Bangkok Tattoo

by John Burdett

  Sure enough, the seats that surround the stage support a fair proportion of female backsides, most of which are Japanese, although quite a few are Thai working women on girls’ nights out. The rest of the customers are gay, white, and male. The men on the stage are all naked and hand-picked either for their youth and beauty; for their testosteronic postures, the dimensions of their cocks; or for the quality of their decorations.

  It happens that I’m just in time for the last act. The house lights dim, “Nights in White Satin” plays over the sound system, and a naked figure in black executioner’s mask strides onto the stage; everyone, especially the Japanese women, gasps at the quality of the tats, which shine brilliantly under the spotlight. A naked boy and girl arrive to kneel and work his member. Soon, as the haunting sound track reaches its crescendo, the Battle of Midway arises magically from out of flaccidity. I have no idea if he has seen me or not, but even if he has, we both know it will make no difference.

  I leave the club within ten minutes of entering. Back on Pat Pong the street is now so crammed with refugees from the curfew, it is hard to walk. I pause in the entrance to one of the bars to pull out my cell phone and press an autodial number. “If I give you my heart, will you give me yours?” I ask.

  “Not if you’re going to die.”

  “We have to stop him. You do know that.”

  A long pause. “This isn’t easy. What do you want to do?”

  “Live with you. Sleep with you.”

  Doubtfully: “Will that do it?”

  My heart in my mouth: “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

  A groan, then she closes the phone.

  39

  I believe it is intrinsic to your cockeyed morality, farang, that when a man and woman engaged in law enforcement are forced to pretend, for strategic reasons (say, a decoy-stakeout situation), to be lovers, they must be scrupulous in preventing their false embraces from developing into full-blown copulation—correct?

  Well, fuck that. Chanya and I, in our tiny love nest on Soi 39, which is the best I can afford in this expensive part of town, go at it like rabbits. Not only is she beautiful, she is also generous. Who am I not to love her? Her extraordinary beauty might not be of her making, but that tactile friendliness, that gentle concern that expresses itself in soft touches, sweet caresses, premeditated kindness—that is all from her soul, and I would have needed to be stone. Nevertheless, it is part of the job to parade our passion up and down the soi, especially in the evening when the Japanese clubs are open and the mamasans stand on duty outside, checking the street. During the day our duties are more practical.

  It is a traditional little apartment, which is to say ablutions are performed courtesy of a great tub of water out in the yard. There is a double gas cooking ring also in the backyard—oh yes, and a single rickety cupboard. There is no bed, so I bought a couple of futons that we keep side by side. I love her best in the mornings when, still sleepy, she rolls over onto her side to admit me from behind. Or do I love her best when she is horny late at night? Or is it when she’s washing out in the yard, using her sarong to conceal her body from the neighbors? Don’t ask me. Love is a form of insanity that pervades every fiber. It is also much increased by the knowledge that one stands a good chance of dying within the week. We keep our mobiles charged, and I check the Net every day at the local Internet café. Day after day, night after night, there is still no word, no attack. Perhaps we are growing complacent. When I remember I’m a cop, I try to elicit relevant information. Generally, she’s happy to oblige but with heavy editing. Her story of the second half of her relationship with Mitch Turner is like the story of Othello without a single mention of Iago.

  Chanya had returned to Thailand when the world was mesmerized by two office towers collapsing over and over on its television screens. She owned over one hundred thousand dollars and had no intention of selling her body ever again. She was twenty-nine and a little old for the Game in any event. She built a new house for her parents, set them up with twenty buffalo, which they used for breeding—a definite improvement on the hard labor of rice growing—sent her two young brothers to the best schools money could buy in Thailand, and already had proudly put her brilliant younger sister through a biology course at Chulalongkorn University. When all bills were paid, she did not have very much left, but then she didn’t need much. Sometime toward the end of her Washington sojourn, beset by homesickness and self-doubt, she had determined to redress the karmic imbalance caused by her unseemly trade by dedicating her life to the Buddha. She was to be a maichee—a Buddhist nun. She was the queen of her village, the idol of her parents, almost a goddess figure to anyone who knew anything about rural Thailand.

  Chanya did her best to make up for the lost years by spending as much time as possible with her parents, especially her father, a devout Buddhist with whom she had always been close. “To want nothing is ecstasy,” he told Chanya. She knew that for him the farang drugs that would give him another decade on earth were a mixed blessing; they brought more obligation than joy. He really did not understand the purpose of extending his life artificially; he took the drugs out of politeness, to make her happy. She bought a Honda motorbike and took him to the wat most mornings for chanting, filled with envy for his innocence and vowing somehow to retrieve her own.

  When she did not go to the wat, she woke before dawn to watch her cousin, whom she had known almost since birth. Jiap was the same age as Chanya and no less beautiful, but she had never been tempted by money or ambition. She lived in the timeless zone of subsistence agriculture; Chanya watched the twenty-nine-year-old mother of three take the buffalo over the paddy fields in the dawn mist singing softly to the animals in the Isaan dialect, exactly as she had when they both were children and with the same weightless joy. The distance was no longer geographic; Chanya was separated from Jiap not by time or miles but by an invisible glass screen. In America, Chanya had generally felt light and free in comparison to the people she met; here she felt heavy, decadent, lost.

  Gloom, though, could not squat long on her shoulders, and during the rest of the day quite different forces seemed to invade her mind. In particular there was the little problem that no one in the compound had dared mention, so it had taken a delegation from a neighboring compound to come and explain it to her one afternoon. Well, not a problem exactly, something really rather positive. The delegates, clearly, were adherents to the more worldly side of the Thai mind.

  Quietly and with an infuriating reluctance to come to the point, they explained to Chanya just how brilliant her sister really was. Consistently top of her class every time, and with that extra little thing that was more than just brilliance, it was Buddha-inspiration definitely. Sure, with a little help here and there, a little sponsorship, she could get through Thai medical school, no problem. But let’s face it . . .

  Tired of watching them beat around the bush, Chanya finished the sentence: Thai medical school? The country’s best doctors all spoke English fluently because they had been educated in the United States or the United Kingdom. It would take money, a quite exorbitant amount, but look what it would do for the country, to have a Thai woman from a dirt-poor background who understood the medical needs of the poor, boasting the very best medical education in the world. It would help the status of women, too.

  Chanya understood very well what all the more worldly villagers were thinking, for she still thought that way herself from time to time: she had a couple more good years in her when she could make the kind of money most Thais could only dream of. After that there really were not going to be any more opportunities. Not for an uneducated girl from Surin—especially not for an ex-whore.

  Chanya did her sums. She didn’t want to leave Thailand again, but she reckoned that with what she had saved and maybe another year or so on the Game in Bangkok, she would have enough. What difference would one more year make in the scheme of things, especially if she made merit by turning her sister into a first-class doctor? She con
vinced herself the Buddha would approve and believed she could prove it mathematically. She used a calculator, and the arithmetic went roughly as follows: an average of three men per week for ten years equals 1,560, at a rate of two screws per john (one at night, one the next morning to put him in tipping mood) equals 3,120 units of negative karma. To achieve neutral karma her sister would have to effect an equal number of medium-to-heavy healings, which Chanya guessed would easily be achieved in a year or so. In other words, in return for her sponsoring her sister, the Buddha would liberate her from the karmic consequences of her trade within about a year of her sister’s qualifying.

  She was going to take her time, though. America had exhausted her more than she’d realized. She wanted to relax, Thai-style.

  She’d left America in such a rush, thanks to Mitch’s warning, that he had not thought to ask for her home address. Nor did he have her telephone number, because her American mobile did not work outside the United States. Had she wished, she could have closed the door on Mitch forever. Even with his access to CIA resources, it was unlikely he would have found her in Thailand. And that was exactly what she intended: to break off with him and his frightening (and delicious) madness forever.

  There is a change of pace, though, in shifting from West to East that can be disorienting. The afternoons in her village were long and hot, and it never occurred to anyone to do anything except sleep, play hi-lo, and drink moonshine. (It was not for nothing they called it Sleeping Elephant Hamlet.) Even her cousin Jiap liked to gamble for pennies and drink cold beer. In her drive to accumulate wealth, Chanya had acquired just a little of the religion of purposefulness (every night you make a short list—the sober Mitch used to preach—of all the things you need to do tomorrow. Review it at the end of the day. How much further have you gotten in achieving your goal?), which immediately translates into restlessness when moved to another country. If only she had waited a couple of months, the restlessness would have faded quickly, and she would have readjusted to the primal rhythms of her beloved home. But the village itself, no more than ten minutes away by motorbike, did boast an Internet café.

  It was a shop house of the Chinese type owned by an old woman who, in addition to horoscopes, love potions, and astrologically based business advice, took in washing to make ends meet, and somehow along the way she had acquired a few desktop computers linked to the Net. Chanya knew that on any number of engines (Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN), it was possible to open an account free of charge. No way Mitch could ascertain her whereabouts from those.

  She didn’t admit it to herself at the time, but in retrospect she realized that Mitch, with all his problems, was the nearest thing to a real lover she had ever had. (Thanee was wonderful, of course, but she was mia noi with him, not goddess.) She didn’t know how much she loved Mitch Turner, but that passion of his, she now saw, was immensely addictive. She did feel as if something vital had been brutally cut off from her life. There was a constant nagging at her heart—a new and quite bizarre sensation in her case.

  Her first message to his Internet address at work was a masterpiece of coy:

  Hi, how are you?

  He replied within minutes on a private account:

  Chanya? Oh my God, where have you been? Where have you been? I’ve been going totally insane! I’ve prayed every day since you left, I go to church every morning and evening now, I sit in the back of the pews, and when I’m not praying I’m crying. Chanya, I just can’t make it without you. I know I’m fucked up, honey, I’ve got religion the wrong way, I’m totally out of touch with everything, I’m a hypocrite in my work, the whole fucking system here is a mess, I know all that, but for me the only way out is you. These last weeks I’ve known just one thing: only you can save me. I’ve just got to be with you. I’ll do anything you want. You can do anything you want. You can go on whoring if that’s what you need to do. We’ll live in Thailand. Where are you? Look, I know I can get a posting over there somewhere. This whole Trade Center thing has got the Company totally wrong-footed. There are guys driving desks who will follow any hint, especially from someone who knows Asia. All I have to do is say I’m willing to hang out on the Thai border somewhere where there are Muslims, gather intelligence, check which way the beards are going . . . I can be there in maybe a month at most, probably sooner. Everyone wants to gain 9/11 points, sending someone like me to a foreign posting in Muslimland looks good on their books. Give me a telephone number, sweetheart. Please.

  Couldn’t we just chat on the Net?

  You have to give me your number. I talked to my boss yesterday, told him I was ready to go over there, and he practically went down on his knees to thank me. Now in return you’ve got to send me at least your telephone number. Please, Chanya, I’m dying over here. PS: I watched The Simpsons for you last night. Homer became the official mascot for the Springfield Isotopes baseball team—it was a good episode.

  Just as at the very beginning of their relationship, she found herself drawn in by some mysterious force. Perhaps that legendary energy that Americans were supposed to have? Or maybe just plain old female narcissism—you couldn’t help but feel flattered when a man wanted you so bad he was prepared to give up Washington and live in a third-world dump just to be in the same country. She sent him her Thai mobile number. After that it was ring, ring, ring. To judge by the timing of the calls, he was a true insomniac and took the precaution of having a glass of wine before he called her, so she was protected from that heavy, preachy, serious side. Drunk, even over the phone, he cracked her up. All of a sudden those long, hot, sleepy, boring afternoons were punctuated by her straight-from-the-gut laughter.

  A few weeks later he was calling her from a town she’d vaguely heard of, right at the other end of Thailand, on the Malaysian border, a place called Songai Kolok. She’d never been there herself but knew it to be a brothel town catering to Muslim men who came over in droves from puritanical Malaysia. In the flesh industry the women tended to be looked down on by the Bangkok elite.

  She closed her mobile after that first call from Songai Kolok in a strange state of mind. So far it had been one long telephonic giggle, a hilarious injection of American wit, passion, energy, and optimism with not a single flash of possessiveness, intrusiveness, hypocrisy, preaching, or intolerance. She was getting the United States strictly as advertised, but she doubted he would be able to keep it up face to face. Despite his pleas she took more than a month to make that first visit down south. She steadily refused to give him her address in Thailand. He still did not know her family name.

  He met her at the bus station in Songai Kolok, and she saw immediately something was wrong. It was early morning (she traveled by night), and he had not had a drink. That brooding, boiling, resentful, fragmented side was working his jaw as he took her bag, but there was more than that. He had lost weight and looked ill. Songai Kolok was not doing him any good at all. From his conversation in the cab on the way back to his apartment, he let slip how much he hated it. Quite simply, he was suffering from severe culture shock. The only other Asian country he’d visited (the only country he’d visited outside of the United States, period) was Japan, which had been a kind of reverse culture shock: in the minutiae of daily life the Japs were streets ahead of the United States, they had managed that almost-impossible thing of combining an ancient culture with hypermodern high-tech gizmos. In Japan everything was better than in America, the food, the hygiene, the nightlife, the women, the tattoos—especially the tattoos. By contrast Songai Kolok was, well, a third-world toilet.

  He pointed out the window of his apartment at the police station with the hundreds of whore shacks leaning against the perimeter wall. “See that? I watch them every night.” Staring aggressively into her face: “I watch them every night.”

  So what? Perhaps he was not sure himself, but it chilled her heart when he showed her his little telescope. “They’re always grinning and smiling. It’s so . . . hell, I don’t know.”

  “What is it, Mitch? What’s t
he problem?”

  A shake of the head. “How can they do it? Why aren’t they in hell? How can they just do it, like they’re taking a shower or something, and afterward it’s all over, like nothing happened at all? Like they’re good friends doing each other a favor, money for her, blow job and fuck for him? It’s like, like . . . I don’t know.”

  On her way from Surin she had changed buses at Bangkok, where she slipped into a downtown supermarket especially for him. She took out a bottle of Californian red, one of his favorites. He scowled at it but gave her a corkscrew to open it. She found a couple of glasses in his kitchen, poured him a very generous slug, and watched him drink. She waited to see if the magic still worked. At first it seemed not to, he continued to curse the filthy animalistic young people who congregated around the shacks every night, but little by little his mood altered. A light—slightly insane but preferable to the depression—came into his eyes. All of a sudden he was grinning.

  Kneeling in front of her where she sat on his sofa: “Goddamned hypocrite, aren’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m getting on my high horse, and what do I really want right now more than anything in the world?”

  “To screw the ass of a Thai whore.”

  A shocked look, then laughter. “My god, Chanya, what is wrong with me? What is it that I just can’t deal with?”

  She did not say: reality. To tell the truth, she was feeling pretty horny herself. It had been nearly five months since she’d had sex with anyone, and she’d been remembering his extraordinary stamina, when drunk. She allowed him to undress her.

  After his usual command performance, he burst into sobs. “I’m so fucked up, honey. I’m sorry. Maybe this is a mistake. I don’t want to see myself torture you all over again. Maybe I’m just a totally impossible, fucked-up freak?”