If old Willie was dreaming of an erotic welcome back to the world, though, he is disappointed. He groans as one glance at the ceiling confirms his worst fear: he’s still alive. Now he turns over on one side to go back to sleep. The nurse isn’t happy with this idea and asks me to sit and talk to him while she goes to find the doctors. I’m tempted to break out the swabs and stick one in Willie’s mouth, but decide against it because I have no idea how long the nurse will take to return. I think there will be more windows of opportunity and with luck I’ll be able to do at least two of them. I’m a little nervous about Harry Berg, the one still on the critical list. I don’t suppose a swab can be life-threatening, but that kind of fragility is scary-and perhaps there’s that cynical thought that I don’t really want it to be him, not if he’s going to die on me. I decide to wait. After all, none of them are going anywhere, I can return again and again. If the worst comes to the worst, I can find some excuse to swab them for forensic reasons when they’re recovered. It is impatience that drives me, though.
The nurse’s instruction to keep Willie J. Schwartz’s attention is not as easy to follow as one might think. Despite that he has just emerged from a coma that has lasted many days, his overwhelming instinct is to return to it. When I sit on one side of the bed to stimulate him with conversation that will prevent a relapse, he turns over again, leaving me with his back. When I walk around the bed, dragging my chair, to attack from the other side, he turns over once more. At least I can be sure he is fully awake and, apparently, an antisurvivalist of some stature.
“Your friend is awake, he needs you,” Nurse Silapin tells him when she returns with two doctors. She has to repeat it three times before he turns his head to look at Larry Krank. At the same time the doctors are forcing Larry to look at Willie. Finally, the two old men recognize each other despite the copious bandages around their heads and chins and start to grin. Apparently the doctors are satisfied with Nurse Silapin’s unorthodox methods and the three of them leave the room together, discussing another case.
Now the old men begin to speak in a language that I cannot follow. It seems to be a mixture of English, Vietnamese, and Khmer, with a few Thai words thrown in. My eyes are fixed on Willie J. Schwartz, waiting for a chance to find out what the J stands for. Using my English and Thai, with just a smattering of Khmer and no Vietnamese at all, I try to understand some of what they are saying. I want to know what names they use for each other. After a couple of minutes I am able to decipher a scrap of conversation:
“Where the hell are we, Mitch?”
“In a hospital in Bangkok. It’s okay, it’s a good hospital. The Thais are taking care of us.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“He bombed us, Brad. The bastard bombed us.”
This news takes a while to penetrate the mind of the man I’ve been thinking of as Larry Krank, aka Brad. After a while, he turns his head in the other direction, to look at Harry Berg for a few moments. Then he turns back to Willie. He makes a slow kind of jerk of the head in the direction of the other man. Now he utters his first full English phrase.
“What happened to Jack?” Larry asks Willie.
“Looks like he got hit bad, Brad, real bad. I don’t know if Jack’s gonna make it.”
My pulse has doubled. How strange is the human heart! Now I am filled with compassion for the man who I’m certain is my father. Don’t die, Jack, I mutter. Whatever you do, don’t die. I stand up, suddenly reckless. The two old men have assumed I’m part of the administration and paid me no mind so far. They look at me. “Did you just call him Jack?” I demand.
They look at each other. Willie, aka Mitch, shrugs. I make a quick assessment and decide they’re both too old, too vague from drugs and injury, too past it to care. Anyway, if it comes to the crunch, who would believe their word against mine? I break open the first envelope, pull out the second, grab the swabs by the stems, careful not to contaminate the heads, and I’m approaching Harry Berg, aka Jack, when an alarm goes off. I turn to see Willie J. glaring at me in senile outrage. It is only then I notice the big red button on the wall next to his bed and the light flashing above it. Larry Krank, too, is suddenly in a state of military alert.
“He’s a fucking cop,” Willie says, then reverts to what sounds like expletives in their private language. Then in English: “Trying to fucking bust us when we’re-”
The nurse bursts in, sees the swabs, and comes to the same conclusion. Her outrage is of the kind exclusive to the pure of heart. Blood rushes to her head. Guards and doctors appear. Now they’re dragging me out and frog-marching me down the corridor to a small room without windows. They lock me in there. Five minutes later a cool Chinese man in a dark suit arrives with two guards. He is the Deputy Registrar.
“Do you have a warrant to take DNA samples from these patients?”
I take a deep breath. “No.”
“Please let me see your police ID.”
I show him. He nods at one of the guards, who snatches it. “I’ll need three photocopies,” the Deputy Registrar says.
We wait, staring at each other until the guard arrives with the photocopies. The Chinese gives me my ID back. He nods at the guards, who jerk their chins at me. I stand up. At the door the Deputy Registrar says, “No doubt you will be hearing from your superiors. Our group’s legal department will decide how far to take this.” He pauses for a moment. “We like to keep on good terms with the Royal Thai Police Force. And the RTPF have good reasons to keep on good terms with us.”
My companions and I take a private lift down to reception, where they throw me out. I’m trying to shake myself free from an embarrassment that attacks like a pinching demon, causing me to twitch, and at the same time feel a strong need for further evidence. I hire the first motorbike taxi that passes.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Soi Cowboy,” I say.
I have the jockey stop outside the Pink Pussy. Lalita is there sitting at her favorite spot, in shorts and T-shirt. She watches as I get off the bike, pay the driver, and turn to her. She smiles. When I join her on the bench outside the bar, she says, “Are you going to buy me a drink?”
“Sure. Make it a lady’s drink if you like, but I’m not here for your body.”
She disappears for a moment to fetch the drink, a spoonful of Coke with a dash of rice whiskey, which costs a fortune, half of which she will keep.
She sits next to me again on the bench and says, “I bet I know why you’ve come.”
“Why?”
“You want to ask more about that old man.”
“How did you know?”
She shrugs. “Just like that. I know you don’t fancy me, so there’s only one other reason.”
I cover my surprise with a cough. “Okay. You’re right.”
“What else do you want to know?”
I scratch my jaw. It’s a question that occurs regularly in detection. How do you know what you want to know from a witness when you have no idea what the witness knows? She’s a smart girl, though, famous for her commercial success.
“You said he was kind with you.”
“Kind and clever. Even though he was old he managed to turn me on. He was romantic. Once a year or so you find a customer who wants his sex served with a little romance. I liked it, even though it was pretend romance. Isn’t all romance pretend anyway?”
“Sounds like it was promising. Couldn’t you find a way to tempt him back?”
“That’s what I was doing-making more of an effort than usual.”
“And?”
“When he was about to come he called me Nong. He’d been calling me Lalita up to then, now he switched. And after we’d finished he burst into tears. He saw I was disappointed, that’s why he paid double.”
I let a few beats pass. “That’s it?”