Bangkok 8 sj-1

by John Burdett

  "I'm going to have to practice, Sonchai, I missed five balloons last night. You don't mind? It'll be like old times. Did you ever tell your mother how you helped me? I didn't, I was afraid she might be angry with me for corrupting your young mind." She walks to a slim cupboard in the opposite corner and takes out a plastic lunch box.

  "I told her a few years ago. She thought it was funny. She wanted to know if it ever got any further than helping with your act. It didn't, did it?"

  "Sonchai, you were ten years old and I'm not that kind of woman."

  "My mother said no wonder I had a wild adolescence, when my first experience of a woman's private part was darts shooting out of it."

  "Not totally misleading, if you listen to the way some men talk about women. D'you hate women?"

  "No. But you hate men."

  "Let's not go into that. I hate men in the abstract. You I like. You helped me perfect my act." She has taken an aluminum tube out of the lunch box together with a pack of condoms. She hands me the condoms while she lies on a futon on the floor. While she is fitting the tube, I cross the room and blow up the condom until it is about a foot long, then I tie the end and hold it out. Kat has prudishly arranged her dress so that she can shoot the darts without flashing me, like an archer from a fortress. I hold the condom as far from my face as I can while she fits a dart into the tube. Suddenly, without any sign of movement from Kat, the cock-shaped balloon bursts and a dart sticks in the plaster. There are pinpricks and chips all over the plaster.

  "I never understood why you couldn't use a dartboard."

  "The customers always move the balloons a little bit. I think I make them nervous. I need to know how to hit something wobbly." She giggles. "Anyway, there's a certain satisfaction in killing cocks."

  "Was it Bradley made you hate men?"

  "Shit." The dart had missed and now it was stuck in the wooden door, really some distance away. I had noticed a slight movement in her lower abdomen this time, in the region of her ovaries. "My first and only husband made me hate men. I'm the jealous, possessive type and he was a motorcycle taxi driver. All over the city, especially to the bars and massage parlors. I don't think there was a whore he didn't screw. I was seventeen years old, for god's sake. Thai men claim to like women, but they only like fucking. Not even that, they love anything forbidden, new, unused. They're terrible for underage girls, far worse than any farang. He was like that. I'm a one-heart woman. I give it once, then I don't have it anymore. So I decided I would never have another man. I learned to shoot darts from my pussy instead. I shoot down a whole army of inflated dicks just for practice. Of course, there's always another army waiting to be shot down."

  "But you did know Bradley?"

  "Yes, I didn't want to talk about it in Nana. Yes, I knew him. An American marine. It's a little painful to talk about. He persuaded me to give men a second chance, after all that time. Five years ago he was a regular visitor to Nana. You know, one of those foreigners who come and can't believe their eyes, get addicted for a few months, then the charm starts to wear off. He was quite a character, though. A man like that, magnificent and very black-who could forget him? He told me he was different. I'm a sucker, aren't I? I'm surprised you didn't find anyone else who recognized his photograph."

  "How many women stay five years in the bars? Tell me how he was different."

  "He was respectful. He didn't have that mixture of lust, fear and contempt. He really seemed to like us women, as if we were people he could be friends with. He was very popular in all the bars."

  "He picked you up? He paid your bar fine?"

  Bang. A good shot! I saw the dart pierce the center of the condom and impale it against the wall, from which it now hangs shriveled and flaccid, all passion dead.

  "Certainly not. I told you, I don't go with men, not even to sell my body. This was different. I do private parties, that's how I really make my money, the floor show is just my shopwindow. I use an agent, and the agent tells the clients: 'Look, don't touch. This lady is not for sale. She does her act, she'll socialize, maybe even sit on your lap if you really want, but that's it.' Usually the agent is very strong about that, really makes sure the client has understood. Anyway, it happened five years ago that the agent called me to say he had a party for me, and the money was double what I usually charge. He didn't say why it was double, so I was suspicious. I said: 'Farangs?' and he said: 'No.' I said: 'You told them no sex?' And he said: 'Yes, yes, all understood, no sex.' "

  I've got into the swing of it now. The inflated condom was already in my hand, at arm's length. Kat paused and sat up slightly. "It was in the Dusit Thani Hotel. The suite on the third floor is for hire for private functions. Very expensive, I would imagine. That's where the party was. They even rigged up a revolving stage for me. This was soon after the first time they showed me on farang TV, and I think this party wanted the live version, exactly as they'd shown it on the documentary-it was the BBC, I think. So I do my act without paying too much attention to the clients. I have to concentrate on the balloons, after all. But how could I help but notice that a giant black man is there, with a lot of peasants?"

  She uttered the word with contempt. "Not even peasants, hill people. Tribesmen down from the mountains, getting filthy drunk and out of hand. When one tried to come up to the stage to touch me, I started looking for the way out. One of the tribesmen had a familiar face, as if I'd seen him somewhere, but I didn't know where, maybe the newspapers, I think he was one of those drug lords from the borderlands. He was the leader, he had this way of barking, and when he barked the others stopped whatever they were doing and listened. It was exactly like a movie, with some chief thug trying to control the other thugs. Two of them got so drunk, though, they were out of control, and their leader didn't seem to care too much-they were talking about, you know, having me onstage together while the thing was going round. In all my years in this game, I'd never allowed myself to get into such a situation, and I thought: Oh no, here we go. Mentally, I prepared myself for gang rape-it's a professional hazard and I thought it had to happen sooner or later."

  Another condom, another bang. "When they took out their guns and started comparing, I knew I was in for a brutal night. Then the black man stands up, comes to the stage, takes off his shirt-it was one of those tropical things, with pineapples and mangoes all over, and obviously it's enormous. He puts it around my shoulders and it comes down to my ankles." She laughed. "Then he says to the boys: 'She's mine, fellas, okay?' "

  She reached in the lunch box for more darts. "And these Stone Age creeps just looked at him. No one was going to mess with this black giant. He takes me into the dressing room and says, really gently: 'Better get out of here-how about a date tomorrow?' " She laughed again. "I'm not the swooning type, but I was thirty-six and wondering if I hadn't been a little hard on the opposite sex for the past twenty years. He had saved me from a nightmare, and he was just-well, frankly, irresistible."

  The practice was over apparently. She stood up to pack away the darts, the condoms and the aluminum tube.

  "How was it?"

  "How was it? Strange was how it was. I thought he was a real gentleman, he took me to dinner, treated me like a lady. He didn't seem in any hurry to go to bed with me. It was as though he wanted to find out something-I think maybe he was still trying to find out about Thai women-what makes us tick. We didn't go to bed together until the third date." She pursed her lips.

  "Would you mind telling me about that?"

  "About the sex? Is that a part of your investigation? I think he was disappointed. Like most men, he assumed I was something very special between the sheets, you know, as if I was going to have two vaginas or something? I kept hinting, explaining: Look, I developed the act exactly because I'm shy and not very good in bed-I don't know how to please a man at all-I don't know what men want."

  "But for you, how was it?"

  "Not like anything I've known before, but I'm not an expert. The girls say most men just want to get
it in, have their little spurt, then get it out again. Well, he certainly wasn't like that."

  "Could you try to be a little more specific?"

  Kat gives me a dirty look. "This turning you on, Sonchai? Want to know what it's like for a woman to be underneath a man like that? Actually, I think he must have been used to being adored. He lay there and seemed to expect me to do all the work. I think he was used to women drooling and lusting after him. Or maybe it's the way Americans have sex, I don't know."

  "How big was his penis?"

  She put a hand over her mouth. "Sonchai! It was normal size, I mean, if it was in proportion to him he would have torn me in two. Normal size, Sonchai, bigger than Thai men, same as a farang."

  "But you did make love?"

  "Of course. But only once, and I didn't enjoy it because I was dealing with this feeling that I'd disappointed him, that he was looking for some kind of extra-exotic, freaky sex-I felt inadequate, I suppose." She sighed. "Afterwards, just to please him, I asked if he wanted me to shoot darts." She laughed. "I must have suspected that's what he wanted, or I wouldn't have brought my darts, would I? A woman like me, you never know exactly what men expect. I got the feeling he wanted me to perform for him, to be his sex toy, but he never asked me to do anything. He wanted me to know what to do. He was being like a woman, in a way. Shooting darts is the only thing I do that interests men."

  "Did you perform for him? Did he say yes?"

  She nods sadly. "Yes. He came alive then. It turned out that he'd planned it. He'd even bought a dartboard and he positioned me on the bed-and he made a video, with close-ups and everything. He'd planned everything beforehand, but he hadn't wanted to ask me. I don't know if he was a gentleman or some kind of strange romantic. Everything had to be perfect, though, the lighting, the position of the camera-everything. That's when he got most excited, but we didn't make love again." A pause. "What I remember most was the silk."

  "Silk?"

  "Yes. Everything was silk, really nice quality with beautiful colors, and he tied a silk headscarf around my head, and tied one around his own head. He kept saying how good it felt on the skin, wanted me to feel it. It was quite nice on the skin, but it was just silk-it didn't turn me on. It was like some Middle Eastern show, him being so black in this purple scarf, and when I left he gave me the scarf. He wanted to give me money, but I refused. I was pretty depressed-I suppose I was in love with him, and wanted it to go on a bit longer-and I was disappointed, you know, that he wanted to make that video, that he was like the others, only more so, in a way."

  I take a photograph out of my pocket and hold it for her. Kat winces. "I've never met her, but I've heard about her. I mean, you know what people are like, they love to see you suffer? About two years after that night with Bradley, people started telling me about this woman he'd been seen with. The way they described her, that must be her. There can't be more than one in Krung Thep like that. What a body! You can't blame him for preferring her to me, can you? I can say it, now that it's so long ago: that's a fantastic-looking whore."

  "You never heard where she worked, what she did?" She shook her head.

  I'm about to leave when a whim makes me fish out the pictures of Warren. I show her the most recent: Warren with George W. Bush at a reception in the Rose Garden. Her eyes flicker between me and the photograph. Fear? More like consternation. She put a hand on my arm. "Is he involved? Sonchai, if he is you better forget about this case."

  "Why?"

  "Did you ever hear the phrase 'a special job'?"

  "Of course. He's one of those?"

  "He's the original special job. He used to be very well known in the bars. He would arrive once a month and the word would go round. He paid top dollar for any girl who would go with him, but none of them ever wanted to go a second time. They wouldn't talk about it, but you can guess. Farangs don't understand us Thais. They think if a girl sells her body, then she has no dignity, no limits. Actually, the opposite is often the truth. Women like your mother are very free spirits. Could you imagine Nong ever holding down a normal job? Or putting up with abuse from a man? A woman might sell her body because it's more dignified and safer than being married to a violent drunk who goes whoring without protection. Well, anyway, nobody went with him twice, at least that was what I heard."

  "And he stopped going to the bars, all of a sudden?"

  "In the middle of the nineties all those Russian women started appearing, from Siberia. The story was they would go with him time after time and put up with his things, whatever they were. They knew all about special jobs. Their pimps contacted him, so he didn't need the bars anymore. Those Siberians are real tough women. Must be the weather up there."

  Kat's hovel belongs to a project almost identical to my own, except that it is not near the river, or anything else of interest to the eye. I stand at the edge of a man-made desert, waiting for a cab, wondering if this wasteland is another Western import. Have we, in our headstrong grabbing of all things Western, inadvertently bought up pieces of the Sahara? Fortunately, I have brought my Walkman with me and listen to Pisit Sritabot's phone-in radio show while I wait. A female professor of sociology is talking in such authoritative tones about prostitution that Pisit for once forgets to interrupt.

  "It's an unfortunate word in that everyone has a different definition. These days a huge percentage of young women studying at university and colleges are subsidized by so-called sugar daddies-men, often farangs but usually Thai, who pay their expenses, even a kind of salary, in exchange for the right to sleep with the students whenever they choose. It is not illegal, but the girl is certainly selling her body. If the sugar daddy isn't rich enough to pay all her expenses, she'll have to take on another, perhaps as many as three. Often the girl will own three separate mobile telephones, one for each lover so she doesn't get the name wrong when one of them calls. Then you have the very naIve rice grower from Isaan who has heard about the money to be made in the big city, who spends a weekend hanging out at the bars on Sukhumvit, perhaps finds a man or two who hire her, only to discover she has not the slightest clue about foreign men, speaks not a word of English. She may be horrified and mystified by the very idea of oral sex and catches the next bus home to her farm in the far north, never to visit the big city again. Then you have experts, very talented and attractive women who can literally wrap men around their fingers. Such girls often receive income from three or more foreign men, who live overseas and of course are unaware of each other, who are paying her to stay out of the bars until they arrive for their vacations. Of course, she continues to sell her body every night and is probably receiving a total income in excess of any middle-ranking professional, such as a lawyer or doctor. Then you have the girls who travel, often on false passports supplied by our local mafia, who also procure visas for countries like Britain and the U.S. Such girls, if they are gifted in their profession, may make as much as U.S.$180,000 a year in cities like London, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Paris, Hong Kong, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore. Of course they never pay tax, and usually they save a significant amount, so within a few years they return to join our wealthier classes. Then there is the girl who is caught in some loan scam, usually in order to pay medical bills for her mother or father, who finds herself trapped in a brothel in the country, or in Malaysia, who is in reality a sex slave all of whose earnings go to pay off the original loan, who may be required to service a man every twenty minutes while she is on duty, which may be for as long as twelve hours a day. Then there are the pool hustlers. Our girls cannot compete with Filipinas, who are world class, but they're improving all the time."

  "What's pool got to do with prostitution?"

  "Thai pool. The game is used as a hook. Not every farang likes go-go bars or wants to spend an evening drinking beer. Pool mops up the remainder of the market-shy men like it too, it provides a lead-in, a hobby in common. It can seem almost like a holiday romance, which happens to last an evening instead of the usual week."

  "I see."r />
  "There is really no comparison between the destinies, mind-sets or lifestyles of these different women, but because they are all prostitutes we inadvertently find ourselves talking about them as if they were in the same plight, which they are not. The truth is that prostitution fulfills many functions. It is a substitute for social welfare, medical insurance, student loans, a profitable hobby as well as being the path to that wealth which many modern women expect from life. It also brings an enormous amount of foreign currency to our country, which means the government is never serious about suppressing it."

  "I see," Pisit says again, in an unusually somber mood. "And we are talking about a significant proportion of Thai women?"

  "Huge. When you consider that many women are ineligible by reason of age, or lack of physical charms, it begins to look as if perhaps twenty percent of women in Krung Thep who are in a position to sell their bodies do so. If you include the sugar daddy phenomenon and the overseas industry, which is very very big, the figure must be even higher."

  "Are we as a nation dependent on this trade?"

  "I don't want to exaggerate or paint these women as heroes, but it's true that without their work we would all be a little bit poorer."

  "Is there something about Thai women that leads them so easily into the trade?"

  Laughing: "Well, farangs especially say how beautiful we are and we don't seem to have the same hang-ups as many Western women. The West tries to turn the act of sex into a religious experience, when to us it is no more than scratching an itch. I'm afraid we're not as romantic as we seem. And perhaps we are a little strange. In other countries such as Japan and South Korea, prostitution declined dramatically as the economy improved. When our economy improves, the number of prostitutes tends to go up rather than down."