by John Burdett
Pisit turns to my mother, who needs little launching:
The government isn’t merely killing the goose that lays the golden egg—it is ruining the only wealth-distribution system we have in this feudal society. This government has no common sense at all. Do they seriously think we’ll get rich by becoming as sterile as the West? I’ve been to Paris, Florida, Munich, London—those places are museums populated by ghosts. The bottom line is that for more than three decades the people of Isaan have been kept alive by what little cash their daughters in Bangkok have been able to send home. There are whole towns, roads, shops, farms, water buffalo, cars, motorbikes, garages—whole industries that owe their existence to our working girls. These courageous young women are the very essence of the female genius for sustaining, nurturing, and honoring life with life. They are also everything that is great about the Thai soul, with their selfless devotion and sacrifice. They ask for no help or gratitude, they don’t expect admiration, they gave up looking for respect decades ago, but they are the heart of our country.
Pisit: How much of our government’s attitude is influenced by Western media, do you think?
Nong: Well, I must say I don’t know what the Western TV networks would do without a brothel in Southeast Asia to point their cameras at. Of course our government is influenced, but it’s just a question of the TV networks improving their ratings. They never trouble to really understand us. What can you do? This is the ersatz morality of the West.
Pisit: Does this crackdown spell the end of the sex industry in Thailand?
Nong: I don’t think so. After all, it’s been illegal for nearly a hundred years, and look what we’ve achieved. Also, there’s a lot of investment from the West these days because the upside potential of investing in a well-run go-go bar is much greater in my view than, say, investing in General Motors. Our girls charge far less per hour than in most societies, yet at the same time they are among the most sought-after women on earth. Rates have not increased in real terms since I myself was active.
My heart swells with pride at my mother’s mastery of a vocabulary usually reserved for the ruling classes, but the taxi driver twists his head around. “That’s your mom? She must have been a real goer in her day.”
“You may go back to your Thai pop CD now,” I instruct.
When the jam finally starts to ease, Lek says: “Have you seen the new stuff from YSL? It’s in the Emporium; some amazing dresses.”
“I haven’t kept up with the fashions this year.”
“Armani and Versace still have the best colors, though.”
“Italians have the best eye for color.”
“But I still prefer the Japanese designers. Junya Watanabe’s stuff this season is out of this world. Dusty grays in satin and velvet. Such a shock at first, you know, then you think: perfect. So did you speak to your mother?”
I swallow, then cast a glance at his ink-black hair, the hue of youth still on his flesh, the buttery glow in those high cheeks, the innocence still in those eyes. I’ve been mulling the thing over in my mind for days, wondering if my mother’s wisdom had deserted her in middle age. It seems almost against nature to introduce this angel to Fatima. Then it clicks. Initiation is the word. My mother is right, as usual. Not only will Fatima be good for him—she is exactly what he needs for experience and survival. Also, Fatima is very rich. If she decides to adopt him, he’ll be set up for life.
“Actually, she suggested a friend of mine who I’d just not thought of in connection to you. I haven’t seen her in over a year, but it won’t be difficult to look her up. I’ll see what I can do.”
Lek beams happily and throws me one of those grateful swooning looks of his. “Remind me again, where are we going?”
“We’re going to see Khun Mu, Lek.”
21
Take a poor Thai girl out of her third-world village, throw money at her, and what is the third thing she wants, after the three-story wedding-cake mansion and the lurid Mercedes? Louis Quinze furniture in acrylic tones, as a rule. Even beige is garish at this level of light reflection, and the green carpet is like something you might play tennis on, but Khun Mu somehow fits the decor.
A word about Mu. Before Vikorn shot him, her husband Savian “Joey” Sonkan used to boast that he’d spent more money renovating her body than he’d spent on the house and the five-car garage, but Mu began sculpting her body before she met him. She was what was known as a late developer. Most of her friends left the Isaan village at around eighteen to work in the big city, and many of them returned for holidays to boast about the money they were making out of dumb farang men who hired their bodies for ludicrous prices. (You could buy a fully grown buffalo for what those guys spent in a night at the bars.) For years these stories seemed not to affect Mu overly much, until one fine day she stole the family savings from under her parents’ bed and blew everything on silicone breast enhancements and a new wardrobe, then fled to Krung Thep to make her pile. As luck would have it, she found her destiny not with Western men (the rigid echoing bosom and the pink body stocking proved resistible, despite assurances from her consultants) but with a home-grown jao por—a young drug baron who appreciated a woman whose taste was as bad as his own.
Joey didn’t just deal drugs—he lived with them. After my Colonel took him down, we found whole cupboards full of yaa baa, the matrimonial mattress stuffed with heroin, bales of ganja in the garage. Vikorn, who had long grown out of shoot-outs with desperadoes and would have been happy to come to some arrangement (say, a modest seventy percent tax on Joey’s gross profits), never wanted to kill him, but Joey’s other passion, apart from drugs and modifications to his wife’s body, was chase movies, the more violent the better. He wanted to die like Al Pacino in Scarface, and after years of provocation Vikorn finally granted his wish.
My dead partner Pichai was there at the stakeout, as were I and half the cops from District 8, not to mention all the TV networks. Joey appeared unarmed on the bedroom balcony, insulting Vikorn’s manhood and goading him into a duel, while Vikorn crouched behind one of the police vans clutching a hunting rifle with infrared aiming device, which he fired before Joey finished proposing his rules of engagement. Maybe Joey had expected some such foul play, for he had placed himself at the very edge of the balcony, thus providing for a telegenic fall, including a backflip before the final splat. A few minutes later Mu appeared on the balcony waving a frilly Louis Quinze white handkerchief and smiling for the cameras. She held no grudges, she explained, beaming. After all, the house and cars were hers now, not to mention the furniture. A couple hours later at the station we discovered, to our astonishment, that the dumb moll who could hardly read and write possessed total recall. She was also apparently fearless and listed a total of three hundred and twenty-one names of her husband’s business associates (a selective list even so: none of them were cops), while maintaining the same eager-to-please smile on her face and pointing her pyramids at us. With very little encouragement (well, an offer of immunity from prosecution, to be precise) she was able to confirm that, despite appearances, Joey had been secretly (and invisibly) armed and that Vikorn was correct in claiming he’d shot in self-defense, thus silencing bleeding-heart critics in the media. Her negotiating skills also proved superior to those of her late husband. Before she left the station, she pointed out to Vikorn that her life was now worth maybe one baht and that if she didn’t have protection for the rest of it, she had as good as committed suicide by giving us that list of suspects.
“You need money” was Vikorn’s response.
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Vikorn said. Mu took this single foreign word as permission for her to continue to trade with the army. He also let her keep about ten percent of the drugs in the house. After all, the remainder was more than ample for the ritual photo-op with Vikorn standing in full Pol Colonel uniform smiling before a table laden with heroin, morphine, meth, and ganja, the street value of which was enough to buy a fleet of airliners.
&
nbsp; All that was a few years ago. We still consult Mu now and then. Vikorn is no mean negotiator himself, and part of the deal was that she should remain an informant—particularly against Zinna, who was Joey’s principal supplier. To keep her alive, our visits to her are restricted to no more than one a year, and total anonymity is required.
Money and time have shown her to be by nature neither a whore nor a crook but a true-born eccentric. Despite the security risk, she has refused to vacate the mansion, the grounds of which she has turned into a refuge for stray dogs and monkeys, which she feeds personally three times a day, usually in a blinding pink housecoat, except on anniversaries of her husband’s death, when she wears mauve, Joey’s favorite color. (One of the Roll-Royces is also mauve.) Armed and uniformed (mauve) security guards are everywhere and constantly patrol the perimeter of the grounds. There is even a sentry box where I had to flash our IDs, and a digital camera that enabled her to examine my and Lek’s faces before letting us in.
Now we’re standing on the tennis-court carpet in the main reception room while she sits on a glittering beige five-seater sofa, fondling a young and very sleepy female Dalmatian. I happen to know, for Vikorn likes to keep tabs, that she has no regular lover, unless it is one of the security guards, which is unlikely. She is like a billionaire nun with a weakness for animals. The solitude has all but dissolved self-consciousness, and the unrestricted play of emotion across her face, from sad to gay and back again, is quite childlike.
Lek is in shock at the vulgarity of the decor and stands rooted to the spot.
Mu says: “I remember you. You are the half-caste who was at the shoot-out. Did you kill my husband?”
“You know very well it was Colonel Vikorn.”
“Ah, yes. At least, he took the credit in the media, but he’s a very cunning man. Perhaps it was you or one of your colleagues who pulled the trigger.” I say nothing. “Would you like to see him?” I cough. “Come along, I’m sure he’ll be delighted.” She lays the Dalmatian down in one of the lounge chairs, then casts a glance at Lek. “Is the beautiful boy coming?”
In a room adjacent to the lounge, Joey is embalmed à l’américaine in a characteristic pose from life, sitting in a director’s chair holding a mobile to his ear, a cigar in the other hand, an open-neck Gucci shirt and jacket, smart YSL slacks, and multicolored loafers. His huge smile, acrylic in intensity, perfectly fits the house theme. In a neat melding of cultures, Mu has surrounded him with gold images of the Buddha in his various postures, and electric imitation votive candles flicker everywhere. The decor is the house standard, and the dominant color—you guessed. She changed into a mauve housecoat before entering the shrine. I have the disturbing sense that there is nothing but modified naked body underneath.
A finely manicured hand flits to her mouth. “You know, every time I think of that day I feel awful.”
“We really didn’t want to do it,” I explain. “Vikorn would have made a deal if Joey hadn’t wanted to die.”
“I know. But afterward. At the station. You must have thought me so stupid, so naÏve, so much the typical country girl out of her depth in the big city.”
“Not at all. We were all pretty impressed, actually.”
“You were?” A deprecating laugh. “Don’t sweet-talk me, Detective. You were all laughing behind my back.”
“Why should we have done that?”
“The silicone, of course. Joey was always so busy making money, he never inquired about proper enhancements. Look.”
She pulls open the housecoat, and there they are. For the first time Lek shows an interest in the case. I feel it will be a load off her mind if I follow her directions and examine them, although I’ve already seen the point. The stiff silicone is all gone, replaced no doubt with saline bags or collagen, which, I can report, yield nicely to the touch, bounce and swing beautifully, and really are more or less indistinguishable from the real thing, although a purist might complain they belong on a woman ten years younger.
“Can I?” Lek asks. Mu smiles and nods. With great reverence he handles both breasts, as if examining art objects that he soon will own himself. “They’re amazing.”
“Yes,” I say, “excellent. You must be very proud.”
“Yes,” as she does up the coat with a quick glance at Joey. “Now, what d’you want to know? About once a year Vikorn sends someone to me, but I’m really very out of touch now.”
“In front of Joey?”
“Of course not. Let’s go upstairs—I like to look at the animals.”
The bedroom is so large, it is like the bedding department of a great store. Everything is high schlock. For a moment my tortured eye rests with optimism on a modest set of bookshelves. I’m impressed that the books are all Buddhist; my heart sinks, however, when I see they are all the same book.
We three sit demurely on a window seat, which I think must be her favorite in the house, and look out onto the courtyard, where a monkey is riding a Great Dane, just like a jockey, even using his long arm to urge him forward. All is going well—even the dog seems to be enjoying the privilege of transporting a higher species from place to place, when another monkey, a chimp I think, somewhat older and shrewder looking, wants to hitch a ride.
“That’s Vikorn,” Mu explains.
Vikorn’s first thought is to swing from the tail, which has the effect of halting the dog. Now he jumps on his back, joining his colleague, while other monkeys gather round. Mu pronounces their names softly from time to time. The whole of District 8 is here, it seems.
One by one Mu names the dogs. They are all well-known drug dealers. “That’s how I remember people. I think which of my dogs they most resemble. Unless they’re cops, then they have to be monkeys. The monkeys are smarter, but they’re not very happy. There’s always a problem with them, but the dogs are pretty content unless the monkeys start giving them a hard time.”
“Is there a dog named Denise?”
She flicks me a glance. “Denise?” Pointing to a female bulldog: “Yes, there she is. Is she the one you want to know about?”
“If you don’t mind.”
She hesitates. “Is this authorized? Vikorn is supposed to keep me alive.”
“We took precautions, came in a cab; I’m sure we were not followed.”
Agitated, she gets up to fetch a Chanel handbag and a large hand mirror in silver frame. Without a hint of self-consciousness she opens the bag, takes out a silver box that might have been designed for snuff, drizzles a line of the white contents onto the mirror, scrapes it all together with a razor blade, leans over, presses one nostril with her left index while sniffing through the right, switches nostrils, and rises again to replace handbag and mirror on a nearby table, all in a seamless movement. Catching Lek’s eye: “For my nerves.”
Flicking me another glance, she sighs. “There are more farang women in the business than there used to be. Denise has been around quite a while now. At first she was a minor player, quite scatty. The British intelligence people, MI6, were spying on her in Ko Samui and Phuket. She never carried herself but used men as mules—a variation on the usual method. The men were always clapped-out white men, mostly Brits and Australians with no brains, beach bums with habits to feed. More than half of them got caught, so her reputation suffered, and everyone who knew anything about the business was afraid to carry for her. Somehow she made contact with the army and reinvented herself. But she had to convince the mules that she was properly connected in Thailand. One of Zinna’s men introduced her to me.”
“You arrange her credibility sessions?”
A smile. “You could put it like that. She became very careful about the men she used. They were still stupid but much more experienced. They weren’t the usual bums, they were part of the industry in their own countries, usually they had done jail time, but at least they knew the ropes. The last one, Chaz Buckle, knew a lot about Thailand and how the system works. He knew that the best way to leave the country with a suitcase full of dope was
to have one of the authorities on your side. Cops or army.”
“He was her lover?”
“Yes. They usually are. She uses sex like that—I think it’s the way she gets her kicks.”
“He has her name tattooed on his arm.”
She shrugs. “Tattoos—what do they mean? They’re like T-shirts. But maybe they had a real thing going. After all, she introduced him to Zinna himself.”
“Why would Zinna agree to that?”
Locking eyes with me. “Because he suddenly found himself with more than a hundred kilos of morphine that he needed to move in a hurry. I think you know where the M came from. It’s the same stuff Vikorn used to try to frame him in that court-martial. He wanted to get rid of it right away because he knew Vikorn would be on to him. He needed the carriers to take as much as twenty, thirty kilos at a time—you can’t do that with amateurs; you have to use people who know what they’re doing. And such people want security. In Thailand they want to know someone big is on their side to ensure a smooth passage out of the country. They tend to be wise to the scam that uses a small-time carrier as a sacrificial decoy while the big shipment goes undetected.”
“The meeting took place here?”
“Yes. I’m the neutral ground.”
“Zinna came with some of his men?”
“Of course. It was quite a show. The farang carrier Buckle was very impressed.” She glances out the window, then back to me.
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s what I needed to know.”