Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  “I suppose not,” I yell above the traffic noise.

  “I mean, everyone knows about it and farangs know they can get it over the counter at any pharmacy anywhere in Thailand, but we haven’t woken up to the new client potential which is coming onstream.”

  “It sounds as if you have, Mother.”

  “Think about it,” she yells. “You’re a seventy-year-old farang man and for the past twenty years your sex life has gone from extremely boring to nonexistent. You expect to die within the next ten years and you haven’t even thought about sex for the last five. You’ve thought of yourself as totally out of the running and you’ve got used to your family and loved ones thinking of you as some decrepit old fool who ought to have the decency to pop off sooner rather than later so they can inherit the house.”

  My mother is remembering Florida, of course, and Miami, where everyone seemed to us to be on their way to or from an old people’s home. I blink several times as certain images of Dan Rusk pass before my eyes. It must be the work of imagination that I see a hoary old hand so huge it is capable of covering the whole of my mother’s backside; the trip from the airport to his “spread” in the U-Haul truck was interminable, as was the spread. A massive kitchen and other vast vacant spaces so impregnated with his solitude it felt as if we had landed on a planet with double the gravity of the earth, turning the most normal activities—conversation in particular—into a chore requiring superhuman strength of will. Rusk lasted a week before my mother called her only relation who possessed a telephone and invented a family emergency—I forget what dire accident her mother was supposed to have suffered, but it was enough for Rusk to drive us back to Miami and pay for the nonexistent hospital care. We were never so glad to be back in Krung Thep with its effortless vitality. “You’ve always had a positive view of human nature.”

  “Then one day someone at your old people’s home mentions Viagra. Some old bugger even more ancient than you, who even you think should have the decency to pop off immediately, whispers in your ear that he recently spent a week in Bangkok and tried the blue pill and had an erection that lasted four hours which he used to sample three or four beautiful young women. Well, what would you do?”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “You’d choke on your false teeth in your rush to book the next flight to Krung Thep is what you’d do. So the market can’t help but grow. There are more than fifteen million American men over the age of sixty-five, their wives and kids have treated them like shit at the best of times and after age fifty in America it is no longer the best of times no matter how much money you’ve got.” She emphasizes these startling truths by stubbing out her cigarette. “They put up with it because they ran out of options a long time ago. At least, they think they did. I have good news for them. But do they really want disco music, techno, all that frenzy—they’re probably too deaf to hear it anyway. Do they really want to watch girls in bikinis cavorting around steel poles, all that nonsense? Of course not. They want something from their own times, an environment that caters to their age group and is sensitive to their needs.”

  “Oxygen on tap behind the bar? An ambulance waiting in the street? Why not add a hospital wing to your brothel?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call it that. I’m providing libido therapy to the aged. What I’m trying to explain is the matter of timing.”

  “Timing?”

  “That’s the thing. A young man gets an erection because a woman has aroused him, and for ten thousand years the trade has built itself around that biological fact.”

  “What else would it build itself around?”

  “So we’re still a primitive industry at the mercy of nature. We’re still at the stage of hunting and gathering. But with the market we’re targeting, the customer gets an erection more or less exactly one hour after taking the pill, it’s the equivalent of a steak in the fridge. We’ve freed ourselves from Mother Nature and taken control of the timing. There’s a four-hour window which he’s not going to want to waste drinking beer and listening to junk music. He might want to relax later, but his main priority is to take advantage of the drug. Especially when he has probably read that it can cause heart attacks.”

  I blink at the apparent incongruity of this last remark. She lights another cigarette. “Don’t you see, in their minds this could be their last fling? They might have decided to go out with a bang, so to speak. We could be helping them to celebrate their last days on earth. They’re trading in a couple more years of limping across the linoleum and endless card games with the other arthritic goners for maybe a week of ecstatic humping with the best thing they’ve seen for fifty years. This is a service of compassion and enlightenment. I’m sure the Buddha will approve.”

  “Euthanasia by orgasm must be better than lethal injection.”

  “Exactly. Also, if it’s your very last party on earth, why spare the expense? If your kids are all selfish jerks you may as well sell the house to spend the money on my girls. So what I’m proposing is a telephone booking service. Just like a restaurant. The customer comes to the bar the first time, sees a girl he likes, after that he calls us from his hotel, warns us that he’s about to take the pill and expects to be rampant in exactly one hour. There’s a plus for us, of course, since we don’t have to hang around waiting for the customer to decide if and when he wants the girl. We get a fixed timetable that we can work around. I’ve discussed all this with the Colonel. He thinks we can’t fail.”

  “How will you structure the advertising? Medical journals or triple X web pages?”

  “Web pages, with plenty of visuals, but we think word of mouth will work for us over time. After all, there’s no one else in this field at the moment.” I think of geriatrics shuffling into the bar with crooked grins and bulging trousers, the missing link between sex and death. “So, Sonchai, what about it?”

  “It could work,” I agree with some reluctance.

  “Of course it will work. The trouble is there’s no way to patent it. As soon as the competition sees what we’re up to there’ll be a thousand similar bars springing up all over the city. We’ve got to move quickly, I’m not the only financial brain in the business.”

  I watch while two young women try to walk past us carrying about ten plastic bags each, crammed with cheap clothing. There’s no room on the pavement and they walk around a taxi caught in the jam. This is where most of the sex traders buy their clothes and we have said hello to a lot of old friends today. My mother’s purchases are under the table. We are in Pratunam because a couple hundred yards away lies a vast market where T-shirts, shorts, skirts, dresses, trousers, blouses indistinguishable from the products of the ateliers of Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, Zegna et al. can be purchased for as little as three dollars each. Nong has bought her season’s wardrobe, which I noticed is a little more austere than usual, befitting a matriarch of industry. I call to the waitress to pay the bill, but my mother restrains me. “This is on me, darling, I want to thank you for signing those plans.”

  I say okay, the plans did amount to a fair amount of work because she and the Colonel kept changing them. Of course there had to be a TV in every cubicle and in the end they decided to include a full Thai massage service, so each five-by-eight room has to be equipped with a small Jacuzzi in the corner with all the plumbing that goes with it. I foresee disaster with ninety-year-old scarecrows slithering around in the soap suds and expiring during the full-body massage. At that age surely a man might be knocked out cold in a skirmish with a mammary gland? But I have to assume the Colonel knows what he’s doing even if Nong has been carried away by her brief congress with the Wall Street Journal. I pass over the slim briefcase in which I’ve been carrying the plans and watch while she opens it. She takes out the plans and rifles through them with growing consternation.

  “You forgot to sign them, darling.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “But you promised.”

  “I know.”

  �
�So what’s stopping you? Here, use my pen.”

  “No.”

  “Sonchai?”

  “I’m not having anything to do with this . . . Until you tell me.”

  It’s one of those mother-and-son things. We have too much on each other not to be aware of the significance of this eye lock. I do not waver or blink. Finally she drops her gaze. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Just sign the plans.”

  “Tell me first. I don’t trust you.”

  “Brat.” Her hand is shaking as she reaches for yet another Marlboro and lights it.

  “Why is it so difficult? If you don’t know who he was, if you were banging three a night that month, just say so, it’s not as if I don’t know what you did for a living.”

  “Of course if I didn’t know I would have told you long ago,” she snaps, and inhales rapidly. “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “How can it be complicated? For god’s sake, Mother.”

  I might be hallucinating, but it does seem to me that some tiny tears have appeared at the corners of my mother’s eyes. “Very well, darling. But you have to promise to forgive me. Promise in advance.”

  I experience profound suspicion but promise anyway.

  “Sonchai, did you ever wonder why I made such efforts for you to learn perfect English? Did you even notice that almost every one of those trips we went on were with someone who spoke it perfectly, even Fritz and Truffaut?”

  “Of course I noticed. If I didn’t notice before I would have noticed with that Harrods man. What else did he have to offer?” An image of a skinny Englishman with a huge nose through which he emitted most of his vowels and an even bigger mother problem, who derived strange pretensions from his apartment’s proximity to Harrods in London—an appalling two weeks when Nong had a screaming argument with his mother, who lived in the flat upstairs, and I went through a brief shoplifting phase in the great store—passes through both our minds. “I thought you were just doing the best for my future.”

  “Well, I was, but it was more than that. I was full of guilt about . . . I was trying to make it up to you . . . He loved me, you see.” My mother bursts into tears. “I’m sorry, I’m so very very sorry, darling”—dabbing her eyes with a tissue from her handbag—“it was all those fire engines. And the food, it was so bland, they had no idea how to cook, it was totally tasteless.”

  Thank Buddha I’m a detective and able to make sense of these fragile clues. Suddenly everything falls into place. A past I never had and a future I never will have flash before my eyes. My heart rate has doubled and for the first time in my life I feel like hitting her. Instead I reach for her cigarettes, take one, light it with shaking hand and order more beer. I drink in great gulps straight from the bottle. “An American?”

  “Yes.”

  “A serviceman?”

  “Yes. Very brave. He had lots of medals. He was an officer. He had a terrible war, he was in a mess psychologically for quite a while.”

  Inhaling deeply on the cigarette: “He took you to the States? He wanted to marry you?” A nod. “New York?”

  “Manhattan. The apartment was near a fire station. There were sirens every five minutes. I thought the whole city was on fire.”

  “And the food was awful?”

  “Have mercy, darling. I was eighteen years old for god’s sake, I’d never been outside Thailand and I hardly spoke a word of English. I was terrified and I wanted my mother. I wasn’t the hard-ass I became. I grew up after I had you.” An exhalation. “They couldn’t even cook rice properly. His parents hated me. I was brown with slit eyes, and no matter what he said they knew how we had met, what I did for a living.”

  “But he adored you?” A nod. “He knew you were pregnant?”

  “He was crazy about you even before you existed. I had to run away. He came back to Thailand looking for me, but I hid up in the country. I was in a state of panic after New York. I’m sorry. I talked about it with the abbot—I went up to the monastery. You never knew that I’d been up there, did you? He asked me if my American lover needed me only while he overcame his shell shock. That was a good question and I didn’t know the answer, so I vowed to the Buddha that if you grew up strong and healthy and I had the luck, I would make sure you learned perfect English.”

  “You deprived me of a crack at the presidency of the United States because you didn’t like the food? That’s very Thai.”

  “You got a crack at nirvana instead. What kind of Buddhist would you have been if I’d stayed in America?”

  I choose to ignore this brilliant riposte. “I could have been an astronaut.”

  “No you couldn’t, you can’t stand heights.”

  “What did he do, what was his profession, was he a drafted man?”

  “Drafted. He was going to be a lawyer.”

  “What? American lawyers are all millionaires. I could have been a senator at least.”

  My mother has dried her eyes. She is a master of abrupt recovery. “Children of American lawyers all die of drug overdoses at an early age. Look what I saved you from. Anyway, if you’ll only sign those damned plans we’ll make a million and you can go and live there if you like. See how long you can stand to be away from Thailand.”

  I have smoked the whole cigarette in less than a minute, causing me to feel nausea. My heart rate is calming, though, and I’m beginning to see things with a little more focus. “What was his name?”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike what?”

  “What difference does it make? Smith. There, now you know, has it changed anything?”

  I do not believe for one moment that his name was Mike Smith, but I let it pass. I surprise her by giving her a big smile and patting her hand, which seems to relax her. She drinks a glass of beer in a couple of gulps, lights another Marlboro and sits back in her chair.

  “Thank you for taking it so well, darling. For thirty-two years I’ve lived in fear of this moment. Did I do the right thing or not? Don’t you think I’ve been tortured by that very question? I wanted to tell you, but all the family advised me not to—what you didn’t know you couldn’t blame me for—that’s very Thai, isn’t it? Sometimes I think I must have been insane to leave America. Even if he’d divorced me after a couple of years, I probably would have got a work permit, the right to stay. But Thailand was a different place then, we were all so unworldly, so fearful of strange lands. We were prudes, too. Does that surprise you? A girl wouldn’t think of selling her body unless she was desperate. My father was sick with his heart problems, my mother was hit by a car when she was riding her bike, my grandmother had to be kept—she was blind by that time—and my two brothers were in their early teens. I had a right and a duty to work in the bars. These days girls will go on the game just to save enough to put a deposit on an apartment, they sell themselves for any old excuse, because they love sex and money, though being Thai they never admit it and like to pretend they hate the work. Would you believe I’m shocked at what the trade has come to? But what can one do? This is the real world.”

  After I sign the plans, she pays the bill and we stand up. I embrace her warmly. She gives me a puzzled look as we say goodbye. She takes a taxi but I decide to wind my way amongst the jammed cars. What difference does it make? He adored me even before I existed. He loved her. I’m walking on air.

  Still high, I am trying to be invisible as I make my way to Charmabutra Hospital. The complex is new and shiny and about one minute from the bars of Nana Plaza. There is a McDonald’s on the ground floor and a Starbucks in the first-floor lobby, a marble and glass reception area with parabolic front desk, Internet access from computers everywhere and a telephone wherever you put your elbow. But it is a hospital. The brochure boasts over six hundred highly qualified physicians and a small army of Singaporean, Thai, American and European managers and talks about the Heart Center, laser correction of nearsightedness, a stroke screening package, abdominal ultrasound, a complete laboratory analysis of blood urine and stool samples, liposuction, body con
touring and laser resurfacing of the face, packages which take care of everyone’s travel needs from the U.S. and Europe and luxury rooms with brilliant city views. At reception I mention an interview I have arranged with Dr. Surichai. An administration official takes me in an elevator to the seventh floor, where the doctor is waiting for me. We spend about an hour together. As I am leaving the hospital a group of three large men surround me and bundle me into a waiting limo. It is a navy blue Lexus and there is plenty of room in the back for myself and two of my abductors. The third remains behind as we speed off with a corny squeal of tires which I feel is unworthy of my Colonel, who is lounging in the front passenger seat, wearing civilian clothes and dark glasses. It is his usual driver behind the wheel.

  “May I ask why I’m being abducted?”

  “You’re not. You’re being quarantined in preparation for your meeting. The last thing we need is for you to turn up in your Tommy Bahama rip-offs, flashing your police ID for every Tom, Dick and Harry to squint at.”

  “Turn up where?”

  “Give me your ID.”

  I hand it over. “I would like to know where we’re going.”

  The Colonel puts my ID in the pocket of his Zegna jacket, which is not an illegal copy, and shakes his head at my obtuseness. “Did I or did I not receive a written request at 4:33 p.m. two days ago to the effect that one Detective Jitpleecheep Sonchai be permitted to interview one Khun Warren Sylvester during his five-day stay in our country on a business trip from the United States?” He turns to look at me, raising his glasses. “Written request with date and time stamp?”

  “I like to do things properly.”

  “You like to fuck things up royally is what you like to do. To whom were you going to go with your copy of your written request with date and time stamp if I refused?”

  “No one. There’s no one to go to. I just wanted to make it clear—”

  “That in the whole of the Royal Thai Police Force there is one arhat, one pure, unblemished soul valiantly and heroically doing his job while the rest of us slop around in the sleaze.” My jaw hangs unattractively. “Have you any idea what shit you’re dragging us into? Why couldn’t you pop unobtrusively into my office when no one was looking and whisper plaintively in my ear that you needed to see the great Khun if I could pull the right strings and so long as it was okay with me and everyone with his foot on my shoulder all the way up to the top of the pyramid? You do know that the most important and influential women in the kingdom get most of their rocks from this jerk? Especially the Chinese. You do know that?”