Bangkok Tattoo sj-2

by John Burdett

  After less than a month the offers of marriage start to come in. It amuses her that the Texan male courts in a way that would be instantly recognizable in the East. He tells you how much money he's got, shows you around his "spread" just like a bird showing off its plumage, and treats you like a princess in a cage. Some even had the sense to feign humility: "Aw, you know, it's just a li'l ol' spread, I ain't rich exactly-but a' course any woman takes me on full time is gonna get half sooner or later. I'm getting on a bit, you know."

  The frontier between marriage and prostitution was as hard to pin down in the United States as it was in Thailand, apparently. Some of the spreads were gigantic in the Texan tradition, but she doubted the owner had any real intention to share. As her fame grew, more and more red-faced men from out of the jungle (she is still very Thai; for her, anything that is not city or suburb is jungle) arrived in the massage parlor's parking lot in big SUVs. Her boss doubled her fees and told her the five thousand dollars would be paid off in three months instead of six, when she would be free to leave. He was an experienced pro and realized she was just too hot to keep. The feds would be around sooner or later to take a more expert look at her passport, maybe check with the ID database in Thailand on which fingerprints were recorded.

  Marriage, she now decides, is not out of the question, but she sees through the men. She sees the meanness behind the charm, their assumption of a future of unchallenged dominance that arises from her being Asian, serene, and eager to please. For her part, if she is looking for anything in particular in a man, it is a Thai sense of fun. Money is important, but without fun life simply is not worth living. Although she enjoys a laugh and a joke with some of the customers, she isn't having a lot of fun, not with the Mexican women developing a homicidal rage toward her. The boss sees it too and hints that she should probably leave as soon as the three months are up-those women have mean connections. Anything can happen in El Paso. Maybe she could leave even sooner-he increases her hourly fee again. Within a record two months of her arrival, she is free to leave.

  Vegas is the place to go for a woman like her. She knew this even in Bangkok. When she first sees the town from the Greyhound bus, she recognizes the vibrations. Using her connections within America's Thai mafia, she has no difficulty finding a job with the biggest of the city's agencies. The agency is so well organized, American style, it even holds an induction course. Chanya sits in a seat in a conference room of a large hotel, along with about fifty other young women, most of whom are not Caucasian.

  She has often heard prostitution referred to as an industry but has never seen it treated like one before. The platinum blonde who stands facing the new recruits is a masterpiece of modern surgery: tit enhancements, stomach tucks, nosejob, face-lift-the lot. She is over forty, though-way past active service-and has surely been shunted over to the human resources side of the profession. No surgery could do much about her voice, which is sandpaper and steel:

  "It's like this, and in this order. I don't want to hear about any of you getting the order wrong, so if you have a learning disability or poor English, write it down. I provided paper and pencil on each desk."

  1. The john arrives in Vegas. He has heard about our services and asks the cab driver how he can contact us on his way from the airport.

  2. The cab driver has one of our cards like this. [It shows a lurid Asian girl with huge bare breasts on one side, the telephone number on the other.] You will notice that there is a code number on the card. Each individual card has a different one.

  3. The john calls the number, and the operator asks for the code on the card. This helps ensure it's a real john and not a cop. It also means a payoff for the cab driver.

  4. The john states his preferences, i.e., race, breast size, height, blow job only, hand job, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, special services, all of the above, etc.

  5. The operator takes down his hotel details and calls him back in his room to make sure he's really there.

  6. If he is where he says he is, the operator tells him the price and usually adds that the girl will be there in twenty minutes.

  7. The operator calls the girl on her cell phone and tells her where to go. She also calls one of the bodyguards to meet her in the lobby of the john's hotel. This is important. You do not go to the john's room or even call him until the guard is in place. You tap the guard's cell number into the autodial feature of your own cell phone. If at any point there is a problem, you press the autodial number, and the guard will be up at the room in double-quick time.

  8. You make contact with the guard and then call the john on the hotel phone to come down to meet you. You do not go straight to his room.

  9. The john tells you what he is wearing. You and the guard both check the john when he appears, but he will not see the guard. You approach, you will call him either honey or sweetie, you will not use any other term of endearment.

  10. The john takes you up to his room. He must now pay you the base fee of two hundred dollars. You do not make a move until you have pocketed the cash.

  11. You now tell him to take out his cock. This is important. If he is an undercover cop, he will not take out his cock. If he refuses, then you leave the room. If he is not a cop, he will take out his cock, which you will work on for a few moments.

  12. You then tell him to lie on the bed while you strip. After you have stripped and he has ogled you, you explain that the price given by the agency was merely for turning up and stripping. If he wants more, he has to pay. You will have your own scale of fees for services, starting with hand jobs and going all the way up to ass-fucking. What you charge at this stage is up to you-obviously the young and stunning will charge the most. In any case, you are advised not to begin your service until you have got your dough.

  13. The rest is up to you and your creativity, but always use a condom for oral, vaginal, and anal sex. From time to time we plant men on you to check for quality control. Any girl who does not roll her own condom on the john will be fired.

  14. An elegant exit is always a good idea. Be polite at all times, but a good exit gives the possibility of repeat business. A repeat customer simplifies things, and of course you know by this time he is not a cop.

  At first she feels much less isolated than in El Paso. There are plenty of Asian women on the Game here-Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Malay, Indian, Pakistani-more or less every Asian race is represented. If they are less popular than blondes, that doesn't seem to matter, there is plenty of work to go around. Here the men are all tourists from other states-the whole of Nevada is a revolving door, millions are flown and bused in every week. Every customer comes with those bulging, moist, expectant eyes of a man who has escaped from his prison for a week or two-or a day, or an hour.

  Almost all the other women are American citizens, though. Many were born there, others have immigrated and stayed long enough to take the oath of allegiance and generally behave exactly like other Americans. Practically every one of them is on drugs. The white women tend to claim, perhaps truthfully, that it was drugs (mostly coke, crack and meth, sometimes heroin) that drove them to the Game in the first place. They needed the big bucks to feed their big habits. The Asians and the blacks often claim it was prostitution that drove them to drugs. Everyone agrees that to survive on the Game in America, you more or less have to be on dope of one kind or another. Pretty soon Chanya understands what they mean. The men hardly trouble to ask her name, there is no repartee, no fun-even less fun than in Texas. To her it makes no sense at all, since imposing a layer of misery has no effect on the popularity of the trade. On the contrary, it may be the puritanical monotony of the working week that drives the men to seek relief in Vegas: not raging bulls, exactly, more like cows waiting to be milked.

  She becomes a production-line worker, if a highly paid one. It is exactly what the men expect. They really need to be disappointed-she can see them starting to tell themselves how sorry they are as they put their pants back on,
how they will try to live better lives and buy their wives a new dress. Her good looks and superb figure are only minor advantages-generally the men are too rushed and furtive to notice.

  She starts to drink regularly, usually a couple of tequilas at the end of a session to keep her head level. She stays more than six months, long enough to save thirty thousand dollars, then takes a bus to Washington. One of her friends from Bangkok has called her. Wan arrived in America soon after Chanya and found work in a Washington, D.C., hotel where the Game is very well controlled. There is a sauna and massage spa attached to the hotel where Chanya can work.

  In Washington it takes Chanya a week to realize she has dropped into a whore's paradise. The hotel where Wan works owns five stars, which means diplomats, high-rolling secretaries, heads of security, and others stay here. But before Chanya has time to apply for a job, her friend introduces her to a Thai diplomat named Thanee, a light-skinned man in his mid-forties with obvious Chinese genes who belongs to one of maybe a dozen very wealthy families who control Thailand. Chanya has heard of his family, who are often in the news in Bangkok. The patriarch, who is still just about alive, made a lot of money in the opium trade while it was still legal, or semilegal, but his eldest son showed true commercial genius by investing his share of the family fortune first in electronics, then in telecommunications. Thanee is a second grandson who showed no interest in business but demonstrated a flair for diplomacy. With his connections it was inevitable that sooner or later he would land a plum job in Washington. He is part of a permanent lobbying group looking after the interests of the Thai economy-well, the interests of Thai patricians, actually.

  The negotiations are very short, and he and Chanya close the deal with hardly more than a smile. Wan finds an excuse to leave them alone after about five minutes. It is such a relief to speak her own language and to be with a man who understands where she is coming from, she almost loses her professionalism.

  There is no hurry to get her to bed. He takes her to a Thai restaurant off Chinatown, where he urges her to choose her favorite dishes. He orders a bottle of white wine to go with the raw prawn salad, and a bottle of red for the duck. He makes her laugh with some Thai jokes, but at the same time his sophistication is pretty intimidating. He not only speaks English perfectly; he owns a kind of smoothness that seems to impress, even frighten, the waiters. He is a master of both cultures, something that leaves her almost speechless with admiration. Best of all, they understand each other perfectly: there will be no misplaced passion and no offers of marriage with this guy. They will proceed back to his apartment at a leisurely Thai pace, their private party will begin with her massaging him slowly with aromatic oil, little by little intimacy will develop, he will not force the issue but will wait for her to signal she is ready. She will stay the night, they will breakfast together, perhaps they will have sex one more time before he pays her generously. She will allow herself to fall in love with him in a very controlled way. They are as far apart within the Thai class system as it is possible to be, so neither of them is going to develop unreasonable expectations. On the other hand, both of them will greet each other with affection and a degree of relief at their next assignation. She will almost certainly become one of his mia noi or minor wives in Washington.

  Which is exactly how it happens, except that she quickly becomes his favorite mia noi. Indeed, Wan tells her he dumped all the others the same week he met Chanya.

  Thanee's wife number one, Khun Toi, the matriarch herself, spends most of her time in Thailand with their two children and only rarely comes to Washington. Of course, she knows about Thanee's various mia noi. She would have laughed out loud if anyone had told her he was faithful to her. She herself, having been educated in the West and being as liberated as any woman in her own Thai way, has a regular lover in Bangkok whom Thanee knows all about. It is not out of the question that Thanee will introduce her to Chanya on her next visit. Everyone would know the rules: Chanya would show great deference toward Khun Toi, and Khun Toi in return would develop an affection for Chanya.

  Which is exactly how it happens. Khun Toi stays for ten days, she and Chanya get along marvelously and go shopping together. Khun Toi buys Chanya some fine new skirts and dresses with the best designer labels, Chanya carries all their bags to the waiting limo. At the end of the ten days Khun Toi tells her husband how it is to be: Chanya is far too beautiful and valuable to be left to the mercies of the local sex trade. Thanee is to pay her a stipend every month, enough to live and dress well and to accompany Thanee from time to time on those few social functions where Americans will not raise too many eyebrows. Chanya will be invited to Thanee's Asian-only soirees. They will not live together, and Chanya will be discreet about coming and going from Thanee's penthouse apartment. Thanee must give her a key so as to make her comings and goings smoother. For her part, Chanya will dedicate herself to Thanee and not take on any other clients. That will take care of the risk of disease, which has been worrying Khun Toi for quite a while. Not that she and Thanee have sex very often these days, but she doesn't want him to get sick and die.

  "Three quarters of my money would go back to my parents," Thanee explains to Chanya in front of Khun Toi. Everyone laughs, Thai-style.

  Chanya thinks maybe Khun Toi gets off on arranging her husband's naughty fucks. I could smell her when she hugged me tonight. She's making him screw her while I'm writing this. She's going to make him tell her what Chanya's like in bed, what he makes me do. Well, we do everything, honey.

  At first Thanee is too canny to give Chanya more than the tiniest glimpse of his professional life, and such glimpses as she is allowed come out of small talk among her new lover and his Thai friends. But although she left school at the age of twelve and has never spent a minute thinking about geopolitics, Chanya catches on fast. She is astonished and even a little dismayed at the unofficial view of this Saharat Amerika she spent so much time and effort to reach. According to Thanee and his Chinese friends, the world's only superpower and its biggest economy is also old, gridlocked, overtaxed, overgoverned, more overarmored than Tyrannosaurus rex, and too hidebound for any dramatic expansion. Modern China is a young country that began life in 1949. It has only just entered the great period of wild entrepreneurs and robber barons, enjoys just the right balance of corruption and law and order that allows the strongest and most ferocious of its businessmen to cut through the red tape, while lesser citizens are kept under control. It approximates to the golden age of the Rockefellers, Joseph Kennedy, and Al Capone. China is also very close to Thailand. When the present phase of road-building projects in Laos is completed, there will be direct land routes all the way from Beijing and Shanghai to Bangkok. This seems to excite Thanee and his closest associates, both the Chinese and the Thai. China is already dominating the economies of Southeast Asia. Within twenty years it will be the world's largest economy and the most important country in the world for anyone living in Thailand. With two billion natural capitalists, its potential for expansion is incalculable.

  Understanding the subliminal message, Chanya realizes with sadness that she is Thanee's last Washington luxury. He sees that she has understood. Perhaps he has deliberately allowed her to overhear certain conversations-he's certainly smart and devious enough for that.

  Career moves take planning, though, and with Asians an awful lot of wining and dining. He is out most nights in his tuxedo. The occasions to which he is able to invite her are few, but he buys her three evening gowns just in case. She causes a sensation in her long gowns with her shining black hair plaited and pinned up and the gold necklace he bought her glittering against her brown skin, large single gold-set pearls in her ears. She sees that not a few Chinese and Thai men intend to inherit her after Thanee's departure. And so they might have done, were it not for a curious move by Thanee himself.

  Chanya thinks she will puzzle for the rest of her life about why exactly Thanee introduced her to the farang. For quite a while she will think of the tall, muscular, a
nd rather unattractive man as just that: the farang, probably because since she took on Thanee, she has hardly met any white men at all. Why did Thanee invite her to lunch with the farang at 7 Duck on Massachusetts Avenue (wicker and pillows everywhere, the penne pasta with seafood would have been a lot better with more chiles), on exactly the day that he broke it to her that he had been posted to Beijing and would be leaving in two months? Sometimes she thinks it might have been a kind of malice, not toward her but toward the farang. Perhaps the subtle revenge of an Asian diplomat who has not failed to notice how even his smoothness, charm, intelligence, and perfect English still do not qualify him as an equal of the Americans who believe they run the world? If that is the case, then it is a stroke of malicious genius on Thanee's part; anyone could have foreseen how hard the farang was likely to fall.

  Mitch Turner cannot keep his eyes off her all through the lunch, to the extent that it becomes embarrassing and Thanee makes signs of irritation too subtle for Turner to notice. Chanya has to keep dropping her eyes so as not to lock with the farang's. Sometimes she slips rather rudely into Thai, in the hope the American will be offended, but he seems not to notice. Those blue eyes simply burn into her skin. He cannot stop staring at her.

  This is not entirely surprising. She has been in Washington for five months now and for most of that time she has been kept by Thanee, who is not a man to begrudge a woman when it comes to clothes and cosmetics. She is wearing a fawn Chanel business suit, and her creamy brown skin has benefited from endless visits to upmarket beauticians who also know how to emphasize the mystery in those Oriental eyes, but best of all, her natural poise convinces everyone that she is a young diplomat herself, the product of the best education money can buy. Surely no peasant girl who began her working life by minding water buffalo barefoot in the paddy could possibly know to sit like that? And to be so relaxed it is almost intimidating? That is the word Mitch Turner will use later, when they know each other better. That whole lunch he feels intimidated by her!