by John Burdett
"Obsessed with the disease. Obsessed with not getting it, but no way was he going to change his profession, even if he could. Not a death wish, maybe a death obsession."
"In the Buddhist sense?"
"Perhaps. He told me he meditated on death. It was the only reality. I got the feeling he was on the edge, you know? How many of your friends can you watch die when you're eighteen years old?"
"When did he stop coming to see you?"
A quick glance at me, then away. "I'd have to check. I don't think I've seen him for eight or nine years. Wait, I'll check. It was before I got this damned computer, so I'll have to look in the files."
"It might not be that important. You never saw him with a black American? A very big man, a marine?"
"No. Never."
"He never told you he was changing sex?"
Raised eyebrows. "That's what he did?"
"Surprised?"
A frown. "Yes, surprised."
"Why? It's not unusual, is it?"
"No, not unusual, not around here. But you get a feeling for these creatures, the men as well as the women. They come in all shapes and sizes. Canny businesspeople some of them, on the game until they've saved enough capital to open a bar or a hairdresser's. Others are the same inadequates you see on the streets all over the world, with not only their bodies for sale but their personalities as well-slaves. They're the ones who go for the operation, generally. With no identity to speak of they have nothing to lose. He never struck me as like that. Oh, he was as gay as a lark, but he had a strong mind. A good head on his shoulders. He knew who he was."
"Not a natural for the operation?"
"Look, I'm not a shrink, what do I know? I don't even practice medicine anymore, I find it too stressful, so I only do blood tests."
"There were pictures of boys dying of AIDS on the wall of his apartment. Some of them looked already dead."
"That sounds like him."
"I think he sat in his hovel staring at them for hours on end."
"Of course he did."
Out on Silom I pass a bookstore with a new biography of Pol Pot. There are aberrations on the Buddhist Path, just like any other. Pol Pot was a monk before he decided to kill a million of his own people. Sometimes the reality of death becomes overwhelming-and compelling.
At River City I pause before taking the escalator to Warren's shop. I'm nervous, without knowing why. Well, I guess I do know why. Fatima killed Bradley-and Pichai. I'm supposed to kill her, aren't I? How to kill that boy who sat in a hovel exactly the same size as mine, crying for his dead friends, just like me, wondering what the hell it's all about-just like me? When I steel my nerves to take the elevator, she's not there. A different assistant, a very well-groomed young man who may or may not be gay, gives me a disapproving stare as I walk in. I make my excuses and leave quickly, relieved I don't have to kill anyone today. Back in my hovel I am Ussiri again, back in his hovel, meditating on death. I bet he'd gone very deep into himself by the time he met Bradley.
Now the mind, in its inexplicable wandering, strikes off in a more practical direction. Monday, I use my mobile to call a clerk in the Lands Department who is amenable to persuasion. I promise him a thousand baht if he will make a few simple checks on his computer. He calls me back in half an hour with a very different address.
If you want to catch a whore at home, even a retired one, go in the morning. Old habits die hard. After more than a decade in retirement Nong, for example, never rises before eleven.
By the mid-nineties Thailand had established itself as a bona fide Asian tiger, complete with expensive roar and land prices shooting through the roof. Families who had had useless lumps of land on their hands for generations found themselves courted by estate agents and developers and became millionaires overnight. Bangkok was a hub, and there's nothing better than that for a city to be, is there? The magic words "developing economy" brought in hundreds of thousands of foreigners, all of whom needed places to live of international quality. Apartment buildings rose from steamy fields like mushrooms. Some of the best of them are to be found off Sukhumvit between Soi 33 and Soi 39, where the apartments rejoice in that attention to detail for which our Japanese cousins are justly famous. Every second restaurant and supermarket around here is Japanese, you can buy sushi, tapanyaki, tofu, harami, tempura, kushikatsu, otumani any time of the day or night. At the end of Soi 39, near Petchaburi Road, the three gigantic towers of the Supalai complex rise to kiss the muggy sky. The guard at the desk in the lobby wants to call up to the occupant of the four-thousand-square-foot penthouse, and can be dissuaded only with five hundred baht and a promise of incarceration if he gives me any more trouble.
Now I am riding the elevator to the thirtieth floor, wondering if today is the day I kill her. On the other hand, I have taken the professional precaution of bringing a small Dictaphone.
It is 10:35 a.m. and, standing outside the impressive double oak doors guarded by Chinese gods in green, red and white porcelain, I can hear the television when I press the bell. Sudden silence as the TV is switched off. Only the neurotically sensitive hearing of a cop like me could discern the soft padding of bare feet across the floor. Now I am being observed through the spyhole. Someone is giving serious thought to what to do next.
It takes five minutes, then the dull thud of a heavy bolt, a couple of clicks for the other locks, and I am face to face with an icon.
Even surprised at home at this ungodly hour, she is nothing less than magnificent. A green and red silk kimono tied up negligently at the waist, her thick black hair hanging down over her shoulders, pearls in her ears, rings on her fingers, designer flesh, modest smile-"Sawadee ka."
"Good morning, Fatima. Nice apartment."
"Please come in."
It is a duplex. A polished teak staircase leads to the bedrooms upstairs whilst the eye is drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows with a magnificent view of the city.
43
Despite her impeccable postures, I have a sense that the shell has cracked. Smiles, frowns, hand gestures-fragments of personality-come and go, as if dredged up from memory, whilst something quite different, beyond the human, seems to control her. From time to time I think she is glaring at me, until I realize there is a total blackness behind the eyes when the postures fail.
"We met on a train to Chiang Mai. I probably don't have to tell you why I was going to Chiang Mai? I was twenty-seven and sick to death of the bar scene in Bangkok. The boys had mostly stopped dying of AIDS by then, but there was no romance left. The clients were mostly just pigs, white pigs. Gay white men on the rampage in Southeast Asia are not always the considerate type. I took the train up to Chiang Mai because the scene up there was supposed to be different. Everyone was so stoned on opium and heroin, so they said, you didn't really have to work at all. That's what I was, a bum boy, a creature without self-respect, a poor, skinny, ladylike thing with a dick, one of the world's lost, just dirt in the road. How could you be anything else, being half black and brought up here? Thais are the most racist people on earth, they despise Negroes. They even look down on pure-blooded Thais if they have dark skin. And look-I'm pretty brown.
"Being that kind of gay, I'd pampered myself and spent everything I had on a first-class ticket in a sleeper that was supposed to be all my own. I'm enjoying a cigarette and contemplating suicide for the thousandth time that year when the door opens and there he was, a magnificent black giant who I would never have taken for a soldier by the way he dressed and moved, except for one of those big round green bags soldiers carry. He looked about forty, which has always been my favorite age in a man, and of course, being black, how could I not make that connection to the father I've never met? Super fit. I thought: What a wonderful country America must be, that someone so black can grow up brimming with self-respect, nonchalant, with a sense of belonging, even amongst all those white people. Of course I gave him my most seductive smile, not expecting any result. He smiled back, though, said sorry for disturbing me, he'd booked the com
partment next door. I said: 'That's okay, love, anytime.' Just like a whore. I thought that would be it, because he looked so straight, you know? Usually when you talk like that to a straight guy, it turns him off, even disgusts him. He gave me this big smile, though, and asked if he could sit down for a moment. My little heart starts on the big thump-thump-thump."
An inhalation. "I won't bore you with the gory details of Chiang Mai. God knows why a man like him was going there at all, except that it's on the tourist circuit. God knows why he's with me. He never admitted that I was his first, you know, but I can tell this is not really a gay. Let's be honest about this, there are all different shades, and men who love sex usually experiment at some stage in their lives. I think he was like that. I think he'd had women all his life and was at that stage of wondering if it's worth it, you know? Maybe that special something missing could be supplied by a man? I thought, Fair enough, I'm having the time of my life staying in a good hotel with the man of my dreams, when it ends I'll have nothing but wonderful memories, something to carry me forward into the next disaster. I can see he's not comfortable with me socially. To tell the truth, we never leave the room together. He would go out for a meal or a drink, I would go out separately. Socially, he's very very uptight. He's a marine, after all. He's going through quite a thing, but to my surprise he didn't dump me after the first night.
"Then, after five days, he gives me my marching orders. I say: 'Of course, darling, it's been wonderful for me, just wonderful, you're the best thing that ever happened to me. And by the way, can you help me out with ten thousand baht, I'm a little short of the readies?' We made that sordid little trip to the bank machine together, he hands me the cash in a dark alley and we walk off into our separate futures-or so I thought.
"Two days later, he came looking for me. He'd searched every gay bar in the town, and found me in the end, drowning my sorrows. That's when I knew something totally appalling was happening to this beautiful man. This giant stood there with tears in his eyes, looking at me across the floor. Of course, I would have done anything for him. Anything at all. If he'd said, Take this knife and cut your throat, I would have done it. You might say that it was a first for me too: love."
"But he never got used to you being a man?"
"No. Well, put it the other way: he never got used to him being queer. He held himself together for the first few weeks, but I could see it coming. I wondered what he was going to do with my poor body when he really started to break apart. Someone like me sees it all the time, it's a professional hazard: the middle-aged man who cannot admit what he is turning into, what he's doing. I wondered if he would have a fit and kill me with those magnificent muscles of his, not that I cared. It was as good a way to go as any. What for him was something squalid and nasty was the high point of my life. He was good to me, when he remembered what a generous-spirited American he was. And I simply adored him. He liked to smoke ganja and I would get some for him. Then the drinking started. I don't think he drank much before he met me, but soon he could get through a bottle of Mekong in an hour. It's like the song says: hate myself for loving you." A sigh. "I think he really did love me, at the beginning. I think I was a kind of liberation, in a way. After all, he'd been chasing pussy all his life and not gotten anything out of it. At least I understood him. I had testosterone of my own in those days, I knew how a man thinks. I've sort of lost that now. He never did beat me, though. Not once. Even his sex wasn't particularly-you know-over the top. He dominated, of course, but it was more like an emperor expecting to be worshiped than a sadist demanding obedience. I hoped that things would work out. After all, he kept talking about retirement, and he wanted to retire in Bangkok, so I thought, Why not come out? What have you got to lose? Spend the rest of your life in love and freedom. With me. I would have looked after him. My god, would I have looked after him. But of course, it never works out that way, does it? There's always something drags us down, just when we think we're being saved."
"Was he into jade at that time?"
"Oh the jade, the jade. Yes, he was into it. I think one of his retirement dreams had been to go into the gems trade. I think when he was in Yemen and all those other dreadful places, he fantasized about coming to Thailand and exporting gems and jade to the States. Perhaps making his own designs. My god, that's almost like me fantasizing about becoming a marine. I'm not an expert, but in my little opinion you don't get near the gems trade out here unless you're Chinese, or very well connected to the Chinese. I wasn't going to tell him that, of course. I helped him, with a sense of foreboding I must say."
"You helped him?"
"He needed an interpreter. He was talking to all sorts of people, including tribespeople from up in the hills and including my own people, the Karen. So I was very useful. I translated into Thai and into Karen and back again into English. I had this bar-boy English at that time, nothing like as good as I speak it now. I have him to thank for that.
"We even got as far as buying a couple of lumps of jade and having them worked into little trinkets by some craftsmen in Chinatown. I had to tell him in the end they were laughing at us. The jade he'd bought was third rate, and his designs were sort of-well, not exactly world class. That penis on the web page was the best thing he did. He modeled it after his own, of course. Even I started wondering where his head was, that he thought starting a web page with a whacking great cock on it was going to change his life. Funnily enough, I think that web page was his way of coming out, his way of finally telling the world what he was: a beautiful, perfectly formed cock.
"Then things started to fall apart. He'd borrowed quite a lot of money to buy the jade and have it worked. I thought he would have borrowed from a bank or something, it didn't occur to me until it was too late that he'd borrowed from Chiu Chow loan sharks. I mean, how dumb can you get? Did he think he'd get special protection because he was a marine? Did he think the President of the United States would send an aircraft carrier if he got into trouble with the sharks? He had that very naIve streak, you see. A blind spot, I suppose you would call it. Perhaps it was from being in the Marines all those years, there were things in front of his eyes on the street he just did not see. That's when his drinking and his ganja smoking started to get out of hand. He had to get a medical certificate a couple of times because he wasn't fit for work. He was terrified of random drug tests. That's also when he started into me, telling me I'd destroyed his life, calling me all the names a bum-boy gets called when his man starts to freak. Even then, I have to tell you he never hit me. I don't think that he was a violent man by nature. Not until someone turned him violent. But I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was my luck was as bad as ever. Even though it wasn't my fault, I'd sort of brought bad luck to this man I loved. I made him pray with me. I was Christian, he was brought up a Christian-at first he didn't understand that someone like me can be a believer. So we prayed and somehow I think that might have made things go from bad to worse."
"How so?"
"Because he really got into the praying, and bought a Bible and started preaching to me about salvation. He would go on for hours, usually after he'd had a bottle of Mekong, and I used to sit at his feet and murmur adoring approval. It was like those American preachers you see on the TV sometimes, all emotion and intensity and certainty about God's grace. We Karen are religious groupies, we love everyone's God, we've had more missionaries over the years than you can count: all kinds of Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. We take them all in, believe every word and never bother about the contradictions. So I was a perfect audience for him. We would reach this peak a few times a week, after ganja and whisky, when we were certain that the doors of heaven were about to open and we would walk right in. You have to bear in mind that he was under a lot of pressure. The loan sharks were closing in. They didn't want to kill him, of course, but they were charging twenty percent a month and at that rate things get on top of you very quickly. He would get these three-in-the-morning telephone calls and the guy's English would b
e so bad I'd have to take the phone and have him make his threats in Thai so I could translate. It was the usual stuff, you know, what they would do to his body, his face-especially his face. They're not stupid, those people, they know a person's weakness."
"And at this time, you were still…"
"Still a man? Oh yes. My change came later. I would say that we decided I would start to take the estrogen together, it was a family decision which popped up quite casually. We were in bed one night, drunk, and he was caressing me and I asked him if he would like me to have tits. I don't think it had occurred to him before. He sort of jumped a bit. Maybe he saw it as a solution to at least one of his problems. If he turned me into a woman he could claim not to be queer, couldn't he? But that wasn't what I'd had in mind. I was just suggesting the estrogen as a sort of-you know?"
"Sexual adjunct?"
"Exactly. So I got hold of some local stuff and, lo and behold, the tits start to grow. The effect on him was weird. I mean, he started obsessing about making changes to my body. I said, 'Sweetheart, I'm starting to feel like a lump of jade that's being worked on.' He laughed, but it was true. And the funny thing was that at that time, everything seemed to change for the better. He told me he'd been contacted by someone very very big in the gems trade in America and it looked like a little real business would be coming his way. Nothing big to start with, but at least there was light. And this jeweler-he never told me his name in the early days-was going to pay off Bill's debts. Boy, I mean, it was just like the clouds lifted all at once, all thanks to this big shot from America, this jeweler, who I never met until much later, but who would come to Krung Thep once a month on business and he and Bill would go somewhere-to this guy's hotel I guess-to talk business all night."
"All night?"
"That's right. I had my suspicions. I mean, it's pretty standard that someone comes from the West or Japan on a business trip and expects to be entertained in the Bangkok tradition when the talking's over. I didn't really mind. I even thought it might be healthy in a way. I mean, from what he said this jeweler seemed to like women and I thought if Bill is doing a little pussy-chasing just for form, it's probably what he needs. He was still pretty freaked out about having a serious affair with a man. Maybe he needed the balance. Anyway, the jeweler had become our number one man and anything he wanted he had to have. At the same time, all kinds of stuff started appearing in our house. Silverware, ceramics, local craft products, things which I thought were priceless in my ignorance of those days, but which turned out to be just leftover junk from the jeweler's warehouse."