Nok freezes and for an instant she is a bird—a frightened, captured bird. She tries to pull away but I still hold her arm.
“Na!” she cries in a little girl’s voice. “Na, na.…”
“There’s more money…” I begin, sliding the baht toward her.
“Na!” cries Nok, tears in her eyes.
Mr. Diang takes a quick step forward and nods toward a huge Thai near the door. The two men cut through the crowd toward us like sharks through shallow water.
I let go of Nok’s arm and she slips away through the crowd. I hold both hands up, palms out, and Mr. Diang and his bouncer stop five paces from me. The old man with the red hair tilts his head toward the door and I nod my agreement.
I drink the last long swallow of beer and leave. There are other places on my list. Someone’s love of money will be greater than their fear of Mara…
Perhaps.
Twenty-two years earlier, Patpong had existed but American grunts could not afford it. The Thai government and the U.S. Army had cobbled together a red-light district of cheap bars, cheaper hotels, and massage parlors on New Petchburi Road, miles from the more businesslike Patpong.
We didn’t give a shit where they sent us as long as the girls and booze and drugs were there. They were.
Tres and I spent our first forty-eight hours trolling the bars and clubs. Actually, we didn’t have to leave our flophouse hotel to find prostitutes—there were a dozen hanging around the lobby—but somehow it didn’t seem enough of a challenge just to take the elevator downstairs. Like shooting sparrows in the barn after shining the flashlight beam on them, Tres said. So we trolled Petchburi Road.
During the first day and night in Bangkok I discovered what a no-hands bar was. The food was lousy and the booze was overpriced, but the novelty of having the girls feed us and lift the glasses to our lips was memorable. Between feeding us bites and sips, they cooed and winked and ran long-nailed fingers up the insides of our thighs. It was hard to reconcile all of this with the fact that twenty-four hours earlier we had been humping our rucks up the red-clay jungle hillsides of the A Shau Valley.
That first six months of Vietnam were beyond anything in my brief experience on this planet. Even now, with more than forty years of life behind me, the heat and terror and exhaustion of jungle warfare stands separate from everything else in my mind.
Separate from everything except what happened in Bangkok.
At any rate, we drank and whored our way through the red-light district for forty-eight hours. Tres and I had taken separate rooms so that we could bring girls back, and this we did. The cost then for an evening of sexual favors was less than what I would have paid for a case of cold beer from the firebase PX…and that wasn’t much. A T-shirt or pair of jeans given to our little girls would pay for a week’s worth of mai chao or “hired wives.” They’d not only screw or give head on command but they’d wash our clothes or tidy up the hotel room while we were out looking for other girls.
You have to remember that this was in 1970. AIDS wasn’t even dreamt of then. Oh, the Army had made us bring rubbers along and watch half a dozen films warning us about venereal diseases, but the biggest threat to our health was Saigon Rose, a tough strain of syphilis brought into the country by GIs. Still and all, our girls were so young and innocent looking, and stupid, I realize now, that they didn’t even ask us to wear rubbers. Perhaps they thought that having a child by a farang was good luck or would somehow miraculously get them to the States. I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
But four days into our seven days of R&R, even the attraction of cheap Thai marijuana and cheaper sex was paling a bit. I was doing it because Tres was doing it; following his lead had become a form of survival for me in the boonies.
But Tres wanted something else. And I followed.
“I’ve found out about something really cool,” he said early on the evening of our fourth night in the city. “Really cool.”
I nodded. Tang, my little mia chao, had been pouting that she wanted to go out to dinner, but I’d ignored her and gone down to meet Tres in the bar when he called.
“It’s going to take some money,” said Tres. “How much do you have?”
I fumbled in my wallet. Tang and I had been smoking some Thai sticks in the room, and things were a bit luminescent and off-center for me. “Couple hundred baht,” I said.
Tres shook his head. “This is going to take dollars,” he said. “Maybe four or five hundred.”
I goggled at him. We hadn’t spent a fraction of that during our entire R&R so far. Nothing in Bangkok cost more than a couple of bucks.
“This is special,” he said. “Really special. Didn’t you tell me that you were bringing along the three hundred bucks your uncle sent you?”
I nodded dumbly. The money was stuffed in a sneaker in the bottom of my duffel upstairs. “I wanted to buy my ma something special,” I said. “Silk or a kimono or something…” I trailed off lamely.
Tres smiled. “You’ll like this better than a kimono for your mom. Get the money. Hurry.”
I hurried. When I got downstairs there was a young Thai man waiting at the door with Tres. “Johnny,” he said, “this is Maladung.
Maladung, this is Johnny Merrick. We call Johnny ‘the Prick’ in the platoon.”
Maladung smirked at me.
Before I could explain that a PRC-25 radio was called a Prick-25 and that I’d humped it around for a month-and-a-half before they found a bigger RTO, Maladung had nodded at us and led the way out into the night. We took a three-wheeled tuk-tuk down to the river. Technically the broad river that had flowed all the way from the Himalayas to bisect the heart of old Bangkok was called the Chao Phraya, but all I ever heard the locals call it was Mae Nam—“the River.”
We stepped out onto the darkened pier; Maladung snapped something at a man who stood on a long, narrow boat that was a mere shadow beneath the pier. The man answered something in response and Tres said, “Give me a hundred baht note, Johnny.”
I fumbled in my wallet, trying to keep the dollars and colored baht separate. Only the light from a passing barge allowed me to find the proper note. I handed it to Tres, who gave it to Maladung, who handed it to the dark form in the boat.
“In, now,” said Maladung and we climbed down into the boat. Tres and I sat on a narrow seat near the bow. Maladung sat halfway between us and the driver, whose face was visible only from the glow of his cigarette. Maladung snapped something in Thai, the huge engine roared behind us, and the boat leaped out into the river, its narrow bow pounding against the barge’s wake.
I know now that these small boats are called “long-tailed taxis” and are for hire by the hundreds. They get their name from the long propeller shaft that has a full-sized automobile engine mounted on it. I noticed that night Tres and I boarded one that the shaft was so well counterbalanced that our driver could lift the prop out of the water with one hand, the heavy engine seemingly weightless in the center.
Bangkok is a city of small canals, or klongs. Guidebooks like to refer to it as “Venice East,” but that is a typical guidebook oxymoron. The last time I was in Venice I did not notice thousands of sampans tied up along the canals, or rickety bamboo structures hanging out over the water like shacks on stilts, or a canal surface so thick with filth and storm debris that one could almost walk across it without getting wet.
I noticed all these things in the Bangkok klongs that night.
We headed downriver past the lights of the Oriental Hotel, a place Tres and I had heard of but could never dream of affording, and passed under a busy highway bridge. Our long-tailed taxi darted in front of a huge ferry with a roar of its V-6 engine, crossed toward the west bank, and then turned into a klong no wider than one of the narrow sois in the Patpong district. The little canal was pitch dark except for the weak glow of lantern light from the tied-up sampans and the overhanging shacks. Our driver had lit his own red lantern and hung it from a stanchion near the stern, but I had no idea how other b
oats avoided colliding with us as we roared around blind turns and under low bridges. Sometimes I was sure that the canvas roof of our taxi was going to collide with the underside of the sagging bridges, but even as Tres and I ducked we cleared the rotting timbers with inches to spare. The few other water taxis roared past us like noisy wraiths, their wakes slapping across our bow and splashing our knees. I looked at Tres as we passed a dimly lighted sampan and his eyes were wild. He was grinning broadly.
Just as I was about to shout a query as to where we were going, the driver throttled back and swung our boat directly toward a high pier with its tall pilings rising ahead of us like a slammed portcullis. I expected him to stop, or at least to throttle back so we could glide up to the dark barrier, but the driver opened the throttle with a roar and we leaped straight at the line of pilings.
“Jesus!” I yelled, but the cry was lost in the echo of our engine rattling back from the underside of the rotted pier above us. Then we swung right again and the shroud of our exhaust was bouncing off listing sampans that had the look of having been abandoned years earlier. The klong here was the canal equivalent of a back alley; there was not enough room for two boats to pass in opposite directions. There were no other boats.
For half an hour or more we twisted our way through these narrow one-way klongs. The stink of sewage was so strong here that my eyes watered. Several times I heard voices coming from the lightless and listing sampans that lined the canal like so many waterlogged wrecks.
“People live in those,” I whispered to Tres as we passed a blackened mass where tumbledown shacks and half-sunken sampans had narrowed the klong to the point that even our suicidal driver had been forced to slow the boat to a crawl. Tres did not answer.
Just when I was sure that the driver had become lost in the maze of canals, we came to an open area of water bound about by abandoned warehouses on stilts and the backs of burned-out shacks. The effect was of a large, floating courtyard hidden from the city’s streets and public canals. Several barges and black sampans were congregated in the center of this watery square, and I could see the dim running lanterns of several other long-tailed taxis that were tied up to the nearest sampan.
The driver cut the engine and we glided to the makeshift dock in a silence so sudden that it made my ears ache.
I had just realized that the “dock” was only a float comprised of oil drums and planks lashed to the sampan when two men stepped out through a ragged hole in the canvas side of the boat and stood balancing on the planks, watching us bump to a stop. Even in the dark I could tell that the two were built like wrestlers or bouncers. The closer of the two men barked something at us in Thai.
Maladung answered and one of the men took our line while the other stood aside to let us climb onto the small space. I stepped off the taxi first, saw a faint glow of lantern light through the ragged opening, and was about to step through when one of the men touched my chest with three fingers that seemed stronger than my entire arm.
“Must pay first,” hissed Maladung from his place on the taxi.
Pay for what? I wanted to ask, but Tres leaned close and whispered, “Give me your three hundred bucks, Johnny.”
My uncle had sent me the money in crisp fifties. I gave them to Tres, who handed two bills to Maladung and the other four to the closest man on the dock.
The men stepped aside and gestured me toward the opening. I had just bent to fit through the low doorway when I was startled by the sound of our boat’s engine roaring to life. I straightened up in time to see the red lantern disappearing down a narrow klong.
“Shit,” I said. “Now how do we get back?”
Tres’ voice was tight with something greater than tension. “We’ll worry about that later,” he said. “Go on.”
I looked at the ragged doorway that seemed to open to a corridor connecting the series of sampans and barges. Strong smells came from it and there was a muted sound rather like a large animal breathing somewhere down at the end of that tunnel.
“Do we really want to do this?” I whispered to Tres. The two Thai men on the dock were as inanimate as those statues of Chinese lion-dogs that guard the entrance to important buildings throughout Asia. “Tres?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Come on.” He pushed past me and squeezed through the opening.
Used to following his lead on patrol and night ambush and LURP, I lowered my head and followed.
God help me, I followed.
It is my second night in Patpong and I am watching a live sex show at Pussy Galore’s when the four Thai men surround me.
The sex show is typical for Bangkok; a young couple screwing on twin Harley-Davidsons hanging from wires above the central stage. The two have been engaged in intercourse for over ten minutes. Their faces show no feigned passion, but their bodies are expert at revealing their coupling to every corner of the bar. The audience seems to find the primary tension not in the fucking but in the chance that the two might fall off the suspended motorcycles.
I am ignoring the show, interrogating a bar girl named Lah, when the brawny Thai shove in around me. Lah fades into the crowd. It is dark in the bar but the four men all wear sunglasses. I take a sip of flat beer and say nothing as they press closer.
“You are named Merrick?” asks the shortest of the four. His face is axe-blade thin and pockmarked with old acne or smallpox scars.
I nod.
The pockmarked man takes a step closer. “You have been asking about a woman named Mara here tonight and in other clubs last night?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Come,” he says. I make no resistance and the five of us move out of the bar in a flying wedge. Outside, a gap opens a bit between the burly men on my left and I could make a run for it if I choose. I do not so choose. A dark limousine is parked at the head of the lane and the man on my right opens the rear door. As he does so, I see the pearl-handled grip of a revolver tucked into his waistband.
I get in the backseat. The two tallest men sit on either side of me. I watch as the pockmarked man moves to the front passenger seat and the man with the revolver settles himself behind the wheel. The limo moves off through side streets. I know that it is sometime after 3 A.M. but the soi are still strangely empty this close to Patpong. At first I can tell we are moving north, parallel to the river, but then I lose all sense of direction in the maze of narrow side streets. Only the darkened signs in Chinese let me know that were in the area north of Patpong known as Chinatown.
“Avoid Sanam Luang and Ratchadamnoen Klang,” the pockmarked man says to the driver in Thai. “The army is shooting protesters tonight.”
I glance to my right and see the orange glow of flames above rooftops. The staff at the Oriental had urged me not to go out tonight. Now the distant, almost soft, rattle and pop of small-arms fire can be heard over the hiss of the car’s air conditioner.
We stop in an area of abandoned buildings. There are no streetlights here and only the orange glow of flames reflected from low clouds allows me to see where the street ends in vacant lots and half-demolished warehouses. I can smell the river somewhere out there in the darkness.
The pockmarked man turns and nods. The Thai on my right opens the door and pulls me out by my vest. The driver stays in the car while the other three drag me deep into the shadows near the river.
I start to speak just as the man behind me laces his fingers through my hair and pulls my head sharply back. The third man grabs my arms as the man holding my hair lifts a stiletto blade to my throat. The pockmarked face suddenly looms so close that I can smell fish and beer on the man’s breath.
“Why do you ask about a woman named Mara with a daughter named Tanha?” he asks in Thai.
I blink my incomprehension. The blade draws blood just below my Adam’s apple. My head is pulled so far back that I find it almost impossible to breathe.
“Why do you ask about a woman named Mara with a daughter named Tanha?” he asks again in English.
My words are li
ttle more than a rasping gargle. “I have something for them.” I try to free my right hand but the third man restrains my wrist.
“Inside left pocket,” I manage.
The pockmarked man hesitates only a second before tearing open my vest and feeling for the hidden pocket there. He brings out the twenty bills.
I can smell his breath on my face again as he laughs softly. “Twenty thousand dollars? Mara does not need twenty thousand dollars. There is no Mara,” he concludes in English. In Thai, he says to the man with the knife, “Kill him.”
They have done this before. The first man bends my head further back, the other man pulls my arms down sharply, while the pockmarked man steps back, fastidiously getting out of the way of the arterial spray that is coming. In that second before the knife slashes across my throat, I gasp out two words. “Look again.”
I feel the tension increase in the knife-wielder’s hand and arm as the blade cuts deeper, but the pockmarked man holds up one hand in a command. The blade has drawn enough blood to soak the collar of my shirt and vest now, but it cuts no deeper. The short man holds a bill high, squints at it in the dim light, and then flicks a cigarette lighter into flame. He mutters under his breath.
“What?” says the third man in Thai.
The pockmarked man answers in the same language. “It is a ten-thousand-dollar bearer’s bond. They are all ten-thousand-dollar bonds. Twenty of them.”
The other two hiss their breath.
“There is more,” I say in Thai. “Much more. But I must see Mara.”
My head is bent back far enough that I cannot see the pockmarked man now, but I can feel the intensity of his gaze on me. The temptation must be there for the three of them to kill me, dump my body, and keep the two hundred thousand dollars.
Only the fact that they answer to Mara gives me hope.
We stand there motionless for at least a full minute before the pockmarked man grunts something, the blade is lowered, my hair is released, and we walk back to the waiting limousine.
Tres had led the way through the tunnel carved through the arched canvas roofs of sampans. The first three boats were empty, the bottoms wet and the interiors smelling of rot and Asian cooking, but stepping through the wall of the third boat led us into dim light and loud noise. I realized as I stepped into the broader space that this was the barge we had seen tied up in the center of the sampans.