Paying Back Jack (25 page)

As Marisa had walked along the platform at Asoke station, she'd almost decided to turn back when a farang had bumped into her. He'd tried to pick her up. At least she was still attractive enough for a man to make a play. She'd drawn in a deep breath. That's it, she thought. Give Fon a chance to grow up. Bakhita had said the world had millions of Fons. As she walked down the street, every ten meters there had been a woman, sometimes old, sometimes young, clutching a baby in one hand and begging for change with the other, reminding her of Bakhita's view of the larger dimensions of the trafficked children network.

At the top of Soi Cowboy, Marisa stopped and thought again about turning back. Then she convinced herself that since she'd come this far, she owed Gung the courtesy of at least talking with Fon. Bakhita's warning played in her head: “Thais have a thin skin when it comes to foreigners exposing anything to do with child exploitation, the sex trade, or the informal networks, official and unofficial, that feed off each other, making it all possible.” Thai sensibilities can go stuff themselves, Marisa had told herself. It was always the sensibilities of the wealthy, the bullies, and the influential criminal class that had to be weighed. Somporn and his kind of people created the environment. She had already worked herself up by the time she turned onto Soi Cowboy. If she lost her job and got kicked out of Thailand, she could go back to Spain. She would never ask him for a thing.

“You can't make a difference with a group unless you start with an individual,” she'd said at the meeting at UN headquarters. She'd regretted the declaration the moment it had come out of her mouth, but she'd said nothing to express her regret. She'd let it stand. Bakhita
had chosen not to respond. Everyone had known exactly where they stood.

Marisa walked the full stretch of Soi Cowboy from Soi 23 to Asoke and back twice before spotting a flower girl coming out of a bar, moving her way through the door girls and touts. The girl sidestepped a food vendor who dumped a large plastic basin of dirty water into the gutter. Marisa looked at the photo of Fon and then up at the flower girl. It was the same child. Then she saw Gung.

“I knew you'd come,” she said. “That's her.” She turned and started to walk away.

“Where are you going?”

“I've got two more kids at Lumpini Park to find. Good luck.”

Marisa watched Gung disappear down the soi, lost in the crowd. Marisa glanced back at the kid, who had her eye on a couple of farangs who were getting the treatment from three of the door girls. “Handsome man, welcome inside,” one quoted from the familiar script. It suggested a level of English vastly superior to the actual language skill of the girl.

Marisa knelt down and looked the girl in the eye. “Gung's gone. I want to help.” The response was restless, bored, no eye contact. With Gung out of the way, she'd reverted to flower-girl mode.

“Are you Fon?”

The little girl looked scared. She held out a packet of chewing gum. “Twenty baht. You want?”

Marisa handed her a hundred-baht note. Fon smiled, her hand offering five packets of gum.

“How would you like some noodles?” Marisa asked, ignoring the gum.

“You don't want gum? You buy laser pen? Very good quality, too. From Taiwan. Not expensive.”

“You spoke with me on the phone, remember?”

“Laser very good,” she said.

“Why are you doing this?”

With Gung gone, it was as if Fon wanted nothing to do with her.

Fon spoke standard street-kid English, good enough to flog flowers and gum. Worthless stuff she had to push. If people bought, they
did so out of sympathy rather than genuine need. She backed off as Marisa reached out to touch her hand.

“Aren't you hungry?” She could see from Fon's face that she was scared. Her small black eyes darted, looking in either direction. Although it looked like she was wandering around on her own, the kid instinctively knew she was being watched all the time. Auntie had told her so. The woman she called Auntie had given her a new dress and makeup and showed her how to put on lipstick.

For the past few days Auntie had been nice to her and told her she'd soon have a surprise. It had given her the feeling that she was special, not like the other kids. Fon had decided it was probably okay to hustle a meal from the mem-farang. At the same time, Auntie had said, mem-farangs might cause a problem. She should never, never trust one or believe anything a mem-farang said. All the kids in the house where she slept were told the same thing.

Marisa took Fon's hand. They walked to a food stall in front of one of the bars and sat on plastic stools. Marisa ordered two plates of chicken and sticky rice. A waitress set the plates down along with spoons and forks. Fon greedily ate with her fingers, stuffing her mouth with chicken.

“Gung says you're from the Shan State in Burma. Is that true?” asked Marisa.

Fon nodded, her mouth full, looking around to see who on the soi might be watching.

“Shan?”

The girl nodded, eyes lined with heavy, gleaming mascara.

“Where's your mother and father?”

“Mother's dead. Father works by the river.”

“What river?”

Fon shrugged. “On the Thai side of the river. He has a card to stay. I will go visit him soon.”

“Who said?”

She blinked. “Auntie.”

“Do you think I could talk with your Auntie?” asked Marisa. As soon as she'd asked the question, Marisa knew she'd made a mistake.

Fon pulled a face, scooping up the last of the sticky rice. “Finished. I go work now.”

Marisa put her hand on Fon's wrist. “On the phone you said that you wanted help. Have you changed your mind?”

The child sighed, stared at the table. She hadn't connected the mem-farang with the woman who had been on the phone. Besides, that had happened what seemed like a long time ago, and she had so much wanted to please Gung. Now she wasn't so sure what she wanted.

“I'll get in trouble.”

“From Auntie?

Fon looked unhappy, frightened. She had retreated to her non-responsive space. She twisted and turned on the stool, scanning the crowd. Marisa wasn't certain how to get through to her—a kid who'd been programmed to distrust a strange foreign woman, her mother dead, separated from her father. At eleven years of age she was still cocooned in the last part of childhood, but her handlers had done her up to showcase her first hint of womanhood. Fingernails painted red; her hair, grown long, had been carefully brushed; and lip gloss and makeup signaled she was selling more than chewing gum.

“Has Auntie told you that in two days she will give you to a man, and that man will want sex?”

Fon rocked back and forth on the stool, her lower lip in a pout. “Auntie wouldn't do that, I know. She takes care of me.”

“Auntie sometimes forces a girl to have sex with a man. You know that.”

Fon sighed, “I have to work now.”

Marisa handed her another two-hundred baht. “You've got your money for tonight. You don't have to worry.”

The worry lines on her forehead suggested otherwise. “Auntie send me to my papa.”

“She's lying to you, Fon. Gung told you not to trust Auntie's promises. I know she said that. And you told Gung that Auntie plans to make you sleep with a stranger. That's why you asked me to help you. If you don't want to sleep with a man, just tell me. And I'll take you out of here. You can go to school, go see your father, have friends, a life.”

“Auntie say mem-farangs say these things but they are not true.”

It was Marisa's turn to smile, “Auntie would say that. Has she ever beaten you? Threatened you? Or hit the other kids?”

They both knew the answers to those questions. “You do know that Gung wants to help?”

She nodded, a flicker of softening in her eyes.

“I can't help you, Fon, unless you leave here with me. Auntie can't punish or hurt you. No one will hurt you. I promise.”

Fon searched Marisa's face for a long moment. “You don't know things.”

“I know one thing.”

Fon waited, staying very still as if holding her breath. She had only experienced a world of broken promises.

“Let's get out of here.” Marisa held out her hand.

BENEATH THE NEON LIGHTS of the Sheba Bar and the huge King Tut head with a striped headdress advertising it, three short, skinny Thai men in flip-flops and worn, patched clothing slowly maneuvered a baby elephant they'd brought all the way from Surin province. The men fanned out, selling bags of bamboo to tourists for twenty baht. No one used elephants on construction projects anymore; the forests were gone, so the elephants no longer had any logs to lift. Beasts with proud working pasts had become carnival sideshows in Bangkok's red-light district.

Two of the men offered small bags of bamboo to a couple of bulky tourists who stopped to sort through their Thai baht. Turning them over, they squinted at the strange bank notes and tried to figure out in the neon light which one was a twenty. Hundreds of yings outfitted in hot pants and bikini tops with nylon robes slung around their shoulders paraded in front of their bars, holding signs advertising the cost of a beer.

“The cops said no elephants in Bangkok. What the fuck is this?” asked McPhail. He waved off one of the men who shoved a bag of bamboo into his face.

“That was last year,” said Calvino. He wasn't looking at the elephant. “That's her,” he said.

McPhail approached the elephant and touched its trunk with the back of his hand. “What do you mean that's her?”

It was the woman from the train station who'd told him in so many words to get lost. She sat at a roadside table with a kid dressed like a whore. The vendor stood behind his counter, hacking up chicken and folding the meat over a perfectly formed scoop of rice. A couple of dancers sat at the table wolfing down bowls of noodle soup. Marisa watched Calvino as he approached. She stood up and smiled. With the young girl in tow, Marisa walked into the soi and threw her arms around Calvino, kissing him first on both cheeks and then with a long kiss on the lips. Pressing against him, she felt the hard steel of a .38 caliber police special inside his shoulder holster. Marisa knew the feel of a concealed gun on a man. Her father had been a police officer.

“Vinny, I'm so happy to see you.” Her voice was a little too loud, as if the volume was raised to make a point.

He grinned, glanced over at McPhail, who had a smirk that looked like it risked becoming a permanent feature.

“Never think it's about you,” said McPhail, but his words were too soft to carry over the roar of the elephant that belched a huge cloud of gas from half-digested raw bamboo.

Only then did Calvino notice the flower girl holding packets of chewing gum in one hand and laser pens in the other. Marisa's arm circled Fon's shoulder in a motherly fashion, holding her in the tight possession of a mother or close relative.

“Please help me,” she whispered. “Those men behind you want to take this girl. I can't let that happen.”

Calvino's grin disappeared and he took one step back. “What are you talking about? What men want to take her away?” He looked around and only saw the usual milling crowd of touts, yings, farangs, vendors, and motorcycle drivers.

“Her name is Fon. She's in danger. Please help me.” Her lower lip quivered. Her eyes were wild, darting from the kid to him and back. The woman who had looked in complete control at the train station had unraveled, and what was left was a terrified human being.

He was trying to understand what she and the kid were doing. Marisa had said the words “help me,” but help do what? Less than two hours ago she had brushed him off like a piece of lint. “Phone the police,” he finally said.

That wasn't the response she wanted. She pursed her lips, shaking her head, afraid to let go of Fon. “It won't work. I need to get her out of here. Believe me, the police won't help.”

“I liked the kiss,” he said. “I made a mistake. I took it for something more than a cry for help.”

It wasn't what she expected. He was a man, and men had to be handled in a delicate way. “All kisses are a cry for help,” she said, trying to smile. If guile was what was required, then she could play that game, too.

McPhail was the first to spot two Thai men closing in from behind Calvino and blocking their path. “If you're going to help, now would be a good time.”

Calvino took Marisa's hand and walked her and the child across the soi to the entrance of a bar where he knew the owner.

A thick curtain covered the entrance. Calvino slipped his fingers into the fold and parted the curtain wide enough for Marisa and the kid to slip inside.

Without looking over his shoulder, he followed them. McPhail spoke to the Surin men who owned the baby elephant and gave them a hundred baht to stay put outside the bar. A small crowd of yings and tourists gathered, and the two Thai men who had been on Calvino's tail backed away, taking up a position behind the crowd. The Thais looked patient, arms folded over their T-shirts; one broke out a pack of cigarettes and passed it to the other.

Several more Thai men joined the first two, filtering in from the Asoke side of Cowboy. No one could enter or leave the bar without going through them. As a line of defense, McPhail admitted they looked impressive. A woman and a child would offer them little challenge. Calvino was packing, but pulling a gun on Cowboy was something that would make things even worse. McPhail curled his lips and spit on the ground before he slipped inside through the curtains.

“Man, there are at least four or five of them waiting outside. They ain't going anywhere soon.”

“They want Fon,” said Marisa, squeezing the kid's hand.

“Of course they want her,” said McPhail. “She probably works for them, don't you sweetheart?”