Bangkok Noir

He cranked up the volume on the black console no bigger than a shoebox. Dolphin voices echoed across the room, liming the ceiling with a blanket of white ice crystals. The hotel window overlooking Sukhumvit Road was caked with a half-inch thick sheet of frost. The rising and falling singsong notes, like musical instruments, formed patterns in the ice.

When Shockley opened the door, it was no longer the hotel. They were aboard ship, in the holding tank. As he stepped inside, Shockley handed her a glass filled to the top with pure iceberg water.

“Take another sip and relax. Another ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye.”

Christopher G. Moore

Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award-winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy.

In his former life, he studied at Oxford University and taught law at the University of British Columbia. He wrote radio plays for the CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985, when he promptly left his tenured academic job for an uncertain writing career, leaving his colleagues thinking he was not quite right in the head.

His journey from Canada to Thailand, his adopted home, included some time in Japan in the early 1980s and four years in New York in the late 1980s. In 1988, he came to Thailand to harvest materials to write a book. The visit was meant to be temporary. Two decades and 22 novels later, he is still in Bangkok and far from having exhausted the rich Southeast Asian literary materials. His novels have so far appeared in a dozen languages.

For more information about the author and his books, visit his website: www.cgmoore.com. He also blogs weekly at International Crime Authors: Reality Check: www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.

The Mistress Wants Her Freedom

Tew Bunnag

Was it destiny? According to Pi Nok there was no doubt about it. His regular fortune teller in Onnut market had told him that very morning that it was going to be a special day, one in which someone from the past might reappear, and that he should be prepared. Admittedly he had already put that piece of cheap, innocuous advice out of his mind by the time he saw Nong Maew later in the Siam Paragon shopping centre for their weekly gossip session. Of course the conversation turned, as always, to her love life, or rather the lack of it.

“It’s so unfair,” she was saying as they peered through the smoky glass display window of a designer store at the ridiculously expensive pair of red suede Italian loafers that they both lusted after.

“He’d buy them for his wife, if she asked him. But I have to wait for him to give me the presents that he chooses.”

Without taking his eyes off the shoes, Pi Nok replied in a sarcastic voice, “You’ve had a sweet Japanese sports car off him, and a sweet luxury apartment and a wardrobe full of clothes and your regular little envelope…”

“All right, he takes good care of me,” said Nong Maew, giggling. “But why do I have to wait around for him all the time? I’m fed up with it. I’m twentythree. I want a life!”

This was a line he had heard a dozen times—the unhappiness of the kept woman—and he never found it convincing. Usually, out of friendship, he commiserated with her, but today her words grated on him. Having lost his own foreign benefactor the previous year and now working in a massage parlour, struggling to keep afloat, he found it hard to sympathize with her poor little mistress number.

“Well, you can always go back to your old life,” he said cattily.

Nong Maew was annoyed at this remark. Even though Pi Nok was her closest friend and confidant, her “gig”, he had no right to be unkind. She did not ever want to be reminded of what she had done or what she had been.Without answering him, and with a petulant swish of her young, lithe body, sheathed in its blue polka dot dress, she turned and headed straight for the escalator.

Pi Nok walked behind her and said, teasingly: “Don’t be so touchy. You know you’re beyond all that now.”

“Oh, you’re such a bitch today. I don’t believe it!” she half-whispered, and they both laughed out loud.

As she looked up towards the floor above, she stopped in her tracks and, to Pi Nok’s surprise, took hold of his hand and squeezed it tightly. Without turning around, she said in panic: “That’s him with his wife. And that must be his grandson. Don’t look, they’re coming down. Oh no! What do I do? Where do I go?”