The Para Ordnance Ten was basically the same thing as the old Colt Government.45, but muscled up to take the hot 10mm cartridge. It also had a magazine capacity of fifteen rounds, unlike the old Colt, which held seven. That made for a mighty hefty grip, but Belew had big hands for his size. For all that the Para was a largish chunk of iron, it suited him well, and felt very good. The feel of a piece of equipment was very important to him.

The fore-end of the Ten in its Cordura holster did tend to kind of gouge him between the tops of his buttcheeks as he walked. That was the price you paid for concealed carry. You did not want to wear a shoulder-rig in the Tropics: Rash City.

An open display of ordnance was conspicuously not a good idea. The Thai Army had taken over again in late February under the direction of a general with the – to Belew anyway – immensely satisfactory name of Suchinda Krapayoon. Though the less resplendently named General Sunthorn Komsongpong was the front man for the junta, Suchinda was known to desire to move from being the brains behind the throne to the butt seated on it. The coup – the seventeenth, successful or otherwise, since 1932 – had come in on a law-and-order theme. Since Western governments did not want their citizens armed, what could be a better way of demonstrating the junta’s commitment to the rule of law than rousting gun-slinging Westerners in approved Southeast Asian style?

The prohibition, of course, did not extend to the Army, the various police agencies, or the paramilitary Thai Rangers. These latter bad boys, in their characteristic Victor Charlie black pajamas, swaggered in bands through the waterfront district with the slings of their Kalashnikovs hung around their necks along with their trademark sky-blue neckerchiefs. Belew gave them room but little thought, as an experienced jungle traveler would a cobra sunning himself on a trailside rock.

The bar was called the Headless Thompson Gunner. It had a cute neon sign with the outline in blue of a big combat-booted dude with no head blazing away with an old drum-fed Tommy 1927 A5, the same gun all the Feds back home – having discovered the hard way in numerous shootouts that, beyond being a shitty handgun round, 9mm was also a shitty submachine gun round – were lugging around in spite of its enormous weight. The sign even had a flickering red-neon muzzle flash, Belew wished the place would open a franchise in Manhattan. It would make the Park Avenue set soil themselves.

It wasn’t really pitch-black inside, but after the dazzle-bath on the street it seemed that way until Belew’s eyes sorted themselves out. He took off the Ray-Bans and tucked them into his jacket pocket to speed things along.

On a rat’s-ass little stage to the left of the door a couple of listless babes gyrated to Madonna, lit by cyan and magenta spots that made them look more like tropical fish than go-go dancers. Both of them wore bikinis. For a town where everything was for sale, Bangkok had its surprisingly prim side. You could see anything your deviant heart desired, if you were willing to pay, but not walking in flat off the street. Even down in the gut of the Chao Phrya slum.

As he got his bearings, Belew listened to the music. It was not really his kind of sound – if he had to hear modern music, he preferred speed metal – but it brought back pleasant memories. Madonna was a dear girl, sweet and genuinely vulnerable behind her sex-bitch-goddess onstage persona. Still, Josй Canseco probably fit better into her lifestyle…

“J. Ro-bear! Mon dieu, fuck me, it is good to see you!”

It sounded like a man trying to bellow with a mouthful of pebbles, and it gave you a major clue why Demosthenes failed to keep the Macedonians out of Athens. Still squinting, Belew saw an oblong oasis of relative light that was the bar, and outlined against that light a hulking shadow.

Grinning, Belew threaded toward that shadow between tables of serious drinkers, who all looked like pirates off the South China Sea and conceivably were pirates off the Chao Phrya. He held out his hand to have it engulfed by a vast black-furred paw. The barkeep and owner of the Headless Thompson Gunner was an enormous lumpy man with a square, scar-tracked face beginning to sag at the jowls, a nose like a bad potato, large and basset-soulful eyes, and, despite the hot humidity that filled the bar along with smoke in defiance of the creaking ceiling fan, a toupee stretched across the top of his head like black-dyed road-kill.

He was, of course, named Roland.

He claimed to be the inspiration for the Zevon song, which was to say the least, unlikely. For one thing he wasn’t a Norwegian. For another there was the inconvenient matter of him still being in possession of his head – which, as his old black-war buddy Belew loved to remind him, no sane man would pick for himself and thus was surely the one he had been born with, QED.

“So how are things, you ugly Walloon ape?” Belew asked, reclaiming his hand, which his sometimes comrade-in-arms had tried yet again to crush and, as always, failed.

“Well enough,” Roland rumbled. He tipped his large head toward the stage. “If they don’t cause trouble.”

They were four Thai Rangers knocking back brews and raising a general hooraw. They had checked their AKs at the door – four men with assault rifles were not stud enough to force their way into a Chao Phrya bar – but the dancers kept giving them apprehensive looks.

“They are either on furlough from the northwest, raping the Karen of their teakwood at the behest of the army of Burma – pardonnez-moi, Myanmar – or from the east running guns to the Khmers Rouges. If you wish to know more, you must ask them yourself – do you still drink nothing stronger than fruit juice?”

Belew nodded. “Still.”

Shaking his head at Belew’s foibles, Roland poured him a glass of apricot juice. He had gone into the Congo as a Belgian paratrooper in 1960 and gone back as a mercenary under Schramme to fight the murderous Simbas in 1964. Since then he’d bounced around the Third World, from the Yemen to Nicaragua to Syria to splintered India, fighting mostly communist and communist-backed insurgents. Ten years ago, pushing fifty, he had bought the bar and retired.

He pushed the glass at Belew. “How the times change,” he said with a sigh. “When I quit, I was convinced the Soviets were winning, slowly but surely.”

He shook his head and laughed. “How quaint that fear seems now, when it is a good morning for Monsieur Gorbachev if he awakens to find he still has Moscow.”

Belew raised his glass. “To changing times.” Roland poured a splash of cognac in a glass, and both men drank.

“But plus change, plus c’est la mкme chose did not become a cliche for no reason,” Roland said, setting down his empty glass with a solid thunk. “Perhaps history has ended, as one of your people has written, but whatever is taking its place still offers employment to such bad men as you, it seems.”

Belew grinned. “And so it does. And bad men like me still have need of bad men like you.” He leaned across the bar. “Roland, I need your help. Right now. The risk is high. So is the pay.”

Ten minutes later J. Robert Belew emerged from the Headless Thompson Gunner. As the sunlight hit him full in the face, he paused long enough to put his Ray-Bans back in front of his eyes. Then he took off down the street like a man on a mission.

Half a block in the other direction, nearer the Menam Chao Phrya, Lynn Saxon and Gary Hamilton sat under the gaudy fringed shade of a tuk-tuk motorized-tricycle cab. Saxon had added a Panama hat with a band that matched the rest of his ensemble, He looked like an up-market drug mule who thought he was on the fast track to middle management but was actually being cultured to take a fall. Hamilton was carrying some extra marble to his beef, and in the wet Chao Phrya heat was sweating as if it were a medal event in the Goodwill Games.