Bangkok 8

by John Burdett

  “Pimp,” he replies promptly. “It’s even more complex than trying to write a novel and requires much finer judgment than playing with neutrons. You would think it would be easy, just a question of supply and demand with the added advantage that the products transport themselves of their own accord, no need for freight and delivery systems. Not with Russians. You think I run these women or they run me? They are independents. Two of them have degrees, one of them is a Ph.D., the other two are merely very well educated. They could get work in Russia if they really wanted to, but . . .” He shrugs.

  “Not well paid, huh?”

  “It’s not money exactly. Not in the American sense.”

  “What is money in the Russian sense?”

  “Gambling chips. They go home as poor as when they arrived, but while they’re here they get to gamble for relatively big stakes in those police-protected casinos which don’t officially exist. Paying their fares home after they’ve blown their profits is part of a Russian pimp’s overhead.” A glance at me. “That and paying off the Thai police of course.” To Jones. “Every Thai cop apart from Sonchai is a world-class businessman. You simply can’t beat them. If I’m not careful they hire the girls, then fine me the price of the girl—for trafficking in women—less ten percent for my expenses. Not Sonchai. He’s an even worse businessman than me. That must be why I like him, he doesn’t make me feel inferior.”

  “I wondered,” I say, sipping more vodka.

  “That and the fact that he’s even more of a head case than me. You should have heard our last conversation. It was like Hindu science fiction. I guess he didn’t enjoy it as much as I did, though, because he stayed away three years.”

  “You passed out after insulting the Buddha.”

  “I did? Why didn’t you shoot me?”

  “I didn’t think you were alive.”

  “Anyway, what did I say?”

  “You said that Gautama Buddha was the greatest salesman in history.”

  To Jones: “I was right. He was selling nothing. That’s what ‘nirvana’ means: nothing. As a cure for the great cosmic disaster most of us call life, he prescribed a rigorous course of meditation and perfect living over any number of lifetimes, with nothing as its final reward. D’you think anyone on Madison Avenue could sell that? But the whole of the Indian subcontinent bought it at the time. Today there are more than three hundred million Buddhists in the world and growing.”

  “You also said he was right. I can’t remember the argument.”

  “Correct. Black holes in space, which can fairly be described as pockets of nonexistence since no light or time survives there, have been seen to emit subatomic particles and reabsorb them. Life comes from nothing and returns there after all. Smoke and mirrors, just like the man said two thousand five hundred years ago. Magic. Which may yet make logic the biggest superstition since the virgin birth.”

  “Well, there you are,” Jones says. “It only goes to show. But there’s a play on words here, isn’t there? He was only selling nothing if you understand nothing in a certain sense. Nothing to a Buddhist is also everything, since only nothing has any reality.” A little self-consciously, she takes another glug of vodka. Iamskoy and I are both grinning at her. Iamskoy suddenly claps a few times and I feel obliged to join him. Jones blushes but I’ve never seen her so happy.

  “You’ve been schooling her?” Iamskoy asks me.

  “Not at all. I didn’t think she was interested in Buddhism.”

  “Are you?” Iamskoy asks.

  “I’m interested in this jerk.” She points at me and takes another deep swallow of vodka. “And Buddhism is the only sure way to turn him on. At least with Buddhism you can get some conversation out of him.”

  “I found that too,” Iamskoy says. “He has this Thai way of falling asleep at the drop of a hat, but mention rebirth or nirvana or relative truth, and he perks up. That’s what I love about this country. Everyone has a spiritual dimension, even cops. Even crooks. Some of the biggest gangsters make merit by giving huge sums to the monasteries and donating to the poor. Makes you wonder.”

  “About what?”

  “About what the past five hundred years of Western civilization have been about. If we’d remained medieval we might have been smiling as much as the Thais.”

  “Gimme some more vodka, will you?” Jones says to me. “I’ve been waiting for a conversation like this, seems like forever. It’s better than school.”

  There are footsteps in the hall and the woman in the nightgown appears. After Iamskoy’s comment I check her figure, as far as I can. She is slim and pale with hair which is almost black and very large green eyes. I could find her exotic. Jones gives her a big warm smile, woman to woman, and she smiles back.

  “This is Valerya,” Iamskoy says. “She’s the Ph.D. You see, she heard the conversation and was irresistibly drawn to join us. That is one of our million faults, Russians are perpetual undergraduates. We still talk about life in a way the West grew out of fifty years ago.”

  “It’s better than sucking cocks,” Valerya says, walking to the coffee table and taking one of the bottles and swigging it. “But I’m not yet a Ph.D. I’m funding my thesis.” Her English is less accented than Iamskoy’s, with a British tone. Now that she has spoken I can see her hardness, though, the hardness of a beautiful woman who doesn’t need to care. I no longer find her exotic.

  “Were you funding your thesis at the casino last night?”

  A shrug followed by a second swig. “You’re right about Russians. We love to blow everything on a bad bet. I can’t believe it. All that sex, for nothing. If I could delete the gambling I could delete the selling of my body, they cancel each other out, but I’d still need to fund my Ph.D.”

  “What is your subject?” Jones wants to know.

  “Child psychology.”

  Iamskoy and I both see the look of horror cross Jones’ face, but Valerya doesn’t seem to as she engages Jones’ eyes and speaks earnestly about how a Russian degree isn’t worth a dime even in Russia, but with a Ph.D. she could probably get a teaching job in one of the American universities, using her research project into criminalized street kids, of which there is an abundance in Vladivostok, just like in New York or Los Angeles. She really wants to get to the States.

  As Iamskoy predicted, the babble of semi-intelligent conversation is too tempting for the three other women, who now appear one by one, with two vodka bottles cloudy with condensation. More plastic cups appear and all of a sudden we have a party. Despite her passing disgust that a hardened prostitute should also be a child psychologist, Jones is taken with Valerya, who seems to offer intelligent female companionship, maybe something to develop while she’s here, maybe she’ll help Valerya get to the States and they’ll be bosom buddies. They yammer away twenty to the dozen about a dazzling array of subjects while Iamskoy develops his theory about materialism being the superstition of the twentieth century, a dark age which will be replaced by an enlightenment of magic. He believes I will be seduced by this, which only goes to show he doesn’t understand Buddhism, which despises magic, but I don’t want to annoy him quite yet. The three other women are babbling in Russian interspersed with English and seem to be talking about a winning strategy at blackjack. The vodka swills and the noise level rises and I fall into silence. This is a Caucasian party. What I see is the great juggernaut of Western culture with its insane need to fill space, all of it, until there is no space or silence left. After a while I say: “Andreev, did any of your workers ever get flayed alive?”

  A thundering silence. Jones is deeply embarrassed and red in the face. Valerya has stopped in mid-sentence and is boring into me with those green eyes which don’t seem so beautiful anymore. Iamskoy has snapped his head away toward a wall and the three others who I didn’t think spoke much English are looking down at the carpet. When Iamskoy brings his head round again to face me his mouth is crooked. “Is that what you came to ask me?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�Get out!”

  “Andy!” Valerya says.

  “Get the fuck out of my flat!”

  “Andy, you can’t talk like that to a Thai cop. You’re a Russian pimp in a foreign land. Stop it.”

  For a moment I think he is going to stand up to hit me, and he does begin to rise, but he is too drunk to make it all the way up from the floor and falls back in despair with his head resting on the seat of the sofa as if he has lost the use of his limbs. “Why?” His eyes plead with me. “Why bring that up? Didn’t your people do enough? Haven’t I spent enough of my life in that purgatory? Was it my fault?”

  I turn to Valerya, whose cynicism might be exactly what I need, in the face of all this indecipherable Russian emotion. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “You’re talking about Sonya Lyudin.”

  “Shut up,” Iamskoy tells her.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Andreev, the whole of Vladivostok still talks about it. Why shouldn’t we tell him?”

  “He knows already. He’s just being a sly Thai.”

  “I don’t,” I say. “I don’t know already. Already what?”

  “If you don’t know already, what are you up to? This is very hush-hush over here, you know. Very hush-hush. Oh yes.” Upset, Iamskoy has lost his urbanity and control over his tongue. “You’re not shupposed to talk about it, even if it’s shtill the big story in Vladivostok. At leasht in the grimy circles in which I am now forced to mix.” Picking up the vodka bottle and looking at it. “Grimy circles. I who once shat at the feet of the great Sakharov.” He bursts into cackles. “That’s good. Shat at the feet . . .”

  “The story of Sonya Lyudin is tragic,” Valerya explains, “but not typical. If it was typical none of us would be here. We’re not orphans or street whores. We’re smart women here to make a fast buck in a hard world. There’s no way we would risk our bodies like that. Sonya Lyudin was different.”

  “How different?”

  “She was a street whore. No education, born into an urka family. Hard as nails, a real Siberian. She’d do anything. She had no fear. She thought all men were dumb animals to be led by the nose. I’m not a great fan of men myself, but I think that’s a dangerous attitude for a woman to take. Especially in this job.” One of the women on the floor says something in Russian. “Natasha says I’m being a snob, that Sonya Lyudin was not so stupid as that. Just unlucky.”

  “She was supposed to have protection,” Natasha explains in English. “She wasn’t an independent. She was brought here by a gang of urkas. They were supposed to protect her. Andreev was just used for the introductions.”

  “That’s true,” Valerya concedes. “They took a contract out on the American’s head. They’ll get him sooner or later.”

  “They won’t,” Natasha says. “The American paid them off.”

  “No he didn’t,” Iamskoy says. “He tried to, but they refused. They couldn’t let it go, it was a matter of credibility. Of face, as they say out here. So the American had to get protection of his own. The best protection, so I hear.”

  “What American?” Jones is alert now, leaning forward.

  “Someone called Warren. A jeweler. A big shot in this country.”

  “This is known? You’re telling me in Vladivostok the name of Warren is openly associated with this?”

  “Oh yes. He’s a kind of bogeyman amongst women like us. You know, the worst nightmare: Be careful you don’t get a Warren tonight.”

  “There’s a video,” Valerya says. “I’ve spoken to women who have seen it. A white American and an enormous black man.”

  “Andreev,” I say, “I have to know. Do the Thai police have a copy of this video?”

  He seems to have reached the passing-out stage. I think he is nodding but I can’t be sure as his head falls forward, then throws itself wildly back, then falls forward again. I look at Valerya and Natasha, who avoid my eyes. Iamskoy slides inexorably into the horizontal with legs together and arms by his side. All of a sudden he’s the tidiest thing in the room.

  Laid out on the floor, Iamskoy opens one eye. “The Thai police bought the video from the urkas, paid a fortune for it. Of course the money came from Warren and of course the urkas promised it’s the only copy. They don’t care about the video, they want Warren.”

  “Valerya, how tall was Sonya Lyudin?” Jones is locking eyes with the child psychologist, who turns to Natasha, who turns to the woman next to her. Now everyone is looking at Iamskoy. “About six feet,” he says with his eyes closed. “Slim. Very good body.”

  “How much time did she spend with Warren before she died? Were there a number of assignations?”

  “There were two. The first was quite short and according to her nothing happened except that she stripped for him and he fondled her. He gave her a short gold stick and told her if she wore it in her navel he would set a jade stone in it. Of course, she was only too delighted to go to the nearest body piercer and wear the gold stick. She never came back from the second assignation.”

  “Did she mention a black American?”

  “No. Only people who saw the video talk about a black man. I never saw the video.”

  “Often the killer in this kind of case will need a trigger,” Jones explains to Valerya. “Sometimes it’s racial, sometimes social, sometimes physical—only tall or small victims for example—sometimes it’s social background. Usually it’s something that somehow gives the killer a proprietorial feeling, some claim on the body of the victim. It looks like Warren was very particular.”

  “He’s a jeweler,” Valerya says. “He would be, wouldn’t he?”

  “Can anyone tell me the date when Sonya Lyudin died?” Jones wants to know.

  “Twelfth December 1997, during the night, so I suppose it could have been the thirteenth,” Iamskoy says. “Now get out, please.”

  In the back of the car again, Jones says: “Warren was in Thailand between December 5 and 15, 1997. I forgot to tell you I checked his dates.”

  On the way back to the Pattaya beachfront we pick up the Monitor, who is waiting outside the shop with his new PlayStation 2 under his arm. We set him up with some fried chicken and more sausages from a stall and join the traffic jams for the trip back to Krung Thep. While the Monitor is munching away Jones does it again with her hand on mine, which is resting on the seat.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you told me about that hospital? Vikorn told Rosen you went there and asked Rosen to ask me to find out why. I’m being straight here. Those are my orders.”

  I look at her. I wonder if she’s ready for this. I draw a breath and say okay. While I’m telling her I’m replaying the visit in my own mind.

  41

  No one was ever in any doubt about how Charmabutra Hospital acquired the capital to buy that fine twenty-story complex and all the state-of-the-art medical equipment it stores, even though its main product never appears on the glossy brochure.

  “What is a transsexual?” Dr. Surichai asked me, raising his arms and hunching his shoulders. “Opinions differ, even in the medical profession. Especially in the medical profession. Is she a fully functioning human being who has finally achieved the gender identity which should have been hers at birth, or a freak, a medieval eunuch pumped full of estrogen?” Dr. Surichai placed a forefinger across his lips as if he were considering the question. His face brightened. “Some shrinks think my patients are all psycho. To them there’s no such thing as a woman born in a man’s body. They think what I do is criminal.” With a brilliant smile: “Or ought to be.”

  “What is your opinion?”

  A frown. “My opinion is that the whole issue is complex beyond anyone’s capacity. As you would imagine, I’ve thought about it a lot. You have to start with the question: What is gender? There’s anatomical gender: breasts, vagina, womb, ovaries, penis, testicles. Then there is chromosomal gender, which is as fundamental as you can go. Here you’re talking about the nuclear building blocks of the body, but the outcome of chromosomal analysis is
not without ambiguity and doesn’t necessarily conform to the anatomy. You can have a chromosomal male with a woman’s genitals, in other words. At the end of the day, the chromosomal approach is only really used in tests for professional sportsmen and -women—you have to have some criterion to decide if your champ is top of the men’s league or the women’s. Then there’s hormonal sex, which is purely a matter of chemistry and can be changed simply by taking a few drugs. And there’s psychological sex. In other words, what gender do you feel yourself to be? How do you respond to the world, as a man or a woman? The big question is, what comes first? For most of us, it’s never an issue, we conveniently experience ourselves as being the gender of our bodies. But supposing you don’t? Supposing you have a nicely functioning, full-size penis, and spend your waking life believing yourself to be a woman in the wrong body? This is not a new phenomenon, there are records from ancient times, especially in Asia, of people who were basically transsexual in an age without the technology to make the change. The only difference today is that we have developed the technology. All I do is to adapt the body, in such a case.”

  “What do you do exactly?”

  “I cut off their cocks and balls. It’s called vaginoplasty, meaning to make a vagina. I use the skin inversion technique. Basically, we skin the penis—deglove it—invert it and sew it into the vaginal cavity. All men have a vaginal cavity, by the way. We open it, line it with the skin of the penis, use the leftover skin to mold a mucosal flap for the clitoris, even give the little darling a hood and Bob’s your uncle. Well, not quite, but that’s the basics. There’s a lot of preparatory work, mostly involving hormone injections and psychiatric tests.”

  “Tell me about the tests.”

  “Well, like I say, there are psychiatrists who just don’t buy the whole ‘woman in a man’s body’ argument, but they’re considered square. The profile of a true transsexual is really pretty simple. The perception of being the wrong gender starts amazingly young—between the ages of three and five. The need, interestingly, seems not to be sexual. A lot of transsexuals are not interested in sex at all. In the M2F—sorry, male to female—category, which is the only one that really matters at the moment, the desire is simply to be accepted as a normal woman, which is almost perverse, because there is nothing more challenging to normal identities than a transsexual. They are the true revolutionaries of our time, the ones who make even gender a flexible proposition.