by John Burdett
“Sorry, I forgot to ask. When Fatima came to you she had already been taking hormones—estrogen I think you said—for some time. Was this something Bradley started her on?”
That frown again. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.”
“Didn’t you ask her?”
His mouth tightened. “I didn’t need to. She was taking estradiol, which is a plant-based estrogen widely used in the U.S. and Europe. It’s quite sophisticated. Most local estrogens are still made from the urine of pregnant cows. There’s no difference in effect, but some evidence to show that the synthetics like estradiol are safer.”
“In other words, left to her own devices, Fatima would have taken the local variant? It does look as if she was coached from an early stage, doesn’t it, Doctor?” A grunt. “That didn’t bother you?”
It seemed that I had finally succeeded in piercing the doctor’s urbanity. He abandoned the intermittent English phrases and broke out in pure Thai. “Bother me? That she was the creature of her lover? You’re talking like a farang, perhaps because you’re half farang. Which of us isn’t the creature of someone else? He was giving her a better life, the life she wanted, that was the only issue for her, and she was prepared to pay any price. Those were my patient’s subliminal instructions to me, the rest is just farang nonsense, bullshit they cook up over there to justify an army of consultants, all of whom cost the earth. Thank god Thailand hasn’t come to that yet.” A swallow, then in a more temperate tone: “Do I really have to remind you what kind of life we offer to penniless illegitimate half-castes, Negroid half-castes, in this land of compassion?”
“Thank you, Doctor. Sorry for one last question, it really is the last: Did you have any idea how Bradley was able to afford you?”
I watched carefully for signs of insecurity and found none. Dr. Surichai simply shrugged. “He was an American. Americans have ways of getting hold of money, even if they’re poor. Perhaps he had a rich relation or something? It wasn’t my business to ask. He paid my bills regularly, on the dot.”
“About how much? Roughly, I don’t need the exact figure.”
Dr. Surichai rubbed his jaw. “Well, I had to charge for all the extra time spent with Bradley, all those two-in-the-morning conversations when he’d woken up with some new idea, or some aesthetic issue that was nagging him. About one hundred thousand U.S.”
“Compared with how much for a more average client with no lover to complicate things?”
“Maybe five percent of that.”
“Five percent? You and Bradley really went to town on Fatima, didn’t you?”
“Like I say, he was obsessed and could afford it.”
Jones is quiet for a long while after I finish. We’re almost at the outskirts of Krung Thep when she says: “That’s what you saw the other day at Warren’s shop? You took one glimpse close up and saw she was a transsexual? I’m a woman and I couldn’t tell. Even now, if I didn’t know and I spent a day with her, I don’t think I would realize. But you saw it and understood the case right away, didn’t you?”
I raise my hands, then let them drop. “The whole case, no. The outline perhaps.”
“You’re gonna tell me it’s your meditation makes you so sharp?”
“Not meditation. I’m from the street, like her.”
“Is that what it takes for a woman to turn you on, she has to be from the gutter? Don’t answer that. So, we have a designer victim?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And a business partnership intended to produce product after product, just like with the jade?”
“Life is cheap in this kingdom, and the life of a male whore particularly cheap.”
“Take a throwaway body, turn it into the object of your fantasies, do what you like with it, then when your sponsor the big boss says it’s time, let him use it in his own unique way, trash it and get ready for the next one? Play God and the devil both at the same time?”
“Yes,” I say, “exactly. What could be more intoxicating for men who, in their different ways, have had the best of everything? Except it didn’t work.”
“You give up your gender, your genitals, turn yourself into a eunuch for the man you adore, then find out what he has in mind for you.”
“By which time you have also found out he is a coward and terrified of snakes.”
“Yep, I would go for the cobras.”
“Me too.”
“But why and how the python? According to the autopsy, the python didn’t even hurt him, it just happened to be on the point of swallowing his head when you guys turned up.”
“Python and Khmer?”
“Python, Khmer and a video?”
Not for the first time Jones has surprised me with her acuity. I wait for her to continue the thought, but do not want to press the point myself. I think that after all she’s not as sharp as all that, when just as she’s about to drop me off at my project, she says: “Makes you wonder why Warren’s here at this time, doesn’t it? I mean, you’d expect him to stay away at least until you’ve finished your investigation.”
On an impulse I really ought to have suppressed, I took her hand and kissed it when I said good night. Her hand snapped over mine like a steel trap and for a moment she refused to let me go. I had to tug to escape, by which time a mean look had appeared on her face. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Sonchai, I’m just trying to get a hold on local customs, but would I be right in thinking that there weren’t too many professions open to you when you joined the workforce?”
“Whore or cop,” I snarl as I leave her.
42
A small bribe to the registration clerk at Charmabutra Hospital avoids those weeks of delays which attend upon inquiries through official channels. Now I have a photocopy of Fatima’s registration card: Ussiri Thanya, male, born in a remote village on the Burmese border in 1969, the year the Americans landed on the moon and Kissinger secretly met with North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris, desperate for a way out of the war. Ussiri’s official address in Bangkok was a remote suburb way off to the east: Room 967, Floor 12, Block E, King Rama I Building . . . Even on paper it sounded like a hovel. It’s the kind of journey best undertaken on a Sunday, when there’s not too much traffic.
It only takes me an hour and a half to reach the blocks of reinforced concrete which stretch for acres in every direction. Housing is a specialized racket, not really suitable for police entrepreneurs, who generally leave it to the Lands Department and planners. One of the most popular scams involves using an illegally low ratio of cement to sand. The building looks fine at first, but the concrete doesn’t have the resistance to the weather or, more importantly, to stresses and strains. Little by little holes appear, oxygen reaches the steel reinforcement, which starts to rust, someone in government has to decide on the optimum date for evacuation: as late as possible, obviously, since there will be a few thousand people to rehouse, but not so late that a big collapse causes too many deaths and an international scandal. I don’t remember ever hearing about this estate, which looks as if it contracted smallpox a long time ago. There are big holes in the walls of many apartments, bare steel visible in columns which surely must be on the point of collapse. No one has lived here officially for years, but there is a thriving community of squatters who seem to be camped out in the car parking areas. There are the inevitable card players sitting around cross-legged on the ground, women bent over cooking pots on gas burners, TVs hooked up somehow to the public lighting, men conscientiously downing mugs of rice whisky this sweltering Sunday morning, dogs with serious diseases, kids and washing. Nobody pays me any mind as I seek and find Block E and climb dangerously decrepit concrete stairs all the way to the twelfth floor—the elevators clearly gave out long ago. I’m breathing heavily by the time I arrive. Sweat drenches my shirt and pants. I’m itching all over from the heat, the exertion and perhaps some bugs endemic to old rotting buildings.
Room 967 is on a corner. The door yields to a single kick and I find myself in
a familiar box. Somewhere there must be a government directive on exactly how little space a Thai can be expected to occupy without going insane or turning communist. The dimensions are exactly the same as my own hovel’s, but Fatima enjoyed the inestimable advantage of windows on two sides. From both the urban sprawl stretches to the horizon. The earth is flat and there are no real landmarks, only the inevitable combination of large housing developments and squatter-type shacks and small houses with tin roofs, all of them a little unreal and insubstantial in the haze. The room itself looks as if it was simply abandoned by the occupant, without any attempt at an orderly removal. I guess no thief was going to climb twelve floors to check out a poor boy-whore’s belongings. Fatima, at this stage in his life, slept on a bamboo mat, smoked Marlboro Reds and joints, and kept photographs of young men dying of AIDS. They are studies in black and white pinned up on the walls: gaunt, skeletal, faces and chests bearing the insignia of Kaposi’s sarcoma. One of them has it in his eye. If I squat in a corner opposite the door, I have this gallery in view in both directions. Now I am Ussiri, long before he became Fatima, my back against the wall, staring stoned at my inevitable future: the failure of the immune system, chest complaints rapidly deteriorating into pneumonia and lung cancer, failure of the body to heal itself inside and out, progressive loss of mental faculties, brain tumors, bewilderment: this was all for—what?
On the floor near the toilet I find a registration card for a medical clinic not far from Pat Pong. I know the clinic, which, like just about every clinic in that area, specializes in tests for sexually transmitted diseases. It’s where the whores go for their monthly checkups.
In Soi 7, off Silom, I sit patiently in the small waiting room while women, men and transsexuals between the ages of eighteen and thirty come and go, either to give blood samples or to receive the results of the samples they gave yesterday. The vast majority are women. I can read their faces without strain. Only a few took risks this past month—perhaps giving in to a client who didn’t want to use a condom (so many farangs complain it kills their erections)—or perhaps permitting some other abuse; most of the girls are quite jaunty, confident they took the right precautions: rubbers, cold-water showers before and after, Listerine mouthwash.
HIV is not that easy to catch and the girls are mostly fanatics for hygiene, now that the government has done such a good job of explaining the mechanics of contagion. Things were different ten years ago, of course, when young Ussiri Thanya took pictures of his dying friends and waited in his hovel for his own death. Then it seemed as if the mystery disease was stalking Thailand in particular—Nong and I made many sad visits to friends in those special hospitals which look like Victorian insane asylums, and which are allotted to the poor to die in. Perhaps we rubbed shoulders with Fatima without knowing it?
The clinic is owned and run by an energetic middle-aged Thai man who steps incessantly in and out of his surgery in a white coat. Everyone who deals with whores on a daily basis learns whorecharm, which is to say a particular way of talking to the girls which neutralizes their tendency to irritability and generally makes them feel good about themselves. The doctor has mastered this art, which no doubt explains the success of his clinic (he is known to accept payment in kind from time to time, if a girl is having a bad month). He asks them when they last “worked” in a serious tone, resonant with respect, counsels against overuse of their assets in a way that gives them the giggles, makes them promise for the thousandth time always to use protection, sells them some Listerine and contraceptive pills and congratulates them on a successful test—“See you next month.” I wait until the room is empty before flashing my ID and asking for his records relating to Ussiri Thanya. To my surprise he recognizes the name immediately and takes me into his surgery, which consists of a red upholstered couch, packs of hypodermics, test tubes and bubblepacks. There is a large refrigerator in one corner.
“He’s still alive?”
“That surprises you?”
A thoughtful pause. “Not exactly. Even ten years ago most people didn’t actually die, though everyone on the game half expected to. He was one of those who developed a real phobia about it—it was a common reaction at that time. I remember he came for a checkup once a week at some stage. I told him, ‘Look, the disease takes a while to manifest, you may as well just come once a month,’ but he was neurotic. The strange thing about him was that you sometimes got the feeling he wanted to be infected. That he hated the suspense. Maybe he wanted to join his friends. The male whores got hit even worse than the girls. It was pretty bad. Nowadays not many true professionals get caught—it’s the amateurs, the weekenders who don’t take proper precautions, who still get infected. Generally, AIDS has had a fantastic effect on our national health. Very little syphilis or gonorrhea around here these days—not even very much herpes. And of course everyone is fanatical about the checkups.”
“His results were always negative?”
“Sure. Like I say, he was neurotic. He once told me he lost half his customers because he was so obsessed with disease it turned them off. He would bring his friends to see me, the ones who were too scared to have the test without someone to hold their hand. He was almost like a medic, he learned a lot about the disease. He was intelligent, he picked up the nature of the virus and could talk about it better than I could.”
“He had a death wish?”
A shrug. “That to me is a Western idea. Humans are the only animal which is aware of death, so you could say we must all have either a fascination with it or an inability to face it. If he’d had a genuine death wish he’d be dead, wouldn’t he? It’s not difficult for a boy whore to die in Bangkok, if that’s what he wants to do.”
“But he was strange?”
“Obsessed with the disease. Obsessed with not getting it, but no way was he going to change his profession, even if he could. Not a death wish, maybe a death obsession.”
“In the Buddhist sense?”
“Perhaps. He told me he meditated on death. It was the only reality. I got the feeling he was on the edge, you know? How many of your friends can you watch die when you’re eighteen years old?”
“When did he stop coming to see you?”
A quick glance at me, then away. “I’d have to check. I don’t think I’ve seen him for eight or nine years. Wait, I’ll check. It was before I got this damned computer, so I’ll have to look in the files.”
“It might not be that important. You never saw him with a black American? A very big man, a marine?”
“No. Never.”
“He never told you he was changing sex?”
Raised eyebrows. “That’s what he did?”
“Surprised?”
A frown. “Yes, surprised.”
“Why? It’s not unusual, is it?”
“No, not unusual, not around here. But you get a feeling for these creatures, the men as well as the women. They come in all shapes and sizes. Canny businesspeople some of them, on the game until they’ve saved enough capital to open a bar or a hairdresser’s. Others are the same inadequates you see on the streets all over the world, with not only their bodies for sale but their personalities as well—slaves. They’re the ones who go for the operation, generally. With no identity to speak of they have nothing to lose. He never struck me as like that. Oh, he was as gay as a lark, but he had a strong mind. A good head on his shoulders. He knew who he was.”
“Not a natural for the operation?”
“Look, I’m not a shrink, what do I know? I don’t even practice medicine anymore, I find it too stressful, so I only do blood tests.”
“There were pictures of boys dying of AIDS on the wall of his apartment. Some of them looked already dead.”
“That sounds like him.”
“I think he sat in his hovel staring at them for hours on end.”
“Of course he did.”
Out on Silom I pass a bookstore with a new biography of Pol Pot. There are aberrations on the Buddhist Path, just like any
other. Pol Pot was a monk before he decided to kill a million of his own people. Sometimes the reality of death becomes overwhelming—and compelling.
At River City I pause before taking the escalator to Warren’s shop. I’m nervous, without knowing why. Well, I guess I do know why. Fatima killed Bradley—and Pichai. I’m supposed to kill her, aren’t I? How to kill that boy who sat in a hovel exactly the same size as mine, crying for his dead friends, just like me, wondering what the hell it’s all about—just like me? When I steel my nerves to take the elevator, she’s not there. A different assistant, a very well-groomed young man who may or may not be gay, gives me a disapproving stare as I walk in. I make my excuses and leave quickly, relieved I don’t have to kill anyone today. Back in my hovel I am Ussiri again, back in his hovel, meditating on death. I bet he’d gone very deep into himself by the time he met Bradley.
Now the mind, in its inexplicable wandering, strikes off in a more practical direction. Monday, I use my mobile to call a clerk in the Lands Department who is amenable to persuasion. I promise him a thousand baht if he will make a few simple checks on his computer. He calls me back in half an hour with a very different address.
If you want to catch a whore at home, even a retired one, go in the morning. Old habits die hard. After more than a decade in retirement Nong, for example, never rises before eleven.
By the mid-nineties Thailand had established itself as a bona fide Asian tiger, complete with expensive roar and land prices shooting through the roof. Families who had had useless lumps of land on their hands for generations found themselves courted by estate agents and developers and became millionaires overnight. Bangkok was a hub, and there’s nothing better than that for a city to be, is there? The magic words “developing economy” brought in hundreds of thousands of foreigners, all of whom needed places to live of international quality. Apartment buildings rose from steamy fields like mushrooms. Some of the best of them are to be found off Sukhumvit between Soi 33 and Soi 39, where the apartments rejoice in that attention to detail for which our Japanese cousins are justly famous. Every second restaurant and supermarket around here is Japanese, you can buy sushi, tapanyaki, tofu, harami, tempura, kushikatsu, otumani any time of the day or night. At the end of Soi 39, near Petchaburi Road, the three gigantic towers of the Supalai complex rise to kiss the muggy sky. The guard at the desk in the lobby wants to call up to the occupant of the four-thousand-square-foot penthouse, and can be dissuaded only with five hundred baht and a promise of incarceration if he gives me any more trouble.
