Bangkok Noir

when he came back. Running at him from thirty yards away and leaping on him, her legs twined around his waist, as all the other passengers stared.

He thought, Don Muang? Do international flights still go through Don Muang? It sounded wrong, but he shrugged it off, along with his shirt and trousers, and padded toward the shower. The girls may be professionals, he thought, but they’re still Thai. It shows respect when you come to them clean.

The road was far too wide.

He came out of the narrow corridor that led from the apartment house’s single clanking elevator, extravagantly scented with cat piss, feeling light on his feet, decisive and clear-headed, as though he were back walking point in Nam. But as the door closed behind him, he saw the road and took a stumble that forced him to step forward or fall on his face. It was six lanes wide, the road, a Mekong River of lights, the demon-red of tail- lights, the hard diamond-yellow of headlights. He stood there for a second, loose-jointed and irresolute, as the narrow soi in front of the old shophouse thinned, shimmered and disappeared, giving way to the street he’d moved to.

He said, “Sukhumvit,” identifying it, and the kernel of unease in his chest softened at the name. His own voice reassured him. “Sukhumvit.” Where was he going? Yes, Jah. Jah worked at... Thai... Thai something. Thai Paradise?

Well, he knew where it was, even if the name eluded him. He stepped to the curb, one arm upraised, palm down, a gesture of long habit. A couple of taxis slowed, but he waved them by until he could flag a tuk-tuk, which almost ran over Wallace’s foot. The driver was a skinny, dark kid with a shadowy mustache and a long fall of black hair dipping over one eye. Wallace climbed in, sat back and said, “Golden Mile.”

The tuk-tuk vibrated as its little two-stroke engine chugged and popped, but it didn’t move. The boy’s eyes found Wallace’s in the mirror. “You say where?”

“Golden Mile, the Golden Mile,” Wallace said. He smiled so his impatience wouldn’t show but got no smile in return.

“Hotel?” the boy asked.

“No, no, no. Golden Mile. Bars. New Petchburi Road.”

“Okay,” the boy said with a nod. “Golden Mile. Petchburi.”

“Thai Heaven,” Wallace said as the cab pulled out.

Jah worked at Thai Heaven.

“Okay, boss,” the boy said, his eyes on the traffic behind. “Golden Mile.”

He sat back and closed his eyes. The exhaust was perfume, the chuk-chuk of the engine, music. Oh, how he had fallen in love with Bangkok on his first R&R, after six months of duty, his feet rotting with the damp, whole colonies of exotic parasites claiming his intestines, his soul knotted with death. The girls in the villages they defended, sometimes by burning them, looked at Wallace and the others in his platoon with terror and revulsion, which the Americans occasionally earned. Three times, men he knew well had turned bestial on the floor of some thatched shack, impatiently taking turns on a girl barely out of childhood. Leaving behind, suddenly tiny on the floor, the crushed and sobbing remnant of a human being, and once even less than that.

And then, after a copter out and a few hours in a plane, he was here, in the city of joy. Smiles everywhere, food everywhere, everything cheap and easy, and girls who loved him. Girls like nutmeg, girls like cinnamon, girls who blended into a single smile, a single “no problem” as he took them, in threes and fours at first, like a starving man sweeping a whole table full of food to himself, and then, as faces and names emerged, one by one. Jah, Noi, Lek, Tuum. Sometimes staying with one of them for days on end. Falling asleep beside her on clean sheets in a cool room. Warm breath on his chest. Safe.

Hansum man, Jah called him. Teerak, Jah called him, Thai for sweetheart. Wallet, Jah called him, and he thought it was her joke until he realized that Thais couldn’t pronounce a sibilant at the end of a word, and she thought she was saying his name, the same way she said “Santa Claut.” He took to calling himself Wallet, appreciating the name’s appropriateness even if Jah didn’t understand it. He was lean and young and handsome, and the way Jah eyed the other girls when they were together made him think of someone driving into the old neighborhood at the wheel of a sports car.

The first night that she stayed with him, just as he’d been about to drop off, she’d raised herself onto one elbow, the bedside lamp creating a circle of reflected light on the smooth skin of her shoulder, and said: “This room. How much?”

He’d told her. Her eyes had gone round and her mouth had dropped open, and she’d emitted a sound like a puff of steam, and then she was up and pulling on her clothes, her shoulders high and rigid with determination. A moment later, the door closed behind her.

He thought, I didn’t pay her. For a moment he panicked, thinking she might have taken the money from his pocket, but it was right there. He was refolding his pants when the phone rang and the desk clerk said, “Mr. Palmer? The young lady has renegotiated your room rate. You’ve been given a discount of thirty percent.” And then she’d knocked on the door, and she had whipped her T-shirt over her head and was hitting him on the back with it before he closed the door behind her.

She’d cried at the airport.

She’s going to be so happy, he thought. I’ll walk into Thai Heaven and she’ll scream, “Hansum man!” and abandon whoever she was sitting with and run across the club to him. With that smile, brighter than Liberty’s torch...

“Okay,” the driver said. “Golden Mile.”

The tuk-tuk stopped. Wallace had his hand in his pocket when the boy said, “One hundred twenty baht.”

“One hundred twenty?” Wallace sat there, a wad of money in his hand. “Twenty, twenty baht.”

“One-twenty,” the boy said. “Twenty baht, one hundred year ago, maybe.”

“Forty,” Wallace snapped. “That’s it.” He dropped two twenties over the back of the seat, feeling the rudeness of the gesture, and climbed down onto the pavement, tuning out the boy’s yells. A narrow street, nowhere near as wide as New Petchburi. A couple of cars, each with a wheel up on the sidewalk, were almost too close together to allow him to pass, but he turned sideways to squeeze through and heard the tuk-tuk putter away, the boy still shouting angrily.

Once up on the sidewalk, he stopped, looking up.

It was a hotel. He was in front of a hotel. Huge letters on the side of the building said “ROYAL SUITES.” Up and down the street were business buildings, some new, some old. Nothing he recognized.

A uniformed doorman came through the revolving door, eyebrows lifted in a question, and Wallace crossed the gritty red carpet laid down in front of the door. The man glanced at him and said, “Sir?” No more than mild politeness.

Wallace said, “The Golden Mile?”

The doorman lifted a hand, palm up, and brought it shoulder high to indicate the hotel behind him.

“Hotel,” he said. “Hotel is owned by Golden Mile.”

Wallace was already shaking his head. “No, no. No, not a hotel. The Golden Mile. Bars, restaurants...”

He ran out of words. “Bars.”

Backing toward the door, the doorman said, “Sorry, sorry. Don’t know. Maybe...” He pointed across the street and to his left, in the general direction of New Petchburi Road, gleaming a long, dark block away. The street the hotel was on was a soi, relatively narrow, with the hotel sprouting from a row of shorter, darker structures, and here and there a shrubbed chain-link fence. “Over there, maybe. Other side.”

“No,” Wallace said, but he was already turning, already forgetting the doorman. “It’s this side. I’m sure it’s this side.”

Although there was no oncoming traffic, he crossed the soi at an angle, as though carried by the same current that would bear the cars along. Once across, he lowered his head and struck out at a brisk walk with the lights of New Petchburi behind him, half-certain that in a hundred yards or so, there would be light and noise and the sound of English.

But there wasn’t. Thinking about Jah, he passed a narrow cross-street, almost turning into it, but it was too