Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  The FBI almost never drinks alcohol, but I know from various telephone conversations that she’s been in a strange state ever since she arrived. Why is she here, exactly? Sure, she’s interested in the case, and from what she has disclosed so far, it really does tie in with her work in Virginia. But even razor-sharp FBI agents don’t just jump on a plane overnight on the basis of a call from a friend. Delighted though I am to have her around, I’ve been wondering about her. As a matter of fact, our friendship went on hold for more than a year, before it restarted with one of those telephone calls farang make out of the blue: “Hey, Sonchai, how’s it going?” as if she were just around the corner and we’d been constantly in touch. It was the middle of the night, my time, and it took me a while to wake up. I had to take the cell phone out into the yard so as not to awaken Chanya and the Lump. (No, I did not say, “Kimberley, do you realize it’s two A.M. over here?” Thai courtesy.) My attitude changed when I started to realize how unhappy she was. As her voice slowed and drooped, compassion kicked in. When she tried out a few amorous gambits, I had to tell her about Chanya and the baby; that gave her pause for a while. She didn’t quite admit that she’d been fantasizing about living happily ever after in Bangkok with that weirdo half-caste cop she’d sort of bonded with on the python case. (A transsexual Thai—M2F—murdered a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras and a giant python. We refrained from potting her/him for reasons of compassion.) Not quite, and anyway it started to emerge that her need was extrahormonal: “I’m hitting a wall over here, Sonchai. I don’t have a lot of friends outside the U.S.—only you, really. Just because America is a big country doesn’t mean the walls don’t close in on you from time to time.” We carried on like that, with middle-of-the-night chats, until the Damrong case gave us something practical to talk about. I really didn’t expect even a supercop like Kimberley to jump on a plane, though. So, the case aside, I’ve been waiting for signals that she’s ready for the deep and meaningful. It’s taken me a whole week—there are parts of the farang psyche with which even I am unfamiliar—to realize that under the tough, relentlessly extrovert, take-no-prisoners carapace, there lives quite a shy girl who doesn’t have a lot of practice in sharing her heart.

  The conversation, at this minute, however, is not about her mood but mine.

  “It’s kind of funny how much you dislike pornography—you know, considering,” the FBI says.

  “That I’ve been involved in the Game all my life and run a brothel? It’s just not the same thing.”

  “What’s the big moral difference?”

  I search for words. Actually, moral difference is the right way of putting it. “Spontaneity. A girl arrives in Krung Thep from Isaan feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, poor. A middle-aged man arrives from the West feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, rich. They’re like two halves of a coin. All my mother’s bar does is facilitate their inevitable congress, supply the beer and the music, the short-term accommodation, and rake off a little profit. The whole thing is driven by a good healthy primeval human need for animal warmth and comfort. In all my years with the Game I’ve only come across half a dozen serious cases of abuse of one party by another, and I figure that’s because the whole thing works perfectly as an expression of natural morality and grassroots capitalism. The way I see it, we’re like a real estate agency that deals in flesh instead of earth. Setting it all up artificially, though, in a film set, choreographing the whole thing so flabby overweights in Sussex and Bavaria, Minnesota and Normandy, can jerk off without having to tax their imaginations—that strikes me as downright immoral, a crime against life almost. I guess the real difference is that in the bar people actually do it. There’s a reality input.”

  She smiles and shakes her head. “You’re just too much, Sonchai. Some people would say you were slightly insane. But when you come out with that kind of stuff, it makes sense, at least for the moment that you’re saying it. How did your mind get so free? What happened to you? Are all Thai pimps like you?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m strange, I guess.”

  She has drunk a bottle of Kloster rather quickly and seems to be sinking into depression. She orders another, though, and drinks it rapidly, straight from the bottle. “Actually doing it,” she says in a musing voice. “I guess that’s exactly what we’re not good at. Maybe that’s why we love war so much: reality starvation.”

  Now she’s giving me one of her most puzzling looks. “You’ve changed,” I say. “Big time. What happened?”

  Another gulp from the bottle. “I hit thirty-five. The midway point. It finally dawned on me that my whole description of reality was secondhand. My generation of women never rebelled—we felt we didn’t need to. We inherited a message of hate and simply elaborated it a bit. I never saw much of my father—my mother made sure of that. I think I went into the only important relationship of my life in order to be a bitch. In order to express hate. Isn’t that sick?”

  How to answer that? By changing the subject. “Why did you come to Bangkok, really?”

  A sigh. “I think I came for this conversation. We don’t have them at home anymore, you know? Maybe it’s modernism: we trade tribal sound bites so we can feel we belong to something. I came for your mind, Sonchai. Chanya can have your body—she deserves it. That is one very smart woman. I can hardly stand to see the two of you together. The cozy, unspoken, genuine love makes me want to have you both arrested. I don’t think it exists stateside. There’s a very powerful taboo against it. Think of all the hours you spend loving when you could be making money.”

  I say, “Let’s go.”

  “I want another beer.”

  “No.”

  In the cab we enjoy silence for a while, then: “I did marry. I lied to you.” A pause. “And divorced, of course.”

  “Any kids?”

  “One. A boy. I let his father keep him. His father said if the baby stayed with me, I would destroy him. I was like a smart bomb programmed to destroy anything male. I was afraid he may have been right.” Another long pause, then: “It was a hell of a long time ago. I was barely out of my teens. When it all fell apart, I joined the Bureau. I figured if I was a natural-born man-killer, I might as well get a license.”

  Somehow she sneaked an extra can of beer into the cab, which she opens. Raising the can to her mouth: “I don’t know, Sonchai, the minute you start to search for meaning, you’re lost. But without meaning, we’re lost also. Who am I, where do I come from, where am I going? Fuck knows. I can’t handle marriage—that’s way beyond my tolerance level. But a lover who lasts more than a weekend might help my emotional stability.” She takes a swig of the beer. “So now I masturbate,” she says with Tragic Mouth, “every fucking night. Maybe I need a toy boy?”

  The best way to check if you’re in Chinatown is by counting gold shops. If there’s not one on each corner, chances are you’ve taken a wrong turn. The shop signs are invariably yellow on red in Chinese characters, and the gold is of the extra-shiny variety that screams at you from the windows. Many of them are not technically shops but hangs: warehouse-size affairs with scales on the counters and turbaned Sikhs with pump guns on guard, all ablaze with neon light bouncing ferociously off the interminable stretches of gold Buddhas, gold dragons, gold belts, gold necklaces, gold bracelets. Clothing is the other industry: crowded narrow lanes made still narrower by stalls selling every kind of cotton or silk garment at astonishingly low prices.

  The FBI has managed to get drunk on a few beers and stays my hand when I try to pay the cab driver. “Do you know I’ve never known simple joy? Darker, more complex emotions, yes, but joy, no. Nor have any of my friends. We were infected by the psychosis of winning at the age of five. But you know joy. That’s what blows me away. You’re the son of a whore, a pimp, you run a brothel, you’re an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, but you’re innocent. I’ve never broken a law, cheated, lied, or presided over a crooked deal in my life, but I’m corrupt. I feel dirty twenty-fo
ur hours a day. Does anyone on the planet recognize the significance of that apart from me? The material you’re made of is fifty percent lighter than ours. Why?”

  “We don’t have original sin,” I explain as I hand a hundred-baht note to the driver. “That iron rod through the skull. We just don’t have it.”

  Vikorn has posted a couple of plainclothesmen outside the warehouse. They recognize me and let us into Yammy’s studio, where Marly, Jock’nEd are sitting around discussing the Iraq war in white silk dressing gowns with crimson trimmings. I feel the FBI’s sexual frisson when she clocks Ed. Excuse me while I explain Jock’nEd:

  They are a team, famous throughout the Bangkok porn industry, and the invariable performers whenever the script requires a farang male to flesh out the skeletal story line. Ed is, well, simply magnificent. A natural six-two male animal with superb pecs that gleam under the lights when rubbed with Johnson’s baby oil, power thighs that could do justice to a lioness, a rocky-handsome bone structure, one of those aquiline noses that emit erotic fire with every exhalation, relentlessly seductive baby-blue eyes, and a telltale cleft in the chin that is so distinctively American it could have been invented by Ford. (Actually, Ed is a Cockney who hails from Elephant and Castle.) On the other side of the karmic balance, lamentably—well, how can one put it? Even tumescent his dong is not of the Big Mac dimensions your randy granny in Omaha is accustomed to ogle over a TV dinner. He has to be supplemented, in other words, using the magical techniques of the silver screen we all love to be conned by. Enter Jock. He is a five-foot-nothing Scotsman with a consonant-free burr, bald, pot-bellied from a heroic beer habit, almost chinless, with slurpy lips you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be kissed by, but armed with—you guessed—a gigantic member of positively pneumatic obedience.

  They are inseparable pals and true pros, who eye Kimberley up and down as if she were a mare in a horse market. The assumption that she has come to work is, in the circumstances, forgivable.

  Now Marly: you will recall she works for us at the Old Man’s Club and was handpicked by Vikorn for her stunning visuals. Her excellent English enables her to understand Yammy’s stage directions—which, I am told, tend to be complex beyond the industry norm. Seeing a potential artistic rival, she does not immediately respond to Kimberley’s big and somewhat inebriated woman-to-woman smile. I leave the FBI to launch a charm offensive—she is clearly fascinated by the boys, the girl, the bed, the lights, and the cameras (well, something is making her lips curl lasciviously)—to go find Yammy, who apparently is taking a creative break in his office in back. I find him huddled over a bottle of sake.

  “Hello,” he manages from measureless depths of depression. “Come to make sure I don’t leave out the raw meat?”

  “Don’t make it difficult for me, Yammy. I’m only doing my job.”

  He gulps the rice wine straight from the bottle. “Listen, I have this fantastically surreal plot, with a cobra and a tiger cub, white kimonos, a Kyoto backdrop straight out of Hokusai…” Catching my eyes, he mimes futility with one hand and lapses back into despair.

  “And? What’s the problem?”

  “It’s so much more erotic with the kimonos left on, don’t you see? Sonchai, I’m begging you.”

  I shake my head in total sympathy. “He won’t go for it. Look, it’s not his fault—blame the consumer. The big respectable hotel chains won’t buy it if it’s not brutally obscene.”

  “I knew you would say that.”

  “Can’t you do both? Subtle erotic with the kimonos on, then the standard stuff with them off?”

  Shaking his head but resigned: “You lose aesthetic balance that way. It ends up like a dog’s dinner.”

  “There’s no point in my trying to persuade him. He’ll say it’s all about money.”

  Silence. Then: “I’ve been thinking. I’ve found a couple of investors in Japan. They’ll go fifty-fifty on a modest, fifty-million-dollar all-Nippon art flick. I just need to come up with the other half, twenty-five million.”

  “Yammy, we’ve been through this before. It’s not that he’s against you—you simply don’t fit the profile.”

  “So what the hell does a successful trafficker look like?”

  I gaze at him for a moment: neurotic, twitches like a horse plagued by flies, desperate and hurtling toward middle age, the unmistakable stamp of jail in the hollow of his cheeks, the hardness under the eyes. “Not like you, Yammy. Any customs officer would get the sack for not searching you on sight.”

  From experience I know there is no point sitting and trying to be persuasive. Yammy does everything in his own time or not at all. I return to the set, where the FBI is interrogating Marly.

  “I would have thought a woman like you would have done fantastically in the States,” Kimberley is saying with an ambiguous smile. “What happened?”

  “It’s not as easy as they make out,” Marly explains. “I did Third World Pathetic, I got a bleeding-heart eunuch. I did Thai Whore in a G-string, I got a geriatric on Viagra.” With a hint of aggression: “Why, what’s your game?”

  “Postmodern,” Kimberley says. “I got a dildo.”

  “We’re shooting in one!” Yammy yells as he exits from his office, suddenly oozing authority. Immediately Marly, Jock’nEd slip out of their dressing gowns and are now stark naked. Marly walks over to the bed and bends over it, careful to lean on her hands so her breasts dangle. “It’s okay, we can still talk,” she tells Kimberley. “It’s just a bum fondle.”

  Right on cue, Ed begins with the oil on her apple-shaped behind, as if polishing a Greek urn. “What are you looking at?” Marly asks the FBI, then casts a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, Jock. He’s amazing isn’t he? You wouldn’t give him a second glance if you saw him in the street, but he’s such a pro, the best in the business. He can do that even when he’s drunk. It’s like he’s got an electric inflator or something. And it is gigantic.”

  Kimberley seems to be suffering hormonal overload. Hoarsely: “Tell me, when you do this, d’you feel like you’re screwing the whole feminist matriarchy?”

  “No,” says Marly with a frown. “I feel like I’m screwing the whole Thai patriarchy.”

  Kimberley, nodding: “Even so.”

  On a signal from Yammy the FBI steps back. “Scene twelve, take one,” Yammy snaps. Marly immediately starts moaning. “Cut!” yells Yammy. “He isn’t inside you yet, honey,” he explains. “If you start with the kettle drums, what’ll you have left for the crescendo?” He goes to a laptop on a table to check something. “And you’re not quite in position, Marly darling,” he says distractedly, working the mouse. “I’ve got your clitoris and the top of your pussy in the floor camera, but we’re going to miss half of Jock’s dick for the fuck cut. Shift your bum about half an inch backward. Good. Perfect. Now, get your body memory to lock onto that. Jock, are you drooping?”

  “Ah wah jus’ wai’in’ on hold,” says Jock, looking down.

  “Okay now, when you enter her, don’t use too much thrust, or you’ll push her out of position, and all we’ll get is your hairy balls. Make it look merciless, but don’t use any real horizontal pressure. Smoothly controlled grinds come out best on the celluloid. Clear?”

  “Och aye,” says Jock.

  “Good man.” Yammy’s mood has swung. With the Promethean will of a true artist, he has conquered despair. He casts me a grin. “I wish mine was that reliable. Okay now, Marly love, you have this gorgeous Ed here polishing your ass like it was Sung dynasty, and you know what’s going to happen next, but you don’t know when, and he’s teasing you to the point of madness. Anticipation agony in every facial muscle, please. Good, keep that. Now give us a little tongue—no, don’t stick it all out, we want only the teeniest pink tip sneaking between those hungry lips. Perfect. Okay, take two.”

  Take two is the penetration shot, starring Jock. I cast a glance at the FBI. “Can we go now?” Kimberley groans. “I need to sit down somewhere cool, or find a man.”

 
; It is as we are leaving that I see the tall athletic forty-something Englishman for the first time. He is sitting in a far corner of the studio in a plastic chair, watching everything, wearing smart casuals of impeccable cut; his open-neck linen shirt reveals a filigreed gold chain. I already know what he looks like naked and that his name is Tom. I feel exactly the same jolt of sexual jealousy as if Damrong were still alive:

  Tom, you’re just amazing. I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.

  Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?

  Why is he here?

  On the way back to Sukhumvit I tell the FBI I have to pick Lek up from the hospital, where he has his monthly check. Kimberley immediately assumes he must be HIV positive and considers taking precautions, like getting out of the taxi and taking another, so I explain he’s in perfect health. The checkup has to do with his gender reassignment. Basically, the procedure is not to cut his goolies off all at once but to ease him into his new identity using the estrogen. The surgery is almost the last stage. Now the FBI is a helpless doomed creature caught in an overwhelming mudslide of curiosity and cannot help staring at him when he gets into the backseat next to her. “You’re so beautiful,” she tells him, taking in his long black hair parted in the middle, his big oval eyes with just a hint of mascara, his gaunt high cheeks, the adolescent litheness that is still upon him.