Bangkok Burn Read online

  The Sauna in Heaven

  12 May 2010 Bangkok 2 pm

  “I’d like you to help me with something....” He paused and waited until I had lowered myself into the still steaming, hot water.

  I wondered if he was clairvoyant. Was I just an open book to him? I had come to tell him I wanted out of the family business. By the look in his eyes, I could tell he knew why I had come, and was preempting the discussion.

  “Yes, Khun Por.” He insists I call him, Father, Khun Por, even though he is not my natural father. Everyone else calls him Jor Por Pak Nam, literally Godfather of The River’s Mouth. Unless you’re Thai, that won’t mean much to you. And that’s how it is meant to be; it’s better you don’t know. I eased myself onto the narrow shelf in the pool, the heat vicious. A tingling sensation covered the sunken part of my body as veins expanded and blood rushed.

  I waited. This wasn’t a request. We both knew that. Whatever he asked me to do; whatever, I would do. It’s a way of life. People in the west - you - you don’t understand this. Perhaps in Sicily. But blind obedience and loyalty, it’s mainly an Asian thing. The Thai word for it, Griengjai, has no equivalent in the English language. You don’t even have a word to describe this cultural trait. But it is what holds us together: our cultural glue. Quitting the family business would have to wait.

  “I need you to go see Big Tiger. I owe him a favor, and he needs…” He smiled, and I knew what was coming next: Dek Farang, Foreigner Kid in English. I’m hardly a kid, but I’ve been called Dek Farang by the family for as long as I can remember. Except Mother, she’s called me Chance since the day she gave me that name, on my fifteenth birthday.

  Dek Farang, coming from Por, is a term of endearment, a bookmark in time to when he first laid that name on me forty-one years ago. On the street, everyone else calls me Khun ‘Oh’, a Thai nickname, shortened from Ohgaat, which translates as Mr. Chance. In business I use an entirely different name. Complicated? Sure.

  We were in a suite in ‘Heaven’ - a high-priced sauna and massage joint on Ratchada - a safe place for us to meet in private. My image as a respectable businessman is something we both want to protect. The suite looked like Ikea meets Bali in the French Revolution. Minimalist sofas, Louis XIV chairs in white and gold, mixed with slate gray post-modernist wall art, the baths of hot and cold water, narrow and long. Not my taste, but it was private, and we weren’t there for the decor.

  Bank and Red waited outside the door. His “boys”. You will never stop at this floor and if you called them boys, you’d either end up dead or in hospital for a very long time. Bank is at least sixty-five; Red, maybe a bit younger, but these are two guys whose wrong side you never want to be on. There’s a story about a Farang, who insulted Por in Patpong one night. This was back in the early sixties. Bank and Red, then in their mid-teens, waited a week to let things settle down. Then they beat the guy a breath short of death in the middle of Patpong Road. He was in hospital for four months before he could eat anything larger than what fits down a straw. The day he came out, they beat him again on the steps of the hospital. I heard it went on for a year. Somehow, the police never found out who was doing the beating.

  I waited to see if he’d give me any more instructions about seeing Big Tiger. It would be impolite of me to speak first.

  Por let his legs float up and waved his arms slowly outward to rest them on the side of the pool. His legs skinny and white, contrasting with the teak color of his arms and face. I watched as the ripple in the flat pool spread towards me, bracing myself for the pain. He turned and looked at me. The brow on his square Chinese Thai face furrowed with thought, and a little smirk, come frown, on his mouth. His lips hardly moved when he spoke.

  “I spoke to your uncle last week. He mentioned you. He hasn’t seen you for a while.”

  No more talk about Big Tiger then, just an admonishment that I hadn’t been to see Uncle Mike.

  “I’ve been busy, Por.”

  “Too busy to go and see your uncle?” An eyebrow raised, a question mark in his large doleful weepy eyes.

  “No, Por. I’ll go see Uncle Mike.” The white eyebrow raised a fraction higher.

  “This week, I promise.”

  He smiled. I smiled back. It’d cost me a day to fly to Phuket to see Uncle Mike. With having to see Big Tiger, what I had on at the office, and Bangkok’s streets heating up, this was going to be a busy week.

  “Ai yah, this water is too hot,” Por said, his Chinese roots showing. He started to slowly lever himself upright. I got up quickly before him and took him by the upper arm, just in case he slipped getting out. He shuffled slightly, a bit wobbly, till he got his bearings. Turning to me, his eyes became deadly serious, hard. He grasped my forearm with a thin bony hand.

  “You be careful with Big Tiger. He’s up to something.” He smiled and squeezed my arm. Chat over. I gave him a deep wai. He waied me back, ruffled my hair, and turned towards the master bedroom. I headed for the shower in the guest room.

  Freshly showered and wearing one of my best Armani knock-offs, I pressed the button for the elevator and had a quiet word with Bank and Red to look out for the old man. His parting words had me worried and had been in my mind while I was getting dressed. Red’s eyes slid to the woman sitting on the fake Louis XIV chair opposite the elevator.

  Por’s newest girlfriend. She was waiting for me to pay her some attention. I didn’t. Half my age, she pouted as she stood with a flounce and a shake of her million-Baht, made-in-Seoul tits. The Koreans do good tits. I looked at her. She paused a second in a defiance, which melted as she dropped her eyes, and gave me a wai. Respect has to be earned from the inside out. It’s just the way we are.

  She brushed past me, the hall wide enough to drive a bus down. Bank opened the door to the suite for her, and with a last glance, she gave me her back like it was a victory. Bank chuckled softly at the look I had received and sat down on the chair she had warmed in her wait. He opened up his Thai Rath newspaper and licked a thumb. Por would be busy for at least a couple of hours.

  The elevator pinged, and Red held the door open as I walked into its red velvet lined interior. So elegant, the designer should be garroted with the gold brocade tassels. I turned and smiled at Red as the doors began to close. I looked at my watch. 3:30 pm.

  The blast knocked me off my feet, and life went into slow motion. I was punched into the rear of the elevator and dropped like a sack of lead to the floor.

  I came round to the sound of the elevator door pinging each time it bumped against Red’s body. I sat up, legs straight out in front of me, a high-pitched ringing in my ears. Over Red’s dead body, I could see to the far wall of the suite. The whole wall had been blown out. Three meters away, her eyes wide open and staring at me, Por’s girlfriend.

  It took me a moment to realize I couldn’t see her body because it wasn’t attached to her head. I wiggled my toes and fingers. Everything still there or at least it felt like that. One hand on the wall of the elevator, I struggled to my feet, lurching into what remained of the hallway. My legs, no, all of me shaky, I was shaking all over.

  Further up the hall, Bank lay face down, a scarlet blood pool around him. On the white marble floor, it was turning to a faint rose color. Water from the sprinklers rained down, mingling with the blood. Dizzy, disoriented, high-pitched ringing in my ears, I walked over the debris of the hallway, into the suite. The wall and door of the master bedroom were missing. I stumbled on the slippery rubble beneath my feet.

  The lounge and pool area ripped apart, small fires dotted the room. The water from the pools sloshed around my feet. I saw rubble move, far right corner of the room. I tore at the brick, shredded furniture, and mattress on the floor in the corner. Por was underneath. Blood poured from his nose, ears, and t
he smashed remains of his right leg. He tried to sit up. I knelt beside him. Taking my belt off, I got it around his right thigh, pulling it as tight as I could, till he screamed. Getting my arms underneath his armpits, I lifted him until I could put him over my shoulder.

  Staggering, my knees still wobbly, I turned. Chai, my driver and bodyguard stood in the doorway. He was saying something, but I couldn’t make out what. He came over to me, pointing at his left eye, and took Por onto his shoulder. I reached up feeling my eye and my hand came away covered in blood. I could feel bits of something stuck in my forehead and cheeks. I pointed to the hall.

  We went back into hall and, bending down, I grabbed Red’s legs and pulled him out of the doorway of the elevator. As I straightened up, everything went sideways.

  Lucky Number Nine

  12 May 2010 Bangkok 9 pm

  “It’s a nine, a nine for sure,” Aunt Malee was saying, looking down at me. She saw my eyes open and smiled, a heavily jeweled finger pointing somewhere on my chest. I raised my eyes to see Dr. Tom, our family doctor. He raised his eyebrows, and then a mirror angled so I could see my chest. The mirror wobbled, I shook my head. The angle changed, and there, halfway between my right nipple and my collarbone, was a perfect, dark purple circle, almost black, and embossed in red tinged white, the number 9.

  “The elevator button,” said Dr. Tom, shrugging his shoulders. Constructing magical formulas of lottery numbers is a national pastime, a habit as addictive as smack that kicks in twice a month in The Kingdom. Cambridge educated doctors aren’t immune.

  “He’s awake,” Aunt Malee announced to the rest of Por’s wives sitting on the sofa behind her. I could barely see out of my right eye and nothing out of my left. But I knew they were all there. I am the son that none of them have produced. Por has four minor wives, Mia Noi, and twelve daughters. Four, the Mia Noi limit, set by Mother: Joom, his Mia Luang, Major Wife. Joom wasn’t in the room.

  “Khun Por and Mother?”

  “Mother is with Por. She said she’ll come and see you later. Por is in the room next to yours. He’s in a coma, and he’s lost his leg, but he is still alive,” Aunt Malee, Jasmine, said. “Now you must rest. You have been badly wounded. Are you hungry?”

  I shook my head slightly.

  She turned, unblocking my view of the other aunties sitting on the sofa, cards on the table in front of them. Ever since Casino Royale, the movie, came out, their game was Texas Hold ‘Em, and they drank vodka Martinis. Aunt Malee reached over and fished a black elevator button from the white plastic kidney-shaped bowl on the side table next to the bed. Doctors and car mechanics have a lot of the same habits. They both start by asking you what your problem is. They both rip you off. And they both leave parts replaced in the boot of a car or a kidney-shaped dish as assurance of work done.

  The muted sound of a girl sobbing in a Thai soap opera laid a pattern for the general hubbub of activity in the room. Everything is a social occasion in Thailand: birth, death and everything in between. I was in a big room and it was filled with people. Hospital rules don’t apply when money, the butt of a gun, and four angry Aunties are thrown into the equation.

  “I see your five and raise you ten,” Auntie Ning said to Aunt Su. Looking at me from the sofa, she smiled and said casually, as if asking what I’d watched on TV the night before, “Nong Oh, did you see anything when you were, um, you know, on the other side?”

  The volume dropped. I could practically hear the sobbing girl’s TV tears hit the ground in the hushed expectation.

  “No, I can’t remember anything, and no one gave me any lottery ticket numbers.”

  The suspended breathing exhaled with a whoosh.

  “But this morning I dreamed about an elephant.”

  A sharp intake of collective breath, the volume went back up. I just couldn’t resist it. The girl sobbing on the TV forgotten, cards by mutual unspoken agreement folded, the aunts turned to compiling.

  Counting off in reverse order the number of sutures I had, 120; the number on the door, 24; and how many pieces of glass, metal, and brick Dr. Tom had taken out of me, 14; then, of course, the piece de resistance, the 9, embossed on my chest … and an elephant in a dream.

  These numbers, turned upside down, added together, subtracted and manipulated with seemingly logical extensions that would have floored Einstein, were then compiled as lottery numbers and jotted down on napkins with jeweled Mont Blancs. The cell phones came out, lottery number consultants, Monks and Mor Doo’s, Fortune Tellers, on speed dial.

  Auntie Dao, Star, wife number two, her fifties bouffant hair-do shimmering with glitter, got up from the sofa with a heave, and rocked her way over to the bed. She reached across and took the elevator button from Aunt Malee, then looked at it as if inspecting a flawed diamond.

  “You know it might not be 9; it might be 6,” she rasped from her smoker’s throat. A collective gasp at the perception. Six is “hok” in Thai, but in a slightly different tone also means fall, as in fall down, with connotations of death or bad luck.

  “No. I had a chat with the police forensics team. It was definitely a nine.” Doctors and teachers are infallible in Thailand. Everything they say is the truth. In Dr. Tom’s case, I had no doubt that he had called the forensics team. After all it wasn’t every day that someone standing five meters from a bomb, survived and, more importantly, had a 9 embossed on their chest. I had just become an urban legend. What amulets I wore on my neck, such information to be gained by bribing hospital staff, had increased tenfold in value.

  Dr. Tom put a hand up to the beeping IV machine and fiddled with a knob. “Sleep now. We’ll talk later.”

  The Aunts chatter faded to the beat of the girl still sobbing on the TV. At least sixty percent of Thai soap opera is spent sobbing. Not the watchers, the actresses. There was a reason for that, but I fell asleep before I could remember what it was.

  ***

  I was born in Goa, the son of two heroin-smuggling hippies from Boston, John and Barbara’s inconvenient accident of free love. They came to Bangkok on the trail of the Double UO with me in tow. The Vietnam War was going full blast, and smack was the drug of choice of the hip set. A lot of people made a fortune smuggling smack. John and Barb got dead, shot-gunned on the stern of a yacht. Por had bought the yacht for them in Singapore, their Valhalla craft off a beach at Boracay Island, an early template for drug deals gone bad. I have the news clipping. It’s on the Internet, an old forgotten article in an Asian Boating magazine, a couple of druggie’s five minutes of fame, all used up.

  Their last name was Collins. Mine is Harper. Samuel C. Harper. It was a name Por got off a clothing store in New York. He took me there to get some suits made. I get a good discount. I’m glad he changed my name. It saved me the job. There was no fucking way I was going to go through life as Sunrise Krishna Collins. But Por had bigger reasons than my problems with my love-child name. The Germans who’d put the hit on my parents, and ripped off Por for a couple of million, were looking for me.

  I became Samuel C. Harper, Por became my father, and when the time was right, the Germans became dead.

  I woke up thirsty, weird dreams taking me back to my childhood, my mouth feeling like the bottom of a bird’s cage. The IV machine cast a green electronic light over the now darkened, vacated, and quiet room. I took a drink from the glass of water waiting on the side-table, and noticed the 9 button was missing. The aunts would have had it cut up by now: five ways. Mother would get the largest piece and they’d split the rest.

  A huddled shape on the sofa snored, the glint of the distinctive curve of an AK-47 magazine cuddled in his arms. His back to me, I couldn’t make out who it was - one of the “boys”. In the nurse light of the hallway, Chai was sitting in front of the door, his back to me, his head held high.

  “Chai,” I said softly. I didn’t want to startle the sleeping shape with the AK. Chai turned his left ear toward me.

  “Help me up.”

  Chai got up from his sentry po
sition and walked over to me without making a sound. His eyes held a question, and he hesitated. Dr. Tom or Mother had left orders.

  “I’m going to see Khun Por.” It wasn’t a request.

  He dropped the steel bar on the bed. I got my legs over the side. Everything hurt. Chai wrapped an arm around me and helped me onto my feet. Taking the wheeled IV drip stand with me, we shuffled to the door. Chai paused, holding me steady, he then let go of me. I wobbled but I had the drip stand for support. He took out his Uzi, and opening the door, gave the hallway a quick scan. He turned and nodded to me, holding the door open. I had a flashback to Red. It wasn’t pleasant.

  Shuffling forward, the bright light of the corridor bit into my eyes. I had a serious headache. I stood, wobbling. Chai took my arm in his left hand, his right held the Uzi pointing down the corridor. Chai’s a ‘shoot first, ask questions when everyone’s dead’ kind of guy: my kind of bodyguard. He parked me by the door, tapped the cell phone on his belt, and whispered into a mouthpiece.

  “Chance has come to see Por.”