© 2006

MUCH LATER, WHEN THE glass had stopped flying and the screams of pain and fear had died to moans and whimpers and the hoarse rattles of death, when the bodies had been taken to the morgue and the injured to the hospitals, when the television cameras had gone and workers had begun to clear the rubble and business along Central Street began to return to a shaken sort of normal, very few people remembered the two men who had been standing on the corner of Soi Cowboy when the bomb went off.

They were definitely Asian, or so said a vigorous, middle-aged woman who owned a pornographic comic book store nearby. Slim, short, narrow eyes, sallow skin, neatly clipped straight black hair, she remembered them clad in identical short-sleeved shirts and light cotton slacks in nondescript colors. A hundred like them sidled into her tiny shop every day to thumb through her merchandise, avoiding eye contact as they made their purchases.

A young man, the proud owner of his own car who specialized in delivering takeout to the pleasure palaces on Soi Cowboy and whose car had been parked twenty feet from the Fun House when the explosion occurred, had been blown backward the entire length of the block. He had landed hard on his back at the feet of the two Asian men, splattered with nine orders of pad thai and the brains of a twenty-year-old American marine on leave from Camp Butler on Okinawa. As he looked up at them, a man’s leg hit the side of the Pattaya Inn just above their heads, and what the delivery man found most odd was that the two men hadn’t looked at the leg, or even at him, instead focusing their attention on the chaos that followed the blast.

An elderly Japanese tourist, seeking relief from his shrew of a wife in Nagasaki in the fleshpots of a resort known for its willingness to provide pretty much anything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the way of entertainment, was sure the two men he had hobbled hurriedly by were Korean, because he’d killed his share in World War II and he ought to know.

At the end of the day the body count had climbed to one hundred and fourteen dead and another two hundred injured. At least half of these were Thai nationals, many of them dancers and prostitutes, sex shop owners, and bartenders. They merited little beyond the standard obligatory protestations of outrage and vows of retaliation from the nation’s capital, quickly spoken and as quickly forgotten.

The other half was another matter. Seventeen American servicemen were dead, twenty-two more injured. Eleven Australians, four New Zealanders, nine Germans, and one Frenchman would never see home again. It was the Japanese tourists who were hit hardest, although it would take a month before all the body parts had been assembled, DNA matches made. The count would stop at thirty-one.

In the following days the world waited for someone to take responsibility for the bomb. After all, that’s why these things happened, one man’s terrorist or another man’s revolutionary set off a bomb on a bus in Jerusalem or on a U.S. destroyer in Aden or outside a federal building in Oklahoma City because he wanted attention, the bright lights of the television camera aimed squarely at his cause. Yasir Arafat would have been just another old man in a galabia spouting anti-Israeli rhetoric without the photogenic properties of the suicide bombers and their residue in Gaza and on the West Bank. So the world waited, for al-Qaida or Hizballah or the IRA or FARC or the Basque Fatherland to step up and declare another victory in the war against first world aggression, Western decadence, and the free-market economy. Or perhaps the hostility was directed against the insidious creep of the Big Mac or the pervasiveness of Steven Seagal movies, either of which a lot of Westerners would have found more logical than the first three as a cause worthy of riot in the streets.

None of these organizations had set the bomb, however, or at least none of them took credit for it. A guy did go into Roy’s Bar in Wallace, Idaho, ten days after the event and started bragging about how he’d just come back from putting a bunch of gooks into body bags. It turned out that he was the founder of White World, which couldn’t exactly be called a white supremacist group as he was the sole member, and the closest he’d ever been to Thailand was the International District bus stop in Seattle on his way to an Aryan Nations meeting in Aurora. The bar patrons hadn’t left a lot for the police to scrape up off the floor anyway. Not that they’d hurried to the scene when they got the call.

But in Pattaya, the comic shop woman and the delivery boy and the Japanese tourist remembered the two men standing so calmly in the middle of so much death and destruction, and wondered.

They would have wondered even more if they’d seen the two men turn and walk away, down Central Street, maintaining an even, unhurried pace, ignoring the wailing sirens and the flashing lights streaking past them toward the steadily mounting rumble of disbelief and horror.

A middle-aged woman, plump and improbably blond, did see them go. She wiped at the trickle of blood on her forehead where a piece of the left taillight from the delivery boy’s car had sliced open her skin, replaced her digital camera in a capacious shoulder bag, and steadied her shaking legs to follow.

The two men walked a little over half a mile and turned down a lane that led to the beach. Here all was peace and order, no storefronts destroyed, no blood pooling in the street, no ambulance doors slamming on the dead and the dying. A causeway led to an outdoor cafe on a plat form on pilings over the beach and a table in the shade of a large marquee. They ordered chai tea in North American English, but the waiter, an elderly French expatriate who had fled to Thailand after the fall of Saigon, didn’t think they were American or Canadian. They looked too much at home, unlike the average Western tourist, who was apt to stare around incredulously as if he’d never seen a third world country before. These men drank their chai tea without first scrutinizing the rim of the glass for germs. If they hadn’t spoken such good English he would have thought they were Korean, the height and broadness of the cheekbones, perhaps. He also thought they might be brothers, but when questioned later he couldn’t say why. Did they look alike? Not particularly. One seemed a little older than the other. It was just a feeling he had. One developed certain instincts after thirty years of serving patrons in a Pattaya bar, where sooner or later all the world came to drink.

“A terrible thing, this bombing,” he told the two men in a placid voice as he set their drinks on the table. “One lives and works one’s whole life expecting these things to happen elsewhere, and then-” He shrugged. “No place is safe nowadays, what with all these terrorists fleeing the American invasion of the Middle East to set their bombs in poor countries like Thailand.”

“A terrible thing,” the older man said without inflection.

The waiter looked up to see a woman hovering in the doorway with a smear of blood on her forehead, and he bustled forward solicitously. Her weight alone was indication enough of her nationality, and when she ordered a Budweiser it was confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt, but her voice was low and pleasant, a relief. He seated her a table away from the two men, or no, the two had been joined by a third. He would have returned to take the third man’s order but a group of German tourists chose that moment to arrive and push all the tables into one corner together so they wouldn’t have to suffer the horror of sitting separately. They chattered excitedly about the bomb, exclaiming how lucky they’d been to have escaped, and peppered the waiter with questions about who could have done such a thing and was Thailand plagued with terrorists, too, and the waiter took innumerable orders for Oolong-Tea-nis and Monkey Faces. Nobody ordered scotch anymore.