by John Burdett
I don't want to cause offense at her time of mourning, so I let her play for time while the last of her guests make their getaway, then she leads us into the flat. She has not troubled to hide the roulette wheels; there are five of them. Cleverly, she has left small piles of cash next to one of the wheels. She glances from the cash to me to Lek to the cash.
"This is a very serious offense that carries a prison sentence," Lek tells her sternly, while taking a peek at the deceased, who is lying with his arms folded over his chest in a brightly varnished pine coffin: the gaunt, humble face of a workingman. Indeed, he is so gaunt, I'm wondering if Nang Chawuwan starved him to death. An ignoble thought, perhaps, but that is one skeletal cadaver.
"Sorry," Nang Chawuwan says.
Unable to maintain stern for very long, Lek stares with infinite compassion at the corpse. "Poor thing's lonely already," he says, "I can feel it."
A sniff from Nang Chawuwan. "That's why I did it, I had to make it worth everyone's while to keep him company. How else was I to fulfill my obligations as a wife?"
Lek finds this question too troubling and turns to me for instructions. I am afraid I am somewhat transfixed by the corpse, like a cadet with his first cadaver. Death is hitting me strangely this week.
"Take the money," Nang Chawuwan says, losing patience and jerking her chin at the cash next to the wheel.
"We don't take money," Lek says, again checking my eyes.
"That's right," I confirm. I smile. "Better put it away-it's a little incriminating lying there like that."
Nang Chawuwan makes big eyes. "You don't take money?" A grin breaks over her features. "I knew my Toong was a good man, but I never knew he had that kind of karma. Imagine, busted at his funeral by two cops who don't take money!" She shoves the cash down her bra for now. "He was practically an arhat, a saint, and this proves it."
"You'll have to give us your ID card," I say, "and if anyone asks, this was a serious bust that went wrong because we didn't know there was a fire escape."
"Right."
"And you're never going to do this again, are you? I mean, you're not going to call around to all your guests to tell them the coast is clear as soon as we're gone, right?"
"Of course not."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"Just this time then.", Locking eyes with me for a moment: "Are you sure you won't take some money? I would feel safer."
"No," Lek says, all firm again and pointing a long finger at her. "You'll have to trust us."
Old Toong's excellent karma has her all excited. She's remembering all over again what a fine man she married and how well he took care of her, even after death. It's not often a ghost gets so lucky at his own funeral casino. Indeed, Nang Chawuwan is now so fortified with his spiritual power, she has fished her cell phone from out of her costume and started calling the guests back before we're out the front door.
While we're walking down Soi 26, though, in search of a cab, I'm starting to feel dizzy and have to stop at a cafe. Normally I don't drink on duty, but I need a beer and order one. Lek orders a 7UP, then goes to a street vendor who is pushing his glass-and-aluminum trolley along the gutter. I watch while the vendor opens the hinged glass, stabs at a sour green mango, dunks it onto a cutting plate, and slices it up so fast his hands are a blur. Now he's using the funnel end of the steel plate to slide the slices into a plastic bag. He chucks the first plastic bag into a second, into which he adds pink sachets of chili, salt, and sugar for the dip. The final touch is a cocktail stick with which to eat the mango slices.
"What's the matter?" Lek wants to know when he returns, chewing.
I felt the blood drain from my face, and I'm sure my skin was gray as I sat down hard on a plastic seat outside the cafe. It's a street that caters mostly to the housing needs of workers in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of katoeys around, a lot of farang, and girls in jeans and T-shirts on their way to work.
"Death," I say. "Every cop builds up a resistance from the first day on the beat. You can lose it, though, just like that." I snap my fingers while he makes big eyes. He does not understand, and there is no way I'm going to confess to a shameful event of last night that the bust has brought back to mind. I swallow the beer quickly but fail to block the memory:
I woke up with a jolt so hard, I could feel it in my joints. Chanya was my first thought, but she was already awake, staring hard at the ceiling. She only does that when she's angry.
"It was her again, wasn't it?"
I waited as long as I could before saying, "Yes."
"Sonchai, I don't know how much of this I can take. I'd fight any living woman for you, but the dead? D'you know what you've been doing for the last half hour?"
I was unable to answer.
"You've been fucking her, haven't you?"
I turned my head away. "Yes."
"On and on. That's the third time in as many nights. Then you came. You're all sticky."
I didn't realize. Now the whole dream came back to me. Except that it wasn't a dream. It was a visit. I couldn't move for trembling.
With an effort my darling overcame her anger and went to fetch a damp cloth. She wiped me down as roughly as she could without removing surface skin. "A normal man has a real mia noi. You have to have a fucking dead one."
"I'm so sorry."
"This has been going on since you went to her apartment the last time, hasn't it?"
"I better have a shower."
"It's the middle of the night."
I went out to the yard to hose myself down like an elephant. We couldn't face each other this morning.
I finish the beer and stare at Lek.
"It's the Damrong case, isn't it?" he asks with that uncanny sixth sense of a katoey. I nod without meeting his gaze. "I want you to come to see my moordu, master, please?"
Lek discovered his infallible seer about a year ago and has been trying to get me to meet her/him ever since. Lek is convinced that he and I have been circling around each other for hundreds of lifetimes, fulfilling various intimate roles for each other: mother/father, sister/ brother, husband/wife. What he's particularly interested in finding out, though, is when I was last a katoey like him. It is a tenet of our Buddhism that all human souls go through the transsexual experience from time to time.
"When I'm stronger, Lek," I say, "not today."
While I'm paying for my beer and Lek's 7UP, my cell phone buzzes with a text message. I fish it out, read it, then show it to Lek. It's another from Yammy, the fifth this week:
I've found a mule so I won't have to carry myself. Please talk to the Colonel. I don't think I can take much more of this. I must practice my art. Yammy.
I groan, show the message to Lek, and put the phone away, only to take it out again because it's bleeping. This time the message is from the FBI:
You live in a magic-ravaged land.
19
Nok ordered me to arrive after eleven p.m., when the Parthenon would be at its busiest. The sofas are all occupied by men in dark suits with two or three overdressed girls to serve them. Nok, in her upholstered ballgown, is quite busy introducing customers to girls, taking men up to the second and third floors, returning to welcome yet more eager sperm-spenders. Even when I look directly at her, she avoids my eye. She did manage a quick grasp of my wrist as she passed by, however. It seems the big moment has arrived when the stage will finally be put to use.
The house lights darken, and an invisible orchestra is playing something saccharin-based from the fifties, the kind of music that justifies fifty girls in low-cut swimming costumes kicking their legs in unison. The show is a perfect copy of the stuff you see in old Hollywood movies featuring elaborate dance routines, with a finale that showcases the girl with the biggest breasts-these are truly gigantic-standing on a circular dais, and everyone else on their knees paying homage. Unlike in other bars five minutes from here, the choreography forbids the baring of nipples and pubic hair; it's almost family entertainme
nt. To keep up appearances, Nok has provided me with three young women who are delighted that I speak Thai despite my somewhat Occidental features, and they have been nattering to me about their lives to pass the time. I think they are aware that I am the mamasan's man, however, because not one of them has made a single erotic pass. Finally, when the show has reached its inevitable crescendo and people are clapping in a distracted kind of way, Nok comes up beside me to ask if I want any of the girls sitting with me. I say no in a polite, embarrassed tone, and the girls immediately disappear. Nok takes me up to the second and third floors, where we go through the same routine as on my last visit. She then ostentatiously takes me to one of the private rooms and locks the door. She leans with her back against it, thrusting her Louis XV bosom at me.
"I thought we were going to the secret rooms."
She raises a finger to her lips. "Don't worry, I have a key card." She dips into the depths of her gown to show me a plastic card with a magnetic strip. "The doorman owes me some favors. I told him you are my very special boyfriend and I wanted to make love with you in one of the secret rooms. This card is the master key: it opens all the doors over there." I smile. "Maybe you'll change your mind about having sex with me when you see the room."
She leads me down a fire escape to a utility area on the ground floor, then uses the key card to open a drab door that leads into a heavily carpeted area and a lift with a padded red-leather door. The lift also has a thick red carpet and zips up to the top floor in seconds.
The doors open out into a fascinating playground. TV monitors show alternating scenes of Paris, Venice, Rome, and fellatio. Nok shows how to change channels to get the erotic image of your choice: any position from the Kama Sutra and many more not contemplated by even that optimistic text. The ceilings are high, gilded but less ornate than the public area. All in all there has been an input of improved taste in the decor, with less emphasis on velvet and crimson. The centerpiece is an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, from which steam rises in elusive wisps. It is amoeba shaped with plenty of Davids, Zeuses, and Poseidons slouching around the edges and a couple of live nymphs naked and splashing each other. I guess they got active when they heard the lift arrive. Nok waves to them through the magic mist, and they wave back.
"This is my boyfriend," she explains.
"Want to share him?" No.
She tosses her head with a defiant smile and leads me by the hand down a corridor off the pool area. Silence save for the bustling of her gown and dripping water from the pool. I count only three doors here, and Nok confirms that there are indeed only three private rooms. There isn't enough space for more.
I see what she means when she opens one of the doors. The room must be more than a thousand square feet with a large kidney-shaped Jacuzzi in the middle. Towels, soaps, gels, and massage lotions with Parisian pedigrees are neatly set out around it, and there are mirrors everywhere. On high shelves what look like priceless antiques in porcelain and jade stand guard. My eyes rest for a moment on a jade reclining Buddha of exquisite workmanship about eighteen inches long, which amounts to a lot of jade. "Everything's authentic," Nok says, following my gaze. The bed, which is larger than king size, waits about ten yards away. What impresses, however, are the LCD monitors, some of them enormous, that populate the walls like paintings. I see there are plenty of closed-circuit cameras too. I guess that armed with a remote one could zoom in on genital activity, whether one's own or someone else's, from any point in the room. We exchange a glance, Nok and I.
"This is Tanakan's room," she confesses, finally bringing herself to pronounce her tormentor's name.
I'd not heard her attribute any of the three private rooms to any particular member before; now that she has done so, many things clarify. I want to ask more, but she takes my hand to the edge of the giant Jacuzzi and starts to undress me. "We can at least bathe together," she says. I want to refuse, but her tone has changed from erotic banter to sad and needy. When I am naked, she quickly strips herself, leaving her gown in a heap by the side of the Jacuzzi, and pulls me behind her into the warm water.
"He brought you here often, didn't he?"
She looks away. "You're so intuitive. That's how you survive, isn't it? Pure instinct. I believe you when you say you come from a poor background. Only the poor and people in jail develop such instincts."
She sighs. "Yes, a lot. At one time I was his favorite. He has a kind of clockwork lust. Each girl lasts almost exactly six months, before he dumps her and finds another."
"But I thought-"
"I know what I told you. I have my pride. He was a sadistic bastard, but he was also"-she waves a hand — "incredible."
"Damrong took him away from you?"
She gives me a sharp look. "It doesn't work that way with the X members. The men call the shots." A sigh. "I was coming to the end of my six months anyway. The mamasan told him about a new girl. I got the push the next day. But Damrong was very gracious about it, and she did give me half the money he gave her on her first night. A real pro and a good heart. It was a joke between us that she took my Saturday-night whipping for me."
Suddenly, without warning, the water jets all around the circumference of the huge Jacuzzi switch on at full power. My heart rate doubles, and Nok is in my arms, naked, wet, scared, pressing her face into my shoulder. "It's okay," I say. "We must have triggered a switch or something."
She clings to me for a full minute before I can disentangle her and set her down again. I have to let a few beats pass while she recovers. "You don't know him," she says by way of explanation.
I let a couple more beats pass. "Six months is quite a long time to be intimate with someone. You must have talked about more than the price of massage oil." Her pain is haunting and far more attractive than her standard seduction routine. I hold one of her fingers under the water, which causes her to flash me a glance. "You were in love with him, despite his sadistic tastes?"
"He knows how to do that. How to make a woman have strong sexual feelings toward him. How to make her lust for him."
"A lot of men would like to know how to do that."
"With his money and power, it's not so difficult. Little by little he takes over your whole life until there is nothing but him. You become obsessed with him, whether you want to or not. A lot of women like to be forced to focus. I suppose I'm one of them." Looking away at the reclining Buddha: "I guess what makes it all bearable is feeling his pain, even while he's hurting you. It's a kind of twisted love, I suppose."
"Is that what happened to Damrong?"
A wan smile. "No. She was different. She was stronger than him." A quick glance at me, then away: "That's why she had to die, isn't it?" She suddenly decides to duck down, then rise up again with the water dripping from her body, as if she has been baptized.
"I don't know," I say. "That's why I'm here. I think Tanakan's psychology is the key. You must have learned something about him."
"Wait," she says. I watch while she gets out of the Jacuzzi. As with the exquisite vases and jade works, her body and limbs are in perfect proportion, just like Damrong's. "Let's have some music." She goes to an electronic touchpad near the door, and a long, low note seems to emerge from everywhere. I recognize a Zen flute, with its long, dry, haunted yearning for infinity. She comes back to the Jacuzzi, smiling. She beckons for me to put my head under water, where the sound is still more haunting; a liquid pleading for a borderless eternity whose center is everywhere.
She nods with a grave expression and picks up where the conversation left off. "Oh, yes. He's smart enough to realize that even a whore needs something to go on if the affair is going to last six months. He's quite good at sharing his heart." Her left hand emerges from the water for a moment, caresses my chest, before giving up and returning to the water. "That's the other side to him, what makes you forgive his rage when he fucks you. You have to understand, he's no charging bull. More like a python waiting to strike."
"So, who screwed him up?"
"I think Thai society did. His father was a Chinese businessman who operated on the borders between Thailand, Burma, Laos, and China."
"Opium?"
"I think so. Tanakan didn't go into specifics, I think his father traded whatever he could sell. Jade was one of his principal plays." She waves a hand at the high shelves. "Tanakan is a world authority on jade."
"I see. And his mother?"
"A Thai whore, of course. She was third or fourth wife, I can't remember which. All the wives lived together in a big house in Chiang Rai, and he and his mother came last in the pecking order. He showed me a photograph of her. I thought that meant he was really serious about me, but when I checked with the other girls who had been with him, they told me he showed them the picture as well. She was incredibly beautiful. You can see it, even in the snapshot. One of those Isaan girls, you know?"
I nod. The rare Isaan beauty, product of hardship like a wild rose growing out of a crevice, is one of those phenomena people in the Game often talk about. It is as if nature takes revenge on a thousand years of feudal repression by occasionally producing fruit of a quality no upper-class girl ever comes near.
"According to him, she was hard as nails. She didn't show a lot of affection, but she knew how to get enough dough out of his father to send her son to the best schools. Of course, everyone in his class knew what his mother was. He developed a need to win at any price." She waves an elegant hand to take in the priceless vases on the shelves, the jade, the astonishing opulence. "He's proud of that. He thinks his mother made a real man of him, a warrior. He doesn't think she screwed him up at all, merely prepared him for reality as she saw it. Maybe she was right. How should a woman like that-like me, for example-bring up a boy, knowing what we know about the world? Should we pretend it's all Disney?"