A Nail Through the Heart

10

Never heard of him," Leon Hofstedler says.

"Oh, come on, Leon." Rafferty shamelessly signals for the Expat Bar's ageless barmaid, whom the regulars call Toots, to top up Leon's vast stein. "You're the living map of expat Bangkok. You know everybody."

"Nice of you to say so, too," Leon says comfortably, watching the foam rise. "But this is one German I don't know."

Rafferty holds up the photo, but Hofstedler's eyes slide over it without recognition. "He's not German, he's just got a German name. He's an Aussie."

"Claus the Aussie?" Hofstedler packs the words with irony leaden enough to deflect gamma rays. He is playing to the house, which is to say to the collection of aging sex addicts who call the bar home. Rafferty mildly enjoys them individually, but as a group they comprise a new paradigm of what he doesn't want to be when he grows up. On the other hand, they collectively know more about one aspect of Bangkok than Rafferty does, and that's the aspect he thinks might have drawn Uncle Claus to desert his life in Australia-niece and all-and live here.

There was a time, if he is honest with himself, when this room could have been part of his future. Had he not met Rose, had he not seen through the rented smiles, had he not found himself focusing on the bewildered eyes of the girls who hadn't yet learned the game, he might eventually have been sitting here. In his heart he knows that the gulf separating him from these men can always be crossed. Bangkok is packed with men who have crossed it.

Hoftstedler lifts the stein to eye level and regards Poke around it. "There is no Australian called Claus anywhere, and certainly not in Bangkok. Australians have names like Hughie and Paul and Geoff."

"I didn't name him, Leon. I'm just looking for him." This earns a snicker from the Growing-Younger Man, halfway down the bar. The snicker barely sends a ripple through facial muscles so saturated with Botox that Rafferty wonders how the man chews his food. New plugs of hair dot the previously barren area above the Growing-Younger Man's forehead like a failing crop. He has spent a small fortune on cosmetic surgery, trying to appeal to bar girls one-third his age, and the result is a sad little froth of Brillo above a face as mobile as the mask of Agamemnon.

For a moment Rafferty thinks he will speak, but Hofstedler plows over whatever he might have been going to say. "You will have to look elsewhere," he says. He lifts the stein to his lips and puts a pint of Singha into the past tense. Then he belches, pats himself on the chest, and leans toward the dim end of the bar. "What about you, Bob?"

Bob Campeau, sunk in permafrost gloom at the far end, says, "He go to any clubs? Patpong? Nana Plaza? Soi Cowboy?" Campeau is the resident expert on Bangkok's more garish red-light districts. The others in the bar may cherish the occasional romantic illusion about the women they rent for the evening, mistaking really creative avarice for affection, but not Campeau. The man is a walking catalog of girlie bars; he can rattle off the specialties, merits, drawbacks, costs, and take-out policies of every joint in the city. He has never completely forgiven Poke for removing Rose from circulation.

"Not that I know," Rafferty says.

Campeau lifts his glass and eyes the bottom, apparently in the hope it refilled itself while he wasn't looking. "Then I don't know him, do I?"

"And he has been here how long?" Hofstedler asks.

"Decades," Rafferty says. "That's one reason I figured you might know him." There is a brief silence as Hofstedler ponders the improbability of his not knowing someone who has been in Bangkok such a long time.

Campeau chews ice. The Growing-Younger Man fingers his hair plugs and sips his green cocktail, made from some obscure age-reversing algae he imports by the carton from California. Everyone except him gets a minute older.

"Is your missing friend gay, Poke?" Mac O'Connor asks from the isolation of his accustomed booth, the Expat Bar's version of the back of the bus. "There's a Claus who pops up at Narcissus occasionally."

"I suppose he could be gay. He's unmarried," Rafferty says. Hofstedler gives a disapproving cluck on behalf of the room's heterosexual population. None of them is married, the better to pursue their obsession with the go-go dancers for whom they uprooted whatever lives they had to move to Bangkok. "What's your Claus look like, Mac?"

O'Connor tents his fingers and peers through them. "Dishy in that kind of seedy way that suggests piercings in unexpected places. About twenty-four or-"

"Wrong Claus, Mac." Rafferty displays the picture again. "This guy's in his fifties and big as a house."

"Definitely the wrong Claus. Not likely to be at Narcissus either. If you're over thirty these days, forget it. It's getting so they barely let you in if you shave."

"Such a life," Hofstedler says unpleasantly. "Such values, yes?"

"I don't notice you taking home any matrons," Mac says from the safety of his booth.

"Okay," Rafferty says, getting up. "He keeps a low profile, doesn't mingle with the European community here, he's probably not gay, he doesn't go to clubs, and he's got an awkward name. I guess that's information. Sort of."

"He is not leading an open life," Hofstedler observes. "Do you know what kind of a man he is?"

"A small-time saint, from what I've been told, although my source is biased."

"I doubt he's a saint," Hofstedler says.

"Why? Because he doesn't troll the bars?"

"One reason people come here, as I believe you said in your book," Hofstedler continues comfortably, "is that here it is possible to behave openly in ways that one would hide at home."

"I wrote that?" Rafferty says.

"It makes you wonder, does it not," Hofstedler says, "what kind of behavior one would hide in Bangkok."