Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  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.”