I looked around, but didn’t immediately see what Anita was concerned about.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said be careful,” Anita repeated.
“Of what?”
“Of this man.”
I grunted. “Greeks bearing gifts? Something like that?”
“Be serious, Jack, and listen to me. Are you listening to me?”
I glanced quickly across at Anita. When I saw the set of her jaw, I knew there was only one possible answer to her question.
“Yes, Anita. I’m listening to you.”
“I am only going to say this once.”
“Okay.”
“People who live in the darkness are very seductive to you, Jack. So whatever you think you’re doing with this man, be very, very careful.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Anita, I not doing anything with him.”
“You’re about to take a huge chance here. I can feel it. You’re walking straight into something horrible, and you don’t even have the sense to be afraid.”
I didn’t reply.
It was a gorgeous night, quiet and very dark. The road was a divided four-lane arched here and there by concrete pedestrian bridges with a rank of tall aluminum streetlights marching down the grassy divider in the middle. The streetlights glowed a sulfurous yellow and the water vapor hanging in the air caught the butter-colored radiance and shaped it into luminous globes. It made me think of a line of huge yellow snow cones impaled on stainless steel sticks.
We drove in silence for a while and it was a few minutes before I realized Anita had slipped off to sleep, her head tilted against the back of the seat with her face turned away from me. I watched jack-o’-lantern houses drifting past the windows of our Suzuki, their waxy lights flicking through tiny openings. I smiled as a Buddhist temple loomed up briefly out of a grove of rubber trees, its fanciful, brightly painted towers sparkling fiercely, even in the darkness.
Moving into the left lane I passed a slow-moving Isuzu pickup. It had been converted into a primitive bus with rough wooden benches rigged down both sides of the bed, but that night it was empty. The stillness of the night in Thailand is always an illusion. It is never really empty. There is always something moving out there in the darkness: a car, a bus, a motorbike, a truck. Once I got myself lost near the airport in Bangkok very late at night, rounded a curve, and found myself face-to-face with an elephant somebody was riding right down the middle of the highway.
It took another half hour to get back to the hotel. Anita slept the whole way. I thought several times of waking her, maybe asking her again exactly what she was trying to tell me and what it was that I should do, but I didn’t.
I should have.
Later, looking back, I realized that if I had listened to Anita right then I might have had some kind of a chance to stop everything.
But, of course, I hadn’t listened to her, I hadn’t paid any attention to her at all. And after that, it was too late.
NINE
The next morning Anita and I had breakfast on the desk outside our cabin and then lounged around for a while reading yesterday’s newspapers from Bangkok. That had always been one of the charms of Phuket for me. You could read yesterday’s papers instead of today’s and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. Back in Bangkok I felt I had to be the informed man and every day I dutifully plowed through both of the local English-language newspapers and two or three international papers as well. In Phuket, I could never think of a single thing I really wanted to be informed
“Let’s drive over to Patong later, Jack. Want to?”
I was half dozing when Anita spoke. I didn’t respond immediately since I wasn’t absolutely sure I had heard her right. Had she really said she wanted to go to Patong?
Patong had once been a sleepy little fishing village on the west coast of Phuket, one that lay at the back of a deep bay with what had probably been one of the world’s most beautiful beaches. But now it was something else altogether. In less than a decade, the international glitterati, the famously beautiful, the notoriously stylish, and the just plain stinking rich may have seized the once drowsy tropical island of Phuket and made it their own, but they left Patong behind.
Patong had instead become ground zero for the hordes of package tourists shipped to Phuket by mass-market tour operators all over Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. The sleepy little fistfishing village was now mostly a jumble of travel agencies, cheesy souvenir shops, Indian tailors, all-night discos, and open-air girlie bars. Once Patong may have been the kind of gentle, palm-fringed South Seas paradise they wrote musicals about, but now it was just another nasty little hole.
“You want to go to Patong?” I asked. “Jesus, Anita, that place is a shit hole.”
“Don’t so snobby, Jack. It’s just a tourist town. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I hate tourists.”
“Oh, I see. Then, just out of interest, how do you think the Thais see you, white boy?”
That hurt. Boy, did that hurt.
The usual route from Cape Panwa followed the southern coast of the island for several miles and then abruptly swung inland and climbed through the rain forest in a series of steep switchbacks before descending again to the western beaches through another equally steep set of switchbacks. The road was slick from a light misting by a clutch of rain clouds still huddled over the center of the island and the traffic was light, but just as we crested the road’s highest point everything on the road in front of us abruptly stopped moving altogether.
We crept along for a half-mile, moving slowly through a double switchback, and then we saw the accident. A motorbike had gone down on a curve and the rider had skidded right into the path of a bus coming the other way. The mob of Taiwanese tourists from the bus was now huddled on the road’s shoulder snapping pictures of each other in front of the crumpled motorcycle. They were wearing Bermuda shorts and brightly colored golf hats and looked as if they thought the whole business might have been concocted just for their amusement.
The middle-aged Thai woman who had been riding the bike was sitting in the road just in front of where the tour bus had come to a halt. She had her legs stretched straight out in front of her and there was blood on her grease-streaked face. She held a grubby piece of cloth to the side of her head and stared off into the middle distance as one by one the Taiwanese stood in front of her and snapped pictures.
Anita shuddered and turned away. “Oh, Christ. I can’t look at that.”
“She seems to be okay. Probably more scared than hurt.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Jack.”
It was indeed, so I shut up and edged our jeep past the accident scene. Twenty minutes later we were rolling slowly through Patong searching for a parking place.
Since the whole village of Patong consists of essentially just two long streets, finding a place to park is pretty much a matter of cruising north along the ocean on Beach Road then turning around and coming back in the opposite direction on the parallel road that is about a hundred yards inland. It was barely past mid-day and we had no problem finding a spot almost immediately.
The west side of Beach Road is mercifully devoid of development and a broad concrete walkway runs along the sand for well over a mile. The beach itself isn’t all that great-the strip of sand is more khaki-colored than golden and a good deal of it is invisible under the ranks of canvas lounge chairs set out for rent by beachfront entrepreneurs-but the ocean is another matter altogether. Maybe, I grudgingly admitted to myself as we locked the
