Bangkok Tattoo

1

Killing customers just isn’t good for business.”

My mother Nong’s tone reflects the disappointment we all feel when a star employee starts to go wrong. Is there nothing to be done? Will we have to let dear Chanya go? The question can only be decided by Police Colonel Vikorn, who owns most of the shares in the Old Man’s Club and who is on his way in his Bentley.

“No,” I agree. Like my mother’s, my eyes cannot stop flicking across the empty bar to the stool where Chanya’s flimsy silver dress (just enough silk to cover nipples and butt) drapes and drips. Well, the dripping was slight and is more or less finished (a rusty stain on the floor turning black as it dries), but in more than a decade as a detective in the Royal Thai Police, I have never seen a garment so blood-soaked. Chanya’s bra, also hideously splattered, lies halfway up the stairs, and her panties-her only other garment-lie abandoned on the floor outside the upstairs room where, eccentrically even for a Thai whore, she has taken refuge with an opium pipe.

“She didn’t say anything at all? Like why?”

“No, I told you. She dashed in through the door in a bit of a state holding an opium pipe, glared at me, said, ‘I’ve done him in,’ ripped off her dress, and disappeared upstairs. Fortunately, there were only a couple of farang in the bar at the time, and the girls were fantastic. They merely said, ‘Oh, Chanya, she goes like that sometimes,’ and gently ushered them out. I had to play the whole thing down, of course, and by the time I got to her room, she was already stoned.”

“What did she say again?”

“She was tripping on the opium, totally delirious. When she started talking to the Buddha, I left to call you and the Colonel. At that stage I didn’t know if she’d really done him in or was freaking out on yaa baa or something.”

But she’d snuffed him all right. I walked to the farang’s hotel, which is just a couple of streets away from Soi Cowboy, and flashed my police ID to get the key to his room. There he was, a big muscular naked American farang in his early thirties, minus a penis and a lot of blood from a huge knife wound that began in his lower gut and finished just short of his rib cage. Chanya, a basically decent and very tidy Thai, had placed his penis on the bedside table. At the other end of the table, a single rose stood in a plastic mug of water.

There was nothing for it but to secure the room for the purposes of forensic investigation, leave a hefty bribe for the hotel receptionist-who is now more or less obliged to say whatever I tell him to say (standard procedure under my Colonel Vikorn in District 8)-and await further orders. Vikorn, of course, was in one of his clubs carousing, probably surrounded by naked young women who adored him, or knew how to look as if they did, and in no mood to be dragged to the scene of a crime until I penetrated his drunken skull enough to explain that the business at hand was not an investigation per se but the infinitely more challenging forensic task so lightly spoken of as a “cover-up.” Even then he showed no inclination to shift himself until he realized it was Chanya (the perp, not the victim).

“Where the hell did she get the opium?” my mother wants to know. “There hasn’t been opium in Krung Thep since I was a teenager.”

I know from her eyes that she is thinking fondly of the Vietnam War, when she was herself a working girl in Bangkok and a lot of the GIs brought small balls of opium from the war zone (one of them being my almost-anonymous father, of whom more later). An opiated man is more or less impotent-which reduces much of the wear and tear on a professional’s assets-and not inclined to argue about fee structure. Nong and her colleagues had always shown special interest in any American serviceman who whispered that he had a little opium back in his hotel. Being devout Buddhists, of course, the girls never used the stuff themselves, but they encouraged the john to get stoned out of his tree, whereupon they would extract exactly the agreed fee from his wallet, plus a tip somewhat on the generous side to reflect the risk inherent in associating with drug abusers, plus taxi fare, and return to work. Integrity has always been a master word for Nong, which is why she is so upset about Chanya.

We both know the Colonel is arriving in his limo, because his damned signature tune “The Ride of the Valkyries” is booming from the stereo as his car approaches. I go to the entrance and watch while his driver opens the rear door and more or less pulls him out (a beautiful cashmere Zegna sports jacket, fawn colored and somewhat crumpled, pants by Eddy Monetti on the Via Condotti in Rome, and his usual Wayfarer wraparound sunglasses).

The driver staggers toward me with Vikorn’s arm over his shoulder. “It’s fucking Saturday fucking night,” the driver complains with a glare, as if it’s all my fault. (We prefer not to investigate even capital crimes on Saturday nights in District 8.) The Buddhist path can be much like the Christian in that the karma of others often seems to get dumped on your shoulders from out of nowhere.

“I know,” I tell him as I make way to let him pass, and Vikorn, sunglasses now thrust fashionably onto his hairline though slightly askew, also glares at me blearily.

There are padded benches in intimate little booths along the back wall of the club, and the driver dumps Vikorn down in one while I get some mineral water from the fridge and hand it to my Colonel, who empties the bottle in a few swigs. It is with relief that I observe the rodent cunning return to those frank, unblinking eyes. I tell him the story again, with a few commercially focused interjections from my mother (“she makes more for us in a month than all the other girls put together”), and I see that he already has a plan to maximize wriggle-room should things get difficult.

Within ten minutes he is close to sober, tells his driver to disappear with the limo (he doesn’t want to broadcast that he is here), and is staring at me. “So let’s go up and take her statement. Get an ink pad and some A4 paper.”

I find the ink pad that we use for our business stamp (“The Old Man’s Club-Rods of Iron”) and some sheets of paper from the fax machine, which Nong installed for those few of our overseas clients who don’t have e-mail (we tried for hooker.com and similar domain names, but they had all been taken, including oldman.com; whore.org had of course been taken since the dawn of cyberspace, so we had to make do with omcroi.com), and follow him across the bar. He stares at Chanya’s dress on the stool and cocks an eye at me.

“Versace.”

“Fake or real?”

Gingerly I hold it up, hefting the weight of the blood it has absorbed. “Unclear.”

He grunts much as Maigret used to do, as if absorbing a clue too subtle for my understanding, and we continue up the stairs, passing the bra without comment. I pick up the panties on the floor outside the room (almost weightless and apparently innocent of bloodstains-they are more a cache-sex than a proper undergarment, with the rear panel no more than a bootlace that divides the buttocks). I hang them over a stray electrical cable for now. Chanya was too stoned to lock the door, and when we enter, she blesses us with a rapturous smile from that awesomely beautiful mouth, before returning to whichever of the Buddha heavens she has escaped to.

She is quite naked, stretched out on the bed with her legs akimbo, her full firm breasts pointing at the ceiling (an exquisite blue dolphin is jumping over her left nipple), her long hair shining like a fresh black brushstroke on the white pillow. She has shaved her pubic hair save for the subtlest filigree black line, which seems to point to her clitoris, perhaps as a road sign for drunk and fumbling farang. The opium pipe, a classic of about three feet of bamboo with the bowl two-thirds of the way down, lies beside her. The Colonel sniffs and smiles-as with my mother, the sweet aroma of burned poppy sap holds fond memories for him, though of a radically different order. (He used to trade it up in Laos in the golden years of the B-52s.) The room is tiny and hardly big enough for the three of us when I bring two chairs and set them on opposite sides of the bed. The sex goddess between us begins to snore while Vikorn dictates her statement:

“ ‘The farang had been drinking even before he came into my club. He called me over to join him at his table and offered to buy me a drink. I accepted a Coca-Cola while he drank’-ah, let’s see-’nearly a full bottle of Mekong whiskey. He did not seem to be able to take alcohol very well and seemed confused and disoriented. When he offered to pay my bar fine and take me back to his hotel, I told him he was too drunk, but he insisted, and my papasan, one Sonchai Jitpleecheep, asked me as a special favor to go with the farang, who was very big and muscular and seemed likely to cause trouble if I didn’t.’ ”

“Thanks,” I say.

“ ‘He struck me as a man with many problems and talked rather abusively about women, especially American women, whom he called cunts. I think perhaps he had had a relationship that had gone badly wrong and that left him with very strong feelings of bitterness toward all women, even though he claimed to like Asian women, who he said were much kinder and gentler than farang women and more womanly. When we reached his room, I suggested to him that he was perhaps too drunk to make love and that it would be better if I went back to my club. I even offered to give him back my bar fine, but he grew angry and said he could fuck all night and pushed me into the room. He ordered me to undress, and I did so. I was now quite frightened because I had seen a large knife’-do we have the murder weapon?”

“A large knife, as a matter of fact-looks like a military thing, solid steel with about a twelve-inch blade. I left it in the hotel room for now.”

“ ‘An enormous military-type weapon lying on a bedside table. He started to tell me what he would do to my body if I didn’t gratify his desires. He stripped naked and threw me on the bed, but he seemed unable to get an erection. He started to masturbate to make himself big, then made me turn over onto my front. It was then I realized that he intended to sodomize me. I begged him not to because I never do that sort of thing, and his member now was so big I was sure he would injure me. Still he insisted, without using a condom or a lubricant, and the pain was so great I started to scream. He became very angry and grabbed a pillow to try to stifle my screams, whereupon I completely lost control of my mind because I was sure he would kill me. Luckily I was able to reach the knife, which I swung around behind me while he was still inside me. By chance I seem to have severed his penis. He went into shock at first and stood up, hardly able to believe what had happened. He kept staring at his penis, which was lying on the floor near the bed (it popped out of me and must have fallen off him when he stood up), then he let out a terrible bestial yell and jumped on top of me. I had turned over onto my back, and unfortunately I was still holding the knife in both hands in a vertical position, and it penetrated his lower abdomen when he landed. His struggles only made the wound bigger. I did what I could to save his life, but it took some time to push him off me because he was very heavy. I was too much in shock to call the police, until I realized he was dead and then it was too late. All I could do to show respect was to pick up his penis and put it on the bedside table. My dress and bra had been on the bed and were soaked in blood. I had to put them on before I could leave the room. When I got back to the bar, I stripped off my clothes and ran up to the comfort rooms, where I took a powerful tranquilizer and lost consciousness.

“ ‘This statement was taken by Police Colonel Vikorn and Detective Jitpleecheep of Royal Thai Police District 8 while I was in full possession of my faculties. It is true to the best of my knowledge and belief, in testimony of which I hereby set my right thumb print.’ ”

I open the ink pad and roll her thumb over the ink, then onto the bottom of the paper. Vikorn, a consummate professional, has neatly ended her report without the need for a second page.

“Anything I’ve left out?”

“No,” I say in awe. The statement is a masterly mosaic of several standard stories from the Game, artfully interwoven with great economy of language. Still more remarkable in a cop who carries his legal scholarship so lightly, he has laid the foundations for an impregnable defense to a charge of murder or even manslaughter: she used only such force as was necessary to save her life and did not deliver the fatal blow; when she saw how badly he was wounded, she attempted without success to save his life; and she expressed sorrow and respect by her sensitive placing of his severed member in a position of honor. The dead farang’s standard-issue hatred of the opposite sex arising from bitter personal experience of his own countrywomen provides a motive for his aggression and his sexual preferences. “I think you’ve covered everything.”

“Good. Give her a copy when she wakes up, and make sure she memorizes it. If there’s anything she wants to change, tell her she can’t.”

“D’you want to visit the scene of the crime?”

“Not really. Anyway, it wasn’t a crime, so don’t prejudice justice by calling it that. Self-defense is not illegal, especially when by a woman on a Saturday night in Krung Thep.”

“Still, I think you’d better come,” I say. He grunts irritably but stands up anyway and jerks his chin in the general direction of the street.

2

The receptionist, already oozing servility thanks to the five thousand baht I gave him an hour ago, starts to stutter when he sees Vikorn, who is by way of being emperor of these sois. The Colonel switches on his five-thousand-kilowatt charm and hints at what a lucrative future awaits those who know how to keep their mouths shut at a time like this. (Positive-type stutters from the receptionist.) I take the key again, and we mount the stairs.

Inside the room the stench that invariably accompanies a competent disemboweling has grown stronger since my first visit. I switch on the air-con, which only serves to cool the stench without diminishing its potency. I can see Vikorn working himself into a rage with me for dragging him over here. “Look,” I say. I take out the dead farang’s passport from the drawer where I found it earlier. I am not an expert on our occult immigration practices, but the form of his visa disturbs me. The passport is the property of one Mitch Turner.

It disturbs the Colonel too, for he grows pale as he stares at it. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

“Because I didn’t know if it was important or not. I didn’t know what it is. I still don’t.”

“It’s a visa.”

“I can see that.”

“Good for two years with multiple reentry thrown in.”

“Yes?”

“They never give two-year visas. Never. Especially not with multiple reentry. Except in certain cases.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The visa has deepened our sense of tragedy, the violent loss of a relatively young life so far away from home. “CIA or FBI?”

“CIA. We let in about two hundred after 9/11. They wanted to keep an eye on the Muslims in the south on the border with Malaysia. They’re a pain in the neck because they don’t speak Thai so they have to have interpreters.” He looked at the corpse. “Imagine an overmuscled six-foot white farang with an interpreter trying to be incognito down in Hat Yai on a Friday night among our little brown people. Damn. I suppose it couldn’t have been Al Qaeda?”

“But we already have a statement from the perpetrator?”

“She could be persuaded to retract. You didn’t see any long black beards tonight?”

Is he serious? Sometimes my Colonel’s super brain is beyond my poor faculties of comprehension. “I really don’t see how that would help.”

“You don’t? Look, he’s CIA-they’ll lean on us from the top down. There are going to be footprints all over my shoulders, not to mention yours. They’ll want their own doctors to examine Chanya-no signs of abuse, and we’re in the shit. We could lose our most productive worker, maybe even have to close the club for a while.”

“How would it help if it was Al Qaeda?”

“Because that’s exactly what they’ll want to believe. They’re practically blaming the weather on Al Qaeda over there. Just say it’s Al Qaeda, and they’ll be eating out of our hands.”

We exchange a glance. No, it’s hopeless. It just doesn’t look like a terrorist castration/murder. So what to do about Chanya? I did not examine her private parts, but somehow one doubts that any man would dare to abuse her. Speaking off the record if I may, she’s as resilient as a wolverine and when cornered just as ferocious. I can tell by his expression that Vikorn shares my doubts. Whatever the truth of what happened in this room earlier tonight, it is unlikely to be on all fours with her statement, which she has not yet read. Now we are both staring at the farang’s face.

“Kind of ugly, don’t you think, even for a farang?”

I had thought the same thing myself but lack my Colonel’s fearless self-expression: an abnormally short neck almost as wide as his head, no chin, a mean little mouth-perhaps she killed him for aesthetic reasons? Vikorn’s eyes rest for a moment on the rose in the plastic cup. I know what he’s thinking.

“Doesn’t quite fit her statement, does it?”

Vikorn turns his head to one side. “No, but leave it. The key to cover-ups is to leave the evidence alone, make the story do the work. The trick is all in the interpretation.” A sigh.

“Bodies deteriorate rapidly in the tropics,” I suggest.

“They need to be incinerated as soon as possible for public health reasons.”

“Having taken a statement from the perpetrator and thereby solved the case, with no identifying documents on his person-we’ll have to lose the passport.”

“Good,” Vikorn says. “I’ll leave it to you.”

We both give the victim the honor of one more scan. “Look, the telephone cable has been stretched-the phone is on the corner of the bed. A last-minute emergency call?”

“Check with the hotel operator.”

“What shall I do about that?” I point.

Sophisticated practitioners, we have not troubled ourselves unduly with the murder weapon, which is lying in the middle of the bed, exactly where one would expect to find it if Chanya had killed him in the manner Vikorn says she did. I see this as a lucky sign and clear proof that the Buddha is looking favorably on our endeavors, but Vikorn scratches his head.

“Well, keep it. She did it, didn’t she? So her prints are going to be all over it. What could they find on the knife except his blood and her prints? It all points to her statement being true. We’ll give it to them as corroboration.” A sigh. “She’ll have to disappear for a while. Since it was self-defense, we don’t have the power to hold her. Tell her to change her hair.”

“A nose job?”

“Let’s not exaggerate-we all look the same to them.” A pause. “Okay, let’s go back to the club. You better tell me what really happened tonight, just so I can take precautions.”

3

Students of my earlier chronicle (a transsexual Thai-M2F-murders a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras-standard stuff in District 8) will recall that my mother’s commercial talent invented the concept of the Old Man’s Club as a way of exploiting the hidden business opportunities of Viagra. The idea, which still fills me with filial admiration, involved blitzing every red-blooded Western male over the age of fifty (ideally, those most pissed by the options left them by their postindustrial utopia) with electronic invitations to screw his brains out in a congenial atmosphere especially tailored to the tastes of his generation. Photographs of Elvis, Sinatra, Monroe, the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, even the early Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Cream still adorn our walls, and our music pretends to emerge from our faux juke box (chrome and midnight blue, with a billion glittering stars). The sounds come out of a Sony audio hard disk hooked up to one of the best systems money can buy.

My mother saw Viagra as the solution to the management problem that has beset the trade since time began: how to accurately predict the male erection. Under her business plan, an old man would come ogle the girls, choose one he liked, then book her by telephone from his hotel room when he had swallowed the Viagra. The drug takes almost exactly an hour to reach full steam, so the logistical problem originally posed by nature was thereby solved. It ought to have been possible to use a simple computer program to work out which of the girls would be occupied almost from minute to minute. (At the height of our enthusiasm project management software was discussed though in the event not installed.) And guess what? It worked a treat, save for one small flaw that really could not have been foreseen by any of us, not even Nong.

What we had left out of account was that these sexta-, septa-, octa-, and even nonagenarians were not old men of the serene, humble, and decrepit genre we were used to in the developing world. No sir, these were former rockers and rollers, swingers and druggies, ex-hippie veterans of Freak Street in Kathmandu, San Francisco (when there were beautiful people there), Marrakech, Goa before it went mainstream, Phuket when there were only A-frame huts to sleep in, the world when it was young and LSD grew on trees along with magic mushrooms and a thousand varieties of marijuana. Scrawny contemporaries of Burroughs and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, and Jagger (not to mention Keith Richards), these boys, doddering though they might appear, had once taken a tribal vow never to underdose. You’re only supposed to take half a Viagra to enhance performance, but would they listen? The hell they would. Some popped as many as three or four. Only a half dozen suffered heart attacks, despite dire warnings on the bottle, and of those only three actually expired. (Desperate times when Vikorn’s Bentley had to be requisitioned as an ambulance in the teeth of expletive-enriched objections from his irascible chauffeur, who doubted there was much Buddhist merit to be made in saving the lives of geriatric farang.) The others uniformly declared they’d gone to heaven without having to die first.

Now what was wrong with that? I’ll tell you. Gentlemen, take a whole Viagra (or more), and you kiss your natural flaccidity goodbye for eight hours or longer. (Forget about urinating for a day; questions arise as to how to carry out basic chores with that broomstick between your legs. Many report nostalgia for detumescence. Poetic justice: there’s nothing to do but screw, whether you want to or not.)

They wore the girls out, who started to leave in droves. My mother had promised full satisfaction and she hated to disappoint, which left us with no recourse but a relay system. One horny old codger could get through five or six healthy young women before the drug started to fade and he allowed himself to be carried back to his hotel in a condition best described as ecstatic catatonia (or rapturous rigor mortis). Profit margins shrank to paper-thin.

Something had to be done. At an emergency board meeting it was agreed to delete “satisfaction guaranteed” from the advertising and to appeal to a broader market. Overworked young men suffering from stress-related impotence were favored. We continued to be the destination of preference for the Western raver on a pension, and at the same time the more traditional customer began to favor us (Western ravers with no pension, basically), but we had lost our market niche. We were hardly different from all the other bars and as such suffered the seasonal downturns, not to mention the recession in the West. Suddenly we were running at a loss in a bear market. It was Nong who suffered most, for the club was her pride and joy, her brainchild and the vehicle by which she was to prove to the world that she was not merely an exceptionally successful whore (ret.) but also a full-fledged twenty-first-century businesswoman of international quality. She grew unusually religious, meditated at the local wat every day, and promised the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po two thousand boiled eggs and a hog’s head if he would save her business. Even Vikorn burned a little incense, and I went further in my meditation than ever before. With such mystic brain power working on our behalf, a miracle was inevitable.

Her name was Chanya, and I still remember the day she walked into the bar asking for work. She spoke English fluently with a slight Texan drawl (but enough Thai in it to keep her exotic), having spent nearly two years in the United States until 9/11 forced her to come home. Post 9/11 was no time to be traveling on a false passport in America. You had to have grown up in the business to recognize her genius. My mother and I saw it instantly; Vikorn took a little longer to catch on. Within a week we were boiling eggs like crazy and taking them and the roasted hog’s head to Wat Po, where the monks ate them or gave them to the poor. Let me explain.

First, farang, please dump those childish notions you harbor about our working girls being downtrodden sex-slave victims of a chauvinistic male-dominated culture; take it from me, there’s nothing your media won’t do to comfort you in your postindustrial despair to make you believe your culture is superior to ours. (Are they kidding?-I’ve been in Slough, England, on a Saturday night-I know what atomized basket cases you are.) These are all country girls, tough as water buffalo, wild as swans, who can’t believe how much they can make by providing to polite, benevolent, guilt-ridden, rich, condom-conscious farang exactly the same service they would otherwise have to provide free without protection to rough drunken whoremongering husbands in their home villages. Good deal? Better believe it. (Don’t look at me like that, farang, when you know in your heart that capitalism makes whores of all of us.) Most of the girls, being the sole breadwinners and therefore matriarchs, dispense the whole gamut of family business through the medium of the cell phone (generally in our staff toilet while changing into their working gear), from care of the sick to rental purchase agreements, from the chastisement of miscreants to the number of water buffalo to invest in this year, from marriages to abortions, religious duties, and grave decisions as to who to vote for in local and national elections.

But chemistry is at least as important for commercial sex as it is for the more art-house variety, which is where you start to differentiate between the supporting cast and the superstars. Here’s the secret: your superstar makes the chemistry. She is a tantric master in a G-string, a topless sorceress, a dancing dervish with wicked allure. She knows how to turn herself into a mirror that reflects the many and varied fantasies of the men she seduces. Guess how many have come up to me to confide they’ve finally found her at long last, the woman of their dreams, the girl they’ve been waiting half a lifetime for, the one they are so sure of they will marry her tomorrow if only she’ll agree, the saintly Chanya? Answer: roughly fifty percent of Chanya’s customers. We have even employed a bouncer (known as the Monitor-like me, he doubles as a cop during the day) to protect us from attack by the brokenhearted. In short, Chanya saved our business, and we are not about to desert her in her hour of need. All genius has its dark side. In our preatomized society personal loyalty is still important, which is why even the wily Colonel Vikorn did not hesitate to interrupt his Saturday night in Bangkok (as the song says, it makes a proud man humble-and occasionally dead) when he realized our superstar was at risk. So here’s what really happened.

I spotted him the minute he walked in the door. We are between mamasans at the moment, a lamentably common state of affairs, which means that as junior shareholder I have to fill in as papasan pending approval of a replacement by my somewhat demanding mother. (Like all ex-whores she has an inveterate loathing for mamasans and can never find the perfect one. I suspect her of manipulating to keep me as papasan.)

I have already described his face, which was not much improved when inhabited by his spirit. A nasty piece of work with the ridiculous arrogance of an iron-pumper. The girls all took the same view and kept away from him, leaving him isolated at a table on his own in a corner, growing ever more volcanic as he observed the girls favoring men older and less muscular than himself. He was drinking modestly (Budweiser beer, not Mekong whiskey, but one does not defile Vikorn’s brilliant narratives with minor quibbles). I was loath to waste Chanya’s porcelain talent on this earthenware vessel and really only intended for her to charm him out of our bar and into someone else’s. We are fond of each other, Chanya and I, and understand each other. It took no more than a shift of my eyes for her to grasp what I wanted. At least (this moment in the narrative requires needlepoint accuracy) I think it was the shift in my eyes that sent her over to his table. Within a minute or so his mean little mouth was stretching itself into a smile of sorts, her hand draped lazily over one of his rocky thighs, and when she leaned forward to sip at her “lady drink” (a margarita with extra tequila), he fixated on her breasts. Yet another proud man was in process of being humbled.

He was the type whose libido required secretive intensity before it could switch to full alert. Chanya adapted herself in a second, and now they were talking conspiratorially (and intensely), almost head to head. To make matters worse, Eric Clapton was singing “Beautiful Tonight” on the faux jukebox. This irresistibly romantic song was the final straw. The iron-pumper’s hand found its way to Chanya’s nearest thigh. I checked the time by the clock on the fax machine. Less than five minutes had passed, and Iron Man was molten-something of a record even for Chanya. I decided to help her out by playing the Clapton song over again-or was I simply curious about the effect of an encore? Tiny tears appeared in the corners of his abnormally blue eyes, he swallowed hard, and the words “I’m so damn lonely” were recognizable as they emerged from that mean mouth, even at a distance of thirty feet, followed by the unbelievably inept “You look beautiful tonight, too.”

“Thank you,” says Chanya, modestly lowering her eyes.

Just then the rose seller came in. One admires this man’s quixotic courage and that of his colleagues: the nut sellers and the kids who sell lighters. (Every bar tolerates them on the understanding they will be discreet and not stay long.) Can there be a greater optimism than a lifelong vocation of trying to sell roses to johns? I’d never before seen him sell a single flower, this rail-thin middle-aged man with a jaw deformed by a tumor he can never afford to have removed. Shyly, Iron Man beckoned him over, bought a single rose for which he paid far too much, and handed it to Chanya.

“I guess I’m gonna pay your bar fine, aren’t I?”

Accepting the rose and feigning surprise mixed with gratitude (all the girls can do Oriental Humble on demand): “Are you? Up to you.”

Exactly seven minutes, according to the clock on the fax machine, and she was about to score. By way of answer, he pulled a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and handed it to her. She put her palms together in a cute wai, then stood up to bring me the bar fine so I could record what was, now I remember, her second score of the evening. It was Saturday night, after all, and she was Chanya. The earlier customer had been a young man apparently without stamina, for she had taken less than forty minutes to return from his hotel.

The only unusual feature of the transaction with Iron Man was that she did not look me in the eye when she handed over the money and I made out her ticket. Nine times out of ten she winks or grins at me at precisely this moment, when her back is turned to the john. A minute later, and they were out the door. It didn’t occur to me to fear for her safety; after all, she had clearly tamed him already-and she was Chanya.

“That’s really the way it went, and there’s no more I can tell you,” I explain to Vikorn and my mother, back at the club. It is three-thirteen a.m. by the clock on the fax machine, and none of us are in the mood for sleep.

“She didn’t look you in the eye when she handed you her bar fine? That is unusual. I’ve seen her, she likes you, she always looks you in the eye and winks. I think she has a thing for you.” My mother has picked up on this rather female detail. Vikorn is clearly back in Maigret mode, on a plane of lofty strategy beyond our reach. Nong and I wait for the pronouncement. He rubs his jaw.

“There’s nothing more we can do tonight. Tomorrow we’ll send in a forensic team to take pictures-nothing too thorough, though. Sonchai will arrange for removal of the body. He’ll get the authorization for immediate incineration from-well, I’ll find someone. He’ll lose the passport. The farang was probably AWOL from some dreary little town in the South where he was supposed to be looking out for men with black beards wearing Bin Laden T-shirts, so the chances are no one knows where he is. She obviously got the opium from him and the pipe too, so it looks as if he’s been in Cambodia. Looks like he was not entirely the weightlifting moron he pretended to be, either. He at least had the imagination to try a little poppy sap. It could be weeks before he’s traced to here, though I expect they’ll come calling eventually. I don’t see any real risk, so long as we lie low and Chanya disappears for a month or so and changes her hair. I don’t want them interrogating her. We don’t know what she got up to in America.” Turning to Nong: “You better talk to her, woman to woman, find out where her head is really at.” Then turning to me: “Or maybe you should do that, since you two seem to get along so well. Try to get her in a good mood. We don’t want you to wind up castrated, too.”

My mother laughs politely at this incredibly tasteless joke-he is the major shareholder, after all. I go out into the street to call him a taxi because he doesn’t want his limo to be seen again tonight on Soi Cowboy. All the bars are shut, but the street is now crammed with cooked food stalls, which invariably appear after the two a.m. curfew to fill the street with delicious aromas, serving exclusively Thai dishes to a thousand hungry hookers babbling to one another with stories of the night. It is a peaceful scene and one I have grown to love, despite the serious religious misgivings I have about working in the trade and making money out of women in a way that is expressly forbidden by the Buddha. Sometimes our sins are a compulsion of karma: the Buddha rubs our face in it until we are so sick of our error, we would rather die than go that way again. (But if that is the case, why do I feel so good? Why is the whole street in a festive mood? Did the rules change? Is monogamy an experiment that failed, like communism?)

Believe it or not, I don’t spend any of the money. Vikorn’s accountant wires my modest ten percent share of the profits into my account with the Thai Farmer’s Bank every quarter, and I let it stack up, preferring to live on my cop’s salary in my hovel by the river when I’m not sleeping at the club. To be honest, I’ve promised the Buddha that when I get the chance I’ll do something useful with it. Does that sound pathetic to you, farang? It does to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. When I tried to take some money out of the account to buy a fantastic pair of shoes by Baker-Benje on sale in the Emporium (only $500), I was prevented by some mystic force.

After helping my Colonel into his cab, I stroll down the street, now entirely empty of farang. Some of the stalls boast electric lights, powered by illegal hookups to the illegal cables that grow up the walls of our buildings like black ivy, but most use gas lighting, which hisses and makes the mantles burn brilliantly. I see many beautiful and familiar faces dip in and out of this chiaroscuro, every girl ravenous after her night’s work. In between the cooked food stalls, fortune tellers have set up their minimalist presentations: a table and two chairs for the well-to-do, a shawl on the ground for the others.

Each turn of the Tarot cards causes a female heart to leap or sink: marriage, health, money, baby, an overseas trip with a promising farang? Nothing has changed since I was a kid. To add to the festive atmosphere, a blind singer with a microphone chants a doleful Thai dirge with one hand on the shoulder of his companion, who carries the loudspeaker on a strap as they make their majestic progress down the street. I toss a hundred-baht note into the box, then, remembering Chanya and the need for luck, chuck in another thousand.

Everyone knows me: “Sonchai, how’s business?” “Hello, Sonchai, got a job for me?” “Papa Sonchai, my beloved papasan,” in a tone of playful satire. “When will you dance for us again, Detective?”

I’m very happy that Vikorn has saved Chanya from that crude and undiscriminating justice they have in America where, if they extradited her, they would never make allowances for her youth and beauty, the stress inherent in her profession, or the ugliness of her victim. Nor would she be able to purchase indulgences in the manner of our more flexible system. That remark about not knowing what she got up to in the United States, though-it is clear proof of the superior vision of his mind, not to say the paranoia that is a professional hazard for a gangster of his stature. Me, for example: I have never given her time over there a second thought. Didn’t she simply work in a massage parlor like all the others?

All of a sudden I experience a dramatic slowing of my thoughts, a draining of energy after prolonged tension. I’m totally burned out, about to crash. I walk slowly back to the bar and mount the stairs to one of the second-floor rooms to lie down. It is eight minutes past five in the morning, and the first signs of dawn have popped out of the night one by one: the muezzin chanting from a nearby mosque, early birdsong, an insomniac cicada, new light in the east.

We Thais have our own favorite cure for emotional exhaustion. No pills, no alcohol, no dope, no therapy-we simply hit the sack. Sounds simple, but it works. In fact, in survey after survey we have admitted that sleep is our favorite hobby. (We know there’s something better on the other side.)

It turns out that the Mitch Turner case has disturbed me at some deep level, however, for in my sleep my dead partner and soul brother Pichai comes to me, or rather I visit him. He sits in a circle of meditating monks who exude honey-colored glows and at first does not want to be disturbed. I insist, and slowly he emerges from his divine trance. Want to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.

I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That’s Pichai at his most gnomic, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?

4

By the time I finally get up, it’s early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.

Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He’s been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.

Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit’s call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. “With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon.” Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.

“Have you spoken to your mother yet?” He has managed to make his head lower than mine so that his delicate face is turned up to me like a flower, his hazel eyes oozing charm. In a feudal society everything is feudal, which is to say personal. I am not merely his supervisor, I’m his lord and master, and his fate rests in my hands. He needs me to love him.

“Give me time,” I say. “With women the mood is everything. Especially with Nong.”

“Are you going to speak to Colonel Vikorn?”

“I don’t know. It’s a judgment call.” I have the cab stop at the junction of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit.

The story of our errand goes like this. Once upon a time, not more than five or ten years ago, every side soi on Sukhumvit boasted at least one stall that sold fried grasshoppers, but with the relentless blanket bombing of our culture by yours, farang, we grew somewhat self-conscious about this quaint weakness of ours, with the result that-in Krung Thep, anyway-our insect cuisine was driven underground. At the same time, though, avant-garde farang cottoned on to this culinary exoticum with the enthusiasm of the pretentious, so that now the one place where you can buy fried grasshoppers is the farang-dominated Nana Plaza.

We arrive at Nana just when the various hunting lodges, known as go-go bars, are shifting into top gear. “Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in black tank top calls out to me over the palisade of one of the beer bars, but Lek’s star is far brighter than mine. Neither the girls nor the katoeys (transsexuals to you, farang) can take their eyes off him as we push our way past mighty Caucasian bodies in sweaty T-shirts and walking shorts, half drunk more with the sexual opportunities than with the alcohol, although everyone is knocking back ice-cold beer from the bottle. This evening every TV monitor, and there must be about five hundred, is tuned to a tennis match between our very own Paradorn and someone nobody cares about in the French Open. There’s no commentary, however, because the ten thousand sound systems are all booming out the usual combination of Thai pop and Robbie Williams.

Finally we reach the far end of the plaza, which is dominated by katoeys who drool at the sight of Lek. In a serious breach of authenticity the stall owner at the back of the plaza has labeled his various products in English: waterbug, silkworm, mole cricket, ant mix, dried frog, bamboo worm, scorpion, grasshopper. I load up on grasshoppers for me, waterbugs, silkworms, mixed ants, and dried frogs for Mum. While the vendor is pouring ants into a paper cone, Lek and I spare a moment to watch a ritual that is far more ancient than Buddhism. Young women in short frilly dresses-this is a bar where the schoolgirl fantasy is intermittently and imprecisely invoked-are standing behind one another in a line with their legs apart while the girl at the front draws elaborate shapes on the ground with a large wooden phallus. When the luck god has been summoned, she sends the phallus skidding across the floor between the girls’ feet, then bangs loudly on the door to the club. Straightening herself with the air of a job well done (if that doesn’t bring in the johns, I don’t know what will), she leads the girls back into the bar and the twenty-first century.

Back at the club I make sure that Lek carries the little bags of insects and hands them to my mother, who has not yet opened for business. (She was waiting for supper.) We all sit down in the bar to eat what, I suppose, is breakfast, and for twenty minutes there is silence save for the snapping of legs and the squirting of guts. When I’ve finished, I leave Lek with my mother while I climb the stairs with the last packet of grasshoppers.

Chanya is awake and beautifully rested after her prolonged sojourn in the arms of Morpheus. She is wearing an outsize T-shirt and nothing else, sitting in a half-lotus on the bed with her back against the wall. I offer her the open packet, and she delicately picks out a fat one to munch. She flashes me a comradely smile marred only by the remains of a hairy leg in the corner of her mouth, apparently suffering no ill effects from her killing spree beyond a touch of nervousness in her eyes as I hand her her statement. (The advantage of a culture of shame as opposed to one of guilt is that you don’t start to feel bad until the shit hits the fan.)

She reads it carefully, then looks up. “You wrote it? This is your writing.”

“The Colonel dictated. I simply wrote it down.”

“Colonel Vikorn? He must be a genius. This is exactly how it happened.”

“Really?”

“Every detail is correct, except he drank Budweiser, not Mekong whiskey.”

“A minor detail. Let’s not bother to change it. I’ll corroborate Mekong if it comes to that. I was behind the bar, after all.”

That iron-melting smile: “That’s fine then.”

I cough and try not to look too sadly at her long black hair. “Just one thing-you’ll have to cut your hair and disappear for a while. Do something else, be someone else for a couple of months, until we can see how the land lies.”

A shrug and a smile. “Okay, whatever the Colonel says.”

“We’ll bring you back to work as soon as we can. We have to know what the Americans are going to do when they find out what’shisname is dead. How heavy will they get? How valuable was he to them? You see the problem?”

“Of course. I’ll probably cut it all off-I’ve always wanted to meditate in a nunnery. Maybe I’ll do a meditation course upcountry somewhere.”

“That’ll be fine,” I say, although the thought of her losing all her hair almost moves me to tears. A slightly awkward silence. “Chanya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if there’s anything you did in the States when you were over there that you think we should know about…”

She searches my eyes. In hers I see only innocence. “I worked of course. The money was fantastic, especially in Las Vegas. It’s a wonderful country, but a bit bland. I got bored after a while. I was planning to come home as soon as I had enough dough to build my own house in Surin, and enough to retire on, but 9/11 ruined my plans. I came home sooner than I intended and for family reasons I needed more money. I stayed here because you’re a good papasan, and your mother’s been a good boss. It’s fun. I like your club.”

The temptation to ask her exactly what happened last night is very strong, but my professional discipline, learned at the feet of my master Vikorn, enables me to resist. That was one hell of a disemboweling, though. Even for a Thai, her coolness is a little unusual, not to say downright scary. I fear my smile was just a tad alienated when I left her alone with her statement and the packet of crickets. I didn’t even ask about the opium since that did not officially exist. I noticed she’d got rid of the pipe.

Downstairs my mother has Lek cleaning glasses. I check the time, then switch to the radio on the sound system to listen to Rod Tit FM. Every cop in District 8 will be listening at this moment, for Pisit has told us he has a scoop on the eternal and notorious battle between our beloved Colonel Vikorn and that blackguard General Zinna, who has just emerged unscathed from a court-martial in which he had to explain his apparent involvement in large-scale trafficking of heroin and morphine. His claim that he was framed by the police, in particular Vikorn, was tacitly accepted by the court.

Pisit begins by reminding us that this drug rivalry between the army and the police is not new. Every Thai has heard about, and some still remember, the great standoff up in Chiang Mai in the fifties when civil war seemed about to break out over a dispute between the two services as to who exactly owned a massive shipment of opium that the Kuomintang (with the connivance of the CIA) had sent into Thailand by train. The standoff lasted three days before a compromise was reached: the entire shipment would be dumped into the sea. According to legend, the dumping of the several tons of opium was organized by the Director of Police, who arranged for a ship to be in the way. Now the perennial battle seems to have fallen onto the shoulders of Vikorn and Zinna. What Pisit didn’t tell us in advance is that his source today is none other than Zinna himself.

Pisit: General Zinna, it is a great honor to have you on this show. You must be relieved and exhausted after your ordeal.

Zinna: What ordeal?

Pisit: General, I was referring to the court-martial that cleared your name.

Zinna: Oh, that. I was framed by a certain police colonel, everyone knows that.

Pisit: But General, if this is true, it is dynamite. Any particular reason why this police colonel, whom we shall not name, or indeed any policeman, would desire your downfall?

Zinna: Simple-they’re scared of exposure. Right now the police run Thailand. Look at the news every day, what do we find? We find naked, unadorned reports of police corruption throughout the country at every level of the police force, but not a damned thing is being done about it. Why? Because the government itself is scared of the police. The police have become the only cohesive power in our country. And they call this democracy. That particular police colonel we have already mentioned is always going on about democracy. It’s all just a power play, of course. This is the problem with the West, it is childishly superficial. Create a system that resembles theirs, no matter how defective and corrupt, and they praise you. Create a different system, and they try to undermine you. So what the cops have so cleverly produced is a police state that looks like a democracy. No wonder farang love us. It’s their system exactly.

Pisit: And the police are scared of the army because it is the only viable alternative to them?

Zinna: Certainly. And the only unit powerful enough to expose them and survive.

Pisit: Nothing to do with rivalry over income sources?

Zinna: What are you getting at?

Pisit: General, you just referred to reports of police corruption. I would guess at least fifty percent of those complaints are drug related.

Zinna: Of course. There has to be motivation for cops to run the country. Under the guise of democracy, of course.

Pisit: And if the army ran the country again?

Zinna: That is a very provocative hypothetical.

Pisit: What would you like to do to that certain police colonel who framed you?

Zinna: That is a private matter between him and me.

Lek, of the abbreviated attention span, has tried to follow but lacks the background that makes the interview comprehensible. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

My mother and I exchange a glance. “The Colonel’s never been the same since his son Ravi died,” Nong says.

No wiser, Lek turns his wide eyes onto me. “The army shot Ravi during the troubles in May ’92,” I explain.

5

The landline rings. It’s the forensic team in quite a tizzy. They want me over there at the hotel where Mitch Turner died right away. I think about taking Lek, but he’s doing his professional duty as he sees it by ingratiating himself with my mother (they’re discussing the finer points of mascara application), so I go on my own.

When I arrive, I see what they mean. In their zeal they turned the corpse over and left it that way. Now they are all staring at me staring at it. I’m not sure whether to vomit or simply scratch my head. I am too stunned to do either. My mind flashes back to Chanya and the way she was this morning: cool and bright, cheerful as a lark. Shaking my head, I lift the receiver on the hotel phone and tell the operator to get me Vikorn at the police station. For once he is actually in his office.

“The forensic boys turned him over.”

“So?”

“He’s been flayed. From shoulders to the top of his backside. The whole of the surface skin is gone. It’s just a bloody mess.”

A long pause, during which I think even Vikorn is stumped. Then: “Tell them to turn him back the way they found him. Have they taken photographs of his back?”

“I think so.”

“Tell them to destroy those.” A click as he hangs up.

While staring at the victim as they turn him over again, I am thinking farang, I’m thinking France, Germany, England, Japan, the United States, G8, I’m thinking decadence. In a single stroke the case has been taken out of Thai psychology, and I’m reduced to whatever cultural insights I acquired overseas. The poor, you see, murder honestly for passion, land, money, or superstition, so this brutal disemboweling/castration appeared at first glance as a common enough expression of rage, fear, or greed well within the grassroots tradition of every third-world country. (The severed penis, frankly, appeared to me as Thai as tom yam soup.) The flaying, though, that gratuitous extra, can only come from a society with a large, wealthy, and bored middle class. (It has ennui written all over it.) So what the hell did happen to Chanya in America?

The next day I spend with Lek on the tedious chore of disposing of the body. Although Vikorn has already primed the clerks at the morgue and arranged for a lightning autopsy for the sake of appearances (he died from loss of blood from an unusually extensive stab wound to the abdomen and stomach and his penis had been severed-surprise, surprise-no mention of the skin missing from his back), there are any number of forms to fill in, people to jolly along, and suspicious glances to deal with, and the guys at the crematorium are a real pain. Somehow they’ve heard that the cremation is not entirely on the level and want a bribe of a value I do not have the authority to grant, so Vikorn has to be reached on his cell phone. I take a certain pleasure in their changes of expression when he’s finished with them, but it is a draining day, and I don’t see Chanya again until early evening, just before I am ready to open the bar. I think her true vocation should have been actress, for I hardly recognize her. It isn’t merely that her hair is short and spiky and mauve, or that she is wearing a different style of makeup; she has succeeded in changing who she is. She wears a long black skirt, a circa 1955 white blouse with lace, and flat-heeled shoes. She is doing the demure Thai schoolmistress type (plus dash of fragmented urban dispossessed), with fantastic attention to detail. When she takes out a pair of unfashionable government-issue spectacles, I shake my head in admiration. She has come to say goodbye. We hold hands for a moment and lock eyes. It does not surprise me that she has the capacity to read my mind.

“It’s not the way you think, Sonchai. I want you to know that.”

“Okay.”

A pause. “I kept a diary all the time I was in the States. Maybe I’ll show it to you one day.”

She pecks me primly on the cheek, gives one last wink, and is gone with a promise to call me from time to time to see if the coast is clear for her return.

As it happens, my mother joins me in the bar just a few minutes after Chanya leaves. She takes a beer from the refrigerated shelf, and I sit down with her at one of the tables while she lights a Marlboro Red and I report on the progress of the case so far. When I’m finish, I say: “Mother, you know better than anyone, what makes a girl like Chanya freak like that?”

She squints thoughtfully as she inhales, then shrugs. “It can be a lot of things. A girl goes through many phases. She’ll start out believing what the customers tell her and get on some ego trip, until one day all of a sudden she starts to wonder if the johns are not exploiting her instead of the other way around. Like with any service industry, nobody ever really knows who is bullshitting who in this game. She gets past that stage and starts to take a professional pride in what she does-she wants to be a star, because there’s nothing else to aim for.” My mother exhales thoughtfully. “Then she realizes that time is passing, younger women are getting the attention, a bigger star than her comes to work at her bar. Another rite of passage she has to cope with-a period of depression perhaps, before she comes to terms.”

I furrow my brow. “But none of that seems to apply to Chanya.”

“No, I know. She passed through those stages years ago. I’ve never seen such a pro. So it must be burn-out. It happened to me once. You become a victim of your own success. You forget one little thing: all you’re doing is fucking for money. Your whole life turns on the male member, you become as obsessed with it as men are. Somewhere inside you a resistance builds up. Some women really freak. I myself had to stop for a whole year when you were ten-maybe you remember, we spent that year in the country with Grandma? Eventually we were running out of money so I had to go back, but it was never quite the same after that. I’ve been watching Chanya get closer and closer to that wall for a while now.”

Why do I wish she were not quite so matter-of-fact? I am consciousness trapped in a pipe. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. Chanya?

“So you think she simply freaked?”

“Yes, I think so. Maybe he was particularly obnoxious, but she would have known how to deal with that. Thing is, a girl gets tired of using guile. Sometimes she craves a full-blooded showdown. I think that was his knife, not hers-and I think it gave her an excuse. She saw it in his room, and some demon possessed her. That’s how I see it.”

“If it was his knife, and what with him being so big and muscular, no one was going to doubt it was self-defense, even without Vikorn’s help?”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m still mad at her. She must have thought about it, even calculated. She could have stopped herself. She could have done what I did-cool off for a while. She’s rich, after all, she doesn’t have a child to look after, she could have afforded to retire all over again. But she’s addicted to the Game, you can see. It’s the same in every profession: when someone finds they have exceptional talent, they can’t stop. They need to score. It’s the hunt by that time, not the money.”

“In that case, how did she do it? That was a big guy.”

A smile. “She’s slim and strong-she would have been much faster than him. He was lumbering and muscle-bound. And she would have had the element of surprise.” A quick glance at me. “I think she cut it off after she killed him. A kind of trophy.”

“And the flaying?”

Mom stares at me, makes a gesture of incomprehension. We both look up as Lek comes into the bar from the yard where Nong has had him organizing the empty beer crates. He looks at me expectantly.

I don’t really have the energy, but I accompany Lek to the wat near the police station. Put any Thai under a microscope, and you’ll find an encyclopedia of superstition embedded in every cell, but Lek’s kind are the most extreme in that respect, and he’s itchy with impatience after a day spent in proximity to death: he’s already lived too many hours with this threat to his luck and spiritual health. We walk quickly to the temple and purchase lotus buds, fruit, and candles from the street sellers outside. Lek goes through the ritual with fastidious elegance, then sits back on his heels with his hands in a deep wai, eyes closed, praying rather than meditating, I would guess.

He takes so long, I leave him there and return to the station, where I’m told Vikorn wants to see me. I assume he wants to talk about the Mitch Turner case, but he wants to talk about Lek instead. In his office he sits under a photograph of the King and a poster from the Crime Suppression Division illustrating the hundred and one ways the police have found to supplement their income.

“Is he queer?” he snaps.

“No.”

“He’s very effeminate. I’m getting complaints from some of the men. If he’s queer, I’ll kick him out. I don’t want you lying to protect him. This isn’t the time for your bleeding-heart stuff.”

“He’s not queer. He’s not interested in sex at all.” Vikorn sits back in his chair to stare me into submission. I’m not really ready to tell Lek’s story, but I guess I don’t have a lot of choice. “He’s from Isaan, from Napo village in Buriram province, not far from where you grew up.” He nods. “When he was five years old, he had an accident. He was jumping onto the hind legs of a buffalo to spring onto the animal’s back, the way you country people love to do, when the buffalo jerked his legs and sent him flying. He was lucky not to land on the horns and be gored to death, but when he hit the earth, he split his head open on a rock. They had no medical facilities, nothing at all. They assumed he was going to die. He looked dead already. Why do I get the feeling you know what’s coming next?”

Vikorn’s expression has altered dramatically. His eyes are glittering when he stands to pace leisurely up and down. There is relish in his words. “They called the shaman, who built a charcoal fire near the kid’s head and blew smoke over the boy to assist the shaman’s seeing. The parents were called. The shaman told them their son was as good as dead. There was one hope and one hope only: they had to offer their child to a spirit who would fill his body and bring him back to life. But after that the child would belong to the spirit, not to the parents.” He cocks his brows at me.

“It worked, but in this case there was a downside,” I oblige.

Vikorn raises a finger. “The spirit was female.”

I hold my palms together and raise them to my eyes in a wai to acknowledge his penetrating understanding while he resumes his seat behind the big desk. “Will you help him?”

He makes an expansive gesture with both hands. “Queers are a Western import. Katoeys are as Thai as lemongrass. I’ll protect him as long as I can, but we’ve got to get him more suitable employment.”

“He’s going to start taking the estrogen soon. It could be tough.”

Vikorn grins. “A male cop with tits? Is he going to have the full operation?”

“He’s not sure. Anyway, he doesn’t have the money right now.”

“So why the hell did he become a cop?”

“Same reason I did. He didn’t want to be a whore or a gangster.”

Vikorn nods. “I understand. Has he found an Elder Sister yet?”

“No. He’s asked me to talk to my mother about that.”

A thoughtful pause. “I don’t want him working the bars. Is he going to dance?”

“That’s what he wants to do. He’s looking for sponsorship. He practices all the time. He loves classical Thai, the Ramakien.”

He turns his head to one side. “I had a cousin who was a katoey. He died of AIDS. Actually, he wasn’t particularly promiscuous, but it was in the early eighties, before anyone knew about that disease. He was unlucky, I guess. Give young Lek one word of advice. If he doesn’t have the operation, tell him not to use Scotch tape. It’s unyielding and causes terrible sores over time. That woven elasticized plaster they use in hospitals is much better. Okay, you can go.”

As I stand up to leave: “Is there anything you’re not an authority on?”

For my exit he offers a dazzling smile.

When I get back to the bar, I find that my mother, who is nowhere to be seen, has abandoned control of the sounds to one of the girls:

I pinch you on the bum

I pinch you on the bum

You pinch me on the bum

You pinch me on the bum

Challenging stuff. I quickly switch to Chopin’s nocturnes and almost gasp with relief: real music is a taste I developed under the tutelage of a German who hired my mother for a few months in Munich when I was a kid-and who later ended up in our famous Bangkok high-security prison called Bang Kwan. My eleventh and twelfth years were crucial for me. My mother’s trade was unusually itinerant, and we spent nearly all the time abroad, in Paris and Munich where her sophisticated customers undertook duties as surrogate fathers. (I learned to love French cuisine and Proust, Beethoven and Nietzsche, Ermenegildo Zegna and Versace, croissants at Les Deux Magots and sunsets over the Pont Neuf in high summer, Strauss played by men in lederhosen while drinking steins of beer in a Munich Biergarten.) Unlike my mother, who loves the Doors (for reasons both sentimental and historic: Apocalypse Now is the only DVD she owns that is not a bootleg), I don’t much like rock or pop.

I lie down on one of the benches and more or less doze off until my mother walks through the door looking fresh as a daisy. We sit down at one of the tables while she smokes a cigarette and listens to my chat with Vikorn about young Lek.

“He doesn’t know any older katoey himself?”

“No. He’s fresh out of the police academy, and before that he’d never left Isaan. All he knows about katoeys is what he’s seen on TV and what he experiences of his own feelings.”

Nong shakes her head. “Poor kid. That’s a tough row to hoe. He won’t survive without the right Elder Sister, someone to initiate him, show him the ropes, warn him. He’s such a beautiful boy, too.” A sigh. “Katoeys got hit the worst during the AIDS epidemic. I used to know thousands. We girls used to drink with them after hours in the old days-they can be hilarious, terrific fun, but totally chaotic. No attention spans at all, worse than girls. He needs a retired katoey in her thirties or older, someone who made the whole thing work for her, big time. I want his role model to be a big success financially-that’s the only way to save him from what comes after the initial euphoria. We have to save him from the despair of those middle years. Katoeys don’t age well without a lot of dough.”

Mother and son exchange a glance.

My jaw drops. “You can’t be serious?”

“Why not Fatima?”

“She’s a killer.”

My mother blinks. “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?”

“But that’s how she got her money, that’s how she made it big, by killing her lover.”

“By killing her lover and using her smarts at the same time. Exactly what your little angel needs for his arrival on earth.”

6

Breakfast time: the street is full of early-morning cooked-food stalls. I’m pretty hungry, so I choose kuay jap, a thick broth of Chinese mushrooms and pork lumps steaming with nutrition as the hawker dips and raises his ladle, a great writhing knot of kuaytiaw phat khii mao (literally “drunkard’s fried noodles”: a stir-fry of rice noodles, basil, chicken, and a crimson tide of fresh sliced chiles), a single fried trout with naam plaa (a transcendentally pungent sauce made of fermented anchovy-an acquired taste, farang), a glass of cold, clear nongaseous water from the world-famous Krung Thep faucets, a 7-Up-and I’m all set. (Dollar fifty the lot, no charge for ice and water.)

Back in the bar I see from our computer diary that we are expecting a tour group. That’s what we’ve decided to call them, anyway. We don’t accept clients in gangs anymore, but there are about a hundred who benefited from our former advertising and arrive every three months or so in clumps of aging punks. These particular guys I remember well as representing maybe the DDD level of the retiree market.

A call from Immigration at Bangkok International Airport: one of the officers wants to confirm a statement that I have booked hotel rooms for a group of twenty old men who have been giving the Thai Air stewardesses a hard time for the past fifteen hours. They are all drunk.

“Yes,” I confirm.

“You think you can control them? Or d’you want us to refuse entry?”

“They’ll be fine.”

A grunt of disbelief, but he lets them through. A couple of hours later a bald, stooping sixtysomething giant in a black cowboy hat with silver studs, skintight stone-washed denims, and irrefutably genuine rawhide boots bursts through our swing doors, followed by a mob of similar rejects from the farang subconscious.

A whoop. “Sonchai, my man! Hey guys, here he is, Mr. Viagra himself. Gimme the coldest beer you got, kid.” Leaning forward, whispering with urgency: “Score the dope like I told you in my e-mail?” A side whisper from mouth-corner to his closest aides: “What d’you say, fellas, a few beers before we get into the joints? Sonchai won’t let us smoke on the premises, so we’ll have to take it back to the hotel-or bribe him to let us smoke upstairs.”

“Oh, he takes bribes? That’s just like the cops on Freak Street in the old days.”

“I don’t take bribes,” I say.

“That’s right, behave yourselves and act civil, this is a Buddhist country and Sonchai here is a yogi-he meditates every day.” Turning to me: “So you got it?”

I reach behind the bar and hand over a package about three inches by two by one, wrapped in brown paper. My mother and I both decided that no way was the bar ever going to sell narcotics, not even ganja, but Colonel Vikorn, after his first glimpse of this gang, decided that any tranquilizer was better than geriatric freaks on alcohol tearing the place apart. The old giant hands over two thousand baht (Nong took over the pricing-that’s roughly a thousand-percent markup), then grabs the package and disappears into the men’s room, together with a few others in the know. I remember that Lou Reed is a great favorite with this crowd and send Transformer blasting through the sound system. In less than ten minutes the big cowboy and his cronies are emerging from the toilets. Lalita has just arrived and recognizes the gang from last time but cannot remember anyone’s name. A brisk wave: “Hi guys, sabai dee mai?”

“Hey Lalita, just great to be here. Jeez, do you have to be so goddamned beautiful?” To Lalita with pleading eyes: “I’m suffocating over there, La, we all are. To be old and sick is bad, but suppose you ain’t sick? Suppose all your bits are still in full working order, but you got a mug so craggy and out of date, people look at you like you’re a Model T Ford?”

Now Om and Nat arrive, one in jeans, the other in a black dress with arabesque trimmings that dips so deeply at the back, you can tell she’s not wearing underwear.

Nat’s dress has sent the tour group into fantasyland. “Hey, guys, time to score the Viagra?”

Now the rest of the girls arrive.

The first thing each of them does as she crosses the threshold is to wai the Buddha statue in the corner above the cash register. He’s a little guy no taller than two feet with, according to my mother’s grasp of Buddhist doctrine, a gargantuan appetite for marigolds and incense and is liable to turn the luck off pronto if we let him go hungry.

All the girls have worked this gang before and manage them skillfully as they squeeze past hoary groping hands on their way to the lockers. They are all taking signals from me that the evening is not to start too quickly. After Chanya’s adventure there is an increased police presence on the street. The cops are all controlled by Vikorn, of course, but appearances are important at times like this.

The bald giant calls to me: “What do we do about the blue pills, Sonchai? They on the house again?”

“No, not on the house. You can get them from a pharmacy. Any pharmacy.”

“Okay, right, boys, policy change. We have to go buy our own Viagra. How about we do that, freshen up, raid the minibars, smoke a few spliffs, and come back ready to rock and roll?”

Whoops of joy at this magic phrase. It is only when they have all trooped out that I notice the stranger who must have slipped in when my back was turned. In his early twenties, big, broad-shouldered, long black pants, polished black shoes, stark white shirt, an intensity to his gaze that could be mistaken for a permanent frown. Not exactly a typical customer, especially when you take into account the black hair, pencil mustache, and brown skin.

All the girls have gone to their lockers now that the gang has left. He and I are the only ones in the bar. I switch the music back to Chopin.

The newcomer seems not to notice the distillation of high genius that emerges from the sound system in the form of infinitely tumbling and rising piano notes. He orders a can of Coke and sits on one of the stools at the bar. He looks at me, Thai to Thai.

“You’re a pimp?” the stranger says in a tone of surprise, too innocent to be insulting. I do not bother to explain the technical difference between what I do and what a pimp does.

Despite the frown, he is a handsome fellow, somewhat thickset for Thai genes. He makes no secret of his contempt for those aging punks-or for me. He glances around at the pictures of Elvis, Sinatra, et cetera, with a sneer. I find it hard to meet the purity of his gaze.

“American,” he says in a neutral tone. He knows I will not mistake his meaning.

I respond with a smile, raise my hands: what can you do?

He catches sight of the Buddha above the cash register and connects him to me with a sweep of his eyes. “They told me you were Buddhist-I mean a real one, not a superstitious peasant.”

“Did they?”

He wants to say more (perhaps he is a little young for his age-his kind often are), but his silence is judgment enough. To tell the truth, I’m caught off guard. The last time I saw such religious sincerity was in a monastery, but this is no Buddhist monk. In the near-empty bar I find myself looking around with his eyes. Not particularly uplifting, I guess, a tad too earthy for a pure soul. (But then look what pure souls have done to the earth, I remind myself.) I refuse the unspoken invitation to repent, and we are in a kind of silent standoff that I do not believe he can win (my bar, my street, my country, my religion-I belong to the majority here), when he fishes in the pocket of his pants to pull out a piece of A4 paper, folded into four. He spreads it out on the bar, watching my expression carefully. It is a digital picture of the farang Chanya murdered. I’m not able to control the flash of paranoia that passes across my face. The Muslim notes and records my wild-eyed moment, but there is no opportunity for explanation or discussion because the rest of the girls have begun to arrive, one by one.

7

Homer listed ships. Should I not similarly honor the vessels of our salvation on the wine-dark sea of market forces?

Nat: Most of the girls keep their work clothes in lockers at the back of the bar, but Nat likes to dress up before she arrives. She claims it’s because she needs time to work her way into her role, but Chanya once told me she tries to find customers on the sky train on her way to work. It’s true she calls in sick more than the others, usually just when she would have been on the sky train on her way to us. That’s okay, every girl has her idiosyncrasies, which probably make her unemployable in most professions. Look at Chanya, for example. In the circumstances, what other employer would have been so forgiving?

Marly: At twenty-seven, Marly is one of our smartest practitioners. Like most true professionals, she sees repeat business as the best way of evening out the violent sine curves of the trade, and that means setting her sights on the middle-aged and older. The charms of younger customers are more than offset by gentleness, generosity, fatherly kindness, wealth, and a tendency in the aged to go to sleep early, thus leaving her free for a little moonlighting should she need the dough.

Lalita is in an asymmetrical YSL fake in black with dipping back and plunging cleavage, revealing her beautifully enhanced bosom-tastefully done by a skilled surgeon, nothing too exaggerated. She is very gifted and has already built a fine two-story house with carport on a piece of land in her home village. Last week her earnings permitted her to purchase two more water buffalo for her parents to rent out. Her opening line to all newcomers: “I loved you from the moment I saw you walk through the door.” I still smile to myself at how often it seems to work.

Wan and Pat, close friends, are wearing identical hot pants with tit-hugging tank tops and high heels. They are not from Isaan, which is in the Northeast, but Chiang Mai province in the far Northwest, where the weather is cooler and the opium fresher. They come from a hill village belonging to the Hmong tribe, where they grew up expert in poppy cultivation. When compulsory crop substitution made them redundant, they graciously switched vices to enable their families to make up for the reduced income. They plan to open a beauty salon in Chiang Mai as soon as they’ve scraped the money together.

Om, with a naturally boyish figure, has cut off her denims at the crotch and leaves cotton strings wherever she sits. She is from Phuket, where tourism has made everyone rich. She grew up without want but got bored with the family minimarket and came to Krung Thep in search of adventure. For her, prostitution is mostly a sport in which the huntress uses charm, guile, and the power of sex. The object is for the john to voluntarily transfer the cash in his wallet to her purse without noticing what a sucker he is.

Ay is in a bikini and high heels, revealing the silver insert in her navel at the center of her flat brown stomach, not to mention the leaping swordfish whose sword peaks just above her panty line. She is a true child of Isaan, where she grew up unlettered. As is often the case with the illiterate, she owns a photographic memory and never fails to recall a john’s name, even if she hasn’t seen him for a year: a powerful charm in this line of work.

Here is Bon. She is more global than the others. She uses us as a base but prefers the more lucrative destinations of Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is a visa expert and offers free advice to any of the girls thinking of relocating overseas. Her English is all but perfect, and I’m told her Japanese is not half bad. She runs her own web page, which brings her a certain amount of work and enables her to keep up with her foreign customers. Way ahead of the curve, she owns her own small business in her home village that her mother manages.

Ah now, here is one of my favorites. Urn is from the poorest part of Isaan, next to the Cambodian border, a genuine country girl who will not defile her identity by learning to read and write or by learning English beyond the skeletal vocabulary necessary for trade. She is slightly flat-footed from a childhood spent in the rice paddy and likes to roll her trousers up to her calves as if she were wading through a swamp. She is reflexively superstitious and never omits to wai the Buddha or to take her shoes off when she enters the bar-for which the others never cease to tease her. She speaks Thai with a hayseed accent and a maximum of vulgarity. She also owns an exceptional figure and a brilliant smile, so she does not starve.

Su: nothing special to look at, but both my mother and I are in awe of her true Thai indolence. As an experiment the other day, I sent a missionary over to her. (We get them from time to time: white shirt, black tie with tiny knot, the sad courtesy of the professional sin-buster, Bible in quick-release shoulder holster-I’m afraid they all look the same to me, the men and the women.)

Missionary to Su: “Whatever you earn, I’ll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning.”

Su (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): “Couldn’t we just fuck?”

Farang, tell your evangelists not to bundle salvation with the work ethic. It really doesn’t play in the tropics. Even the Muslims and the Catholics know better than that, and we Buddhists have bagged ninety percent of the market by peddling inertia for two and a half millennia.

Sonja: she is not with us anymore, but in her day she was quite the most beautiful girl in the street, a small star-shaped scar on her left cheek notwithstanding. (Motorbike: ninety percent of the scarring on Thai flesh is due to taking a corner too fast while drunk.) Her life changed when she saw a B movie starring Ronald Reagan in which the heroine, also scarred, came out with the immortal line, which Sonja immediately committed to memory: “Oh, how can any man love me when I am so hideously disfigured?” The ploy proved so fetching, she had to produce a short list of suitors, which consisted of an Englishman, an American, and a Chinaman.

The Englishman: “But darling, it only makes me love you all the more.”

The American: “Come to the States, I’ll have someone take care of it.”

The Chinaman: “I want a ten percent discount.”

Naturally, having been trained by my mother, Sonja chose the man most likely to make a fortune in this lifetime and went to live happily ever after in Shanghai with the Chinaman. (It’s your system, farang.)

And so on. Not a one of them whose combination of calculation and naÏveté could not defeat the hardest of asses-unless the hardass has God on his side, of course. The dark young stranger has not ceased to squirm and sneer since the girls came trooping in. The moment is saved by the Australian, thank Buddha, who trips on the threshold with his habitual curse.

8

Slim and wiry, about thirty-six, his inevitable name is Greg, and he has been a regular these past two months. He sits next to Ay, who immediately and expertly shifts on the stool so she can hook a leg over Greg’s walking shorts. Greg appears not to notice.

“Gimme a Foster’s, Sonchai.” A cock of the head. “Thirsty weather, mate.”

“You buy me drink,” Ay says.

“Do I know you?”

“Yes.”

“Better give her one, Sonchai.”

The young Muslim is watching.

Ay finishes her tequila in one, then sucks on the salt-encrusted lime. Nobody knows what swarthy fellow in a sombrero first introduced our working girls to tequila (okay, it was probably a Chinese entrepreneur), but history will reveal this act of marketing genius in its true glory.

“You pay bar?” Ay wants to know, now massaging Greg’s member, which has begun visibly to swell under his shorts. The dark stranger turns away in visceral disgust to stare at the wall.

“Let’s go back to my hotel-at least there’s enough space to turn around in.” He takes a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and holds it up to the light. “Or maybe we’ll have a few more, what d’you say?”

Ay plucks the note from his fingers with amazing speed and hands it to me. I raise my eyebrows in a question to Greg. “Yeah, may as well, the kid’s right, I’ll only be too shit-faced later, probably make an arsehole of myself.” Looking at his fly. “Christ Ay, what you been doing down there while I’ve been having an intellectual conversation with Sonchai here?”

On his slim figure the protuberance is somewhat dramatic, drawing the interest of the other girls, all of whom want to measure the circumference and check for hardness. “Big banana,” Lalita confirms among the oohs and aahs of the others. “I hope you gentle with her.”

The Muslim grinds his jaw.

“What about me? I’m just a poor little Australian farang all alone in your big hard city.”

“You hard, not city.”

Greg bursts out laughing. “You can’t win.” A quick glance at the Muslim, then away. Greg catches my eye, I shake my head. Silence.

“I go change,” Ay says.

We all watch her backside under the bikini bottom as she walks down the bar on her high heels. Except the Muslim. The atmosphere starts to congeal.

Fortunately, Ay’s “dressing” was a simple matter of slipping on a skirt and T-shirt. Now she is back, and Greg has already paid for the drinks and her bar fine. “See you later,” he calls out.

The Muslim watches the couple’s exit with exquisite disdain.

Now the bald giant and his gang burst in, filling the bar. Hardly an improvement, I guess, from Allah’s point of view.

“Hey, Sonchai, what you do to the sounds, man? That stuff is about a thousand years old.”

I switch to the Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin.”

“Better.”

I shift my attention to deal with this gang. They are in a fairly manageable state at the moment, but old men of this tribe require ceaseless vigilance. Fortunately more girls have begun to arrive-Marly, Kat, Pinung et al.-until there is one for each old man, who feels honor bound to show appreciation and virility by cooing and slobbering all over them. The girls, laughing, hardly have time to change. Their drinks are waiting for them when they return from their lockers, and I have to make a call to order more tequila.

Everyone knocks back their drinks except for me and the stranger, who purses his lips. He has refolded the picture, and I’m wondering why he remains sitting here when the old men so obviously get on his nerves. I’m deeply worried now, because I’m having one of my flashes.

I’ll have to explain. We were teenagers when my best friend and soul brother Pichai killed our yaa baa dealer. Our mothers arranged for us to spend a year at a monastery in the far North, run by a highly respected abbot who happens to be Vikorn’s elder brother. Pichai was killed in the cobra case (op. cit.) last year, by the way.

Twelve months of intensive meditation in that forest monastery changed both of us in a way that is impossible for nonmeditators to understand. Ever since, I have experienced flashes of insight into the past lives of others. Sometimes the information is precise and easy to interpret, but most of the time it consists of rather vague phantasmagoric glimpses of another person’s inner life. This Muslim’s is something else, something so rare in Bangkok, I’m in shock. I’m almost certain of it: we met at the great Buddhist University at Nalanda, India, oh, about seven hundred years ago. I have to admit he’s kept his glow.

From the corner of my eye, I see him put some money down on the counter under his empty Coke can and disappear out the door.

Light dawns somewhere in the bald giant’s brain. He remembers that Lalita knows how to jive.

“ ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ ” he yells.

The girls all remember from last time. “Yeah, Sonchai, give him Elvis.”

We start with “Blue Suede Shoes,” go on to “Jailhouse Rock,” “Nothing but a Hound Dog,” and most of the others. A few of the old men pick their partners and start to jive. We’re all clapping them on with plenty of oohs and aahs and whoops. Now the bald giant declares in a shout that all the old folk took a couple of Viagra each about half an hour ago. Screams of hilarity from the girls, who like to check and discuss the mysterious and creeping tumescence with their owners and with one another. The old folk’s vacation has hit the sweet spot: This is really living beams on those craggy old faces.

When I return to the spot where the Muslim was sitting, I see he has left exactly the cost of the Coke, plus a card with a telephone number and address, plus that photograph of Chanya’s victim neatly folded.

“Jai dum” is Marly’s comment as she passes by the empty stool where the stranger sat and scowls at it. Black heart.

By now the playlist has progressed to the slow tunes. Elvis is singing “Love Me Tender,” and the ex-hippies are holding their partners close, clinging more than hugging.

“Old men,” Marly whispers to me in Thai. “Dead soon.”

9

At the beginning of this kalpa, three men traveled together, a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. They were good friends, and when they discussed spiritual matters, they seemed to agree on all points. Only when they turned their gaze on the outer world did their perceptions differ. One day they passed over a mountain ridge to behold a fertile and populated valley below.

“How strange,” said the Christian. “In Village One down there the villagers are all fast asleep, whereas in Village Two they are lost in a hideous orgy of sin.”

“You are quite wrong,” said the Muslim, “in Village One everyone is in a perpetual state of ecstasy, whereas in Village Two everyone is asleep.”

“Idiots,” said the Buddhist. “There is only one village and only one set of villagers. They are dreaming themselves in and out of existence.”

10

The address on the Muslim’s card is of an apartment building a few minutes’ walk away, but there is nothing I can do while the old men are waiting for the miracle of medical science to rescue them from impotence, a period the girls see as a window of opportunity to persuade their increasingly ardent suitors to buy them more lady drinks. (The bar and the girls cut the profits of the drinks fifty-fifty-some girls prefer to make their money that way.) One by one the old codgers take their paramours to the rooms upstairs (we charge five hundred baht for two hours) or back to their hotels.

I’m now too preoccupied with the stranger’s card and the photograph of Mitch Turner to think of anything else. It is ten minutes to midnight by the clock on the fax machine, but I decide to try the number on the card anyway. Someone lifts the receiver on the first ring. The salutation, in a dialect from the deep South, is spoken softly, almost in a whisper. Not the voice of the young stranger: there is power and age in the tone I hear now, and the habit of authority.

“This is-”

He switches to standard Thai: “Yes, we know who it is. We were hoping you would do us the honor of coming to see us.”

A pause. “I’m scared.”

“I understand,” the old man says, somehow managing to convey compassion over the telephone line. “What guarantee can we offer that would reassure you?” Although obviously older than me, he uses a polite form of address normally reserved for youth when addressing age. In other words, he knows I’m a cop. Interesting and, in the circumstances, disturbingly subtle. Why do I get the feeling he’s smarter than me? “Would you like to bring a colleague? Of course, you can make a telephone call to inform Colonel Vikorn where you are going. We don’t really mind, although we would prefer not.”

I feel like a man in a blindfold: is the next step an abyss or merely level ground? I take a long time to reply. “No, it’s okay. I’ll come now. Shall I come to the address on the card?”

“Yes, if that’s all right. And thank you.”

I call my mother to tell her to come mind the bar. She is in the middle of watching a soap (a family of wizards who live in a mysterious region above the earth and intervene in earthly affairs from time to time, especially in the love life of the lead couple, who are perpetually pursued by a light-stepping human skeleton-we like realism in our entertainment). My argument is compelling, however, and she arrives in about fifteen minutes in her Chanel business suit and her discreet perfume by Van Cleef and Arpels, dripping in gold. Some of the girls are returning one by one from their romantic trysts and, surprised to see the matriarch herself behind the bar, give her deep, respectful wais.

The apartment is close to Soi Cowboy, and it takes me only ten minutes to walk there. It is in Soi 23, a street famous for its restaurants, which cater to every conceivable taste (fussy French, flaky Chinese, Vietnamese, British, German, American, Japanese-we call it the “street of the hungry johns”). As I stroll up the soi, I have frequently to step off the pavement to avoid bumping into romantic couples, most of whom consist of middle-aged white men and Thai women in their twenties. (Cultural note: look closely, and you will see the girls are flinching away from embraces, despite what they are about to do, or have recently been doing, in private: a matter of face, farang.)

A modest building guarded by a few guys in security uniforms with handcuffs and night sticks hanging from their belts. Two of them are sitting at a makeshift table playing Thai checkers with bottle tops. I flash my ID and take the lift.

A door like any other opens onto something quite different. I count eight prayer rugs (richly colored in greens and golds, geometrical patterns only) laid out in parallel at an odd angle to the room as the young man from the bar lets me in. Something in his manner suggests an ancient Arab tradition of hospitality (he has suspended the heavy judgments for the time being, even morphed into gracious host), and he manages a wai, which I return. I’m distracted, though, by the other person in the room, a man in his sixties with a long robe and a skullcap, who rises from a chair to wai me mindfully. I wai back. Wais are more than just a matter of placing your hands together and raising them to your face, however; they are a social semaphore with a whole alphabet of meaning. Let me be frank, those who embark on the spiritual path have ways of recognizing each other’s rank, and this imam impresses me immediately. (Thin and straight, there is depth and fire in those coal-black eyes.) I raise my pressed palms as high as my forehead and pause there for a moment, a form of homage that pleases and impresses the young man. (Under the rules a Buddhist cop need not show such reverence to a southern Muslim, however senior.)

“Welcome, stranger. Our house is your house.” The old man offers the traditional welcome in that power whisper I recognize from my phone call. He nods to the young man.

“My name is Mustafa Jaema,” the young man says, “and this is my father, the cleric Nusee Jaema.”

I do not disguise my surprise. Although rarely photographed, Nusee Jaema is often in the news these days as a moderate voice in the far South, respected by Buddhists as well as his Muslim followers. There are those who believe that he alone holds back the threat of insurrection-for now. I know he lives in a town in the far South called Songai Kolok.

“I am Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I say, “but then you already know that.”

“Let us sit,” says the imam, elegantly descending to one of the prayer rugs and tucking in his feet. His son and I do likewise.

“Please do not be afraid,” Mustafa says.

The imam raises a hand. “Forgive my son, he is thinking of the American, Mr. Mitch Turner.” To Mustafa: “The Honorable Detective is not afraid, his intuition is too good, and anyway there are only the three of us.” To me: “We asked the others to leave us in peace. I’m afraid that too many Muslims in one room these days sends shivers down Buddhist spines. Is that not so, Detective?” I shrug. He studies me for a moment. “I give thanks that Allah has blessed us with a man tonight.” Darting eyes from his son. “Let us cut to the chase, as Americans love to say. Why are we here? Why have we invited you? Mustafa, tell the Detective everything.”

In the presence of his father, Mustafa has become self-conscious. He garbles his words. “As you know, Songai Kolok is on the border with Malaysia, where half the world’s computer components are made.” A glance at the old man. “We were eavesdropping on the American. We followed him here.”

A sigh from the old man. “It is in the nature of youth to begin at the end and work backward. The beginning, Mustafa, if you please.”

I watch Mustafa compose himself. “We knew Mitch Turner. Everyone in Songai Kolok knew him. That was his problem. Our problem too.” I half-expect the old man to interrupt again, but both are questioning me with their eyes. Do I understand? How smart am I? Smart enough to be trusted?

The old man coughs. “I think I do not need to bore a man of your discernment with irrelevant detail. Will it suffice to say that our people called my attention to his presence the minute he arrived in our town?”

“My father has organized an intelligence network,” Mustafa says proudly. “It is necessary.”

“You guessed the American’s profession,” I supply. “Perhaps not all of your fellow townspeople were hospitably inclined toward a farang spy?”

“Exactly,” from the imam in a tone of relief. “He was a source of great anxiety to me and my supporters. Can you guess the rest?”

“Word spread locally, then down into Malaysia? Perhaps as far as Indonesia?”

A profound nod from the imam. “I cannot control all the young men in Southeast Asia. We received many requests, some more polite than others, some barely disguised demands with menaces…”

“For assistance in killing him?”

“Yes. And with the escalation in violence in our part of the country-the somewhat heavy-handed way the government is dealing with it-it was becoming difficult to continue to protect him.”

“You were protecting him?”

Gloomily: “Who else? His people could not even protect their own skyscrapers.”

The harsh irony takes me by surprise. I stare at the old man. “You feared a backlash from the government if he were assassinated?”

“Let us be frank, he was CIA and looked like every young fanatic’s idea of an arrogant American predator. If he were murdered in the South, Washington would be sure to put still more pressure on Thailand. We were terrified of an Internet beheading. More pressure, more backlash, and so the vicious circle continues until we are all rounded up and placed in camps. This was my fear. When we were told yesterday that he had been murdered-you are not the only one who can bribe a receptionist, Detective-I knew I had to come to Krung Thep to assess the situation.”

My eyes flick to Mustafa: serious, intense, a young man with a mission quite free of troubling nuance. There could hardly be a greater difference between him and his subtle father. The old man reads my mind without effort.

“Oh yes, my son also is tempted by the world of black and white. Of course, everyone who enters that tunnel believes they are on the side of the white. Is that not so, Mustafa?”

“I have always obeyed you, Father.”

“Obeyed without understanding. And when I’m dead, will you remember my wisdom?”

Mustafa looks away, then back to me. Adoration of his father may be the most human trait in this stern young man. “Have you any idea how much the Muslim majority did not want the United States to make a total asshole of itself and encourage the radicals? My father’s position is very difficult.”

I say: “What d’you want me to do? I should probably take you in for questioning. After all, you seem to know a lot about the murder victim.”

A stiffening from Mustafa, but the imam is not perturbed. There is a twinkle in those old eyes: “But that would upset your Colonel’s cover-up, would it not? We understand that one of your, ah, employees was responsible.”

I nod. “I understand. You want to make sure nobody blames a Muslim?”

“Would that not be both a fair and truthful result?”

I want to play every cop’s game of I ask the questions, but there is a higher calling. I accept the old man’s challenge to look into his eyes. “Yes.”

“Then a man of your integrity would want to be sure that justice was done?”

I raise my hands in an extravagant shrug. “You must know it is not up to me.”

Mustafa shifts on his rug. “Your Colonel is well known throughout the country. He is very wily. If things go wrong with his plans, he will start blaming us for sure. He has no morality at all.”

“If he does, what can I do?”

“Warn us,” Mustafa says, “that we may prepare.”

A long silence. The imam’s concentration is unwavering as he looks at me.

“We want you to come down South to see us.” He makes a curious gesture with his right hand, as if he is caressing an invisible creature. “You see, we knew Mr. Turner quite well. He was here to spy on Muslims, of course. Now he’s dead, murdered. That in itself is sufficient for the Americans to feel justified in whisking some of my people away to unknown locations, interrogating them, perhaps torturing them, using up years of the lives of innocent men-husbands and fathers upon whom their families depend. I cannot simply wait and do nothing.” He studies me.

“I see. That’s really what you came for? You think all it takes is for you to show up in Krung Thep, call me over to your apartment, and get me on your side for the sake of a God I don’t believe in?”

The old man winces. “Not for Allah-who cares what name you call him? I see that in the language of your prophet the Buddha you are an awakening being. You cannot allow yourself to be the instrument of a serious defilement that may cost many lives. For you that would be impossible. Within your belief system, how could you even contemplate the endless lives of suffering you would have to endure? We want you to come see us in Songai Kolok-I’m sure your Colonel will agree. After all, a certain amount of background will prepare you for when the CIA arrives, will it not?”

“But what do you get out of it?”

“Your integrity. We ourselves could not hope to persuade the Americans that, far from killing Mr. Mitch Turner, we were exerting ourselves to save his life. But coming from a Buddhist policeman who has conducted an inquiry and made a written report-”

“Something to wave at the media or a judge?”

The imam surprises me with a broad grin. “Is this not the way wars are won in the modern world? And of course, look how much merit you will make.”

“You seem to know a lot about Buddhism.”

“I’m Thai. My mother was Buddhist until she converted at my father’s insistence. I am not a fanatic. Educated clerics know that Islam did not suddenly appear from nowhere. It bears many influences, some of them surely Buddhist and Brahminic. It is the youngest of the great religions, which is why we see it as the perfection of a spiritual path as old as man himself.”

Who could not be moved: this rail-thin old man who must loathe Bangkok and all it stands for, on a pilgrimage with his son and a group of disciples for the sake of peace; the shrewdness to understand the political implications of Mitch Turner’s death; the naÏveté to stake everything on a five-minute assessment of my character. But there is more here.

“Exactly how well did you know Mitch Turner?”

Mustafa turns to his father. This is a question they anticipated. “We asked him to leave, once,” the old man says with a sigh. “Unfortunately, our visit to his apartment had the opposite effect. The Western mind is wild and unpredictable, devoid of center. He came to see me several times after that, and I offered what solace I could to an infidel. You Buddhists have your nirvana, we have Allah, even true Christians have a path of sorts, beset though it is by childish miracles. But what of these products of capitalism like Mr. Turner? Human souls locked out from God forever. One hears their screams of anguish even while they drop their bombs, these young people who have no idea who they are. They think they are killing others. They are killing themselves. I warned him of his death wish, but a good part of his identity had already been annihilated. He was a collection of cover stories.”

A long pause. “Now I understand better,” I say. “In any investigation it will be discovered that you knew him, that he came to see you, that you were able to eavesdrop on him. You’re right, it won’t look good.”

“Come,” Mustafa says in a voice of such urgency I think for a moment he intends to take me out of the room. “Come to Songai Kolok. We know about you. You are a complex man, but truthful. You take your Buddhism seriously. If you make your report early, exonerating us, it will be difficult for anyone to contradict later.”

“But how can I justify a report when the case is closed?”

Impatiently: “Your Colonel will not fool the CIA. We don’t know the details of the cover-up, exactly, but it will certainly be a pack of lies. The Americans will be sending agents very soon, and everyone knows how dishonest they are. Would people who invade sovereign countries on false pretenses stop at anything? There are many interests in the West who benefit from wars with Islam.”

I shake my head, glance from one to the other. “So now you’ve made it my problem?”

I may be mistaken, but I do believe I glimpsed a smile pass over the old man’s lips.

11

I’m wearing my earphones, listening to Rod Tit FM at the same time as wondering what to do about the noble imam and his son. I’m of a mind to call Vikorn, who has flown up to his mansion in Chiang Mai for a few days. Subtext: to be with his fourth mia noi, or minor wife, a spirited young woman who doesn’t take any nonsense from the gangster-and won’t have his kids either, a revolutionary form of mutiny that Vikorn has never had to deal with before. My mind flits to Pisit, who is nattering in my ear about how superstitious we Thais still are. He is taking his rage out on a moordu, a professional seer and astrologer whom Pisit clearly despises.

Pisit: Take the current trend to buy lottery predictions.

Seer: Yes?

Pisit: I mean, how pathetic. Thais are spending more on these little pamphlets that you see all over the newsstands than we spend on pornography.

Seer: Is it your point that pornography would be a superior superstition?

Pisit: My point is that pornography is not a superstition at all. In other countries newsstands make money from honest lust, not medieval mumbo jumbo. Do you have any input into these predictions?

Seer: No, I’m not qualified.

Pisit: Oh, so there’s a branch of your profession with special qualifications to predict next week’s winning lottery numbers?

Seer: You could say that.

Pisit: And could you tell us what is the success rate?

Seer: It depends. Some have a high degree of accuracy-they can improve one’s luck by as much as fifty percent.

Pisit: Just by someone like you staring into a crystal ball?

Seer: Not exactly. You see, someone pays a bribe to the lottery operator, then they make a profit by selling the information to the pamphleteers. They have to pretend it’s mumbo-jumbo, as you put it, and dilute the success rate, or someone will get suspicious. It’s not as risky as bribing an operator, then winning the lottery outright. People get caught that way.

I finally summon the courage to call Vikorn, who hates to have to deal with business when he’s at his retreat in Chiang Mai. He listens, though, and I note a catch in his voice when he says: “Nusee Jaema is involved? You’re sure?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“Of course. He’s the main moderate influence down there. He set up a network, which his son runs. He’s walking a tightrope. If he cooperates with us, his people might see him as a traitor. If he doesn’t, he might be seen as a militant.”

“What kind of network?”

“Information. You better go down there, see what you can find out.”

There’s nothing for it, it seems, but a trip to the benighted South. But back at the bar next morning I am distracted, not for the first time, by an e-mail message on a computer monitor:

Michael James Smith, born in Queens, City of New York, Social Security Number: 873 97 4506, profession: attorney; marital status: divorced (five times); children: three; financial position: wealthy; criminal record: none, successfully avoided conviction for substance abuse a number of times, by hiring an expensive lawyer. Military service: enlisted for Indochina War, 1969-70, rank of major; served with honor (Bronze Star and Purple Heart); believed to have attended detox program for alcoholism during March/April 1988; active member of Veterans Against the War.

The e-mail comes from one Kimberley Jones, an FBI special agent who worked with me on the cobra case. The karmic reward I continue to enjoy from refusing to sleep with her, despite a campaign of threats, bribes, cajoling, and tantrums on her part, is that she has become a friend for life. (The karmic price is that she still won’t give up-this particular message is unique in that it is entirely free of sexual innuendo, declarations of undying lust, or the legendary fury of a woman scorned.) I am now inestimably in her debt, for she has adopted Thai ways to the extent of putting personal feelings before abstract duty and used the FBI database to illegally obtain these precious details of Michael James Smith, attorney, Vietnam war veteran, former user of Thai prostitutes (at least one, once), and father of at least four children, not three. My cell phone rings even while I’m staring at the screen.

“You got it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re reading it right now, aren’t you?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Love intuition. How do you feel?”

“Terrified.”

“Going to get in touch with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Going to tell your mom?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean I went to all this trouble and risked my career just so you can do your Thai thing and think about it for the next three lifetimes?”

“I want to thank you. You’ve done something no one else could have.”

“Thank me with your body next time I’m over there.”

“Okay.”

Silence. “Was that a yes?”

“Yes. How could I refuse?”

“But you don’t really want to?”

“Don’t be such a farang. I owe you, I’ll pay, you’ll enjoy.”

Whispered: “Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Have you any idea how horny this is making me? How am I going to get back to sleep now?”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to hang up, Sonchai. This is doing something to my head, I don’t know what.”

“You can say heart if you like.”

“Yes. Right. Heart. I said it. Bye.”

She hangs up. Now I’m alone again with Michael James Smith, the Superman who came in from the war one fine night to find his destiny waiting behind a bar in Pat Pong. The man I mythologized long before I knew his name. The bastard whose bastard I am.

I’m shocked that his name is really Mike Smith. I extracted it from my mother after three decades of cajoling and begging, but I was convinced she was lying. The name and the Vietnam record and the approximate age were all Kimberley Jones had to go on, plus the likelihood that he had become a lawyer and was born in Queens. I never asked her to do it. She must have thought about it for months before compromising herself. I guess that means a lot in farang-land, no?

What to do about him? While I am pondering this most challenging of questions, I see that I have received a new e-mail. When I check, it is from Kimberley again:

You kind of threw me just then. I guess I hadn’t really thought through what it must mean to you. I was holding out on one thing, but I guess if we’re going to be lovers I’ll have to share it with you. Just be careful how you use it and try to cover the trail: mikesmith@GravelSpearsandBailey.com.

Ah, the immediacy of modern communications! I think I would have preferred the age of sail, when letters took months to travel from one continent to another and one might easily have died of cholera or heatstroke before knowing how one’s heart has been treated by the special correspondent on the other side of the world. But this is the twenty-first century, after all, and when in Babylon, one must do as the Babylonians do. A couple of clicks brings up our standard advertisement for the Old Man’s Club. I add the single line Hello from Nong Jitpleecheep and your loving son Sonchai, before zinging it off to Superman alias my biological father. I guess it’s the kind of early-morning message every middle-aged man with those kinds of skeletons in the cupboard least wants to receive. We’ll never hear from him, right?

I call my mother and tell her about Kimberley ’s e-mail, keeping to myself for the moment the fact that I’ve just taken the irrevocable step of sending him a message.

A long silence. Whispering: “She really got those details from the FBI?”

“Yes.”

“It’s been thirty-three years, Sonchai. I don’t know if I can handle this.” A muffled sound that could have been anything-surely not an uncontrolled sob? But she does hang up immediately, which is not like her at all.

Now I’m alone with him again. Hero and substance abuser, successful lawyer, lousy husband, absentee father (at least in my case). Lost soul?

My cell phone is ringing again. “Would you mind telling me what you intend to do?”

I confess that I’ve sent Superman her cyberversion of “Hello Sailor!” with our family name attached. A gasp. “Have you lost your magic tortoise? Sonchai, you could have at least discussed it with me. Don’t you have any respect?”

“He’s my father.”

She hangs up again. I shrug. When I call Bangkok Airways, they tell me there are nine flights per day to Hat Yai, only two a week to Songai Kolok. I book the next flight to Hat Yai.

12

FYI:

Roughly translated, the full name of our capital means: “Great city of angels, the repository of divine gems, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of reincarnated spirits.”

Phonetically it goes like this: “ Krung Thep mahanakhon bowon rattanakosin mahintara ayuthaya mahadilok popnopparat ratcha-thani burirom-udomratchaniwet mahasathan-amonpiman-avatansathri-sakkathatityavisnukamprasit.”

There’s no Bangkok in it.