrode her. I heard him go into the bedroom and come out again. Climbing to my feet, I saw the girl curled on the daybed that ran along one wall of the room, and Hansen bending over her with a blanket, tucking her up. When he had finished, he switched out the lamp above her and touched her cheek with his fingertips before striding to the French window to stare at the sea. A full red moon hung above the horizon. The rainclouds made black mountains across the sky.
”What's your name?” he asked me.
”Mark,” I said.
”Is that your real name? Mark?”