by John Burdett
Complications come naturally to us, we are never without them, like our traffic jams. Like Vikorn. If only one could package him for export.
46
Last night the FBI invited me to supper at the Italian riverside restaurant at the Oriental hotel. With great compassion she told me not to dress up. She wore a generic pair of white linen shorts, open-neck white short-sleeved shirt, open sandals: simplicity itself, I gratefully observed. I ordered antipasto misto and calf's liver to follow. She copied me with the antipasto and ordered a baked lasagna for herself. When the waiter came with the wine list she gave it to me, because I had told her about Truffaut and his meticulous education of my palate. I ordered a simple Barolo and made a great fuss of holding the glass to my nose, sipping decorously, then chasing the wine round my mouth with my tongue, while the wine waiter-a Thai-stared at me, before I gave Kimberley a big wink and knocked the wine back with a vulgar gulp. It was only a Barolo after all. We both realized that this was the first time I had made her guffaw, a dangerous moment in the ritual of seduction. I am ashamed to admit I did not turn off the charm as resolutely as I ought to have done, and she muttered darkly about my being too damn cute for words. I was asking for trouble.
"Sonchai, why do you hate me?"
"I don't."
"But you pretend not to find me attractive? A stupid woman would decide you were gay-lots of women protect their egos that way-but I'm not stupid. You're not gay, sometimes you're attracted, at least on a physical level, but you veer away. Time after time. Like a wild animal that sees a trap. I'm curious."
I cast my eye over the other patrons. Three middle-aged Western couples who were probably staying at the hotel, and at least four tables consisting of a young Western man and a Thai girl. What a good life we must offer to any young farang with a little money. An evening spent trawling the bars will secure you that beautiful young goddess of your dreams for as long as you care to rent her, and you may play out a romantic evening or two with her in an expensive restaurant under the stars with the certainty of bedding her afterwards. And all without petulance or temperament, or obligations which stretch into the future. Tip her well and she will even come to say goodbye to you at the airport. Love a la carte must surely be an improvement on the fixed menu?
"I don't want to feel like an ice cream."
"Huh?"
"Look at them." I wave a hand at the other tables. "Those girls don't speak English as well as I do. They don't surf the Net. They've probably never been abroad. They don't realize they're a new flavor from Haagen-Dazs. Anyway, they're professionals."
Jones swallows hard. I feel sorry that I've brought her close to tears. She's tough, though. "That's how you see me? Another Western sleazebag, just like the farang men?"
I don't say anything for a beat or two. Then: "No one escapes their own culture. It's hardwired in us, from birth onward. A consumer society is a consumer society. It may start with washing machines and air-conditioning, but sooner or later we consume each other. It's happening to us too. But you see, the Buddha taught freedom from appetite."
"Him again." A sigh. Now she is determined not to let me off the hook by changing the subject, or even talking at all. I start to grin. "What are you laughing at?"
"The beauty of the Buddha. Look how perfectly he described cause and effect. Your ego is injured, so you won't talk to me. Perhaps I will retaliate by not talking to you. Then we become enemies. If we had guns perhaps we would shoot each other, over and over again, in lifetime after lifetime. Don't you see how futile it all is?" I've made her unhappy, far more than I expected. It is as if I've kicked her in the pit of her stomach, just when she was offering love. A crime against life. "Kimberley-"
"Don't."
"Kimberley, when my mother was sixteen years old she offered herself to a mamasan she'd been introduced to in Pat Pong. Nobody forced her to do so, her parents were not those kind of people. Nobody was going to stop her, though-they were dirt poor. The mamasan put her on display at her club every night, but postponed selling her until a good offer came up. Virginity is supposed to be most highly prized by Japanese and other Asian men, but the highest bid in my mother's case came from an Englishman in his forties. There are plenty of men who would understand the special pleasure in deflowering a child, but I don't. He paid forty thousand baht, an astronomical sum. My mother insisted that her best friend accompany her so she would not feel so terribly alone. The friend sat in the toilet while the event took place. He was kind to her, in a manner of speaking. He used a lubricant, tried not to hurt her too much, and burst into tears when it was over. My mother and her friend stared with great wonderment at this man who was more than twice their age. As the Third World said to the First World: If it makes you feel so bad, why do you do it? They felt sorry for him. It was my mother's blood on the sheets, but the agony was all his. He did not appear to be rich, so he must have saved up. Forty thousand baht was a lot of money, even for a Westerner. It was a very special occasion for him, a kind of feast. Perhaps it was his birthday. When we are in the grip of hunger we think only of eating. Then, when the banquet is over, we see the evidence of what we really are."
Something is happening behind her eyes. I wonder if I've succeeded in reaching her latent Buddhahood. A Thai woman would simply have thrown a tantrum and walked out, but there is American Will here, that grim hanging on.
Quietly: "You've never slept with a Western woman?"
"No."
"If you did, you would be that virgin on the bed, being raped by a pig?"
"She wasn't raped. She knew what she was doing. She was proud that she commanded such a good price. Of course, she gave almost all of it to her family. That's what innocence looks like over here."
"The legal age is eighteen in this country. In the States it would have been statutory rape. He could have been sent away for twenty years." A long silence during which the atmosphere freezes and I realize how naIve I'm being. No latent Buddhahood in the FBI, merely the cold fury of a will deflected, an appetite frustrated: no ice cream in the fridge tonight: damn.
"Did you ever think your meditation might not be such an asset in the craft of detection?"
"How so?"
"NaIvete. A luxury no cop can afford, frankly. The way you see it, Warren, Bradley, what they did to Fatima, what they did to the Russian whore-what they planned to do to a bunch of other boys and women, that's peculiarly Western, isn't it?" The expression on my face says: Yes, obviously. "That kind of existential crime without meaning, without profit motive, has to be just an extension of Western self-indulgence, doesn't it? A variation on the theme of the guy who raped your mom? Let's get the bill, I wanted us to eat here tonight for a reason. Let's say it's reality sandwich time for both of us."
She makes no attempt to extract the arrogance from the gesture when she calls for the bill. She pays with a gold AmEx card and I follow almost at a trot as she strides across the floor, leading me around by the pool between great mountains of bougainvillea, crimson hibiscus nodding in the evening breeze. We wind up at the Bamboo Bar, the hotel's famous jazz venue. Jones checks her watch before leading me inside. She asks the maitre d' for a discreet table for two near the window. The seats are woven wicker with luxurious cushions, the air-conditioning glacial, the margaritas perfect with viscous ice, salt glittering around the rim of wide glasses, generous shots of tequila. We are just in time for the first act. The maitre d' anounces "the incomparable, the spectacular, the truly magnificent Black Orchid." Enthusiastic clapping from the old hands in the audience, the small band plays a couple of bars and she walks on.
The song had to be "Bye Bye Blackbird," didn't it? Corny perhaps, but wonderful, too, with a depth of melancholy I've never heard before. I wouldn't have guessed she could even sing like a woman. Jones is enjoying the shock on my face.
"She's not bad. Not a professional of course, and jazz outside the States is always a bit of a disappointment, but she's not bad."
I realize that Jones is de
af to a specific quality in Fatima's voice. Let's call it heart: build the fire, light the light, I'll be home late tonight, blackbird, bye bye.
Let's not call it heart. The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the thoroughly dispossessed. "No," I say, and sip the margarita, "not as good as an American, but not bad."
"Now look to your left at about ten o'clock. Don't move your head, just your eyes."
"I already saw them." Warren and-a triumph for Jones to judge by the expression on her face-Vikorn. She doesn't know that the short dapper Thai man sitting with them is Dr. Surichai until I tell her. Together the threee of them make a half-moon around a large round table. They are all absorbed by Fatima and have no inclination to look behind them, but the diva in the long purple silk gown and heavy pearl necklace glances in our direction. Our eyes meet for a moment and she misses a beat. Not a professional at all. She recovers quickly and the band covers her mistake, but not before that total blackness has intervened behind her eyes. A few seconds later and she's got a better idea. She cocks her head slightly to one side and engages my eyes mercilessly while she sings: No one there to help or understand me, oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me…
"I want to go," I tell Jones, sounding just like a girl who is out too late and-I'm afraid-covering a single sob by leaning over and coughing. We wait until Fatima has finished her song, when the clapping masks the noise of our departure.
"Pretty well as soon as Kennedy decided to send military advisers to Laos, the CIA realized they had a problem," Jones explains in the back of the cab. "It was the CIA who ran the war there, by the way, from beginning to end. The problem was the opium. When the French ran Indochina it didn't bother them at all, they ran it as a state monopoly, complete with bonded warehouses in Vientiane and Saigon. When America got involved the obvious knee-jerk reaction was: no more opium. Just like us to try to reinvent the wheel, right? That noble idea lasted maybe ten minutes and here's why. The Laotian armed forces had this unique characteristic: they didn't fight. Not anyone, anywhere, anytime, and most of all they didn't fight the North Vietnamese regular army, which scared the shit out of them. The only people who would fight were the Hmong, the indigenous mountain tribe up in the north, whom the Laotians were happy to see annihilated by Ho Chi Minh. Americans like guts, we love to fight and we love fighters, and the Hmong were that. They became the CIA's favorite exotic pets, but the drawback was they depended entirely on the opium crop to survive. Of course, the French would have explained all this to us if we'd asked them, but-well, we were Americans, weren't we? The only answer, though, was to help the Hmong sell their opium. Being fantastic hypocrites-like all masked avengers-we didn't want to get our hands dirty. The Agency tried to keep its involvement to a minimum. Basically they would use anyone they could disown afterwards. They preferred non-Americans. Your Colonel was hardly more than a kid at the time, but he caught on real quick. Coming from Udon Thani, he also spoke Laotian fluently, so after he'd done a stint as short-order chef he got the job of organizing the Hmong's crop up in the mountains and getting it to the airstrips. With the Hmong you have to realize we're talking Stone Age-people whose idea of commerce was trading pigs for wives. Vikorn was fine up there in the hills, but even he wasn't that sophisticated when it came to dealing with the Chinese. It was the Chinese traders-specifically the Chiu Chow clan, who originate in Swatow-who brokered the product when it reached the cities. Of course. The Chiu Chow are the finest businesspeople in the world, then, now, and for maybe a thousand years past. They run this country-hell, they practically run the Pacific Rim. The Agency didn't want to be in the business at all, but they had to accept that since they were in it, it was in their interests to make sure the Hmong didn't get too burned. They needed a dealer who was a match for the Chiu Chow."
"Warren."
"Sylvester Warren was born to a theatrical couple in Boston. They were the usual alcoholic narcissists who started to fade early in life. The only way they could deal with the responsibilities of parenting was to employ a Chinese maid on a minimum wage. A Chiu Chow girl from Swatow who hardly spoke English. As the parents faded out altogether, she took over the house. She ran everything, including Sylvester's education, which took on a very Chinese flavor. To survive at all the kid had to learn Chiu Chow, and this fascinated the other Chinese from Swatow who were living in Boston and particularly New York. They saw a low-risk investment. Warren has been involved with them all his life. They funded his gemology degree, set him up in his first businesses and loaned him as much money as he wanted. The price he paid was to belong to them body and soul. When the CIA found out about him he was already in the jade trade, importing into the States with a shop in Manhattan. They didn't worry too much about conflict of interest. On paper he looked like the perfect broker for the Hmong's opium when it reached Saigon and Vientiane. As a matter of fact, he didn't do too badly by the Hmong. He got halfway decent prices for their opium. At the same time he did exactly what Vikorn did. He built up connections in the Agency, and just in case the Agency should become useful in later life or-just as likely-decide to double-cross him, he collected a body of evidence showing how the heroin epidemic on the streets of New York during the sixties and seventies was largely thanks to the CIA's helping the Hmong sell their crop. I guess he and Vikorn didn't meet more than once a month, but they talked over the field radio a lot. Vikorn wouldn't learn English, so Warren, who is one of those people who can learn any language in a month, made a point of learning Thai. Vikorn has been in awe of him all his adult life. Warren did what Vikorn did, but he did it bigger and better and for a lot more money-just like a Yank is supposed to. For every million Vikorn made out of the opium, Warren made ten, but more important than that, Warren's connections in the CIA and the Bureau go all the way to the top. You didn't really think it was money alone that got him all that influence, did you?"
We're turning into Wireless Road now, on the way to the Hilton. I wonder what is going to happen next when I say: "Why didn't you tell me before?"
"Because I wasn't going to pop your naIvete until you popped mine. I kinda liked that medieval loyalty you have for your Colonel-says a lot for your heart, but not much for your head. No money no honey, isn't that what your ma always told you?"
"Fuck you." As she's getting out of the cab, I say: "Surichai? What was he doing there tonight?"
An elaborate raising of the hands and shoulders. "Did I say I knew everything?" Then: "Want me to pay for the cab, or can you manage?" Poking her head back into the car, almost going nose to nose with me: "Warren's winning, by the way. He'll have me out of here in a week or less. I'll be out of your hair."
I am in the back of the cab, racing through the night; the shock of Vikorn socializing with Warren and Surchai, of Fatima singing in a jazz club, is slowly eclipsed by a shock of my own making. I've never told the story of my mother's first sale of her body before, never really taken it out from that secret, painful place where it resides in my heart. It wasn't Nong who told me, but Pichai. The friend who sat in the toilet was Wanna, Pichai's mother, who must have told her son, who whispered the story to me one dark night up in the monastery, when the future seemed nonexistent.
What is shocking is the way the story has marked me without my realizing it, and Jones' effortless reading of me: yes, that must be why I've never slept with a farang woman. If I didn't know that about myself, what else don't I know?
When I reach my room I call Jones. She is half asleep, surprised to hear from me and intrigued by the tremor in my voice. "According to the principles of profiling, how long has Fatima got?"
"Before she flips completely you mean? There's no way of knowing that. Profiling is like predicting share prices. You know what the market will do eventually, but you never know when. A day, a month, a year-who knows? Why is it suddenly so important?"
"Surichai," I s
ay, and hang up.
There was something else too-something to which only a Thai cop would have attached significance. A couple of tables removed from Vikorn's group: five well-dressed Chinese men in business suits. Vikorn must have been aware of them. Likewise Warren.
47
Professor Beckendorf, in volume 3 of his masterwork Thai Culture Explained, turns almost Thai himself in the final paragraph of chapter 29 ("Fate and Fatality in Modern Siam") in the way he lurches without warning into metaphysics:
Whereas your average Westerner does all he can to direct and control his fate, the latter-day Thai is no closer to adopting this attitude to life than were his ancestors a hundred or two hundred years ago. If there is any aspect of modern Thai psychology which continues to accept in toto the Buddhist doctrine of karma (so close to that Islamic fatalism often expressed by the phrase: It is written) it is surely in the conviction that que sera, sera. At first glance such fatalism may seem backward, even perverse given the dazzling spectrum of weapons Westerners now have in their arsenal against the vicissitudes of life; but anyone who spends much time in the kingdom quickly finds themselves questioning the wisdom, and even the sincerity, of Western attitudes. When he has paid up his taxes, his life insurance, his medical insurance, accident insurance, retrained himself in the latest marketable skills, saved for his kids' education, paid alimony, bought the house and car which his status absolutely requires he buy within the rules of his particular tribe, given up alcohol abuse, nicotine, extramarital sex and recreational drugs, spent his two-week vacation on some self-improving (but safe) adventure holiday, learned to be hypercareful of what he says to or does with members of the opposite sex, the average Westerner may-and often does-wonder where his life went. He may also-and invariably does-feel cheated when he discovers existentially that all the worrying and all the insurance payments have availed him not a jot or tittle in protecting him against fire, burglary, flood, earthquake, tornado, the sack, terrorist activity, or his spouse's precipitate desertion with the kids, the car and all the spare cash in the joint bank account. True enough, in a kingdom without safety nets a citizen may well be brutally flattened by accident or illness, where a Westerner might have bought himself a measure of protection, but in between the bumps a Thai still lives his life in a state of sublime insouciance. The standard Western observation is that the Thai is living in a fool's paradise. Perhaps, but might the Thai not reply that the Westerner has built himself a fool's hell?