Killer Elite

27

… Tree-lined Silom Road is the business heart of Bangkok but, behind the high walls that skirt one section of its rod-straight length, a seminary of nuns inhabit a strict Carmelite convent, and it is this building that serves as a convenient marker for the entrance to the sex capital of the world, two great parallel roads, Patpong One and Two.

Brothels are forbidden by Thai law, but 950, describing themselves as bars or clubs, thrive in Bangkok alone, with names such as Pussy Galore or Purple Pleasure. For gay visitors, Pretty Boy Lounge, the Golden Cock and many others await their patronage. The bustling pavements throng with pimps of both sexes trawling for clients. Inside the cramped neon dens their sharpend colleagues, clad only in high-heeled shoes, hypnotize with oiled buttock and sequined nipple. Most are under eighteen, many far younger and, unlike the majority of their European counterparts, they sport firm, lithe bodies that would cause lip-tremble in the most elderly of monks. They pose and pout from revolving carousels, or upturned fruit boxes, so that their shaven crotches gyrate at nose level to their audience.

The farangs, foreigners, flock to “Sin City” in the hundreds of thousands, AIDS notwithstanding, for where else could they find such abundance of youth and beauty cheaply available and amenable to every conceivable deviance?

Meier indulged in an annual tour of Far Eastern sex cities and seldom omitted a Bangkok visit, usually for a four-day stint. Giving himself wholly to the cause of sensual gratification from 5:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would sleep soundly for eight hours in his fifth-floor executive suite at the Bangkok Hilton. After breakfast in bed he would pass the day by the hotel’s spacious figure-eight outdoor pool with a supply of subscription magazines that were his greatest joy: high-tech electrical and mechanical engineering titles and a medley of publications for model cars and aircraft enthusiasts.

On his first evening in Bangkok, Meier normally took in a sex show to stimulate the level of his prurience. This invariably consisted of pretty pubescents in the act and ladies with acrobatic genitalia opening Pepsi bottles, fire-eating, and causing bananas or Ping-Pong balls to disappear.

October was the end of the rainy season, averaging eighty-four degrees of clammy humidity. Meier liked to be driven around town in the early evening like some fat vulture, beak a-dribble with anticipation, circling fields of carcasses before descent and satiation.

For five hundred baht, on the second evening of his 1986 visit, Meier found an air-conditioned Mercedes with plastic flowers around its steering wheel and a less than normally talkative driver.

But for the girls of the New Petchburi and Sukumvit Road area the tour was unimpressive. Straight streets, crazy cat’s cradles of overhead wires, smog from diesel pollution, a fetid river stench from the Chao Phraya, and everywhere giant billboards advertising Marlboro, Seiko and Sony. Young Thai bodies in their thousands nightly welcomed the humping farangs, Meier chuckled to himself, in order to balance the huge Thai import bill with their vital contribution to the nation’s invisible exports.

The Mercedes dropped Meier at the soi, or small street, close to his hotel and in front of the Cleopatra Massage Parlor. Joining a small throng of tourists, he put on his spectacles and peered into a brilliantly lit auditorium in which sat a hundred or more bikini-clad Thai girls. Later there would be two or three hundred of them, but now, at 5:45 p.m., business was just beginning. Meier liked this best as he knew the girls were at their cleanest. He called for the general manager and asked for his favorite girl of the previous year. She had gone away, beamed the Thai flesh-keeper, but he would happily make recommendations.

Meier settled on number 89, Voraluk, and her younger friend Tui. All the girls in the dazzling goldfish bowl sported handheld number plates to facilitate selection, and the pair gave beaming smiles when hailed to Meier’s side.

The three took coffee together in a nearby lounge. Meier made no attempt to talk and merely sat with his coffee mentally devouring the girls. They did not mind and chattered merrily enough. When Meier rose, straightening the front of his safari jacket to cover any visible sign of his state of mind, the girls took his hands and, giggling, led him to the lift and thence to an upstairs room, on the way collecting condoms, key and hygiene items from a fat floor lady.

The room was plush with sofa, bed, bath, and, on a section of tiled floor, an outsize air bed. Tui explored Meier’s mouth with her tongue while Voraluk undressed all three of them and bathed Meier thoroughly.

With a sweet-smelling unguent, Tui anointed the air bed and her own body. Meier was laid on the bed and the girls alternately massaged his body with great care and total intimacy. Voraluk lay beneath and facing Meier while the lighter Tui snaked her oiled body up and down over his back in the time-honored fashion of the Thai body-body massage. Her pubic mound, her stomach and breasts took over the work of the hands of a European masseuse. In a while the wonderful movement from above caused Meier to penetrate Voraluk, but Tui seemed to sense the event. She rose, disengaged them and turned Meier around. Then, with Voraluk still below him, she continued her massage for a further ten minutes. Her expertise lay in keeping her client at the very brink of release.

The two girls dried Meier down, led him to the bed to attend his instructions and afterward showered him before returning him to the general manager’s office. He paid 6,000 baht and praised his host for the continued excellence of the Cleopatra.

Tui reappeared in a smart blouse and skirt and drove Meier in her own Toyota to the Fish Supermarket in Sukumvit Road. With a trolley, they plundered displays of red mullet, snapper, grouper, sea bass and many other species. A uniformed attendant cooked the fish on the spot and they drank their meal down with glasses of local sanuk amid a bustle of farangs. Meier took his leave of Tui, for the urge was again upon him, and summoned a three-wheel tuk-tuk to take him to the Grace Hotel, locally known as the Pussy Supermarket. This adjoins the Arab ghetto in Soi Nana Nua, an ugly block of dirty skyscrapers sprinkled at base level with a smattering of mosques and pseudominarets.

Meier passed through the dingy lobby of the Grace wrinkling his nose at the shish kebab and curry odors from the adjacent Arab restaurant, a place of rice and belly dancers. He descended a staircase and entered a dimly lit basement lined with a long, narrow bar and prowled by over two hundred freelance prostitutes.

Every manner of client dallied at the bar, drank in the many small booths or propped up the pillars that gave the Coffee Shop its aspect of subterranean nastiness. Cigar smoke swirled around these pillars like fingers of mist about stalagmites, and everywhere were hungry eyes and stiffened loins. It was the sort of noisome chamber of erotica Meier loved. He took a whiskey to a vacant booth and let the atmosphere sink in.

The low, predatory babble of Western businessmen and robed Arabs was punctured from time to time by the crude shouting of British, Dutch or German yobs and crescendos of “yeah, yeah” from the jukebox.

Lone druggies and alcoholics were out of place, for this was the court of the sex goddess. Tarts of every age and background were on offer, slowly sweeping the cavern for business. Many were part-timers moonlighting for extra cash, to buy a car perhaps, or new clothes for their children. In Bangkok there are over 200,000 girls and an unknown number of boys living wholly or partly by sex earnings. Since an income from prostitution can be ten times that of a standard city job, small wonder many succumb to the temptation despite the dangers.

For an hour Meier turned down the callers at his booth, narrowly eliminating a dark thirty-year-old with large firm breasts and wasp-waist clad in a crocodile jumpsuit. He settled for an elfin-featured thirteen-year-old in a school uniform. She led him to a tiny room, some blocks away from the Grace Hotel, where she kept a baby in a brightly colored cot.

Meier stayed until 1 a.m. and marveled at her skill. She spoke passable American English in her singsong way and told him he was big. Many farangs, she said, were smelly, and Japanese so small she had to use a special small condom like a finger stall; normal-sized ones, she said, just slid off.

Back at the Hilton, Meier was welcomed by the general manager, a charming man who had recently moved from a major Hong Kong hotel that he had run for many years. Meier ordered a Mercedes for the morrow to take him to Pattaya Beach, down the coast of the Gulf of Siam: a place of sun and sand as well as sex.

At 10:30 a.m. he was woken with breakfast and the Bangkok Post. He was especially interested in the London kidnapping of Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu and extremely annoyed when a loud knocking on the door of his suite turned out to be an unexpected call by de Villiers.

“Try to look happy to see me.”

Meier grunted and wiped crumbs from his lips.

“To what do I owe this enormous pleasure?”

De Villiers, it transpired, had been at work in Melbourne when a call had come through from Davies. He had decided to fly via Bangkok just in case Meier proved reluctant to withdraw from his Thai pursuits, as had happened on previous occasions.

“We leave for London on this evening’s flight.”

Meier canceled his Mercedes, silently cursing both Davies and de Villiers…