Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  He grunts, and a native garrulity takes over. “I was early thirties, getting over a relationship, came here for a ten-day vacation, met Damrong, caught her disease.” I flash him a look. He waves a hand. “Just a manner of speaking. The disease in question used to be called passion. The only officially sanctioned form of happiness known to the West: being in love. What a con. I was gaga. Of course I sent her all the money I could so she wouldn’t rent her body to another man. Of course I believed every promise she made about that. Of course she lied her head off. Of course she fucked every dude who was willing to pay her price while I was trying to set up a computing business in Fort Lauderdale for us to live happily ever after. Of course I went through all the damned paperwork U.S. Immigration threw at me, of course I married her, of course she came to live with me in the States, of course it didn’t last a full year. Of course she’s the only woman who has ever reached me that deeply. Of course it’s because she had a better grasp of reality. Of course, of course, of course.” Waving a hand: “I’m Mr. Average Farang. I got caught the same way they all do, doesn’t matter if you’re French, Italian, German, British—whatever, it’s the same dumb story, over and over again. I don’t need to tell you that, right?”

  It seems to have been a genuine tantrum, with the usual moment of disorientation straight afterward: Did I really just say all that? He grinds his jaw with the determination of the righteous. “Yeah, that’s how it was with me and her. Mistress-slave syndrome. Want to know how I got along with my mother?”

  “No, thank you,” Lek says with a look of revulsion and a glance at me to take it from there. Estrogen doesn’t increase attention spans.

  “You sound very bitter, Mr. Baker,” I say with a compassionate smile which he disregards by turning his head away.

  “Comes with the territory, doesn’t it? Know any farang men in my position who aren’t bitter?”

  I shrug. “Cultural conflict has its casualties.”

  He turns to stare incredulously. “Cultural conflict? You mean between a Western man with his pathetic need for a safe womb to crawl into and a Thai whore looking for a gold mine to exploit? I guess you could call it cultural conflict if you were giving a seminar to anthropology students.” He scratches his head and shakes it. “Total fuck-up is what I call it. Of me, by her. Period.”

  I check Lek to see if he is as intrigued as me. I think he is. When a psyche is fragmented, it often experiments with different postures. What posture should we provoke now?

  “Mr. Baker, let me be frank. I have checked the national database here in Thailand and sought assistance from the FBI.” I smile.

  Knowing that I know causes a new Baker to emerge from the old. He snaps his head around to stare at me, then smirks. “The Bureau? They told you about her little scam?”

  “Only the criminal record part. I’d love to hear the details.”

  The smirk becomes a permanent fixture, proclaiming, I think, a defiant pride. “So I did six months’ jail time after remission, for pimping. She got deported. That’s how it panned out, but it wasn’t what I had planned when we married.” He pauses to stare at the topless girl in the poster for a couple of beats. “I was still in the walk-into-the-sunset, midpubescent phase when she came to live with me in the States. We hadn’t been married a month, though, when she disappears for most of one Saturday night. I’m calling emergency services, I’m going out of my mind thinking she’s been raped or murdered or both, or been run over, all the crap that drives a man crazy when he’s in love. Then she walks in about four in the morning with a great big grin on her beautiful, cynical face and lays out more than a thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Sheeze!”

  This last is a kind of yelp, caused by severe backbite of heartburn. He has to gulp a couple of times. “She didn’t care so much about the money as the power, the very liberating act of walking out at about seven P.M. in a big strange land and coming back more than a thousand dollars richer a few hours later. That turned her on a lot more than I could.”

  He has to pause to steady himself, then appears to regain sovereignty over his mind. “She tossed me half the money and told me how it was gonna be. I’d never seen that side of her before. It was frightening and very unnerving. I cried like a baby for two whole days, but it didn’t affect her at all. She had seen men bawling like that plenty of times. No way was she going to change, and she wasn’t afraid of violence. I didn’t even threaten to hit her—she was way too tough for that. Kick her out? And spend the next months in mental torture wondering about what she was up to in the States?”

  He scratches his chest hair, lets a couple of beats pass. “After I’d quit bawling my eyes out, she started talking reality. She told me about her childhood. I mean, she told it like it is in a way you never hear Thai people talking unless you’re one of them. I started to see the world with her eyes. It was a total personal revolution for me, what it must do to your head, growing up like that. In the West all our problems are social and psychological these days. But suppose you were programmed in a totally different way, suppose your very existence was constantly under threat, and there was no way out—no way out. That was her message. She didn’t give a shit that she could make a lot of dough in the States—that didn’t alter the fact that all her people, everyone she had ever known and been fond of, they were still there, trapped, hungry, impotent.” Waving a hand: “At least that’s how she put it at that stage. She admitted she was in America to work, not to play at love. She said she had a family to look after. Turned out she was talking about her kid brother. I don’t think she gave a shit about anyone else.”

  A long pause filled with heavy sighs. He does seem to be going through something. “At first I only went along with it to keep her from leaving me.”

  “You became her pimp?”

  “Not really, but the law saw it that way. In the technical sense I suppose I was, but that lady didn’t need a pimp. What she needed was my house and me as a secretarial service.” A pause while he fidgets with something on the table. “Then later to hold the video camera while I was standing in the wardrobe and she was performing with the john.” Looking me full in the eye: “Within six weeks she had a full diary for every day, starting at lunchtime and going through to about two A.M. Word of an exciting new game spreads real quick in a small town in America. She had the local movers and shakers lining up—the male ones, that is—practically begging for the privilege of hiring her body. Big shots who owned chauffeur-driven limos arrived at our house in hired cars and taxis. Within a few months we were in a position to blackmail most of the leading local lights, including judges and prosecutors. That’s why I only did six months’ jail time and she only got deported. It was a deal. If they’d have gotten heavy, we would have started flashing video clips. As it was, we made three hundred thousand dollars before they closed us down.”

  He’s walking around his small room, fidgeting with this and that, pretending the poster of Angkor Wat needs adjusting. My eyes rest on it: the vast, sinister jungle temple with its five phallic towers at the center. I think we have arrived at yet another psychologically interesting moment, when there’s a knock on the front door. Baker cannot disguise his relief and says with an apologetic smile, “That’s my lesson.” Hurriedly he grabs a T-shirt from a drawer and pulls it on.

  I nod for him to open the door, and Lek and I both examine the new arrival: a slim Thai in his early twenties, respectfully dressed in white shirt, black pants, and polished black lace-up shoes, an innocence in his eyes that you rarely see in farang of that age. What unreal ambition has brought him here today, probably on his day off from some dreary office job? What stories has he believed about the global economy and language skills? When he sees me, he makes a respectful wai and says, in excruciatingly correct English, “Excuse me, am I interrupting a conference?”

  “We’re just going,” I say in Thai. In English to Baker: “Perhaps we might return at a more convenient moment?”

  Baker gives a helpless shrug to
say, A Thai cop can make me do whatever he likes.

  “Say seven P.M.?”

  “Tomorrow evening would be better. I’ve got another private lesson at six, and then another at nine, plus I’m working at the school all day.”

  Lek and I stand up. “Tomorrow then.” I cough apologetically. “Mr. Baker, I’m afraid I must ask for your passport in the meantime. I will return it to you tomorrow.”

  The Thai student makes big eyes. He hadn’t realized I was a cop, and to see his respected ajaan hand over his passport suddenly changes the dynamics. He’s ready to flee from Baker, so I say to him in Thai, “Just an immigration matter,” and smile. He smiles back with relief. Downstairs I slip the guard another hundred baht on condition he keeps an eye out for Baker’s comings and goings.

  In the cab back to the station, I check Baker’s passport, then pass it to Lek. We exchange a shrug. Baker was out of the country at the time of Damrong’s killing. It would seem he flew to Siam Reap in Cambodia, the nearest airport to Angkor Wat, several days before the event and did not come back until after the approximate time of her death. Damrong owned an American and a Thai passport; both documents indicate that she had not left Thailand for more than a year before her death. Forget Baker.

  7

  Without any leads other than Baker, I decide to spend quality time with the ladies in my life. I take my mother, Nong; Chanya; and the FBI for a buffet supper at the Grand Britannia on Sukhumvit, just near the Asok Skytrain station. A gay waiter charms Chanya with his concern for her condition and makes her laugh when he admits he envies her. The FBI also is solicitous and insists on fetching her whatever food she wants, while Nong casts a shrewd eye over the clientele.

  “See that whore from Nong Kai? Her name is Sonja—she works at Rawhide. I’ve been trying to persuade her to work for us, but she’s happy where she is. You know how they are.”

  “Friends are everything. If she has plenty at Rawhide, she’ll never come work for us. How can you blame her? They’re as lost as farang in Bangkok—even more so, since they don’t have any money.”

  “Well, she certainly seems to have her customer under control. She’s giving him the marry-me treatment. Look, she’s brought her family down from Isaan to meet him.”

  “Must be serious,” I agree.

  A big muscular Australian in walking shorts, long white socks, and sandals, in his fifties with a gigantic beer gut, is bringing his plate back to where the girl, her mother, and a few other relations, who are probably siblings or cousins, plus a boy about five years old, have occupied the table next to us.

  “That’s her son by a Thai lover,” Nong explains in a whisper.

  The Australian tries to make conversation with the family who are keen to adopt him, but his true love is enjoying speaking her native tongue, a dialect of Laotian, and cannot resist gossiping with her family. Every now and then she casts the Australian a warm, comforting smile, presses his thigh with one hand, and says a few words to him in English, then returns with renewed enthusiasm to the gossip. The Australian perhaps does not realize it, but his future in-laws are behaving exactly as if they were at home in their wood house on stilts and sitting barefoot on the floor nattering, probably with the TV on at full volume and a dozen kids beating one another up in the background. Nong understands Laotian better than I do and has started to grin. When the FBI comes back with a plate of oysters for Chanya, my mother enthusiastically explains in English for Kimberley’s benefit:

  “Her aunt just asked what color the farang’s dick is, and her mother wants to know how they do it when he has that huge gut. The girl’s explaining that his dick is white most of the time, but after sex it turns bright pink. She says she asks him to take her from behind except on special occasions, because when he gets on top his flab kind of splodges all over her stomach like a ton of Jell-O and she gets indigestion in the middle of boom-boom. Anyway, it’s not usually an issue because most nights he’s too drunk and falls asleep on the sofa while she watches TV in bed. It has the makings of a successful marriage.”

  While Nong is talking, the family bursts into raucous laughter. The FBI looks down at her oysters. “Is this, like, normal suppertime conversation?”

  Chanya, Nong, and I share grins. “We are mostly peasants, children of the earth,” I explain. We all keep our heads down when the Australian starts to speak.

  “I wouldn’t mind knowing what you and your family are talking about, Sonja,” he says to his girlfriend with just a touch of chagrin. She has no idea about Western etiquette so decides to tell him straight, word for word, in good but somewhat wooden English. He turns pale for a moment, finishes his beer, and orders another. I admire his power of recuperation, though, when he says, “You’re gonna do just great in Queensland, Sonja, just great. Ever seen a dwarf-throwing competition?” He explains the sport to Sonja, who has a bright gleam in her eye when she translates into Laotian. The family listen with big eyes, then bombard her with a dozen questions about dwarf-throwing, which she translates into English. Do the dwarfs get paid? How much? How short do you have to be? My aunt’s older brother is only four feet ten, does that qualify? Can you gamble on it? Can throwing dwarfs get visas easily? Her family had been quite bored with him, but now they are warming. Delighted that he finally has a topic that interests them—he had tried income tax, the world economy, standard of living, his new Toyota four-by-four, his giant refrigerator, health care and life insurance, the Middle East, et cetera, without much response—he launches into plain tales of the outback, including ’roo-baiting and yarns about man-eating crocs and the lurid wounds inflicted by blue-ringed octopus and box jellyfish. Suddenly he’s a hit, and they have decided to welcome him into their hearts. “You’re half Isaan already,” the girl tells him. Beaming, he downs his beer in one gulp and orders another. Thailand’s not so different from Queensland after all.

  I stand up to fetch more seafood. Oysters, prawns, and shrimp sit in trays under an ice sculpture of a seahorse. Elsewhere in the middle of the huge room Chinese, Thai, Italian, French, Middle Eastern, and Japanese cuisine is piled high around a vast circular island. Standing near me are delegates to some convention with large name tags clipped over their hearts and Best Behavior software controlling their facial expressions. In their hygienic anonymity they form a quite distinct tribe, prompting me to ponder that perhaps Bangkok is located on some cosmic intersection where visitors from different galaxies mingle but never communicate. As I reach our table with a plate piled high with sushi and prawns, the FBI returns with ice cream for Chanya. She is fascinated by her, almost like a lover. I cannot take my mind off the case for long, though, and by coincidence (of course it’s not really coincidence, it’s cosmic intervention), just as I’m thinking about Damrong, my cell phone rings.

  “I can’t say for sure, but I might have something,” Lek says. “There might be more than one copy of the DVD.”

  I have to disguise my relief that the case might be moving again. “I’m so sorry,” I say to the table at large, “I’m going to have to dash.”

  When I take out my wallet to pay in advance, Nong makes me put it away, saying she’ll charge the bill to the Old Man’s Club as business entertainment. I check the FBI’s face to see how she likes benefiting from the profits of prostitution, but she’s enjoying the food too much to make the connection.

  Out in the street I use the Skytrain bridge to walk across the road, then take the escalator down to the new subway at Asok. It’s been open only a couple of years and still has a brand-new feel about it. I get out at Klong Toey, where Lek is waiting.

  “You’ll never believe this,” Lek says, excited and cautious at the same time, “and it may be a long shot, but there’s a rumor going around the clubs about a snuff movie with a masked man and a Thai whore. I tracked the story down to a katoey who’s famous all over Soi Four for having a HiSo lover.”

  The shantytown at Klong Toey is our biggest and in many ways our tidiest. Most of the huts are of similar size an
d height and the narrow walkways are kept riap roy, or spic and span, in true Thai style. There’s plenty of extreme squalor, of course, if you want to look for it, but generally people are getting on with their lives in near rent-free accommodations, which can be handy if you want to do a course in higher education, are a professional girl nearing the end of her shelf life, prefer recreational drugs to reality, or just plain hate work. Lek has been here before and takes me down a path that follows the railway track, with the endless line of wooden huts on our right: scratching dogs, shy cats, naked kids getting bathed in oil drums, teens with orange and green hair, families eating together in the cool of evening. “He’s an artist,” Lek explains. “That’s why the HiSo master likes him. I came to a party here once. Actually, he’s totally ban-nok, worse than me, but he has this creative streak, so he gets these upmarket lovers.” Ban-nok translates roughly as “country bumpkin” but is a lot more insulting. We stop at a front door that bears a magnificent dragon in scarlet on black. “See what I mean?” There’s a playful element in the rampant posture, the feminized, elongated claws, the malicious grin.

  “It’s very well done,” I say, which makes Lek beam with pride at katoey talent. He knocks on the door. “Pi-Oon, it’s me, Lek.” No answer, so Lek knocks harder. “He likes to smoke ganja, all artists do. Never touches anything else, not even alcohol most of the time, but he can go into a dope-trance for days.” Embarrassed in front of me, he knocks more aggressively, then, muttering Fucking katoey bitch, fishes out his cell phone. He speaks into it using his Isaan dialect based on Khmer, sounding much like a whore in a temper. “I told him I was bringing you,” he says, folding the phone and putting it away. “Now he’s all shit-faced from the ganja.” Then he offers me a pained smile. “He’ll open up in a minute. He has to get back from the moon.”

  Finally we hear sounds of life from the other side of the door. A couple of bolts are drawn back, and he opens a crack. Then he reveals himself in his full glory, wearing only a pair of cycling shorts: a surprisingly bony, masculine face with purple eyeshadow and lipstick, long ink-black hair drawn back in a ponytail in the ancient way, and a magnificent tattoo of a chrysanthemum adorning his hairless chest, where two small new breasts are budding. His gestures are exaggerated in the tradition of his tribe, but there’s something else: it is not difficult to believe there is a real woman behind the prizefighter’s features. When he drops the katoey posturing, he can seem genuinely female.