by John Burdett
Somehow she sneaked an extra can of beer into the cab, which she opens. Raising the can to her mouth: "I don't know, Sonchai, the minute you start to search for meaning, you're lost. But without meaning, we're lost also. Who am J, where do I come from, where am I going? Fuck knows. I can't handle marriage-that's way beyond my tolerance level. But a lover who lasts more than a weekend might help my emotional stability." She takes a swig of the beer. "So now I masturbate," she says with Tragic Mouth, "every fucking night. Maybe I need a toy boy?"
The best way to check if you're in Chinatown is by counting gold shops. If there's not one on each corner, chances are you've taken a wrong turn. The shop signs are invariably yellow on red in Chinese characters, and the gold is of the extra-shiny variety that screams at you from the windows. Many of them are not technically shops but hangs: warehouse-size affairs with scales on the counters and turbaned Sikhs with pump guns on guard, all ablaze with neon light bouncing ferociously off the interminable stretches of gold Buddhas, gold dragons, gold belts, gold necklaces, gold bracelets. Clothing is the other industry: crowded narrow lanes made still narrower by stalls selling every kind of cotton or silk garment at astonishingly low prices.
The FBI has managed to get drunk on a few beers and stays my hand when I try to pay the cab driver. "Do you know I've never known simple joy? Darker, more complex emotions, yes, but joy, no. Nor have any of my friends. We were infected by the psychosis of winning at the age of five. But you know joy. That's what blows me away. You're the son of a whore, a pimp, you run a brothel, you're an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, but you're innocent. I've never broken a law, cheated, lied, or presided over a crooked deal in my life, but I'm corrupt. I feel dirty twenty-four hours a day. Does anyone on the planet recognize the significance of that apart from me? The material you're made of is fifty percent lighter than ours. Why?"
"We don't have original sin," I explain as I hand a hundred-baht note to the driver. "That iron rod through the skull. We just don't have it."
Vikorn has posted a couple of plainclothesmen outside the warehouse. They recognize me and let us into Yammy's studio, where Marly, Jock'nEd are sitting around discussing the Iraq war in white silk dressing gowns with crimson trimmings. I feel the FBI's sexual frisson when she clocks Ed. Excuse me while I explain Jock'nEd:
They are a team, famous throughout the Bangkok porn industry, and the invariable performers whenever the script requires a farang male to flesh out the skeletal story line. Ed is, well, simply magnificent. A natural six-two male animal with superb pecs that gleam under the lights when rubbed with Johnson's baby oil, power thighs that could do justice to a lioness, a rocky-handsome bone structure, one of those aquiline noses that emit erotic fire with every exhalation, relentlessly seductive baby-blue eyes, and a telltale cleft in the chin that is so distinctively American it could have been invented by Ford. (Actually, Ed is a Cockney who hails from Elephant and Castle.) On the other side of the karmic balance, lamentably-well, how can one put it? Even tumescent his dong is not of the Big Mac dimensions your randy granny in Omaha is accustomed to ogle over a TV dinner. He has to be supplemented, in other words, using the magical techniques of the silver screen we all love to be conned by. Enter Jock. He is a five-foot-nothing Scotsman with a consonant-free burr, bald, pot-bellied from a heroic beer habit, almost chinless, with slurpy lips you wouldn't want your worst enemy to be kissed by, but armed with-you guessed-a gigantic member of positively pneumatic obedience.
They are inseparable pals and true pros, who eye Kimberley up and down as if she were a mare in a horse market. The assumption that she has come to work is, in the circumstances, forgivable.
Now Marly: you will recall she works for us at the Old Man's Club and was handpicked by Vikorn for her stunning visuals. Her excellent English enables her to understand Yammy's stage directions-which, I am told, tend to be complex beyond the industry norm. Seeing a potential artistic rival, she does not immediately respond to Kimberley's big and somewhat inebriated woman-to-woman smile. I leave the FBI to launch a charm offensive-she is clearly fascinated by the boys, the girl, the bed, the lights, and the cameras (well, something is making her lips curl lasciviously) — to go find Yammy, who apparently is taking a creative break in his office in back. I find him huddled over a bottle of sake.
"Hello," he manages from measureless depths of depression. "Come to make sure I don't leave out the raw meat?"
"Don't make it difficult for me, Yammy. I'm only doing my job."
He gulps the rice wine straight from the bottle. "Listen, I have this fantastically surreal plot, with a cobra and a tiger cub, white kimonos, a Kyoto backdrop straight out of Hokusai…" Catching my eyes, he mimes futility with one hand and lapses back into despair.
"And? What's the problem?"
"It's so much more erotic with the kimonos left on, don't you see? Sonchai, I'm begging you."
I shake my head in total sympathy. "He won't go for it. Look, it's not his fault-blame the consumer. The big respectable hotel chains won't buy it if it's not brutally obscene."
"I knew you would say that."
"Can't you do both? Subtle erotic with the kimonos on, then the standard stuff with them off?"
Shaking his head but resigned: "You lose aesthetic balance that way. It ends up like a dog's dinner."
"There's no point in my trying to persuade him. He'll say it's all about money."
Silence. Then: "I've been thinking. I've found a couple of investors in Japan. They'll go fifty-fifty on a modest, fifty-million-dollar all-Nippon art flick. I just need to come up with the other half, twenty-five million."
"Yammy, we've been through this before. It's not that he's against you-you simply don't fit the profile."
"So what the hell does a successful trafficker look like?"
I gaze at him for a moment: neurotic, twitches like a horse plagued by flies, desperate and hurtling toward middle age, the unmistakable stamp of jail in the hollow of his cheeks, the hardness under the eyes. "Not like you, Yammy. Any customs officer would get the sack for not searching you on sight."
From experience I know there is no point sitting and trying to be persuasive. Yammy does everything in his own time or not at all. I return to the set, where the FBI is interrogating Marly.
"I would have thought a woman like you would have done fantastically in the States," Kimberley is saying with an ambiguous smile. "What happened?"
"It's not as easy as they make out," Marly explains. "I did Third World Pathetic, I got a bleeding-heart eunuch. I did Thai Whore in a G-string, I got a geriatric on Viagra." With a hint of aggression: "Why, what's your game?"
"Postmodern," Kimberley says. "I got a dildo."
"We're shooting in one!" Yammy yells as he exits from his office, suddenly oozing authority. Immediately Marly, Jock'nEd slip out of their dressing gowns and are now stark naked. Marly walks over to the bed and bends over it, careful to lean on her hands so her breasts dangle. "It's okay, we can still talk," she tells Kimberley. "It's just a bum fondle."
Right on cue, Ed begins with the oil on her apple-shaped behind, as if polishing a Greek urn. "What are you looking at?" Marly asks the FBI, then casts a glance over her shoulder. "Oh, Jock. He's amazing isn't he? You wouldn't give him a second glance if you saw him in the street, but he's such a pro, the best in the business. He can do that even when he's drunk. It's like he's got an electric inflator or something. And it is gigantic."
Kimberley seems to be suffering hormonal overload. Hoarsely: "Tell me, when you do this, d'you feel like you're screwing the whole feminist matriarchy?"
"No," says Marly with a frown. "I feel like I'm screwing the whole Thai patriarchy."
Kimberley, nodding: "Even so."
On a signal from Yammy the FBI steps back. "Scene twelve, take one," Yammy snaps. Marly immediately starts moaning. "Cut!" yells Yammy. "He isn't inside you yet, honey," he explains. "If you start with the kettle drums, what'll you have left for the crescendo?"
He goes to a laptop on a table to check something. "And you're not quite in position, Marly darling," he says distractedly, working the mouse. "I've got your clitoris and the top of your pussy in the floor camera, but we're going to miss half of Jock's dick for the fuck cut. Shift your bum about half an inch backward. Good. Perfect. Now, get your body memory to lock onto that. Jock, are you drooping?"
"Ah wah jus' wai'in' on hold," says Jock, looking down.
"Okay now, when you enter her, don't use too much thrust, or you'll push her out of position, and all we'll get is your hairy balls. Make it look merciless, but don't use any real horizontal pressure. Smoothly controlled grinds come out best on the celluloid. Clear?"
"Och aye," says Jock.
"Good man." Yammy's mood has swung. With the Promethean will of a true artist, he has conquered despair. He casts me a grin. "I wish mine was that reliable. Okay now, Marly love, you have this gorgeous Ed here polishing your ass like it was Sung dynasty, and you know what's going to happen next, but you don't know when, and he's teasing you to the point of madness. Anticipation agony in every facial muscle, please. Good, keep that. Now give us a little tongue-no, don't stick it all out, we want only the teeniest pink tip sneaking between those hungry lips. Perfect. Okay, take two."
Take two is the penetration shot, starring Jock. I cast a glance at the FBI. "Can we go now?" Kimberley groans. "I need to sit down somewhere cool, or find a man."
It is as we are leaving that I see the tall athletic forty-something Englishman for the first time. He is sitting in a far corner of the studio in a plastic chair, watching everything, wearing smart casuals of impeccable cut; his open-neck linen shirt reveals a filigreed gold chain. I already know what he looks like naked and that his name is Tom. I feel exactly the same jolt of sexual jealousy as if Damrong were still alive:
Tom, you're just amazing. I don't think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can't.
Don't worry about that. There wouldn't be any fucking point, would there?
Why is he here?
On the way back to Sukhumvit I tell the FBI I have to pick Lek up from the hospital, where he has his monthly check. Kimberley immediately assumes he must be HIV positive and considers taking precautions, like getting out of the taxi and taking another, so I explain he's in perfect health. The checkup has to do with his gender reassignment. Basically, the procedure is not to cut his goolies off all at once but to ease him into his new identity using the estrogen. The surgery is almost the last stage. Now the FBI is a helpless doomed creature caught in an overwhelming mudslide of curiosity and cannot help staring at him when he gets into the backseat next to her. "You're so beautiful," she tells him, taking in his long black hair parted in the middle, his big oval eyes with just a hint of mascara, his gaunt high cheeks, the adolescent litheness that is still upon him.
"Lork?" says Lek, trying to catch my eye.
As she gets out of the cab at the Grand Britannia, there's a catch in her throat: "My first angel."
Back at the station I'm thinking about the Englishman named Tom and trying to work out what the hell he was doing at Yammy's atelier, when my cell phone rings.
"It isn't going to happen," the FBI says.
"What?"
"We're not going to let him go through with it. I'm having nightmares about the knife, and I'm not even asleep yet. Ugh!"
"Of course he's going through with it. For a true transsexual, the surgery is the most important day of his life. It is the birth of his real self."
"It isn't going to happen," the FBI says in that tone Americans use when they intend to bomb the future into submission. "He's too beautiful. Give me his phone number."
"No," I say, and close the cell.
15
Next day Lek comes to see me at my desk at about four in the afternoon. He has something of the weary professional about him, which he manages to feminize by passing his hands deftly through his long inky hair and shuddering. He has not been able to resist adding a touch of rouge to his cheeks. He takes out a yaa dum aromatherapy inhaler and sticks it into his left nostril.
"I've been chasing leads all day," he explains, switching nostrils, "and it's hot and stinky. That whore has been everywhere, really everywhere, but she never stayed long. I tried to follow what her ex-husband, that American Baker, told us about her, and he was basically right. She was steadily working her way upmarket."
"Was she attached to any bar at the time she died?"
"That's what I'm coming to. She'd done Soi Cowboy, Nana, and Pat Pong, where she was one of the best earners on the street. Then she moved to the Parthenon Club." A pause while he searches my face.
"The Parthenon," I repeat, swallowing. I guess it was inevitable, but it hardly simplifies the case.
He looks at me to make sure I'm aware of possible obstructions to further inquiries.
"And? Who did you talk to there?"
"I needed a disguise, didn't I?"
"Lek, what did you do?"
"Pretended I was looking for work. How else was I going to get anyone there to talk to me? If I'd told them I was a cop, you would have had the male half of Bangkok's HiSo on your back."
"They take on katoeys?"
A proud pout. "Of course. No bar is complete without us these days."
"Who did you talk to?"
"A low-ranking mamasan. I told her Damrong was my cousin, and I was using the connection to look for work. She told me Damrong worked there for the last two months. She said she didn't know why Damrong hadn't turned up for work recently-she assumed it was because Damrong had found a highflier to look after her. That's what all the girls and boys at the Parthenon are looking for, of course."
"You didn't find out which members she'd been with? Anyone special in her life?"
"I had to keep it all on a gossipy level, you know, emphasizing my cousin's amazing success in her work. The mamasan didn't exactly spill her guts, but she did let on that Damrong had been the favorite of two club members."
"Farang or Thai?"
"One was farang, the other Thai."
"You got their names?"
"No. If I'd started asking questions like that, I would have blown my cover."
"Right."
"By the way, that female farang in the cab yesterday-is she a hundred satang to the baht?"
"The FBI? Why?"
"She got hold of my number from the station switchboard and says she's interested in gender reassignment and wants to take me out to lunch to discuss it with me. I told her F2M is very complicated and nothing I'm going through has any relevance to her case, but she insisted, and out of greng jai to you, I said I would go."
I am blinking rapidly. "When's the date?"
"Tomorrow."
"I'd like a full report," I say, not meeting his gaze.
I'm pondering and frowning, not sure if there is going to be any way to penetrate the Parthenon Club without committing professional suicide and wondering if this is the case that will finally reveal my secret martyr complex, while I take the stairs down to the cells. The word from the turnkey is that the farang Baker is more than ripe for interrogation.
He is sitting in a peculiar position at the end of his bunk with his forehead pressed so hard against the bars, he seems welded to them.
"He's been like that for hours," the turnkey says. "He stopped eating and drinking. I think we've broken him already."
I nod for him to open the cell door. I tell him to leave it open and to disappear from view, while keeping an ear out in case the farang turns violent. When a personality splits like this, you never know which way the particles are going to fly.
I step inside the cell, which is to say I step inside the psychology of its inmate: a meltdown at the center. Reaching out with open hand, I grab the hair at the back of his head and pull him away from the bars. He is shivering and twitching like a rabbit. I have to caress his head and face to calm him down. The bruise under his left eye is healing well but has turned dark. Now he'
s looking at me with helpless eyes. I grab a chair and sit directly opposite him on his bunk.
"Why are you here, Dan?"
A blink. The challenge of verbal communication is lifting him from a mood that is sustainable only in solitude. It is, of course, exactly solitude combined with classic Thaicopparanoia that has broken him. He blurts and blabbers at first.
"Why am I here? Because you put me here. Because you're a Thai cop who's found a fall guy and doesn't give a damn about truth, or justice, or freedom, or democracy. You're all about sending me to death row so you can get on with the next case. So I ran away, and now you have an even better excuse."
"You know a lot about the Thai system of justice?"
Bitterly: "I've been here four years, man. I've seen a lot. You don't have a justice system."
"If it's so dreadful, why are you in Thailand?"
Suddenly: an avalanche of words that must have accumulated in his feverish brain during the couple of days he's been down here. His tongue races to keep up with the thoughts:
"I'm here because there is no such thing as rehabilitation in the free world: one criminal conviction and you're out, no jobs above subsistence level for you. I'm here because marriage doesn't work. I'm here because I'm bald and almost middle aged-sounds silly, but I haven't come across a single Thai girl who gives a damn if I'm thirty or forty, bald or not, divorced or not. You're a nonjudgmental people, and it's taken me four years to find out why. You've got a massive underground hell called the prison system that devours anyone who falls off the tightrope. It's amazing, it's the most outrageous institution in the world. It isn't really a prison service — it's a Stone Age money factory owned and run by cops and prosecutors. No one is safe. It could happen to anyone, Thai or farang, male or female, old or young: you're walking down a quiet street one night, a cop emerges from nowhere, plants an Ecstasy or yaa baa pill on you, and takes you off to jail. You have a choice: pay his fee for freeing you, or watch the system gobble up the whole of the rest of your life. In your society there is only one judgment to be made: has he fallen into the pit or not?"