Bangkok Noir

More applause burst from a sizeable section of the audience. Chinapat observed that a number of those applauding were missing little fingers. The absent appendage didn’t muffle or reduce the sound of the clapping. Then an attractive young Thai woman with red streaks in her long black hair entered from one of the side doors—she looked no more than seventeen or eighteen. She wore a tight, short black miniskirt and a crisp white cotton blouse with shiny buttons that looked like military decorations. She walked straight to his row and sat in the seat next to him. “I know who you are,” she said. “And I have a message for you.”

He didn’t recognize her at first. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else, younger sister,” he said.

“It’s a trap,” she said, looking straight ahead at the stage. “We’ve been set up.”

“That’s not my reading,” he said.

Her name was Seven and she’d expected an argument. “That’s because your calculations are off point four,” she said.

He ran through the sequence from top to bottom. “Fuck, you’re right,” he said, his mouth ajar. “How did that happen?”

She leaned over and whispered, “You were in a hurry. Now we don’t have much time. But I have a backup plan.”

One of the things Chinapat loved most about Seven was that she always came with a fully developed contingency program.

She firmly grabbed his hand, and together they moved down the row to the exit door and out into the main lobby. Seven handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the men’s restroom. A couple of minutes later, Chinapat emerged wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with a small dolphin icon above the heart.

2.0

Where are you?

Nana Entertainment Plaza

In a small, overcrowded back room of a bar converted into an office, a couple of tables, chairs, bookcases, a filing cabinet and two enormous safes occupied the area behind a locked set of teak doors.

Sitting amid gray smoke, a heavy-set MiddleEastern man named Jaul slumped in front of a computer screen. His enormous stomach rose above the edge of the table as his right hand moved the mouse and his left hand fed a large, freshly fried chicken drumstick into his mouth. Jaul was online, working through a pirated version of an early program of an archeological dig outside Baghdad. He was the owner of the Smoke but No Fire Bar.

The bar, once a travel agency, was discreetly set back from the staircase on the second floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza. It was early morning, and the plaza was deserted. A few delivery trucks downstairs. Otherwise only a stray cat and a couple of resident dogs occupied the narrow corridors. Jaul loved the early morning, when he was left alone to count his money. His was a popular bar, and his women tall and young and beautiful. Money, piles of cash, accumulated every night like clockwork. He had counted his money twice and made notes in a ledger. Behind the chair where he sat, the safe door was ajar. Through the door appeared rows of stacked Thai thousand and five hundred baht notes.

One of Seven’s cyber friends had struck up a friendship with Pepsi, who worked at Jaul’s Smoke but No Fire Bar in Nana. Pepsi was a dancer and she took drugs. She paid cash for some cyber work involving several foreign customers, and Seven had been a subcontractor in refining Pepsi’s network of clients. Like most addicts Pepsi had a keen awareness of where lots of money was hidden and loved to gossip. She traded information about Jaul’s safe after Seven promised a full system upgrade and payment security that her bookie couldn’t hack.

Chinapat stepped into Jaul’s office, finding crude, out-of-date furniture and equipment. The primitive quality of Jaul’s software made his computer system no better than a toy. A porn site with several naked actors on a sofa flickered on the computer screen.

“What do you want?” Jaul asked, looking at Chinapat and then at Seven. “A job?”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he mentally undressed Seven.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

Jaul understood exactly what she meant. “Pray tell me your wish.”

“The money,” Seven said. He followed her eyes to the open safe door. Pimping clearly was more lucrative than murder.

As Jaul swung around to close the safe, Chinapat caught him along the side of the head with a 9mm Glock. There was nothing like hardened plastic to send a man to dreamland. A gush of blood dribbled down Jaul’s cheek. His attempt to fall back over his keyboard was interrupted by the bulge of his stomach, leaving him in the no-man’s land of being half-suspended in space. “Someone named Jaul should make better choices,” said Chinapat.

Seven rolled her eyes, knowing that Chinapat had accessed the Arabic dictionary as he stuffed the 9mm into the waistband of his jeans.

They cleaned out the safe, stuffing Seven’s suitcase with over a million baht. Jaul remained unconscious as Chinapat left first, carrying the suitcase. A moment later Seven followed.