Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  “We call them the X members. Actually, they are the founders. It’s their money that keeps the place going. For them it really is a private club. They get the pick of the girls, anytime, anywhere, any kind of service, on call 24/7. One of the mamasans gets a message from the manager: such-and-such a girl is to go to such-and-such an address at such-and-such a time. The girl does as she’s told—she doesn’t know anything about X members. She doesn’t mind because she gets paid double and is given the next night off. Sometimes the assignation is upstairs at the club. Usually she won’t know who she’s sleeping with. We’re all simple country girls—we don’t know much about HiSo.”

  “You mean a private room like we used?”

  “No. These are the real private rooms. You get to them by private elevator.”

  “Who are the X members?”

  “Who do you think? The highest fliers in Thailand—senior army officers, very senior cops, bankers, businessmen, politicians. Pretty much the same sort of men as the official members, but much more senior.”

  “So the official members are basically fall guys?”

  A shrug. “They get their money’s worth. Very often they’re business associates of the secret members, so it pays for them to join.”

  I turn to examine her face. “Do I need to ask you how you know all this?”

  A shake of the head. “I’m quite popular with the X members. I talked them into making me mamasan so I didn’t have to go with the official members anymore. Better one big bastard once a week than a little jerk every night.”

  “And Damrong?” I ask. “She was popular with the secret members too, no?”

  She turns away and speaks to the wall. “Tell me what happened to her. Is she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Are you investigating for her family?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She turns to study me. “She wasn’t popular with everybody. A lot of men saw through her, and women didn’t think she looked special.”

  “But the rest, among the X members?”

  “Suppose she was popular with one of them, what about it? What difference if she’s dead?”

  “It’s my job to investigate.”

  A pause, then: “She was a kind of genius prostitute. The genius was all in her instinct, which was so fast, so accurate, she was more like a wild animal. She would know in a single glance if a man was going to fall for her or not. The ones she couldn’t reach in the first ten seconds, she ignored. They ceased to exist for her. That gave her time and energy to concentrate on the others. The suckers. She understood what a lot of girls don’t, including me.” I raise my eyebrows. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” As she speaks, her left hand seeks out mine. “She was my friend, though. She was very kind to me. She protected me.”

  Now we are looking at each other eyeball to eyeball. “From what?”

  “A pig. I told her I didn’t think I could carry on with him. I was losing all self-respect—of course I was never told his name. He paid big money, but he was brutal. She seduced him herself, got him away from me. She didn’t seem to mind sadism. Maybe she was kinky that way. Or maybe I’m just too sensitive. She even shared with me the money he gave her the first time he had her. That’s the kind of woman she was. Jai dee mark mark.” Shaking her head: “But I didn’t think anyone could reach him the way she did. For me he was hard as diamond.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Thai Chinese, tall, slim, about fifty, still very handsome in a vicious kind of way.”

  I let a couple of beats pass. “I think you know who he is.”

  “I found out.”

  “Khun Tanakan?”

  She seems reluctant to repeat the name and gives only the briefest nod.

  “But at the same time one of the official members was crazy about her—the lawyer Tom Smith. You told me about him.”

  “That moron. He has no idea how close he came to being bumped off by the Thai Chinese. He didn’t know who his rival was, or he would have kept his mouth shut. He would go crazy whenever he came to the club and she wasn’t available, started making threats. Farang are like boys—they have no self-control.”

  “Did Tanakan know about Smith?”

  “Sure. That kind of guy knows everything. He pays.”

  “But he didn’t do anything about Smith?”

  “Smith is still alive, isn’t he?”

  “Did he do legal work for the Thai Chinese?”

  “How would I know a thing like that?”

  “Of course. Sorry.” I hold up the remainder of the banknotes. “Who organizes all this? There has to be someone in control?”

  “The footman at the door. Take a look at him. He’s smart. He carries the names of every secret member in his head, and he’s the one who takes the girls to the assignations. The secret members pay him big bucks to keep his mouth shut. Of course, he wouldn’t dare to talk anyway.”

  I’m holding out the wad of notes but clamp it between my fingers when she reaches for it. “Khun Kosana, the advertising mogul, he is an X member, isn’t he?”

  She blinks for a moment and swallows. “Yes. He was a close friend of Khun Tanakan.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s disappeared. Everyone thinks he’s dead.”

  “Did Tanakan do it?”

  A flash of anger. “How the hell do I know?” Calming herself. “Khun Kosana was the main reason the club hired katoeys. I think he only pretended to like girls—I only ever saw him hire katoeys. He was a kind of slave to Tanakan. They say he didn’t really have a head for business, Tanakan had to bail him out plenty of times. But he was very clever with the media. Tanakan used him to buff his public image.”

  I hand over the balance of her money, then peel off some more notes and hold them up. “Get me into the secret part of the club, where the escalator leads to the private members’ rooms.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to look.”

  Now she has changed her mind about me all over again. “I think you must be a real cop. That’s where she was killed, isn’t it? In one of the private rooms.”

  “How would I know without taking a look?”

  She snatches the money out of my hand. “I would do it for nothing. Come to the club tonight. Call ahead to ask for me personally, and reserve a room for us.”

  We leave the short-time hotel separately. Lek is calling me on the cell phone, asking if I’m coming back to the station because the duty calls are starting to come in. I say I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Sergeant Ruamsantiah is running the response teams today.

  I’m in a cab when my cell phone starts to vibrate in my pocket. It’s Ruamsantiah with a bust. “It’s a damn funeral casino,” he says, his tone full of apology.

  “I thought we stopped busting them.”

  “Unofficially. We got a report from a cop—must be a disgruntled relative who wasn’t invited. It’s not something we can ignore. You can go as easy as you like, just make sure you take down names and keep notes so we can say we acted promptly on the information.” I call Lek to tell him to meet me at the Skytrain station nearest the address.

  Sorry to lay a culture shock on you halfway through the yarn, farang; funeral casinos work like this:

  You are a newly minted ghost all alone on the Other Side without a body, feeling understandably disoriented. There is still plenty of connection with your living relatives through subtle lines that science will not be able to detect for a few hundred years yet, but after your loss of vital functions, the communication operates largely through transfer of emotional energy: urges outlive reason. Without a body, though, you are dependent on a certain residual awareness filled mostly with separation anxiety. Now, what do you most not want? Answer: you most don’t want to be alone. Relatives who might have irritated you profoundly before you became a corpse now acquire an important—nay vital—function. It is the duty o
f close family to surround you with as many people as possible for the duration of the wake, which can go on for forty-nine days, at the end of which you will have found a new bivouac in someone’s—or something’s—womb. Now, there is one activity and one activity alone that will keep your average Thai coming to your home day after day for seven weeks, especially if they didn’t much like you in the first place. The other advantage to buying a few roulette wheels and offering a private gambling service is for the bereaved spouse to use the profits to pay for the monks, the food, and the roulette wheels and to put together a fistful of baht to see close family through the difficult postwake period.

  All of which explains why Lek and I find ourselves outside Nang Chawiiwan’s third-floor apartment in a modestly appointed building on Soi 26. Lek snooped around and confirmed there is a fire escape from the apartment by means of the back door. By banging loudly on the front door, therefore, and yelling, “Police,” we are able to cause an immediate evacuation. Sounds of Sunday-best shoes slapping on the wrought-iron fire escape on the opposite side of the apartment, excited whispers, some giggling. The exit goes on for about ten minutes, which probably indicates that more than a hundred guests are now legging it down the soi. We bang again on the door, and this time it opens on an exhausted, tearful, but spirited woman dressed in traditional Thai costume; Nang Chawiiwan is all of five feet tall.

  I don’t want to cause offense at her time of mourning, so I let her play for time while the last of her guests make their getaway, then she leads us into the flat. She has not troubled to hide the roulette wheels; there are five of them. Cleverly, she has left small piles of cash next to one of the wheels. She glances from the cash to me to Lek to the cash.

  “This is a very serious offense that carries a prison sentence,” Lek tells her sternly, while taking a peek at the deceased, who is lying with his arms folded over his chest in a brightly varnished pine coffin: the gaunt, humble face of a workingman. Indeed, he is so gaunt, I’m wondering if Nang Chawiiwan starved him to death. An ignoble thought, perhaps, but that is one skeletal cadaver.

  “Sorry,” Nang Chawiiwan says.

  Unable to maintain stern for very long, Lek stares with infinite compassion at the corpse. “Poor thing’s lonely already,” he says, “I can feel it.”

  A sniff from Nang Chawiiwan. “That’s why I did it, I had to make it worth everyone’s while to keep him company. How else was I to fulfill my obligations as a wife?”

  Lek finds this question too troubling and turns to me for instructions. I am afraid I am somewhat transfixed by the corpse, like a cadet with his first cadaver. Death is hitting me strangely this week.

  “Take the money,” Nang Chawiiwan says, losing patience and jerking her chin at the cash next to the wheel.

  “We don’t take money,” Lek says, again checking my eyes.

  “That’s right,” I confirm. I smile. “Better put it away—it’s a little incriminating lying there like that.”

  Nang Chawiiwan makes big eyes. “You don’t take money?” A grin breaks over her features. “I knew my Toong was a good man, but I never knew he had that kind of karma. Imagine, busted at his funeral by two cops who don’t take money!” She shoves the cash down her bra for now. “He was practically an arhat, a saint, and this proves it.”

  “You’ll have to give us your ID card,” I say, “and if anyone asks, this was a serious bust that went wrong because we didn’t know there was a fire escape.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re never going to do this again, are you? I mean, you’re not going to call around to all your guests to tell them the coast is clear as soon as we’re gone, right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Just this time then.”

  Locking eyes with me for a moment: “Are you sure you won’t take some money? I would feel safer.”

  “No,” Lek says, all firm again and pointing a long finger at her. “You’ll have to trust us.”

  Old Toong’s excellent karma has her all excited. She’s remembering all over again what a fine man she married and how well he took care of her, even after death. It’s not often a ghost gets so lucky at his own funeral casino. Indeed, Nang Chawiiwan is now so fortified with his spiritual power, she has fished her cell phone from out of her costume and started calling the guests back before we’re out the front door.

  While we’re walking down Soi 26, though, in search of a cab, I’m starting to feel dizzy and have to stop at a café. Normally I don’t drink on duty, but I need a beer and order one. Lek orders a 7UP, then goes to a street vendor who is pushing his glass-and-aluminum trolley along the gutter. I watch while the vendor opens the hinged glass, stabs at a sour green mango, dunks it onto a cutting plate, and slices it up so fast his hands are a blur. Now he’s using the funnel end of the steel plate to slide the slices into a plastic bag. He chucks the first plastic bag into a second, into which he adds pink sachets of chili, salt, and sugar for the dip. The final touch is a cocktail stick with which to eat the mango slices.

  “What’s the matter?” Lek wants to know when he returns, chewing.

  I felt the blood drain from my face, and I’m sure my skin was gray as I sat down hard on a plastic seat outside the café. It’s a street that caters mostly to the housing needs of workers in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of katoeys around, a lot of farang, and girls in jeans and T-shirts on their way to work.

  “Death,” I say. “Every cop builds up a resistance from the first day on the beat. You can lose it, though, just like that.” I snap my fingers while he makes big eyes. He does not understand, and there is no way I’m going to confess to a shameful event of last night that the bust has brought back to mind. I swallow the beer quickly but fail to block the memory:

  I woke up with a jolt so hard, I could feel it in my joints. Chanya was my first thought, but she was already awake, staring hard at the ceiling. She only does that when she’s angry.

  “It was her again, wasn’t it?”

  I waited as long as I could before saying, “Yes.”

  “Sonchai, I don’t know how much of this I can take. I’d fight any living woman for you, but the dead? D’you know what you’ve been doing for the last half hour?”

  I was unable to answer.

  “You’ve been fucking her, haven’t you?”

  I turned my head away. “Yes.”

  “On and on. That’s the third time in as many nights. Then you came. You’re all sticky.”

  I didn’t realize. Now the whole dream came back to me. Except that it wasn’t a dream. It was a visit. I couldn’t move for trembling.

  With an effort my darling overcame her anger and went to fetch a damp cloth. She wiped me down as roughly as she could without removing surface skin. “A normal man has a real mia noi. You have to have a fucking dead one.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “This has been going on since you went to her apartment the last time, hasn’t it?”

  “I better have a shower.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  I went out to the yard to hose myself down like an elephant. We couldn’t face each other this morning.

  I finish the beer and stare at Lek.

  “It’s the Damrong case, isn’t it?” he asks with that uncanny sixth sense of a katoey. I nod without meeting his gaze. “I want you to come to see my moordu, master, please?”

  Lek discovered his infallible seer about a year ago and has been trying to get me to meet her/him ever since. Lek is convinced that he and I have been circling around each other for hundreds of lifetimes, fulfilling various intimate roles for each other: mother/father, sister/ brother, husband/wife. What he’s particularly interested in finding out, though, is when I was last a katoey like him. It is a tenet of our Buddhism that all human souls go through the transsexual experience from time to time.

  “When I’m stronger, Lek,” I say, “not today.”<
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  While I’m paying for my beer and Lek’s 7UP, my cell phone buzzes with a text message. I fish it out, read it, then show it to Lek. It’s another from Yammy, the fifth this week:

  I’ve found a mule so I won’t have to carry myself. Please talk to the Colonel. I don’t think I can take much more of this. I must practice my art. Yammy.

  I groan, show the message to Lek, and put the phone away, only to take it out again because it’s bleeping. This time the message is from the FBI:

  You live in a magic-ravaged land.

  19

  Nok ordered me to arrive after eleven P.M., when the Parthenon would be at its busiest. The sofas are all occupied by men in dark suits with two or three overdressed girls to serve them. Nok, in her upholstered ballgown, is quite busy introducing customers to girls, taking men up to the second and third floors, returning to welcome yet more eager sperm-spenders. Even when I look directly at her, she avoids my eye. She did manage a quick grasp of my wrist as she passed by, however. It seems the big moment has arrived when the stage will finally be put to use.

  The house lights darken, and an invisible orchestra is playing something saccharin-based from the fifties, the kind of music that justifies fifty girls in low-cut swimming costumes kicking their legs in unison. The show is a perfect copy of the stuff you see in old Hollywood movies featuring elaborate dance routines, with a finale that showcases the girl with the biggest breasts—these are truly gigantic—standing on a circular dais, and everyone else on their knees paying homage. Unlike in other bars five minutes from here, the choreography forbids the baring of nipples and pubic hair; it’s almost family entertainment. To keep up appearances, Nok has provided me with three young women who are delighted that I speak Thai despite my somewhat Occidental features, and they have been nattering to me about their lives to pass the time. I think they are aware that I am the mamasan’s man, however, because not one of them has made a single erotic pass. Finally, when the show has reached its inevitable crescendo and people are clapping in a distracted kind of way, Nok comes up beside me to ask if I want any of the girls sitting with me. I say no in a polite, embarrassed tone, and the girls immediately disappear. Nok takes me up to the second and third floors, where we go through the same routine as on my last visit. She then ostentatiously takes me to one of the private rooms and locks the door. She leans with her back against it, thrusting her Louis XV bosom at me.