The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

“YOU ARE, YOU know. Do the job right and you’ll earn so much money you can buy your whole village. If you want it, I mean.” Fon pours herself an inch of white wine and offers the glass to Kwan, but Kwan shakes her head yet again, and Fon drains it. The half bottle at Fon’s right hand is mostly gone, and the dishes that litter the table are empty on Fon’s side and almost full on Kwan’s. The food was strange to her, and anyway, she’s too unsettled to eat and she doesn’t want to ruin her lipstick. She feels like she’s been turned into something new, like she just woke up in someone else’s life.

She forces herself to remember what Fon just said. “Before I make money,” she says, “I have to decide to work.” Without thinking, she takes a rambutan from a pile of them in front of her and peels it by feel, her eyes roaming the room in which they sit, a room unlike any she has ever been in, although it seems familiar.

“You will,” Fon says. She leans back in her chair and picks up her cigarettes.

The restaurant is a geometrical landscape of crisp, square white tablecloths and dark corners. At odd intervals, spotlighted on the walls, hang paintings of—Kwan supposes—Europe. They depict farang people in odd, old-looking clothes, and horses, dogs, and dark, hazy forests. Here and there, usually glimpsed in the bluish distance, is a house big enough to be a palace. One of the horses is white and has a horn coming out of its forehead, and dogs are leaping at it. She has seen pictures of paintings like these in school, but she never thought she’d see the real thing.

In the center of each table is a small golden lamp with a pale pink shade, and Kwan thinks the light makes Fon look younger and softer, her cute face restored to the freshness it probably had when she was sixteen. Waiters in white shirts and black slacks stand idly by; it’s early still, and only a few of the tables are occupied. She and Fon have walked just a few blocks from the noise and glare of Patpong, but it could be a hundred miles. This is a different Bangkok. And then she knows why the room seems familiar: It makes her feels like she’s in one of the television programs she watched in the village. She’s at the edge of the life in which people have things.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she says.

Fon says, “You can. You have to.” She starts to light her cigarette, but a waiter is suddenly there with a lighter outstretched. Fon nods and smiles thanks as though it happens every day and says, “You’re never going to make enough money to send some home until you start going with customers.”

Kwan waits, her eyes on the tablecloth, until the waiter is gone. “It doesn’t . . . bother you, talking about that in front of .

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