by John Burdett
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 soirées. 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, and 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!
On this day at least she is saved by neo-Puritanism. Normally Turner permits himself only half an hour for lunch, and this one has gone on for seventy minutes. When he can take his eyes off her, he gets into a cryptic conversation with Thanee that she cannot follow. Now Turner must get back to the office.
Thanee and Chanya exchange signs of relief undetectable to non-Thais, order champagne as soon as he’s gone (of course Mitch Turner never drinks at lunchtime—and very little at other times), and slowly seduce each other for the thousandth time. When they eventually arrive at Thanee’s apartment, she automatically goes to the bathroom to change into a bathrobe to begin his massage. When she finds him on the sofa, also in a bathrobe, he gives her a box finished in crimson velvet. Inside is a heavy gold chain with a Buddha pendant. When she takes it out, she sees the chain is very chunky and not especially beautiful. It is twenty-three-karat gold and alone worth maybe five thousand dollars. The Buddha pendant is in gold and jade and worth double that. The chain does not really suit her, it is too hefty and ostentatious, but she knows that is not the point. This is Thanee’s Thai way of taking care of her. The gold is her insurance in the United States—or anywhere else, for that matter. If she ever gets herself in seriou
s trouble, she can pawn or sell it. Thanee is saying goodbye, in other words. For the first time in her life, Chanya bursts into tears over a man. She recovers quickly, though; only a stubbornness around the jaw tells how hard she is fighting to control herself.
He comforts her and makes love to her in a way he has never done before. His tenderness says it all. He loves her too, more than she dared hope, but neither of them is so dumb as to suppose they can run off to a desert island somewhere. The rules of the Thai feudal pyramid are etched into both their hearts. He could not possibly take her to Beijing, that would be broadcasting their intimacy in a way that would damage his wife’s face, and in the East nothing is more important than face. This last party of pleasure is the best they can do, and they make the most of it. He forbids her to come to the airport when he leaves. She understands. The news of his assignment to Beijing has got out, and the press will be all over him. The airport will be no place for a mia noi.
We Thais do not set great store by the compulsive amplification of emotion through that distortion of the facial muscles so beloved in the West. When they say goodbye for the last time, it is in the parking lot of Thanee’s apartment building. His chauffeur, a Thai, will take her home. Both are dry-eyed and solemn at the last kiss. Both know they will never meet again.
At exactly the moment when Thanee’s plane takes off, Mitch Turner calls her in her apartment, where she is watching TV.
“Hello,” he says, his voice dry and unnaturally high. “I hope you don’t mind my calling. I guess you didn’t expect to hear from me, but, ah, I did hear over the grapevine that Thanee flew out just now, and I was afraid—ah—you might be feeling a bit down. Maybe you have a lot of other things to do, but if not, I wondered, could I buy you a drink or a bite to eat? I certainly would like that very much.”
“Get lost,” Chanya says, and hangs up. She goes back to watching The Simpsons, the quirky humor of which she has only recently begun to understand.
The farang is certainly stubborn. He does not actually stalk her, he knows better than that, but he carefully chooses moments to simply show up. Thanee told her Mitch Turner is CIA undercover, ostensibly another Washington staffer taking care of lobby groups and visiting dignitaries. She wonders if he might not be abusing his professional privileges, so uncanny are the occasions when they almost bump into each other. A Thai man in that state of towering lust (her word; she doubts Turner would have called it that) would certainly start to make threats sooner or later; Turner could easily check her passport and visa on the CIA database and threaten her with deportation if she didn’t give him what he wanted. She allows him points for doing no such thing. He behaves, in fact, like a gentleman in love. Quietly persistent, from sidewalks, carefully chosen tables in her favorite cafés, the odd telephone call: “Just checking you’re okay, no need to feel threatened. Want me to get lost?”
“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry I said that, it was a bad moment. Thanks for calling.”
“Sometime when you’re over him?”
“Maybe.”
She puts the telephone down with a wan smile. The romantic farang thinks she is moping over Thanee. Well, she is in a way, but there are many ways to mope. When you’ve been brought up by subsistence farmers, lovesickness can be something of a luxury, and Chanya has a problem. Thanee paid three months of her rent on her small apartment and has left her with ten thousand dollars on top of all the gold and expensive clothes. In addition, she still has the thirty thousand dollars she saved in Las Vegas. But when the rent and the money run out, she will be back to ground zero as far as making a fortune in Saharat Amerika is concerned. A week after Thanee leaves, she calls Wan to ask her if there are any places vacant at the sauna of the hotel where she works.
Wan fixes her up with an interview with the boss, a Hong Kong Chinese, who sees her potential instantly. Samson Yip makes sure she understands that this is the United States, not Asia, especially not Thailand: feds are everywhere. They are especially interested in Asian women who work in massage and sauna businesses. Some of the men who come for massages are FBI hoping to sting the joint. The slightest hint of soliciting for work on her part would be a disaster not only for her but for him, Samson Yip, too. Yip is short and fat and does not share her reluctance to sport huge quantities of gold. His own necklace is even chunkier than hers, and a lot uglier. As a Thai, she is familiar with the Chinese mind. He is ruthless and greedy but straight. He will not try to cheat her. In return, she better not try to cheat him if she wants to stay in America. Understood? Good, so this is how it is.
More than half the men who come for massages or to use the sauna baths are foreigners. Some are sophisticated Europeans, especially French and Italian, with whom a certain understanding is possible. Many are Asians, especially Japanese and Chinese, who generally know how to play the game. Samson Yip tells her she can use a certain very limited amount of discretion in such cases. Americans, on the other hand, are strictly off limits unless he personally gives her the go-ahead.
After a week he sees he’s been wasting his breath. Chanya is far too smart to make a false move. Yip tells her never to take a customer back to her apartment. He supplies a room in the hotel. The room changes from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, so she will not draw too much attention. Of course, certain employees in the hotel know what is going on. Keeping them quiet is part of his overhead.
Within two weeks he has doubled her hourly rate. Within a month she is his star worker. It isn’t merely her good looks and physical charms; those three months with Thanee have polished her natural talents. Diplomats especially appreciate a certain subtlety in her approach, a new charm to her conversation. All the men like the way she makes them feel special. It is almost like not being with hired flesh, more like having found the woman of your dreams waiting for you in a sauna bath.
So when Mitch Turner shows up for a full-body massage, she gets the shock of her life. She’s been so careful, tried to make sure he is not following her when she comes and goes from the hotel. She has only a very limited understanding of the difference between FBI and CIA. She hasn’t heard from him or seen him for more than three weeks, so she assumed his passion was spent and his mind flipped on to some other obsession in the feckless way of American men. But here he is, with a white towel wrapped around his loins, lying on the massage couch, waiting for her.
She makes no sign of recognizing him, simply treats him like any other customer, except that she is especially careful not to do anything that might be misconstrued. Her massage technique has improved somewhat, although to tell the truth she has never exactly been of professional standards. In his case she carefully leaves out upper thighs and buttocks. She has to admit he owns a superb musculature, one that is obviously the product of many hours pumping iron. Neither of them says anything personal or gives any sign they know each other, until half an hour into the massage, when she tells him to turn onto his back and their eyes lock. She turns her face away to speak to the wall.
“Why are you here?”
“Because I’m obsessed with you.”
“I don’t want you to come here again.”
“How can I stop myself?”
“I’ll leave, go to another city.”
“I’ll find you.”
“I’ll go back to Thailand.”
“I’ll find you.”
“I’ll cut your dick off while you’re sleeping.”
“That’s the most Thai thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
She hadn’t considered he might be familiar with Southeast Asia.
When she’s finished with his massage and he’s left, Samson Yip calls for her to go see him in his office. He asks her about her last client. She tells him truthfully all she knows. Yip looks grim, in a state of shock almost.
“He knew everything. Every damned thing. Even the numbers of the rooms we use. He must be FBI or CIA. He’ll close me down if you don’t do what he wants. It’s up to you—you can run away, or you can see him. He c
laims he only wants to get to know you better, have dinner a few times, no sex, just give him a chance. He’s weird enough to actually mean what he says. What will you do?”
“Tell him I’ll have dinner with him once. That’s all. No sex. If he wants more, I’ll run away—or he can have me deported if he wants. Up to him.”
Yip nods, his big oval face of many chins concentrated in puzzlement. “Just tell me one thing. He seems like a good, clean-living American with a strong career—the kind of man women like you come to this country to marry. Why do you keep rejecting him?”
Chanya looks into Yip’s face and sees only money, greed, stupidity. “Because I’m a whore.”
Yip nods again. He isn’t so stupid after all. He is just testing to see how smart she is. “You’re right. An American like him could never forget or forgive. Once the first months of passion were over, he would torture you with it for the rest of your life.”