Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  I don’t really know how to reply, although this is an observation one hears from time to time. The amputee is a standard visitor to Nana. Not only amputees; men unacceptably short in the cultures of narcissism whence they hail will be snapped up by our accommodating women (who are likely to be as short or shorter). Chronic alcoholism might be a form of leprosy in your fastidious country, farang, with us it is the mildest of ailments, hardly worth a mention. Nor are buckteeth, false teeth, gray hair, no hair or clubfeet any impediment to admission to our Oriental Democracy of Flesh.

  All of a sudden, just as we’re coming into the suburbs of Pattaya, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Jones lays a hand on mine. This is not a flirtatious gesture, although affectionate. I would say it was almost pitying. “Sonchai, I think I understand the case so far. Not as much as you do, but almost. You’re gonna have to tell me what you expect of me with regard to what happens next. That’s only fair. I’ve been thinking about you and about the case and about Thailand, and I’m still here. I haven’t fled back to the States, or complained about you to the head of the FBI, or shot you, or even kicked you in the balls. I’m still here. If you want me to stay, you better level with me.”

  “You know who did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know why she’s also innocent in every human definition.”

  “But not in any legal definition.”

  “I’m talking personal morality.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re taught to avoid at the Academy. We call it getting creative. It’s a no-no. It’s the law that counts.”

  “Culture shock. It’s getting creative that counts. Even Vikorn, whom you despise, he has a strong personal morality from which he never waivers. He’s led me in shoot-outs which could easily have gotten him killed. He’s a brave chieftain. Maybe he’s a dinosaur to you, but there are reasons why we love him. We don’t love cowards over here.”

  “You want me to keep my mouth shut?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll give me Warren?”

  “I don’t know if I can do that. Maybe he belongs to me. He didn’t kill your partner.”

  “He didn’t kill yours either.”

  “Karmically he’s responsible.”

  “That’s an easy argument to make. It’s also easy to turn around. Maybe he killed me in a hundred previous lifetimes. Maybe he owes me this time. Anyone who hunts human beings will tell you, most of the time it’s not personal, but sometimes there’s that special chemistry. I want Warren, Sonchai. Do we have a deal?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  We have turned into Pattaya and drift slowly in the stream of traffic along the main waterfront avenue.

  “Did I really just see a bar called the Cock and Pussy Bar?” Jones wants to know. Her mood has changed dramatically, she seems angry. “Is there anything here not dedicated to sex?”

  She has a point. Bar after bar line the street opposite the sea, and behind every bar a team of girls who will do anything you want for five hundred baht so long as it doesn’t hurt. We are a peace-loving people, we don’t like pain. We don’t like people who inflict it, either. We do not give law, sex and death more importance than those delusions deserve, but deliberately to inflict suffering is seriously un-Buddhist.

  Turning away from the bars, back to me and the case, Jones says: “Have you any explanation at all for why Fatima should be in Warren’s shop?”

  “No. None at all. I agree it’s a puzzle.”

  “Like the puzzle of how the python?”

  “The problem of how the python is second only to why the python.”

  “I know.”

  On Naklua Road I tell the driver to let the Monitor and me out of the car. We walk quickly in the heat toward a shop whose window is packed with pirated CDs, most of them games.

  “I know why you’re doing this,” the Monitor confides.

  “You do?”

  “You’re going to fuck the farang woman, aren’t you? Are you going to a hotel?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I don’t want to waste your money.”

  “How so?”

  “PlayStation 1 is totally out of date. Okay, it’s cheap, but it has no value, you couldn’t sell it secondhand.”

  “And the others?”

  “Microsoft Xbox is good but it doesn’t have the range of software.”

  “And GameCube?”

  “GameCube is okay, but it’s out of date.”

  “Leaving?”

  “PlayStation 2. It’s awesome. You can download from the Net, it plays everything designed for PS1, it plays DVD sex movies, DVD games.”

  “Do you need a computer?”

  The Monitor looks at me strangely. “You plug it into a TV, like all the game consoles.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. How much is PS2?”

  “Seventeen thousand baht.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “You want me out of the way with my mouth shut, right?”

  “Right.”

  In the store the Monitor starts into an arcane argument with a young shop assistant about the latest version of a game called Final Fantasy. The clerk, a boy about fifteen with ring-riveted eyebrows, shows disdain. It seems he favors Dragon Warrior VII, and even Paper Mario, rather than Final Fantasy, a position the Monitor cannot relate to. “Are you kidding? Paper Mario better than Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy is awesome.”

  A shrug from the boy. “Look, I work here, what do you think I do all day? I play the games. What do you do?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “So, how would you be at the same level as me? I’m telling you, DWVII is more awesome and you get a hundred hours.”

  The Monitor is seriously nonplussed. “What’s the ending like?”

  “Awesome.”

  “What about shoot-outs, what’s the best in your opinion?”

  “In my opinion? How can you do better than Unreal Championship. The guns . . .”

  “Awesome?”

  “Awesome.”

  “How many games do you throw in with the machine?”

  “Usually five, but since you’re a cop, you can have ten.”

  The Monitor explains to me that the selection is going to take some time. “What about porn?” he asks the shop assistant.

  “We have everything. What do you need, straight or gay? S&M? Lesbian? Whips and candle wax? Gang bangs? What race, farang, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Latino?”

  “Latino? What is Latino porn like?”

  “Awesome.”

  The Monitor gives me the nod and allows the shop assistant to take him to one of the booths where a PlayStation 2 is already set up. I watch while the clerk loads a disc and the screen immediately shows a dark-eyed beauty naked on a park bench somewhere in Latin America. One by one muscular young men arrive color-coded in blond, black and auburn, no doubt to make them distinguishable. The Monitor fast-forwards like an expert, freezing moments of penetration which he examines with the eye of a connoisseur before continuing, discarding all padding. He is done with Latino porn in less than five minutes and the clerk loads the more serious entertainment of Dragon Warrior VII. The Monitor is immediately absorbed and seems to impress the clerk with his swordplay. The clerk returns to me and I pay for the machine. Outside the FBI is waiting in the car. She says: “That easy?” I nod. There was something akin to real intelligence on the Monitor’s face when he was doing battle with the dragon. I think there must be some cultural moral in that, but Jones never appreciates those kinds of thoughts. “What is he watching?”

  “Latino porn and Dragon Warrior VII.”

  “D’you think he is someone from humanity’s immediate future?”

  “How is it you can say things like that and I can’t?”

  “Are we going to have another one of those arguments?”

  “No.”

  “How did you explain to the Monitor the reason why you wanted him out of the way?”

  “I let him
think I was going to fuck you.”

  “Doesn’t your Buddhist code stipulate that you’re not allowed to tell lies?”

  “There’s relative truth.”

  “Want to make it absolute?”

  “We’ve been through that. We’re culturally and spiritually incompatible.”

  “Meaning my abrasive American personality turns you right off, huh?”

  “You are an excellent agent.”

  “How about if I were to soften up? I hear Johnson’s baby oil can help in these kinds of situations.” She turns away from my paranoid gaze with a smirk on her face. “It’s the protocol,” she says to the window, “information-sharing. Your Colonel is pretty selective, but then I guess so are we.”

  At the end of the waterfront strip we veer off to the left, then to the right. Halfway to Jomtien Beach, we take a left down a private road belonging to an upmarket block of condominiums. It’s upmarket for Thailand, anyway. No one has bothered to repave the road since I was last here a few years ago, and we have to sit and wait in the car for the security to come and open the main gate.

  I have timed the journey, taking the likely traffic problem into account, so that we arrive at about noon, when all good Russians are somewhere between sober and drunk. It is 12:12 p.m. when we reach the penthouse apartment on the thirty-seventh floor of the condo building and I press the buzzer. I agonized over whether to call ahead or not and finally decided not to. If Iamskoy is compromised with a half dozen Siberian women without visas, or who have overstayed their visas, or are obviously on the game, he might be that much more willing to talk. A lot will depend on how drunk he is, though. Too drunk and he will pass out, the way he did last time. Too sober and he’ll be uptight, too far into himself with his Russian melancholy to communicate at all.

  I think I might be in luck because a woman answers the door. She is about twenty-six, dyed blond hair, Caucasian, thick lips and a wolfish look which she clearly believes to be irresistible. She is wearing a black dress which comes an inch or two below her crotch and reveals a lot of cleavage. Her perfume is not up to my mother’s standards, but then I don’t think this woman has spent much time in Paris. She looks blank and about to close the door on us when I flash my ID.

  “Andy,” she calls without anxiety. Instead of Iamskoy another woman appears in shorts and T-shirt. Then another. A fourth is dressed in a long nightgown done up firmly at the neck. “Is this a bust?” the first woman asks, more with curiosity than concern.

  “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I want to speak to Andreev.”

  Eventually Iamskoy appears from among the small crowd of females. He is tall and gangly and has kept most of his hair, which makes him seem younger than the fifty and some years he has spent in this body. He does a double take, then grins broadly. I think he has absorbed just the right amount of alcohol when he says: “Sonchai! So long it’s been! Come in, my good friend, come in.”

  I’m checking Jones’ face as we enter, thinking she’ll be surprised, because apart from the collection of women this is not like the home of a pimp at all. It is very untidy and a major contributor to the untidiness are the books. They are everywhere, on shelves on the walls, on the carpet, stacked up in corners, under the legs of collapsing armchairs.

  Jones is fairly wide-eyed, but mainly because of the women, who seem to be unnerving her with their glares and snippets of harsh-sounding Russian. In my humble opinion Jones is a lot more attractive than any of them, which could explain the glares. I don’t think she has seen the books at all, so I point them out. “Andreev is the most obsessive bookworm you’ll ever meet. Look at them! French novels, Russian, American, Italian, but that’s just light reading. Physics is his subject. He still keeps up with the latest developments, right, Andreev?”

  This is not a diplomatic question on my part. His expression turns to bitterness for a moment, then he recovers and puts a forgiving arm around me.

  “Thais are actually not sensitive at all, they just have this way of covering up through ritual politeness,” he explains to Jones. “If you cut away the wais and the other formalities, you find a people who really don’t give a damn.” His accent is thick, the grammar perfect.

  “I think I’m finding that,” Jones says. She’s looking at the books now and, as I expected, warming to Iamskoy, whose eccentricities are so much more comprehensible than my own. She has read books about this stereotype, perhaps seen him in movies. Gently: “Are you really a retired physicist?”

  “Unemployed. Sacked. Kicked out. Let’s not mince words. The boot was looking for me even while Gorbachev was in power, that world-class loser. It got me right up the ass when the economy collapsed under the terminal drunk Yeltsin. We pick our leaders, we really pick them.”

  He leads us, still moaning about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, into the living room, where chaos has all but defeated order. The only unambiguous landmarks are three vodka bottles, partially consumed with the tops left off, on a large plain glass coffee table. From my last visit I remember the Russian tradition of opening more than one bottle. One bottle may be spiced, another flavored with apricot or apple; it is similar to the Thai habit of providing dipping sauces to flavor a meal. Of course, vodka is not food unless one is Russian.

  Apart from the vodka, you have to spend a moment before you can visually disentangle one object from another. Books are not the only culprits. There are pieces of women’s underwear, shoes, ashtrays, a vacuum cleaner with its tube snaked around the coffee table, crushed beer cans, some unopened bottles of wine, and on a side dresser such a heap of makeup products it’s like a miniature rock pile. Nothing is horizontal or vertical, everything is resting crookedly on something else. And yet it is a huge apartment with five bedrooms, easily enough to accommodate twenty neat Thai girls who would surely keep the place spotless.

  Two of the women have followed us into the room, the others are having an argument in the corridor. Muttering to himself in Russian, Iamskoy starts picking things up off one of the sofas and chucking them in a pile in a corner: a black bra, a volume of an encyclopedia, a bottle of shampoo, books which he examines curiously like long-lost friends before condemning them to the new pile. It takes a few minutes before we can sit down. He sits on the floor with his back resting on another sofa which has not been emptied of junk and says something to the woman in the short black dress, who finds some plastic mugs. She pours some vodka into the mugs and hands the mugs to us, without asking if we want any or not. She hands Iamskoy the bottle, then pours herself a drink from one of the other bottles. Meanwhile, the other woman leaves the room.

  “Zoya has an appointment with an army general,” he explains. “He’s a first-time customer and she’s slightly nervous. Only slightly, though. That’s why she’s only drinking slightly.” We watch as Zoya pours more vodka into her cup and knocks it back. She says something in Russian to Iamskoy, who waves her out of the room. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he asks Jones.

  “What?”

  “Did you see her figure under that dress? Power legs, fat ass, short strong torso, round shoulders—a form evolved over many thousands of years to survive the steppe and work the land—but the General finds her exotic. With all these brown-skinned goddesses around, he actually pays more than ten times for Zoya.”

  The front door slams.

  “Perhaps it’s love,” Jones says.

  Startled for a moment, Iamskoy looks at her, then breaks into a broad grin. “That’s good. That’s very good. Excuse me.” He puts the bottle to his lips to knock the vodka back. I watch his Adam’s apple move twice in full-throated swallows. “I think I must seem even more of a wreck to an American than I do to myself, no?”

  “I guess I don’t know how much of a wreck you seem to yourself,” Jones replies. I realize that Iamskoy and I are both watching to see if she will sip any of her vodka. I take a sip of mine by way of provocation and I’m pleased to find it is from the spiced bottle. She catches me looking at her and puts the mug on the arm of the
sofa.

  “To myself I look more than a wreck. I’m atomized. I was a nuclear physicist so I should know. Nobody knew where my master the great Sakharov was leading us when he took his stand. He was like Christ pitting himself against the Roman Empire. How many put their money on Christ at the time? He must have drawn the longest odds in the ancient world. But then they weren’t Russians. Russians love a bad bet.”

  “You worked with Sakharov?”

  “Let’s not exaggerate. I was an assistant to his assistant. More properly, an assistant to the assistant of his assistant. Communism was strangely hierarchical toward the end, a point which has been made many times.” Another swig. “It’s really ironic, isn’t it, that the transformation in Russian society largely provoked by Sakharov the nuclear physicist has led to our atomization? It’s like reality imitating a bad pun. Of course, nobody told us that’s where it was all leading. We knew that capitalism makes whores of everyone, but not atomized whores. That was something we could not conceive in our theoretically logical universe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union I have become the proud owner of at least twenty different personalities. This is necessary in the global economy. I’m a burned-out physicist, an intellectual snob, a drunk, a failed poet, a renegade husband, absent father, a master of unfinished novels, an incompetent businessman, a fan of Russian ballet, a bankrupt and a pimp. It is impossible to be all these things at the same time, so I must decide, moment to moment, which of these many Iamskoys I should wear. In America you must be adept at such rapid costume changes, you’ve had more practice. For a Russian, it’s still hard.”

  “You must enjoy the challenge.” To my surprise, Jones picks her mug up and takes a deep swallow, not a polite sip at all. She glares at me. “Which of your many parts do you find the most difficult?”