by John Burdett
“If I ask you a question to do with the case, will you be straight with me? Or am I a pawn in some game you’re playing with the CIA in Laos, or the FBI in Washington, or the American embassy?”
“Sonchai, I swear to you, may Buddha kill me if I lie.”
“A stunning woman in her early thirties or late twenties, half Negro, half Thai, very tall, maybe as tall as six feet, beautiful long legs, full firm bust, great face, hair dyed all the colors of the rainbow, a discreet little piercing in her navel for a jade ball set in a gold stick. Who is she?”
The Colonel sips his whisky. “I’m supposed to know?”
“This is your bar, right in the middle of the red-light district. Girls move around between here and Nana, they try everywhere to see if they can get a better deal—you know the skin trade like the back of your hand.”
“You’re saying she’s a prostitute?”
“What is the likelihood she’s not?”
“She’s a suspect?”
“She’s a possible accomplice. No woman acting alone could organize something like that. I still have no idea how it was done. How does anyone drug a full-size python and twenty cobras and get them to bite the right guy at the right moment? It must have taken an incredible organization involving a lot of people. The snake aspect is simply incomprehensible to me at the moment. Who is she?”
19
“What am I, an idiot?” The Colonel is drunk and has launched into his favorite topic—the difference between East and West—without answering my question.
“Don’t I know I’m vulnerable to an inquiry anytime? Don’t I know that some army bastard or muckraking journalist, or some asshole who wants my job, can start digging anytime and find stuff—my boat, my little house up north, my handful of bungalows on Samui—and start pointing the finger? Wouldn’t I be happier with less assets and more peace of mind? Why d’you think I keep that stuff where everyone can see it, when I could just sell up and put the money in a bank in Switzerland? Why?”
“Because this is Asia.”
“Exactly! If I’m to do my job properly I have to have face. And my enemies have to see the war chest. You just don’t survive at the top of the greasy pole if you’re a humble little cop piously shuffling files around. Someone’s bound to defame you, and then what d’you do if you don’t have the money to pay lawyers? If you don’t have money to buy senators and M.P.s, how the hell are you going to defend yourself? How are you going to fight back at all?”
“Very difficult.”
“I envied you and your late partner from the start, because you guys made a decision never to rise in the force—how could you if you never take money? I admired it. You made no contribution to the common pot, but I put up with that. I defended you against those who said you’re not pulling your weight. I said: Look, every district needs at least one cop who doesn’t take money, we’re lucky, we’ve got two. We can wheel them out as shining examples, pure Buddhists, half monks, half cops. Besides, I said, Sonchai speaks perfect English, what a prize for a district like ours to show off to the foreign press. How many times have you spoken to the foreign media?”
“Hundreds.” Dozens anyway. Every time there’s a big enough scandal in District 8 to fascinate people overseas—the extravagant execution of those fifteen traffickers was a good example—the Colonel drags me out in front of the cameras to send my mug zinging around the international networks.
“And you do it brilliantly. What’s that favorite phrase of yours? I love it.”
“Whilst Thailand is a humane Buddhist society committed to human rights and the dignity of its citizens, the wealthier countries of the world must appreciate we do not always have the resources to meet those high standards of law enforcement which, frankly, are a luxury afforded only by those countries which industrialized first.”
The Colonel claps his hands in delight. “Brilliant. Did I ever tell you the Director of Police himself said what a good front man you are?”
“Yes, you told me. But it won’t get me a promotion. You told me that too.”
My Colonel sighs. “Sonchai, the difference between us, the only real difference, is that you are a man of the future, I am a man of the present. The present is still, unfortunately—” He cuts himself off to watch a girl who brings more Mekong, more snails, more sticky rice, a whole chicken fried in honey and chili sauce and shredded, two bottles of Kloster clouded with condensation. She wais respectfully, and slightly flirtatiously, to the Colonel. She is the most beautiful of the bar’s girls and the one who most frequently serves her boss, who waves a hand toward her and laughs before he continues. “The present is as it is. It’s not only your enemies you have to have face for, it’s your friends, too, perhaps even more than your enemies. What kind of district do we serve? Is it populated with upwardly mobile yuppies, Internet fiends, law-abiding sandwich-class lawyers, doctors and dentists?”
I miss my cue because I’m cramming chicken into my mouth with large quantities of sticky rice. The chicken is to supply nutrients, the sticky rice to absorb the alcohol and chili. I have never felt so surely on the point of being dangerously ill.
“No, it’s not. It’s a sewer and the rules which apply to sewer workers are not the same as those which apply to stockbrokers. My people would never forgive me for being as small as life. Of course, I do not fool a man of your intelligence, I don’t try to, I’m not a superman, but my people need a superman and that requires—” A yacht, a hundred bungalows, et cetera—I recite the list to myself as he falls into a rant. “There are gangsters who give millions to the poor, honest people who talk compassion and give nothing. Tell me, wise one, who do the poor prefer?”
“The gangsters,” I manage to croak. I’m so drunk now, the feeling in my stomach so lethal, that I’m afraid I’m going to have to make a dash for the toilet before the punch line. It comes just as I’m standing up. “Sonchai, I swear to you I know no woman of the description you gave to me. If I did, if she was as good as you say, I would have invited her for a week on my boat—you know me.” The old man grins and waves a hand to excuse me. As I rush toward the sign marked GENTLEMEN I look back once and catch an image of an attractive military figure brimming with health and contentment as he pats the backside of his favorite, who jumped to fill his glass as soon as I left the table.
I am a long time in the toilet, and when I return to the bar the old man has gone. It is like the Colonel to offer this subtle compassion, just when one least expects it; he has cut short the lunch which he was clearly enjoying and given orders for me to be taken upstairs to the room the girls use to service their short-time clients. I don’t want to sleep here, don’t want to look on this girl showing me the way up the stairs and see my mother twenty-five years ago, but I know I couldn’t make it out in the street. Fearing I might soil the bed in my sleep, I lie down on the floor in the upstairs room and fall asleep there, just like a whore. After such a banquet what would I dream of if not Paris?
At a big café near the Opéra, with a glass extension that took up three-quarters of the sidewalk and waiters even ruder and more arrogant than elsewhere in the city, my mother said: “If only he were a hundred years younger.”
Only a slight exaggeration. I had watched Monsieur Truffaut in the mornings as he crossed the great spaces of his Cinquième Arrondissement mansion flat in his paisley dressing gown, looking exactly like the undead. It was as if he’d left his mind in the grave during the night and did not catch up with the fact of being alive until after twelve o’clock, when he swallowed his collection of pills.
Nong reported that her bedtime duties were not heavy. He was one of those Frenchmen who had enjoyed a young female body next to him in bed all his life and saw no reason to give up the habit merely because his biology was failing.
It was hardly a strain to fit in with the old man’s rituals. Nong and I had the mornings to ourselves. The old man would spend the hour between 12 and 1 p.m. digesting his pills and the daily newspapers with increasing vi
gor as the drugs took hold, then we would march off to one of the world-class restaurants at which he was treated like the Roi-Soleil. Maxim’s, Lucas Carton, the restaurant at Fauchon, Le Robuchon; these shrines from the gospels of cuisine were everyday events for the bar girl and her son. With true Parisian discretion, the waiters neither nodded nor winked behind the old man’s back. They called Nong “Madame” in reverential tones, and I was “Monsieur.”
Truffaut’s afternoon vigor lasted long enough to give me an English lesson, interspersed with French, and here was revelation. To the old man the only reason for learning English was to win arguments with Englishmen and Americans, preferably without their noticing it. He taught the finer points of the language: the effective use of sarcasm, the acid two-word cap on a bore’s monologue, how to tell the other guy he was a jerk in a way that everyone except the jerk understood; it was the English of a fencing master, and I loved it.
He also taught pleasure. A lunch or dinner at a place like Lucas Carton was to be approached with reverence, as one would seduce a beautiful woman. The pleasure of food was more reliable than sex—a wink at Nong, ironic and self-mocking, which made her smile. “Paris is an old whore, but a five-star one.”
One took a stroll before the meal, then an aperitif at one of the pavement cafés. “Choose a place full of life, for god’s sake, full of intrigue and adultery. Then make your way slowly to the temple of pleasure.”
Everything about the old man told me what I was going to miss out on: urbanity, the cultivated conversation of the demimonde, that special sort of job which was an extension of one’s social contacts. Like the Colonel, whom I had not yet met, Truffaut was one of life’s golden ones, a member of a special tribe to which I knew even then I would never belong. There was something else about him, though, an authenticity to which Vikorn would never aspire. Every day after my English lesson Truffaut, in a state of rapture, read two pages from a book by someone called Marcel Proust. Nong noticed it too—the authenticity, not the Proust. I think she would have settled for twenty years younger, for they shared a passion for life cleansed of illusion. More than once I saw her reach out, but they both knew there just was not enough of him left. Oh yes, we could have been happy in Paris, and for several months we were.
The inevitable happened during our fifteenth week. In the middle of the night my mother felt obliged to call a number the old man had given her, and the emergency services arrived with oxygen and drips.
It was not a serious stroke, but it brought a small army of bequest-minded relatives, one of whom was delegated to tell Nong it was time for her to go. The old man had been persuaded to agree—he was hardly in a condition to argue—but true to his code, he insisted that mother and son return to Thailand in style on a first-class ticket on Air France, with whom he had family connections. An Air France official met Nong and me at the airport and during the flight we were treated as if we were Siamese celebrities, perhaps of a new generation of brown-skinned billionaire entrepreneurs. Nong groaned when we emerged into the muggy heat of Krung Thep and joined the taxi line. Going back to the bars was going to be especially tough after Paris.
I awake to a familiar ghost gnawing at my feet.
20
It is male, about nine feet tall with the round shape of a tic, tiny feet and legs. His mouth is the size of the eye of a needle, just as the tales stipulate. I have seen his kind too often to be truly frightened, but the echo of my childhood is infuriating to me, as if I’ve got nowhere in all these years. From downstairs there is the muffled boom of the club’s sound system, but we are all alone in a primeval space, this hungry ghost and I. He is the spirit of one who was greedy and selfish in his lifetime and must spend a thousand years with that tiny mouth which can never take in enough food for that huge body.
The hungry ghosts are the most common of our indigenous ghouls, of which there are many varieties, and I’m not entirely surprised to find him in a go-go club, for they feed on every kind of vice. We all believe in them, by the way, even those who would deny it to foreigners. To many people, especially in the country, the undead are a serious pest. One of their more disgusting tricks is to appear late at night on quiet lanes holding their heads under their arms, although the more common posture is a dead-eyed, flabby-lipped stare from the foot of the bed. They bring bad luck and the only repellent is a visit to the temple and some expensive exorcism by the monks. They can be a hazard to prostitution. Every bar has its own story of the girl who contracted to spend the night with a client, only to flee in the middle of it because the ignorant farang had chosen an old run-down hotel infested with these filthy spirits. Even Nong, above averagely robust in most respects, once woke, with her middle-aged customer snoring peacefully beside her, to see an apparition greedily licking at the used condom which the farang had been too lazy to dispose of. She too had dressed hurriedly and departed, vowing never to visit that particular hotel again. I deal with this one by reciting the Four Noble Truths to myself in Pali. I watch while he vanishes, and with him the dull gray space he inhabits. I stand up and open the door.
The music and roar of voices from the bar is suddenly deafening. The burning in my stomach is ferocious and the sourness in my mouth makes me nauseous. I grope my way down the stairs and enter the bar.
It is twenty minutes past midnight, just the hour when the great game reaches a climax. Shy men who have been saying no all night find their wills sapped by drink and the ceaseless attention of near-naked young women; all of a sudden the prospect of going back to the hotel alone is more appalling—and somehow more immoral, a crime against life, even—than congress with a prostitute. Skillfully, the girls build a dream world of fantasy in the Western mind, a world which is mysteriously difficult to let go of. And the girls, too, have their fantasies: of finding the farang who would support them for life, or, failing that, take them to the West and relieve them, for a year or two, of this living hand to mouth, not to mention the indignity of their trade. The bar is packed.
A gang of brutal-looking young men, their heads shaved like pink coconuts, ears pincushions of ironmongery, tattoos glowing at the edges of cutaway singlets, sit mesmerized around the bar, which is in near darkness. It is the paint act. The girls on the platform are naked except for streaks of luminescent paint asymmetrically applied the length of their bodies. Under the ultraviolet spots the effect is eerie: erotic pink and mauve shapes move sinuously to the music, a Thai pop song with the usual upbeat rhythm. Other men sit in padded booths surrounded by attentive girls and staring at the show. The floor is flooded, too, by Englishmen telling each other it is the cheapest bar in Pat Pong. As I pass a booth I hear: “I want to take you out, I’ll pay your bar fine.”
“I don’t know. Cork you too big.”
“I tip big too.”
“Oh, okay.”
Outside the street is no less crowded. Here the forces of capitalism produce a strange conjunction. Families on their first trip to the Orient, sleepless with jet lag, browse the dense lanes of clothes stalls. Women and girls make oohs and aahs as they translate the prices into their own currency while their men acquire rubber necks. The moral impropriety of designer rip-offs seems not to trouble the respectable bourgeois conscience as they cram plastic bags with Calvin Klein T-shirts, Tommy Bahama jeans, fake Rolexes.
“Well, if you’re tempted, Terry, go ahead and get it off your chest,” a stout woman is saying in bitter tones as she holds the hand of a wide-eyed boy of about seven. “Just remember to use protection, and don’t expect us to be waiting in the hotel when you’ve finished.”
“I didn’t say I was tempted, darling,” the man says (also stout, balding, haggard), “I merely said you can see how some blokes might be tempted.”
“Well, I have to say I can’t see what’s so tempting, I hate to be racist, but this is the Third World.”
I am in a hurry to escape this street full of sad memories, but it doesn’t do to try to rush. The place is so crowded, the night so hot, the music so lou
d, the ten thousand television monitors so insistent, you have to adjust to the prevailing rhythm: somnambulant rather than relaxed, as if these were not real people so much as dream-bodies the true owners of which are tucked up between crisp sheets in one of the safe clean suburbs of the West. I eventually make it out to Silom, where still more stalls line the road for more than a mile. I hail a cab.
It takes more than an hour to reach Kaoshan in the dense midnight traffic. When I arrive the music is even louder. The taxi cannot penetrate the crowds in the street who are carousing, swigging from beer and whisky bottles and checking out pirated tapes and CDs on the stalls. I pay the driver and, once again squeezing between hot damp Caucasian bodies, find the soi where the teak house stands in near darkness.
I imagine the black man doing this: escaping the insanity-with-soundtrack of Kaoshan, escaping the light, escaping the city, escaping the world to retreat with a sigh to his private and perfect world in the nostalgic wooden house of yesteryear. At the top of the stairs leading to the first floor I slip off my shoes and gingerly try the door. It yields to my push and I slip inside like a shadow.
It takes a moment to realize the lights are switched on. The glow they give is so soft, hardly more than that of safety lights. The old lady sits cross-legged in one of the dark corners, softly murmuring.
She is perhaps the last survivor of her generation in the village where she was born and brought up—probably somewhere in the northeast in the area we call Isaan, near the Lao border—and she is talking to all those friends and relatives who have already passed over to the other side. They are as real to her—realer—than the living. She must do this every night, no doubt longing for her own liberation from a world she has never understood and never will. I take the key from my pocket and slip out the front door, climbing up the external wooden staircase to the upper floor where the twenty-first century awaits.