The Blue Jungle (6)
A noir novella in 10 chapters. “You’re dealing with Risa Nakamura now.”
Naomi is a struggling reporter in LA. Gangsters kidnap her because their boss thinks only Naomi knows what happened to his daughter.
He may be right: Naomi covers the porn industry, where all secrets lead to the king of sleaze, Bobby Feathers.
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THE BLUE JUNGLE: CHAPTER SIX
BANGKOK
NAOMI
From the City of Angels, USA, to Krung Thep, Thai for city of angels, a.k.a. Bangkok. Fifteen-hour red eye plus connection via Hong Kong, plus another four to get all the way. Arriving three-something a.m. local time, feeling DOA, but the only one truly dead was Meredith.
Naomi had managed to find a little calm. Not peace or tranquility, just sufficient clarity to act. L.A., what she had thought of as home, had become a charnal house. Eriko had gotten out just in time.
So there was really no choice. She had thrown a few clothes into a suitcase and cabbed it to LAX. The round-trip ticket to Bangkok, plus some cash for expenses, had cleaned out her bank account. The next month’s rent wasn’t going to be paid. Babs’s problem now.
She spent the flights retracing everything that happened and still couldn’t understand how Sumo and Bug Eyes had found out about Meredith – or why. Naomi was sure she had kept enough secret. Meredith, though, must have done some digging, and talking, of her own.
Naomi had been just stupid enough to get her...
Merry, crazy bitch. My friend.
Okada’s calm certitudes: Your father and your grandmother, your high-school teacher Mrs. Ito...Mikoko, Emi and Hiro...
Tattooed arm ending in inky squid’s tentacles.
The awfulness of what Naomi had done lodged like economy-class breakfast in her throat.
She had to get smart, and fast. No hesitations, no more mistakes. Not a single one.
Bangkok emerged below, orange glows coalescing into something resembling a city. She could make out highways, spangled like phosphorescent spider webs, and then the lights were rushing past her, shadowy buildings behind them, and the plane landed.
Airport, the usual. But everything a little alien. The byzantine Thai lettering on the signs, the heat nagging even at this dead hour, the smell outside: spices and dust, sour fruit and piss.
A woman behind a small desk was there to offer hotel rooms, even at this hour. Naomi pointed to the cheapest one and handed over a couple thousand baht, not sure how much it was in dollars.
Jetlagged confusion on how to get a taxi, no speako the lingo, these Americanisms crowding her thoughts in her midnight exhaustion, and now a little panic over the shifty looking guys offering to take her luggage.
Naomi fingered the scratched silver cellphone, wondering if she should tell the goons where she had gone.
She decided yes. As a taxi bore her into the city, she tapped a brief text message. She didn’t want them thinking she was trying to hide.
Because Okada would find her. He wouldn’t be cute about it.
The flyover toward the city was a brightly lit bridge over vast expanses of darkness. Thai country music on the radio. Amulets and marigolds competing for dashboard real estate. Soon the car descended into urban bowels, the streets and the buildings coming alive, the persistent lighting casting everything in ghoulish relief.
Traffic, even at this undead hour: motorbikes piled up with families, street hawkers competing with homeless laborers and feral dogs for sidewalk turf. Darkened temple complexes shouldered between silent office towers, flickering with flurescents. A city like any other, roads and buildings – but off kilter, knowing it was unknowable, sidestreets that curved like condescending smiles.
The hotel claimed to be a three-star off a major drag called Sukhimvit Road. As they turned into the lane leading to the hotel, Naomi realized with a sinking heart why it had been affordable. The girlie bars were closed but she could see people stumbling around outside of nightclubs, underfed women in skimpy outfits mingling with the men, white and Asian, overconfident and garrulous.
The hotel’s lobby was aggressively but unconvincingly hip, and so brightly lit as to pretend no one knew what was going on outside. The two men at reception seemed surprised to see a woman arrive alone.
The key fob was clunky. The elevator was out of order so she climbed the stairs two levels to a hallway of stained orange carpets and cigarette odors.
Inside the room, the outside’s neon flooded through the window’s raised blinder.
She crossed to lower the shade. The sky was streaked with pink, and the dawn’s glow was leeching the neon signs of their mystique. Street cleaners were hosing down the curbs. A brand new day.
From the unfamiliar Bangkok hotel room, liminal connection to seaside Japan, north of Sendai, a dying village, working-age adults abandoning it one by one to children and grannies. Mother, then still alive, teaching to those whose parents work in the faraway city and resenting every second of her isolation here, is the one who catches her in the parked car with Michiko, hands up each other’s sailor-suit skirts; cue Naomi’s first true beating, telling Father it was the schoolyard bully, mom and daughter’s little dirty pact.
Books and American TV her escape. Soon she’s reading Nancy Drew in English, trying to ignore Mother’s sickness, not see the clumps of Mother’s hair in the shower drain, the village teacher fading like a photo too exposed to harsh light.
At least, she tells herself, no more nagging about marrying one of the town boys.
But with Mother out of the picture, Father comes back from the cannery, smelling not like fish but like sake, and marriage is on his mind too, advising her she’ll need to practice if she’s to make a boy happy, practice kissing like this.
By now she’s reading Jane Eyre and To Kill A Mockingbird from her futon behind the door she’s learned to barricade. The day she graduates from high school, she cleans out whatever loose change Father has and walks the five kilometers to the bus station.
Tokyo, thirty million souls, not a one interested in a country waif with no money. Newspapers turn her down but she parlays brains and English into an office gig, enough of a job to look respectable even as her head and her heart and her pussy lead her down a thousand dead ends, not knowing how to get it right. Intimacy of any kind ending in a slap, a punch, a payoff. Answer an ad, as thousands of Tokyo girls do every year. For the money, sure, but also…taking the abuse on camera. Risa Nakamura deserving it.
Until one day Father shows up, stinking of beer. She’s never been more shocked. He slurs about hard times, missing her mother, then demanding money, hitting her and leaving with her purse. Thirty million people is a city too small. It takes no time at all to count what’s in her bank accoun, and cash it out.
L.A.: a city like Tokyo, with neither form nor stricture. Thinking, here she can be who she wants to be. And it’s true, on the surface. Japan, she could like girls all she wanted, but she’d have to keep it hidden behind a straight marriage. Prison sentence. Her first memory of California: bars along Santa Monica, doors swung open, men wearing nothing but tight shorts aggressively Frenching. Here no need for Risa, no double life. She can just be Naomi.
But then: paralysis. Straight, gay, nothing – not about orientation. Thrilled to land her first job, lying about reporting gigs in Tokyo, yet somehow resigned to Stu’s offer. Pornalism…explained through one of her new Americanisms: fucked her up. It’s the only job she can swing, not something she had sought out. Coolly gliding among these oversexed narcissists, she realizes America doesn’t just let you be what you wanted to be: it demands militant flaunting. So even with Meredith whispering encouragement, Naomi looks and smiles and flirts and then panics and runs away. She begins to miss the Japanese preference for gilded cages.
Frozen. Until Eriko, with her flaming looks and red-hot body and manipulative eros. The key that could turn a lock. And the teenage bitch has to go and steal Bobby Feathers’ business card and disappear. Cue more self-loathing, Naomi once again the idiot who can’t understand motive, the stupid dreamer who nobody really likes, the blowup doll for the ruthless.
Indentured into Okada’s schemes to recoup his wayward runt. Suddenly Eriko back in the picture – unwelcome, a threat, an evil little wench who knows way too much about Naomi. Proof: Meredith’s mangled body.
Naomi wants to think that the silver lining is that she’s finally doing something. She had thought coming to California, getting the job at X-tra, had been like emerging from a chrysalis. But she hadn’t become anything beautiful.
Now, though, now she is spreading wings. Like a bat.
This is going to make her into something. If she survives. Something – but what?
Spending the Bangkok morning thinking of follow-up moves, the right way to approach Bobby Feathers, what to say to Eriko. Alternating that with diabolical charges of self-delusion, disgust, hopelessness. Deserving abuse. Deserving it…another Americanism: big-time.
Jetlag times two. The constant churning in her mind had exhausted her. Naomi’s cowardice, her paralysis between worlds. Meredith’s severed arm – would the rest of her corpse ever be found? Were they waiting with images of other body parts, in case she needed prodding?
Now this: confronting Bobby Feathers.
Could it wait another day?
No. Who knew for how long Bobby and Eriko would be staying here? Besides, she didn’t want to give Bug Eyes and Sumo an excuse to do something like what they had done to Merry. Her only friend in the world.
She turned on the TV as she showered and got dressed. CNN. While Naomi had been flying over the Pacific, President Bush had given Saddam Hussein and his sons an ultimatum. Forty-eight hours or else.
Naomi had been in California when the Twin Towers came down two years ago, and had joined in the national miasma of anger and grief. But that was about the extent of it: the looming war hadn’t penetrated into the sunlit gutters of the San Fernando Valley.
Now she felt even further removed from it all. She couldn’t muster an opinion, not even a gut feel, about America going to war. That had been Merry’s department.
She decided to take a taxi to the Grand Hyatt.
Bangkok. It was Naomi’s first time. This city of angels was like a more congested, dirtier version of L.A., thick with sprawl, the drivers of Lexuses indifferent to the wretches outside shaded beneath rustic bamboo hats. Despite the poverty and the chaos, though, the city emanated a sooty energy that made languid L.A. seem boring.
They were moored on the boulevard, sidestreets and shopfronts to one side, an extension of the Skytrain overhead. She pressed against the window to take in the scene. Eventually the traffic gods took notice and the street opened up. Within a flash they were turning in the midst of a giant plaza, department stores on all corners, and there it was on the left, a thick white edifice fronted by pillars and statues of elephants.
“We sat there this whole time,” Naomi complained to the driver. “I could have gotten out and walked.”
Security guards opened the trunk, peeked beneath the chassis with mirrors. Clear. The taxi ascended the steep ramp to the hotel’s entrance.
She entered the expansive, high-ceilinged foyer. The huge room burst with giant porcelain vases and expensive floral décor. Although there were a few other tourists dressed casually like her, Naomi was sensitive to the tricked-out Thais ensconced in the plush furniture, giving off aristocratic airs.
A pair of well-upholstered women looked her way, and she instantly recognized them as Japanese tourists. Naomi felt a moment’s panic, as though the troubles of the world had landed on her all at once. But instead of thinking of Sumo and Bug Eyes, or Eriko, or Meredith, she squared her shoulders and advanced on the reception desk.
She had already called: Eriko wasn’t registered as a guest. But Bobby Feathers was.
Find Bobby, she could find Eriko. Then it was just a matter of texting Sumo and Bug Eyes – and ensuring Eriko didn’t go anywhere until the torpedos showed up to take her home. Not that she had any clue how she was going to keep Eriko on a...leash.
Look on the bright side, she told herself. Bobby probably brought one. And handcuffs.
Reception was an elaborate display of teak and gold backing the uniformed attendants.
“How can I help you?” asked a receptionist, his hair gelled precisely.
“I’m here to see Bobby Feathers,” Naomi said, spelling Feathers.
The man nodded, clicking away at a keyboard. “He’s requested he not be disturbed. Perhaps you could leave a message?”
Naomi said, “He’s expecting me. Risa Nakamura.”
The man stared at his computer. “Actually he did leave a message for you.”
The receptionist handed her an envelope bearing the hotel’s insignia. Naomi stepped aside and removed a piece of folded lavender paper.
Dear future business partner,
It is my pleasure to invite you to a dinner banquet at the prestigious Sirocco, State Tower, the evening of Tuesday, March 18, 6.30pm.
Keep it sexy!
Sincerely,
Bobby Feathers
At the bottom right corner, a feather, embossed in silver.
The city shrugged off its stupor as daytime faded. A kink in the river jabbed into the commercial district, and here, presiding over the brown waters of the Chao Phraya, rose a cluster of new skyscrapers. State Tower, the tallest, was an edifice to new-money Bangkok, a charmless skein of uniform balconies with a view.
This was where she was going to find Bobby – and Eriko. They were expecting ‘Risa Nakamura’. Well, that’s who they were going to get: double the makeup, half the usual hemline. She had bought the cheap white summer dress along Silom Road this afternoon. The shoes too, and she struggled to keep her balance in the plastic heels. In her bag, her reporter’s notebook and recorder, and some business cards in Japanese script with Risa’s name in English, the fresh ink from the two-hour kiosk starting to bleed in the Bangkok heat.
A poster inside the lobby gushed, “Welcome to the largest building in Southeast Asia – 3.2 million square feet, 247 meters tall, and sixty-eight floors!”
More posters advertized Sirocco, an expensive, open-air restaurant on the sixty-fourth floor, showing photos of the city’s skyline and close-up shots of dishes, lobster, pasta, generic Western tourist fare.
She checked her watch as she waited outside the first of two banks of elevators needed to take to reach the top.
Full house. The elevator doors closed. She closed her eyes against the claustrophia of the crowd.
She switched elevator banks, waited with the same cluster of visitors, mostly white people, and the seconds ticked down. Everybody out. Big restaurant lobby, backlit by a gaudy sunset. Host and hostess, black clad, greeted her.
“Good evening,” said the host. “Welcome to Sirocco.”
Naomi handed him Bobby Feathers’ invitation. The host nodded instantly. “Please follow my colleague. She’ll take you to this party’s table.”
The hostess led her to the doorway leading outside. Naomi stepped out – into the abyss.
Below, down a stairway carved out of the roof: the restaurant, faux Greek columns upholding the sky, threading through the tables until they reached a bar, cantilevered over the edge, the throng of partygoers saved from death only by a waist-high wall of glass. A jazz trio blasted through speakers, hot trumpet matching the blaze of the dying sun, cool keyboard summoning the million lights of the city below.
Naomi pulled loose strands of hair out of her face and trembled, her footsteps uncertain amid the disorienting panorama. She followed the hostess down to a large set of cushioned seats near the bottom of the stairs – at the cliff’s edge.
Suddenly Eriko wasn’t worth it.
Feather-shaped patches sewed onto his shoulders like a general’s epaulettes, gold lamée pants and fishnet tank top beneath the linen jacket…Bobby Feathers was holding court.
Surrounded by his entourage, the porn magnate looked smarmy and confident, until he saw her. Then his eyes widened and his jaw unhinged.
“Bobby Feathers?” Naomi said, all business. “I’m Risa from Silk on Demand.”
He didn’t bother to get up, even though his eyes were devouring her. “Well I’ll be damned. Sucky-Fucky, is it really you?”
She scanned the table, desperate for succor she knew wasn’t there.
Pimples, known to his mother as James Exeter, was unconvincing in his Ferrari red suit. His arm was draped around a skinny young Thai woman but without the nonchalance of Bobby Feathers – more as if to attempt a pose he was still trying to get right.
Two Thai men. One, black T-shirt and black jeans, eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, a well-built thug.
The other – the other was a wow, even to her. Naomi’s gaze lingered on him a microsecond too long. Perfectly combed black hair, handsome bones, an impish gleam in his crescent eyes. He was a good dresser, too: crisp white Oxford shirt, unbuttoned just low enough to display a smooth, sculpted chest. Silk hankie in his light jacket. Handsome and confident, like someone who was comfortable with having inherited a fortune. Which, judging by the cigar Slick was puffing, may have been the case.
Thai women sat interspersed between Pimples, Thug and Slick, a tapestry of revealing dresses and jangling jewelry. Plenty of slits here and there, all red lips and taut brown skin.
No sign of Eriko.
“Naomi?” Pimples said, struggling in amazement to get the word past his teeth.
“Wrong woman,” she replied, irritated by how she noticed the wind play with the slick playboy’s hair. “You’re dealing with Risa Nakamura now.”
Bobby chuckled. “Well now, aren’t you full of surprises. Put that ass right here next to my pagoda.”
“I’m not here to sit on your lap, Bobby. I’m here to make a deal.” To Pimples: “Move over, zitface.”
The redhead gulped and shifted back. Naomi balanced her butt on the edge of the sofa. “Honey, get me a vodka lime on the rocks. Don’t skimp on the booze or Mr. Feathers here will complain.”
The hostess nodded. “Of course. Anything else?”
“Nah, we just ordered a round,” Bobby said, waving her off. “So…okay. You got me. Risa, that it? I have to admit, I always pictured you in one of my librarian scenarios. This…I am impressed.”
Slick revealed a tube from his jacket pocket. “Montecristo Number Five. Would you care for one?”
She took it, feeling that shudder again. Something about his face. He knew how to smile just enough to be relaxed, not pushy. She wasn’t a smoker...no, Naomi wasn’t a smoker, but stupid Naomi wasn’t here, was she?
The Thai man in black and wraparounds just frowned at her.
“I like a man with manners,” she said, making a show of checking out the Thai women in their midst. “Although I’m a little disappointed, Bobby. I thought you’d get more expensive looking bimbos.”
Slick, too far across the table to do it for her, handed her a heavy-duty cigar lighter, five pounds of metal.
Bobby: “So you’re, what, an industry executive now? That reporter thing was, like, a charade or something?”
“Something like that.”
Bobby lit a cigarette. “How’d you get that invite?”
“You gave it to me. Silk on Demand.”
Pimples said to his boss, “Isn’t that the company Eriko mentioned?”
Bobby waved him shut. “This don’t make sense.”
Naomi smiled as she worked one end of the cigar with the gigantic lighter. “So where’s Eriko?”
“Eriko?” Bobby wondered. “What’s she to you?”
“I’m the one who sent her your way. Glad you two really hit it off.” A waitress arrived with Naomi’s vodka lime. She swapped the cigar for the drink and took a greedy gulp. The booze gave a satisfying burn. “So last I heard you had something going on here and you wanted some Japanese distribution.”
Bobby ate an olive and spat the stone into the air, the wind whistling it to parts unknown. “My friends and I here are putting together something very spicy. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?”
“Spicy,” said the Thai thug in black, grinning from behind his wraparounds.
“You know, it’s getting dark,” Naomi told him. “Wear those shades, buddy, you might fall off this place.”
Slick laughed. “His English is not so good, Risa.” His Thai accent bent like reeds in the breeze. “But don’t worry, he is used to wearing sunglasses. It is his style.”
The thug in black pursed his lips and pointed his finger at her, like a pistol.
“I liked Naomi better,” Bobby said. “She didn’t talk back.”
She opened her purse and handed him a card. “Well now you know the real me.”
He didn’t bother to look at it, just flicked it behind his ear, feeding it to the voracious wind. “Paper card don’t mean squat. But, whatever. Even if you are who you say you are, it’s kinda late. Because the terms have changed, got it?”
Naomi smiled at him. The cigar, the knife-edge play, the booze – her head was turning into a chamber filled with static. “My associates accept that we will have to pay the price to be included.”
“And forgive me, but SOD – it’s a legit player. Is this really your kind of thing?”
This was straining Naomi’s poker face to the max. “We have multiple lines of business. Under different brands. Holding company. Cross-shareholdings. It’s complicated.”
Bobby shook his head. “You’re so full of shit.”
Naomi leaned towards him. “Eriko: where is she, Bobby?”
Pimples interjected, “Meredith said Eriko had told you about the plan.”
“It’s cute when you try to form complete sentences,” Naomi told him, now feeling like the gusts would blow her over the edge. Meredith…
“Hunh?” Pimples squeaked.
“So Bobby, I guess you could say Eriko’s one reason why SOD is interested.” Naomi took another careful puff. “She still calling herself Tamaki?”
Bobby Feathers ran fingers through his thinning hair. “She’s the reason you’re here? That’s what you’re selling me?”
Naomi shrugged. “Eriko’s hot stuff back in Japan.”
“Listen, Sucky-Fucky, there ain’t no way you’re here because of some Tokyo gash. You know why? Because there’s too many of them for anybody to give a shit.”
“We’ve got our star system too, you know.”
“If you were from a Japanese production company, you’d know the industry puts out a hundred vids a day. Of which two thou a year feature a new girl. About a hundred-fifty thousand women active any given time. That’s almost a city’s worth of gash doing porn. And you’re telling me SOD sent you all the way from Tokyo to ask me about one girl?”
Naomi took a sip of vodka. Nothing else left to play. “Well, there’s her father.”
“You’re not from the video company,” Pimples said. “Bobby, she’s just doing a story for that paper.”
“Or,” Bobby sneered, “you some kind of cop?”
The slick Thai man said something to his colleague, the thug in black, who stood up and removed his shades. His eyes were full of anger and he shouted something at her. No feminine sing-song lilt to this guy’s Thai accent, just words that hit like a sledgehammer.
“Trat don’t like you,” Bobby told her. “And you’re just making me tired.”
She was slipping out of her heels, ready to bolt, when Eriko showed up running: creamy skin in a shimmering blouse and cutaway blue jeans, black hair dyed into a flaxen bob, cute little chin and nose, and big luminous eyes. Naomi had to tap down the little electrical jolt the girl still triggered, but the shock and fear in Eriko’s face extinguished any lingering lust, pronto.
Eriko was out of breath, but seeing Naomi stopped her short. In Japanese: “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Your father wants you back,” Naomi told her, reaching for the silver Kyocera in her tiny handbag.
Eriko looked back, then at Naomi again, as if surrounded by ghouls.
“Shit!”
“Nice to see you two catching up,” Bobby mused.
The hostess returned. “Another guest is here,” she announced.
Bobby gestured to Naomi. “Trat, would you have your men escort this lying bitch the fuck outta here?”
Naomi looked up the steps. A giant golden dome crowned the rooftop and housed the restaurant’s interior. The trumpet blew and the wind howled and there, standing in the single door leading inside, was a thin Japanese man in a black suit and a crimson shirt. Ridiculously skinny, except for his unnaturally bulbous eyes.
The source of Eriko’s panic. Naomi had to swallow her own.
“Where’s Meredith?” Pimples asked.
Naomi looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Dead, Pimples. Meredith is dead. And that guy did it.” She pointed up at Bug Eyes.
Then Eriko saw him too, and her hands went to her mouth and she doubled over and screamed. Eriko knew what these men were. Knew it by heart, as though witnessing severed limbs was part of her childhood education.
The hostess was now in motion, diners at other tables were peering up like meerkats. Bug Eyes was past the jazz trio’s mezzanine, murming sweet nothings on his cell. Trat, the Thai thug in black, was shouting orders, and the rich man was calmly relighting his cigar, which the wind had extinguished. Bobby was saying to Eriko “What’s wrong, what the hell’s wrong with you,” and Pimples was protesting, “But I just spoke with her.”
Naomi called out, “Eriko – wait!”
But the girl was scrambling toward the thicket of dining tables, away from her, away from the stairs where Bug Eyes was making his descent.
Trat’s men, Thai guys wearing polos and slacks that didn’t match their steel-tipped boots, jumped into the fray. One grabbed Naomi from behind and the other charged up the stairs at Bug Eyes.
She didn’t know what was happening except her arms were cinched behind her and her feet had slipped free of their shoes. The hoodlum spun her above the world, and there was nothing there – just the wind, the trumpet’s underhand rag – the edge.
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