Harry is talking to the driver.
“What’s the problem?” My speech is slurred.
“He wants to know what hotel we’re going to. I told him the Marriott, right?”
“Right.”
Harry reconfirms it with the driver as the car moves to the left onto what appears to be an off-ramp. I’m in that middle place where the brain is debating whether to sample another slice of death or wake up. The car takes a broad sweeping turn to the right. We cross over the top of the main highway and onto another road. It is lined with palm groves and low brush. There are several large buildings that look like factories off in the distance to the right.
Behind us the landscape erupts in occasional sharp jutting hillsides, an indication that maybe this is volcano country. Ahead of us the lay of the land is low and flat for as far as I can see, and the sky has that kind of ethereal edge to it that makes me wonder if it might be kissing the sea. If I had to guess, I would say we are moving toward water, a shoreline somewhere off in the distance.
“How much longer?” I ask.
“He says maybe ten minutes,” says Harry.
I look at my watch. At the airport I had changed the time to Bangkok time. It’s just after one in the afternoon. I decide to rouse myself so that I can move enough at least to get to the room.
“What time is it back home?” says Harry.
“I don’t have the slightest,” I tell him. My leaden brain is not up to those kinds of calculations, not at the moment anyway. Joselyn is sprawled across the backseat, her head on my lap. She is out cold. I am wondering if I can wake her or if we’re going to have to roll her inside with the luggage.
Within minutes the traffic begins to thicken. Occasional small motorcycles, some of them spouting sidecars mounted with smoking braziers, begin to propagate along the sides of the road. Soon there is a growing herd of two- and three-wheeled traffic. Like a line of motorized wildebeest they hug the edges of the road with the riders bent over the handlebars as the cars and trucks speed past them using the main traffic lanes. As we draw closer to civilization I notice that some of the bikes are carrying four and five passengers, a few of them with small children clutching the handlebars and standing up front between their momma’s knees. None of them are wearing helmets. It looks like the motorbike equivalent of the family minivan.
Doing sixty miles an hour you’d have trouble slipping a playing card between the grip on the handlebars on some of the bikes and the side of our car. How our driver is missing them is a mystery.
“Damn!” says Harry. “This could be an ambulance chaser’s paradise.”
“Maybe they don’t get that much for an arm or a leg off over here,” I tell him.
“You think?” says Harry.
“Not everybody has a jackpot tort system like ours. Why do you think all of our manufacturing jobs moved over here twenty years ago?”
“I figured that was because of the thirty-cent-a-day minimum wage.”
“That too,” I tell him.
“Pretty soon I suppose the doctors will figure out a way to do intercontinental robotic surgery. Then we won’t be able to reach them anymore. And the way Washington wants to tax the rich, they’ll all be picking up and moving over here. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left to sue. So why should we bother going home?” says Harry.
“I don’t know. You got me.”
We pass under a high gold arch that spans the road. A short distance farther on, the road swings to the left. Here there are multiple lanes in each direction separated by a wide grass-covered median strip. We travel on this road for a few miles, moving at high speed. There are commercial buildings and businesses on both sides of the road, and traffic is starting to get heavy. It looks as if we’re getting close to the center of town.
We come to a stoplight. The driver maneuvers into the far right lane, getting ready to cross traffic and make a turn. The light turns green; we go a couple of blocks and find ourselves stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sidewalks here are crowded with pedestrians, vendors selling fruit, fish, chicken, anything you can eat from the sidecars of parked bikes. Now the slower two-wheel motorbikes get the upper hand as they stream between the stopped cars. They jump to the front of the line at each stoplight.
“How much longer?” says Harry.
“Not far. Maybe ten minute.”
“That’s what you said a half hour ago,” says Harry.
“You give tip?” says the driver.
“I give tip if we get there today,” says Harry.
The driver maneuvers into the left lane and a few feet farther up he turns into a narrow alley and starts to move. We twist through a maze of backstreets, dodging kids and dogs, Asian women with pushcarts selling food, and potbellied white men in tank tops and T-shirts hanging out in the beer bars, some of them tattooed like scrimshaw.
A few more minutes and two more turns and we find ourselves on a broad four-lane one-way street with shops and businesses on both sides. Here the traffic is heavy once more. There are vendors all along the street and beer bars on every corner. “Seccon Road,” says the driver. “Marriott.” He gestures with his head up the street.
Harry turns to glance at me from the front seat. I’m looking out the window to see if I can catch any street numbers. According to the note, the office for “Waters of Death” is somewhere along Second Road.
“I don’t see any numbers,” I tell him.
“Don’t worry about it. We can check with the front desk when we get to the hotel. Show them the address. I’m sure they can tell us where it is,” says Harry. “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna get some sleep before I go anywhere.”
I look at my watch. “It’s a quarter to two. Hope to hell our rooms are ready.”
“They better be,” says Harry. “Otherwise I’m gonna crawl over the counter and kill the clerk.”
Chapter Fifteen
Liquida sat in a chair near the window of his room on the third story of the small hotel and listened to the prattle of motorbike engines, watching the traffic as it streamed by on Second Road.
He had arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, three days ago and had been planted in the city of Pattaya ever since.
He settled into the hotel because of its location. For a few extra Thai baht, he was able to get a room with a good view of the building across the street. It was the place where the lockbox was located.
The old charm of the block-long cream-colored colonial facade with its small curved balconies and masonry balustrades had become buried behind a vast picket of painted metal business signs. These jutted out over the sidewalk in such a bewildering array of sizes, colors, and shapes that it was almost impossible to focus on any single message. A thick tangled vine of black wires and cables meandered across the front of the building until the messy snarl reached over the sidewalk and snared the wooden power poles along the street out in front. The building sported corrugated metal add-ons on the front and the roof, where the penthouse looked like a flattened- out army Quonset hut.
At ground level the building housed small retail shops, restaurants, and a grab bag of other businesses, some of them open air, others sealed behind the comfort of air-conditioned walls. On the sidewalk out near the curb, street vendors reduced the normally broad walkway to a narrow path, setting up business under canvas awnings or sheets of plastic to peddle their wares.
Through all of this confusion, Liquida’s attention was riveted on a single green-painted wooden door. It was situated across the street about half a block south of the window in his room.
The green door was located between a Pakistani tailor shop and a small pharmacy. It seemed almost invisible set against the harried sea of commerce taking place on the sidewalk in front of it.
But every once in a while someone would either come or go, entering or leaving the building through the green wooden door. Whenever they did, Liquida would use his field glasses to study them closely. He looked at their faces to see if they were Asian or if they looked Caucasian, what the Thais called farang — foreigners. If they were
