Behind the Night Bazaar Read online

  BEHIND THE NIGHT BAZAAR

  In 1992 Angela Savage travelled to Laos on a six-month scholarship, then spent the next six years living in Asia. Based in Vientiane, Hanoi and finally Bangkok, she set up and headed the Australian Red Cross HIV/AIDS subregional program. Behind the Night Bazaar won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for unpublished manuscript. This debut novel launches a series featuring Jayne Keeney PI. Angela lives in Melbourne.

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Australia

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  Copyright © Angela Savage 2006

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Design by Chong Weng-ho

  Typeset by J & M Typesetting

  Printed by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Savage, Angela, 1966- .

  Behind the night bazaar.

  eISBN 9781921834714.

  ISBN 9781921145223.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  This project was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its art funding and advisory body.

  To Andrew Nette

  All roads I travel lead home to you

  The sluggish Bangkok traffic forced Jayne Keeney to slow to a crawl at Siam Square. To her right, a motorbike the same as hers carried a family of five: father driving, mother and two children in school uniform riding pillion, infant perched on the petrol tank up front. In front was a blue pickup truck, its tray full of plastic water bottles, a young man sprawled across the top of them, sound asleep despite the car horns.

  Coming to a halt, Jayne placed her feet on the road either side of her bike, taking care to avoid a squashed rat in the gutter. It was late afternoon, the hot bitumen sticky beneath her sandals. She removed her helmet and shook the sweat from her long, dark curls. Reflected in the rear-view mirror, her pale skin had the rosy flush of someone emerging from a sauna, and she wiped smudges of mascara from beneath her amber eyes.

  She smelled the garlands of jasmine an elderly woman was selling as temple offerings from a cart on the footpath. A tattered Happy New Year banner hung over the cart. It had been there long enough to cover several new years, from 1 January, the Chinese new year in February, and the mid-April festival of Thai new year the previous week. Beside the banner was a gaudy red and gold picture of a rat, the symbol for 1996.

  On the facade of the department store behind the flower seller, a wall of televisions advertised skin-whitening cream. Opposite, a hand-painted billboard announced the release of another American action movie, while next door the evening’s special at the Dok Bua Restaurant was spicy fish-head soup.

  Despite the atmospheric cocktail of high octane petrol, humidity and dust, Jayne felt invigorated. Not even the sight of a couple of Western backpackers kissing on a nearby corner could dampen her mood. The jaded charm and polite anonymity of the Asian metropolis suited her. Even the congestion on the roads worked in her favour: tailing someone was easy in a traffic jam.

  Her target was a Thai woman whose American spouse suspected was having an affair with a colleague. The wife had told her husband she was flying to Udon on a business trip. But the taxi Jayne was following had bypassed the airport turn-off and headed into Bangkok’s city centre. Or one of them. The Thai capital was too much of an amorphous sprawl to be restricted to a single hub.

  The traffic jerked forward and the sleeping man rolled over the water bottles undisturbed. Jayne replaced her helmet and joined her fellow commuters in honking at the backpackers. The Thais considered public displays of affection rude, though if Didier could see her, he’d say she was jealous. The lovers remained oblivious to the attention they attracted, love being not only blind but also deaf in this case.

  She accelerated to gain on the taxi as it turned up Phayathai Road towards the Asia Hotel. The hotel’s lobby bar looked like a 1960s film set—dim booths and low-hanging lights—and Jayne had fond memories of seeing a Thai Elvis impersonators show there a few months back. As she inched her motorbike past the hotel onto a bridge, she caught a whiff of fetid klong, its contents the colour and consistency of sump oil. The canals were once the lifeblood of the city, where people drank, bathed, commuted and traded. These days the remaining klongs stank in the summer and flooded in the wet season, a reminder that Bangkok was built on a swamp and might easily become one again.

  The taxi pulled over at the entrance to a soi, one of the numbered streets that branched off Bangkok’s main roads like tributaries from a river. Jayne parked and slung her helmet over the handlebars—headgear was so unpopular there was little risk of it being stolen. While the Thai woman paid her fare, Jayne waited by a fruit stall, rolling a rambutan around in the palm of her hand. The fruit’s egg-shape and hairy texture made her think of testicles—though it was a long time since she’d handled any of those. She put it aside as the woman emerged from the cab and paused to fold a piece of paper, probably a falsified receipt showing an airport drop-off. Jayne had seen it all before. In a city awash with sexual intrigue, spying on unfaithful lovers had been her bread and butter for over two years.

  The woman adjusted a large tote bag over one shoulder and dragged a small case on wheels into the soi. The area was affluent but modest, low-rise apartments dotted among Thai homes with established gardens—the sort of place where Buddhist monks still begged for alms in the mornings and tailors made house calls. The woman headed towards a newer block of flats, a mishmash of architectural features including iron balconies, faux-marble pillars and a portico suitable for a Greek temple, complete with ornate caryatids.

  Jayne ducked behind a large rubbish skip on an adjacent building site and opened her backpack. Her camera would record the time and date of the woman’s arrival and departure, which Jayne knew was the residence of the colleague under suspicion. This should give her client sufficient grounds to confront his wife, though whether she would fess up was another matter. In Jayne’s experience, circumstantial evidence was grounds for separation only if either party wanted out of the relationship. The need for proof was greater when there was more to lose.

  It was a safe bet her subject would be spending the night. Jayne anticipated a stake-out and came equipped with water, a notebook and a novel. She didn’t bother carrying food, given the round-the-clock supply available from the street vendors. A local joke was if more than three people gather in the same place for upwards of two days, a food stall will appear. Indeed a group of women had set up a narrow strip of kitchen-cum-cafes on the footpath nearby. One of them, wearing a white chef’s hat and an apron advertising MSG, tossed noodles in a wok large enough to bathe a baby in. Another offered flattened half-chickens on bamboo skewers and catfish speared from mouth to tail, both grilled over hot coals and accompanied with plastic bags of pickled vegetables and whole chillies. The aroma of frying garlic and barbecued meat was enticing, but Jayne was too hot to eat.

  She eyed the entrance to the apartment building where a security guard was dozing. It would make for a much more pleasant evening if she could conduct her surveillance inside. Although the sun was setting, the temperature rarely dropped below thirty at this time of the year. Jayne wiped her forehead, dirt and sweat coming away in greasy balls on her fingertips. The least she could do was suss out the pos
sibilities.

  Taking one of the caryatids by the waist like a dance partner, Jayne sidled around the statue-cum-column, slipped past the guard and entered the building through tinted glass doors. To the left was an unmanned reception desk, concealed from the entrance by a row of potted bamboo. On the opposite side of the foyer was a lift. A glance at the residents’ directory confirmed a match with the name supplied by her client.

  Jayne checked out the view from behind the reception desk, the ideal height for her camera. The terracotta pots containing the bamboo were heavy, but the airconditioning gave her new energy. She dragged a pot around to the front of the desk, concealing her camera and ensuring the lens poked through the bamboo stalks. She checked the focus, activated the remote control and had just taken a test photo of herself, when she heard the lift rumble behind her.

  The doors opened to reveal her client’s wife locked in a passionate embrace. Her lover’s face was obscured against the woman’s neck, his hand on her breast. They didn’t seem to notice that the lift had stopped. The woman’s eyes were closed. It was an opportunity too good to miss. Jayne pressed the remote control button and released the camera shutter.

  The Thai woman’s eyes snapped open and the couple sprang apart. The woman pressed herself against the back of the lift, holding her tote bag against her chest like a shield. The man started shouting, an Australian accent. Jayne turned to the reception desk, relieved to see she hadn’t blocked the shot with her body. Through the glass doors, she saw the security guard had woken up, roused by the noise. She stepped quickly over to the reception desk to retrieve her camera.

  She turned back to the Australian, ready with her usual spiel about acting within the laws of Thailand, when she felt something wet and warm running down her left arm.

  Jayne saw the blood but couldn’t feel the bleeding, light travelling faster than pain. She looked up from the gash in her arm to the knife in the Thai woman’s hand. Her face was a mask of fury, her arm raised to strike a second time.

  The Australian man moved towards Jayne from the left, the security guard from behind. Shouting in Thai and English, they lunged forward.

  But it wasn’t Jayne they were after. The two men grabbed the Thai woman’s arms and the knife clattered to the floor. The guard kicked it out of reach, and the woman slid to the ground. ‘Are you all right?’ the Australian man said, but Jayne couldn’t tell who he was talking to. The guard looked at her wound and blanched. At that moment, the pain set in.

  Her legs shook and she crumpled to the floor. Still clutching her camera, she took the weight of the fall on her right shoulder, bringing her eye-to-eye with the Thai woman. They met each other’s gaze and in that moment, Jayne understood her mistake. It was, she realised, her first case in which the unfaithful party was a Thai female. And she’d seriously underestimated her quarry.

  Her girlfriends would give her hell about it. But she could rely on Didier to make her feel better. An overwhelming urge to be with him was the last thing she remembered before passing out.

  Jayne sank into a rickshaw outside Chiang Mai station. Two weeks had passed and the stitches were gone, but the wound was still tender enough for her to accept the tuk-tuk driver’s help with her backpack. Her luggage was mostly books. When she’d phoned Didier from Bangkok, she called a book club meeting as an excuse to see him. She planned to tell him about the attack in person—once she figured out how to bring it up.

  She directed the driver to head for the Rama IX Bridge, then turned around to take in the view. Chiang Mai was no longer the sleepy town it was when Didier moved here fifteen years earlier—‘so quiet, you could hear the chanting of the monks in the middle of the day’. Thailand’s second-largest city now had its share of traffic, high-rise buildings and fast-food restaurants, though trees still lined the roads and there were almost as many push-cart vendors as cars. At the town’s centre, ancient ruins were surrounded by immaculate gardens and a square moat, which was lined with flaming torches during festivals.

  But the biggest difference between Bangkok and Chiang Mai was the sky. In Bangkok towering office blocks and condominiums obscured the horizon, freeways stacked like shelves. Pollution turned visible patches of sky a noxious shade of grey that at dusk blazed red like a chemical fire. In Chiang Mai, Jayne could breathe again.

  The tuk-tuk turned onto the road that curved along the Ping River, and she drank in the sunset, the sun dipping behind the jagged mountains that ringed the town, turning the sky and water a matching shade of pale gold. Jayne felt like a creature coming out of hibernation, revitalised by the light after months in a cave.

  Not that she would admit this to Didier. Almost as much debate took place on the merits of ‘The Big Mango’ versus ‘The Rose of the North’ as on their other favourite topic, crime fiction. Didier read what Jayne scathingly referred to as ‘cosy’ authors, while she preferred darker fiction, which he found ‘unnecessarily grim’. Perhaps that was how she could raise the issue of her injury: proof that the violence in modern detective novels wasn’t exaggerated.

  The tuk-tuk driver veered left after the bridge, passed the market, and stopped in a narrow soi. Didier’s place was built in the traditional Thai style. At the front of a lush, tropical garden was a sarn phraphum, a small house-shrine for the land spirits, piled high with offerings of fresh marigolds, rice balls and smoking incense. Set back from the street, the house was made of teak and built on stilts. A steep staircase led to a large verandah furnished with triangular pillows and rattan tray tables. Didier and Jayne had spent many nights lounging there in the mottled light cast from lampshades made of eel-traps and sticky-rice baskets, drinking gin and tonics and arguing about books. While the interior of the house reflected his Thai partner’s love of all things modern, preferably plastic, the charm of the balcony and garden was all Didier.

  Jayne was paying the driver when Nou came to the gate. He was wearing a grey Calvin Klein T-shirt, which Jayne suspected was an original. Didier’s boyfriend’s real name was Sanga. His nickname, Nou, meant ‘rat’ in Thai, an apt moniker in Jayne’s opinion. Though Nou was always polite to her, she sensed the dislike was mutual. They greeted each other with a wai—the prayer-like bow—and he insisted on carrying her backpack into the house. It was a gesture of hospitality and she let him do it, but after more than three years in Thailand she still felt uncomfortable being waited on by Thai people, and especially by Nou.

  None of that mattered when Didier appeared at the top of the stairs. His face was perfect—strong chin, straight nose, high forehead, thick, honey-coloured hair. And at this point in the hot season, his skin was at its deepest shade of olive. He hid hazel eyes behind black-rimmed glasses in an effort, she suspected, to make himself look less attractive. But the ugliness of the glasses only enhanced his beauty. Jayne felt better just for laying eyes on him.

  He stood aside to let Nou pass and held out his arms.

  ‘It’s good to see you, chérie,’ he said, pulling Jayne close and kissing her on each cheek.

  She winced as his hand gave her injured arm an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘What is it?’ Didier said, holding her at arm’s length. ‘What’s the matter, Jayne? You look pale.’

  ‘I always look pale,’ she said, shrugging off his hold. ‘Besides, I’ve been on a train for fourteen hours and desperately need a gin.’

  ‘Of course,’ Didier smiled, though the concerned look remained. ‘You settle in, I’ll make the drinks and then we can talk. We’ll sit outside, yes?’

  ‘That’s a rhetorical question, right.’ Jayne returned his smile.

  Didier held the door open. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ he said. ‘We have so much to talk about.’

  Nou watched Didier hand Jayne a drink then take a seat on the balcony beside her. They were talking about books. Nou had a reasonable grasp of English, but he wasn’t interested enough to keep up with what they were saying. He wondered why Didi wanted him there, since he never paid him any attention when his
farang friends were around. The farang friends didn’t pay him much attention either. Jayne only talked to him when Didi was out of the room. Otherwise her focus was on Didier, one hundred per cent.

  There were often nights like this when Jayne came to stay. Their friendship did not surprise Nou: he knew plenty of Thai women who preferred the company of men who were gae because it was safer than going out with normal men. But Nou did resent the effect Jayne’s presence had on his boyfriend. She seemed to bring Didier to life. He talked faster, used his hands when he spoke and smiled more than usual. Didi never paid attention to Nou the way he did to Jayne. With her there, Nou might as well have been a dog asleep at the foot of the stairs. As he slipped inside to change his clothes, he was glad he’d made his own plans for the evening.

  He and his friend Jet were dropping by Loh Kroh to turn a couple of tricks before heading off to the card game Jet had set up. They were going to take on a couple of southern Chinese tourists with more money than brains. It would be easy to outwit them once they started to play by Thai rules.

  Nou chose his clothes with care. He selected a new, black Boss shirt and clean beige slacks, fixing his hair in place with a trace of oil. He checked his appearance in the mirror. Though he wished his skin wasn’t so dark or his nose so flat, he was otherwise pleased with what he saw. His cheeks were smooth, his eyes round, and his lips looked ready to be kissed—or so more than one customer had told him. Nou pulled a lot of business with those lips.

  He looked smart but not slick. He wanted to put his opponents at ease, lose a few hands to begin with, before going in for the kill. Nou needed a big win. His creditors were not men who liked waiting.

  He didn’t mention any of this to Didi. Sometimes he needed to prove to himself—and to friends like Jet—that just because his boyfriend was a farang with plenty of money and a good education, that didn’t mean Didi controlled Nou’s whole life.