Bangkok Noir

Precisely an hour later Nong Maew returned to the apartment, having collected the bottle of tequila, not from the Oriental Hotel, but from a nearby bar in Sathorn Road where she often went. There she had ordered a dry martini in anticipatory celebration and flicked through a fashion magazine, all the while allowing herself to daydream of the clothes she would buy, of the places in the world that she would visit, of the freedom that she would finally have. When she returned to the condo she was mildly surprised to find that the men were still in the bedroom. She could hear the sound of their lovemaking as she walked through the front door, and it was so abandoned that it made her blush for a moment. And yet a second later she registered that there was something wrong. Her eyes scanned the living room. Clothes were strewn everywhere. She looked over to the bedroom and saw that the door was slightly ajar and a light flickered from inside. The sound of sexual pleasure was now pulsating. Instinctively she hesitated before taking another step forward. Just then a fit-looking young man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a pink polo shirt and chinos stepped out of the room in such a nonchalant way, as though he lived there in the apartment, that Nong Maew suddenly felt she was in a dream, dislocated somewhere between the familiar and the unexpected. Then, as she began to open her mouth to speak, she saw a gun in his hand that was pointed directly at her heart, and her whole being went cold. The man nodded slowly as though he understood how terrified she was.

“I’m sorry, sister,” he said, as the sounds of love from the bedroom subsided. “It’s just a job.”

Khun Taworn’s wife sat on the edge of the bed, wearing a cream silk dressing gown. Her wig was off, and she was rubbing moisturizer slowly over her pale, bald cranium. When she finished, she wiped her hands on a small towel, leaned over to the bedside table and poured herself a glass of tequila. When the mobile phone shuddered to life, she did not rush to answer it but stretched her free hand behind her to pat the body that was stirring—the beautiful, naked body of the young actress she was grooming to be a star.

“I have to answer this, darling.” She too used the English word but pronounced it correctly. “Go back to sleep.”

Now she picked up the phone and took a sip from her glass.

“It’s done,” said the man’s voice on the other end.

“No hitches?”

“None. But the girl was making a home movie. That’s why she called the electrician from the “Twilight” the other day.”

“Then he has to go too. And get rid of the tapes.”

“No problem.”

“Tell me. How was it? My husband?”

“He promised me the moon.”

“He was always a bad liar.”

“The gay boy cried. The girl tried to talk her way out of it. She wasn’t making sense. She kept on saying that all she wanted was her freedom.”

“She should have taken the money and run. Why are people so greedy? Anyway, now she’s free.”

“The papers will have a field day.”

“Yes, it’ll be juicy. You’ve done well. Thank you.”

With her drink in her hand she walked to the window with its view of the city stretching south. Her sad eyes looked down at the lights twinkling in the streets below and at the giant billboards on the sides of the tall buildings, then slowly towards the horizon, where the glow of the city gave way to the dense, dripping dark of the tropical night. Then they started to fill with bitter tears.

Tew Bunnag

Tew Bunnag was born in Bangkok in 1947 and educated in Cambridge University where he studied Chinese and Economics. In his time he has been a T’ai Chi teacher as well as a volunteer worker in the Klongtoey slums and feels at home in all the stratas of Thai society. His fiction writing deals with the tensions between the traditional and the modern, and the contradictions and anomalies that are evident in present Thai society.

Hansum Man Timothy Hallinan

The room was dark when he opened his eyes. For a moment he was confused; the window was in the wrong place. Had he been sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed? His sleep was thin these days, thinner than the worn sheet that covered him, but he didn’t usually move around that much. Or did he?

Oh.

The new apartment. The one he still couldn’t navigate in the dark without bumping into something. Unlike the shopfront he had lived above for all those years, the two rooms with the woodshuttered windows that you could prop open with a length of doweling. Cool cement floors.

He sat up with a soft grunt and put his feet down. Carpet. Window on the right. Not the shophouse then, the apartment. What had happened to the shophouse?