LONTAR issue #2 (11 page)

*

She woke to the sound of water. Quyên opened her eyes and found herself lying in the shallows on the bank of the Mekong. The sun was high in the sky and the basil leaves were spread around her in the water, dancing on the surface like lily pads.
 

"Bà noi!" she shouted, not caring who heard her. She stood up and the water dripped from her like unshed tears. In the distance she thought she heard the sound of trumpeting.
 

 
Quyên ran home.

The Apartment

John Burdett

John Burdett (UK/Thailand) practiced law for 14 years in London and Hong Kong until he was able to retire to write full time. He is the author of a number of books, including the bestselling supernatural crime series about Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep:
Bangkok 8
,
Bangkok Tattoo
,
Bangkok Haunts
,
The Godfather of Kathmandu
, and
Vulture Peak
.

"You really don't want to have sex with me today? You paid for it, you know," Salee said, leading her customer down the hallway to the front door.

The customer's eyes jiggled in their sockets and sweat beaded on his forehead, causing her to feel sorry for him all over again. It was mainly her fault he hadn't been able to get a hard-on.
 

Now her cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her silk kimono. She fished it out, read the message in Thai script:
He's trying to kill me
, slipped the phone back into her pocket. She gave the little bald guy one of her best smiles. Focus was everything.

"How about we do it this way. I give you a credit, then when you want to cash it in, you call me to make an appointment?"

He shook his head. "You really are something else," was all he could say. Salee put her palms together and raised them to her lips in a
wai,
which had such an effect in New York. She'd once stopped a bull cop in his tracks with it after he'd pulled her over, thinking she was Black. She used the
wai
strategically after that. She reached out to touch the customer's cheek. "Relax, poor little rabbit. Your wife will never find you here."

The cell phone vibrated again. She didn't want to be unprofessional, but she didn't want Somchai to kill Aunt Mimi, either, so she checked the tiny window and read the tall, curling characters in a flash:
He sent assassins an hour ago. I'm on the run
. Well, if you looked on the bright side, that meant Mimi was alive and free, didn't it?
 

They'd reached the great door of the great apartment, which prompted a comment they all made: "You really own this place? You make that much from what you do?"

"Let's say I don't pay rent," Salee said, "and soon, very soon, it will all be mine. You must come to the house-warming."

When she opened the door for him he lingered long enough to say: "You're right about one thing, no one's ever going to catch me here. Not with that pimp you've got.
Sheesh
."
 

*

As soon she had closed the door she leaned against it to press the green button on the phone. Now Mimi's cell was ringing somewhere in Thailand. Her aunt didn't bother with a
hello
, but launched straight into her breathless story. With Mimi jabbering into her ear in the Isaan dialect, Salee walked slowly back down the long corridor with its pastel shades, the architrave sensitively picked out in a slightly darker lilac than the walls, turned left for the stainless steel kitchen with the stainless steel island where, still listening, she fixed herself a chrysanthemum tea with her spare hand. The gist was simple enough: Three weeks ago her former lover had returned to Bangkok for a few days and got thrown into jail, probably for life, on a drugs violation. That's karma for you. Then somehow Somchai had found out that it was Aunt Mimi who had told the cops where to find a couple of bags of heroin he kept under the floor of his Bangkok flat. From prison he'd sent thugs to kill her: "So I have to bolt in the middle of a shower, no time to dry my body. Next thing, I'm legging it down the soi in a wet tee shirt, no bra. How embarrassing is that?"
 

Salee knew what she was getting at. Aunt Mimi had the biggest tits of any woman in the whole vast extended family and couldn't stop drawing attention to them, not even at a time like this.

"So where are you now?" Salee said.

"I'm at Don Muang. I'm getting the first plane, wherever it goes." Don Muang was the domestic airport.
 

"You don't have your passport?"

"I grabbed it. It was that or the bra. But the international airport is too obvious. You know how thorough he is when he wants to snuff someone." Mimi broke off to speak in desperate tones to a clerk in Standard Thai. "Okay," Mimi said, back in the Isaan dialect, "I've got a flight to Surin. I just bribed the clerk. They're letting me on right now. I'll call you."

*

Salee sipped her tea. Spiritually speaking, it was obvious where the problem originated: she loved the apartment too much. But she'd have to redeem the
samskara
in another lifetime, right now she couldn't do without the thirteen bedroom mansion flat and she'd told Achan Po as much. Achan Po was her spiritual guide whose main qualification was that he was her great-great-great grandfather—in Isaan people took their lineage seriously, kept up with the ancestors—and the Achan had always looked after her. It didn't bother her at all that he had been thrown out of the Sangha—the brotherhood of monks—a hundred years ago, for claiming he was the reincarnation of Daku Angulimala, an early Buddhist saint who had seen the light only after murdering 999 people and cutting off their fingers. After disrobing, Achan Po had started his own sect, which differed from conventional Buddhism in quite a few ways: the Sangha had petitioned the government to ban it, so it had had to go underground, where it remained and grew after his death. One thing the Sangha wanted to make clear: this sect, whatever it was, was not Buddhism.

Every night for a week she'd contacted the Other Side and explained to Achan Po in her local dialect that she had to have the apartment, so Achan Po had to fix it for her, seeing as she had no idea how to get hold of that kind of dough. Selling sex for money sure wouldn't cut it; anyway, it was registered in the name of her former lover and that was the first hitch she needed to deal with. Then:
chokdee
: she'd met Bethany Winsgrove Washington, her lawyer for a minor automobile violation—something about not having insurance for Somchai's late model navy Benz with tinted windows; a gangster's ride in both hemispheres. Bethany Winsgrove Washington kind of fell in love with her because she was almost as cute for American women as she was for American men, and after she'd given her a couple of massages in return for getting her off the charge, and Bethany had agreed to share some of her clients, she'd started hinting at a little idea she had for stealing the apartment. Well, not really
stealing
. She'd made sacrifices, risked a lot of jail time, she deserved the apartment.

Bethany Winsgrove Washington encouraged friends to call her BW for short, and, if Salee was not mistaken, that was her this very minute, ringing on her cell phone.

"You're okay?" BW wanted to know, referring to the customer.
 

"Of course. He was no trouble."

Salee let a beat pass because she didn't want to talk about customers, she wanted to talk about the apartment, but she waited for Achan Po to put the idea into Bethany's head. BW hadn't called to talk about the apartment, though.
 

"I've got another one for you."

"When for?"

"This afternoon. Met him at the courthouse this morning. He came onto me and I deflected to you. A white collar con artist. Better take the money up front, but he has dough, speaks softly, no history of violence. Damn good looking, too. I was almost tempted myself. I told him you did Thai massage, he got the picture." Salee tapped the counter. "So, are you free?"

"I'm tired."

"Oh, okay. The last one wear you out?"

"No, he didn't even screw me, I psyched him out of it. I've been feeling lazy all morning. Maybe I'll go for a walk in the park."

"He didn't? I thought he was, like, totally gaga?"

"He is but I raised his level of consciousness when I gave him the massage and he couldn't get an erection because I dragged all the
chi
out of his balls up into his heart chakra. It won't last though. In about half an hour, the
chi
will drain back to his crotch and he'll be wondering why he didn't screw me when he had the chance." Salee sipped her tea between sentences.

Bethany sighed. "I don't know if I believe the stuff you tell me. It's like you come from a different planet or something. Anyway, you've certainly changed my life. I can't believe you talked me into all this—without even talking. Are all Thai women like that?"

"Sure," Salee said. "We don't have feminism, so we have to use black magic." She wanted to say:
Can we talk about the damned apartment now?
but restrained herself and directed her plea to Achan Po.

BW's voice dropped an octave and lost a lot of decibels when she said: "About, ah, our thing. I've checked the law. I don't know how you worked it out, but I can't see a damn thing wrong with it."

"Achan Po told me how to do it. I made merit by giving him two hundred boiled eggs—not here, in my village, I sent the money to my kid sister and told her what to pray for. Then it came to me when I was sitting on a bench in the park."

"So the great Achan Po's on our side? I'm glad to hear it. What I wanted to say, we need that inventory. How long since the decorators were in?"

"About a month."

"And you have a list of all the things they did? Materials, man hours, all that?"

"I have it somewhere, I think it's in some big brochure with glossy pictures, like a file that folds out and you're looking at the inside of some palace, but there was a list as well. I don't read English so good."

"Right. So, I'm gonna come round tonight with some docs for you to sign. It's to start your own corporation—an up-market interior design and decoration company, with you as chairperson and majority shareholder. You need a second shareholder—a one-man band always looks dodgy."

"Please will you be my partner?"

"For Christ's sake, Salee, I'm a lawyer."

"But you get me such great customers, I thought, you know, we're maybe soul mates from a previous lifetime—I guess you don't feel the same way? That's okay. I'll find someone."

"Warmth? You're selling me warmth, humanity, friendship, kindness, bonding, serenity, a shoulder to cry on, someone I can always count on
in New York?
—that's the way you play your customers, isn't it? Talk about
alien
."

"I'm just me. I don't know how to be anyone else."

"We'll talk tonight," BW said, and closed the phone.

*

Salee let her mind relax until it was not contaminated by a single egoic impulse—except her lust for the apartment. Could she count on Bethany or not? It was worrying that the attorney did not seem even slightly scared or anxious. That was probably because the last time Salee had massaged her she had drawn the attorney's assemblage point up in the air above her head and left it there like a halo. That was a good temporary fix—a person felt no fear in that condition—but there was risk of a crash before the court case. Images of a tall, blond, skinny, freaked-out attorney gone haywire with limbs flailing like a damaged blue-eyed robot flashed through her head. Well, she'd have to let the Achan deal with that, there was nothing she could do right now.
 

She walked all the way to the office at the other end of the apartment and pulled open a drawer. There it was, the inventory of all the work those men had done in their paint-spattered coveralls, who called her
ma'am
so polite and tried not to stare at her body too much and were so grateful when she made them green curry with duck, even if she'd put too much chili in it and they all turned crimson for an hour. A couple of
wais
and they forgave her. She sat down at the laptop and started to copy the inventory into Word, then immediately got bored. She called the interior design company.

 
"Can I speak to Mister Harry Kline, please?" The operator patched her through to Kline who was on a job upstate somewhere. Kline was the one who had fancied her the most and was least irritated about the chili. He was also the biggest, a giant as she recalled. "Oh, hello Mister Kline, I'm so sorry to bother you, I wonder if you could do me just the smallest little favor?"

Kline's tone turned to mush. "Don't have to be small, ma'am. Anything I can do I'd be glad to help."

"It's just that I've lost the inventory of all the wonderful work you did here and I was wondering if you could e-mail me a copy?"

"That's all? I'll call the office and tell them to do it right away. Hell, your principal already paid for it, didn't even make the office send a reminder. You're one of our favorite people around here."

"That's wonderful of you, Mister Kline."

"I think I already told you to call me Harry."

"Well, Harry,"—she pronounced it
Hally
—"there's just one boring detail, if you don't mind."