Authors: Collin Piprell
Bangkok Knights
Stories by
Collin Piprell
© 1991 by Collin
Piprell. All rights reserved First Edition 1989. Second Edition 1991
Editions Duang Kamol Siam Square G.P.O. Box 427 Bangkok, Thailand
Typeset by COMSET Limited Partnership
Printed in Thailand by
D. K. Printing House, Ltd. 205/54-57 Ngamwongwan Rd. Bangkok 10210
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 974-210-537-5
CONTENTS
INSTINCT, OR
GENES, OR SOMETHING
Any resemblance between characters, guesthouses, or bars
in these stories and real people or businesses is entirely coincidental.
Versions of the following stories have appeared in print
before:
“Lotus Eaters”
(Dateline Bangkok,
Foreign
Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, January-March, 1989); “Getting Away From It
AIT
(Bangkok Post,
January 17,1988); “Mother Makes a Match”
(Bangkok
Post,
June 28,1987); “Sid’s Wake”
(Bangkok Post,
September 20,1987).
The latter three stories were printed under the name ‘Ham Fiske’.
“I’m not a crook!” screamed Nixon. “Auk! Not a crook!”
At least I think it was Nixon. The other birds had picked
up the expression now, and you didn’t know who to believe. Five mynah birds in
bamboo cages hung around the wrought-iron enclosure in back of the Cheri-Tone.
Nixon was the biggest and baddest of the five; he also managed to look twice as
depraved as his closest rival. I believe he had the avian equivalent of mange,
and the feathers on his head stuck out in all directions.
“You crud! Auk! You crud!”
“I’m going to wring your neck, Nixon,” I said in a quiet
voice. I just about meant it, too. After all, it
was
a Saturday morning
and he was kind of shrieking.
“Hello, hello.
Sa-wasdee krap.
Auk!” The whole
assembly welcomed Eddie as he emerged from the back of the guesthouse.
“Get stuffed,” said Eddie.
“Get stuffed! Hello. Get stuffed!” rejoined Nixon, backed
up by one or two of the others.
“You want a beer?” asked my host He looked a little under
the weather, and I had the feeling I was supposed to say ‘yes’.
“No thanks, Eddie. I guess I had my fill last night.”
“Hoo, boy. Me, too. Yeah, you’re right; best have a coffee.”
I had come over for a late breakfast with Eddie Alder at the
Cheri-Tone Guesthouse.
“How’s business?” I asked.
“Well It´s lucky I have a contempt for money let’s put it that
way.”
“Not a full house?”
“We’ve got two Canadian ladies who’ve just gone off to the
Seventh Day Adventists in search of high adventure and natural peanut butter.
And as though that’s not enough, we’ve got
another
guest, even. I
haven’t seen this specimen yet, but Lek tells me he’s straight in from Kuwait and he’s a perfect gentleman. Of course Lek thinks anybody with a clean shirt and no
backpack is a perfect gentleman.”
Lek was Eddie’s wife; she and her sister Meow really ran
the joint. Eddie only kind of hung around with the birds and worked on his
novel.
“From Kuwait?” I said. “What’s he doing
here?
I
didn’t mean to cast aspersions on the Cheri-Tone, but funseekers from the Middle East generally scorned such modest accommodation, and this particular guesthouse
wasn’ t within a convenient stagger of any of the conventional nightspots.
“I don’t know, but here’s our man now; let’s ask him.”
The young man who’d just appeared wore a preoccupied air.
He also had big red ears that stuck out and a little blond moustache, the kind
you sort of notice after a while—you say *Oh,yeah. That’s a moustache. He’s
growing a moustache, I think.’
It turned out his name was Trevor Perry and he was from Norwich. He said he’d arrived from Kuwait late the night before, his flight having been
delayed eleven hours. Exhausted, he’d been. He told the taxi driver he wanted
the Sheraton Hotel, and he was promptly transported straight to the Cheri-Tone.
“I was too tired to argue,” Trevor said, running a
fingertip over the blond fuzz on his lip and sighing mightily.
“If that doesn’t beat all,” Eddie mused. “Do you think
Lek’s started paying off the airport cabbies?” Normally, of course, it’d be
some backpack traveler trying to get to the Cheri-Tone who’d be shanghaied to
the Sheraton.
”Do you want a coffee, Mr. Trevor?” Lek called from the
doorway.
“No, thanks.”
“How about a cold beer?” said Eddie, his whole manner
suggesting anybody just off the plane from Kuwait who didn’ t want one had to
do some serious reflecting on his basic aims and priorities.
“No, it’s okay. I’m waiting for my champagne to chill.”
“You’re doing what?”
“I’m waiting for my champagne to chill.”
“Ah. Okay... When did you put it in the cooler?”
“An hour ago.”
“Maybe it’s ready,” Eddie suggested.
It wasn’ t; it needed another half-hour, in Trevor’s
judgment. In the meantime, he told us a little about himself.
It seemed he was a traffic engineer from Norwich working
in Kuwait, and this was the first time he’d been in the Far East. Trevor was
not a reticent type, for an Englishman, and before long we discovered that this
was kind of a business vacation he was on. But it wasn’t traffic he was
interested in, no matter how much of this commodity there was to be found in Bangkok. No, what he was after was a wife.
“Eighteen months I’ve been in Kuwait,” he told us,
“without a break. And I have to go back.”
Was he on parole, then? Why did he
have
to go back?
“I’m buying a house in the U.K. In Norwich. And I want to
get a flat in London — as an investment, you know.”
“So you’ ve come to Bangkok to get stuck into the gogo
bars, shopping for a missus to look after this ancestral home you’re
acquiring,” Eddie said, summing it up with a flourish.
“No, no. No, I’ ve heard enough about that kind of thing
from some of my associates back in the Gulf. No, that’s not for me. But I do
need a wife. You can’t live in Kuwait longer than two years if you don’ t have
a wife.” For a callow youth with reddish jug ears and a sort-of moustache,
Trevor could do a remarkable job of looking like a man wise beyond his years.
Especially when he stroked at his upper lip with a forefinger and gazed sternly
off into the middle distance. “You want to have a woman with an education —
someone you can talk to, and someone who can raise your children. Someone you
can introduce to the boss’ wife. You really want to know something about her
background.”
“How long do you plan to be in Thailand?” asked Eddie.
“Three weeks,” said Trevor. “Three weeks here, and then
three weeks in Manila.”
“So I guess it’s Manila for the honeymoon, right?” I asked.
Trevor chose to take me seriously: “Oh, no; I’m not going
to get married right away. No, first I have twenty-five dates lined up in Bangkok, and thirty more in Manila. These are going to be like preliminary interviews.”
Eddie and I looked at each other in wonderment. This
in-other-ways-unremarkable young fellow who’d never been to the Far East before was apparently contemplating fifty-five dates in six weeks. And he claimed
he was going to stay away from girlie bars. Evidently, traffic engineers knew
things about planning and scheduling the rest of us mortals did not.
Indeed, Trevor went back to his room to fetch his schedule
and he showed us, with understandable pride, the projected outlines of his
first vacation in eighteen months. It wouldn’t have been possible, of course,
without his specialized background and the use of modern computer technology.
He had employed a computer and a word-processing program, over the past year,
to correspond with several hundred ladies.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds — I only used four different
standard letter series. With the word processor, changing the salutations and
any other reference to names is no trick at all. The computer, on the other
hand, lets me keep track of sequencing — where I’ve got to with each candidate
— and it files the ladies according to criteria such as physical attributes,
educational background, and distance from their residences to the base of
operations in the field. In this case, the Sheraton Hotel, Bangkok.
“When it came time to make my trip, it was a simple matter
of informing the computer of my requirements, specifying the anticipated length
of stay and so on, and this is what it gave me.”
On the print-out there was a list of fifty-five names,
addresses, personal notes, dates, times, and even suggested locations for the
assignations. It seemed the floppy disk had become the little black book of the
Space Age, at least if you were about to do some gallivanting on the scale
Trevor had in mind.
“Before it’s over, I’ll have made considerable investments
in postage, transportation, meals, etc.,” said Trevor, “but I expect it will
have been worth it”
Eddie and I expressed amazement and admiration at his
resourcefulness and his grasp of modern technology. For his part, Trevor’s ears
burned vivid red with modest pride and his sort-of moustache virtually quivered
with some similar emotion.
Not that he didn’t enjoy the ambience at the Cheri-Tone,
but his plan specified the Sheraton as the optimum base of operations, as he’d
said, and he would be leaving to take up residence there that very afternoon.
In the meantime, perhaps we would like to join him in a glass of champagne to
celebrate the inauguration of this mass courtship?
With no noticeable hesitation, Eddie said he’d get a
couple more glasses; Trevor already had his Thai International Airways glass,
which he’d scored at the same time he’d negotiated the bottle, and which he’d
chilled together with the wine.
Showing more animation than he had all morning, Eddie did
a funky little shuffle and sang a snatch of song: “Gon-na have a par-ty...”
“Mao laaoh;
drunk already,” said Lek’s sister Meow
with disgust, going over to Nixon’s cage and starting a language lesson:
“Mao
laaoh; mao laaoh...”
Eddie told us he was of the opinion Lek’ s sister learned
more from the birds than they learned from her, but he said this in a kind of
undertone, not being too foolhardy.