by John Burdett
“Okay, I’m persuadable.”
She disappears under the sheet to go to work on me. When she pops up again she has reverted to manual labor, but very skillful. “Sonchai,” she says in the cozy voice she uses for moments like this.
“Yes?”
“Suppose I did have a little fling with Krom. Would it upset you very much?”
I freeze for a moment, then relax and scratch my jaw. That’s quite a question. “I’m not sure.”
“It wouldn’t be the same as if I went with a man, would it?”
“Maybe not.”
“I mean, it wouldn’t be like some rival had usurped my womb and thereby threatened the survival of your line, your DNA? The sort of thing male lions get het up about.”
“I guess not.”
“But you would be hurt?”
“I’m not sure.”
The hand goes on strike. “Sonchai, I’m trying to have a mature adult dialogue here. You’re my number one relationship, that’s final. I don’t want to damage us by being selfish.”
“I hate it when you do this soft, liberal, middle-class stuff. It’s so condescending. Like you hold all the cards and aren’t you great for not acting like a fascist bitch.”
Now the hand has relinquished the love object altogether. This has the effect of making me feel lonely. Under the guiding influence of cannabis I grab the hand and put it back. I hold it there in a viselike grip. “Why don’t you admit that was what her call was all about? You discussed having an affair, didn’t you?”
Instead of pulling back, because I won’t let her, she tries to strangle it. “Okay, yes, we did kind of touch on the subject when she called. You were definitely the main point, but then we talked about it.”
“And?”
“I said I would want you to be okay with it.”
“Okay with it? What does that mean?”
She sighs. I release my hand. She relaxes her grip and returns to the traditional up-and-down motion. “It means if I had the fling with Krom would you use it as an excuse?”
“To do what?”
She pauses and grips tight again. “Screw that new girl at your mother’s bar. I’ve seen the way you look at her.”
I honestly hadn’t thought of that. Her name is Katrina, a leuk kreung like me with a Russian absentee father, twenty-three, stunning, with everything still firm. Now my dear wife has really given me a hard-on. “You bet,” I murmur.
“Bastard,” she murmurs back. She lets go and withdraws the hand, leaving me desolate and lonely. Then she jumps on me. That’s okay, we don’t have the crime of marital rape over here; basically, you get into bed naked with someone, you take your chances (am I being a tad too robust for you here, R?). Anyway, if she’s channeling Krom, I’m definitely fantasizing that she’s Katrina.
Afterward we are relaxed rather than blissed. The tension is gone. Chanya curls up against me. In the silence and the dark I wonder about my lover. For her the thought of doing anything new and challenging, like sleeping with a woman for the first time, is a welcome cure for an extreme numbness. It could just as well have been base jumping.
Now, in the way of all humans, especially stoned humans, my mind switches to something completely different. A memory that hitherto had no relevance to the present pops up in perfect clarity. It went like this:
—
I heard the first whisper one hot humid afternoon on Soi Cowboy. The Isaan lingerie vendors were selling bras and panties from their stalls through oral hire purchase agreements, the cooked-food stands were doing a roaring trade, and the motorbike taxi jocks were practicing kung fu while making lewd offers to every female who passed. The soi boasted its usual abundance of attractive women under thirty and not a one of them looked more fatale than any regular country lass in shorts and T-shirt, yawning, eating, and gossiping al fresco on a sultry day. The sorcery of sex and money would transform them into irresistible succubi at exactly seven p.m., not a minute before.
They all knew me and I knew them, mostly because they all wanted to work for my mother, Nong, at the Old Man’s Club. Mama Nong paid better than all the other bars because Police Colonel Vikorn owned most of the business. She didn’t need to bribe cops so she had a wider profit margin; therefore she could be choosy, and she was. She chose girls like a seasoned wine taster chooses wine. Sometimes she surprised even me, taking on a girl who didn’t come close to a rival in looks and body, but possessed a certain extra something that Nong herself had owned in her day: magic that could turn a poor girl into a rich one overnight. All you needed was the talent to make a man believe with all his soul that he couldn’t live without you, even though you were, well, an article for sale among thousands. That’s all. I understand you call it capitalist democracy, R, over there in the West.
Now O called out from across the street: “Hey, Sonchai, some old man was asking for you last night. Said he saw you on TV.”
As the respectable face of Police Colonel Vikorn’s pharmaceutical empire, I was often on TV, giving the kind of glowing account of our district’s law enforcement record that farang like to hear. Naturally, I speak in English. No Thai would believe a word, but I didn’t feel guilty or impure about this particular duty. If the world currency is hype and hypocrisy, then hype and hypocrisy it must be. Survival has always been the guiding fundamental on these shores.
“Really? So, what bar are you working in now?”
“Rawhide.”
“How is it?”
“Oh, it’s okay. Bit quiet. Any room at the Old Man’s?”
“I’ll ask, okay?”
“Thanks, Sonchai.”
Like the bite of a mosquito—how are you supposed to know it’s malarial?
It happened the next afternoon too. This time it wasn’t just hot and humid; the heavens opened when I was halfway between Country Road and Suzy Wong’s, so I dived into the Pink Pussy where I’d misspent much of the sperm of my youth. Some of the girls who really were girls then are still there, mostly as entrepreneurs introducing customers to new arrivals from Buriram (there’s a saying: Are there any pretty girls left in Buriram?). “Hey, Sonchai,” Lalita said, “some old man was in here last night asking about you.”
“Really? Did you tell him to look for me at the Old Man’s Club?”
“Of course. He said he knew that.”
I shrugged. “That’s all?”
“He bought me a drink.”
I waited for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I said, “So, did he take you upstairs?”
She smirked. “For an old man he was really cute. Kind in bed and very funny. Very generous, too—we only lasted thirty minutes and he gave me two thousand baht.”
“Anything else about him you noticed?”
“Just the way he was—kind of hard, but knew all about sex. Different. He wasn’t your usual wick-dipper, that’s for sure.”
I didn’t think any more of it until the next day when it happened again. The reportage came from Superbar this time. And then from Blue Balls. It finally dawned on me that he was playing some kind of game, this mysterious old man who claimed to be looking for me, but never looked for me in the Old Man’s Club, where he would surely have found me. Then one evening, at about ten p.m., I was strolling down the soi to grab some fresh air, having been on the go at the Old Man’s since five in the evening, when I saw an aging farang leaning against a wall at the end of the street, staring at me. What impressed me most was that he was standing under some exterior air-conditioning that split the light into a joyful spectrum of colors, which were raining all over him.
I wondered if this was the old man who had been asking about me—and should I be thinking about personal security? To avoid any kind of problem I deliberately averted my eyes, turned, and walked back to Mama Nong’s bar. Only then I allowed myself to reproduce the image of him in my imagination: he reminded me just a tad of Brando in Last Tango in Paris. In Europe or North America he would have been wearing a sweatshirt under a gray raincoat open
at the front, disclosing once-impressive musculature—and showing signs of alcoholism. That night he was in long shorts and T-shirt, like me, and drinking from a can of iced lemon tea. An old man, sure, but a dangerous one. And there was something else that only returned to me with hindsight: a look in his eye unmistakable to any cop who has had to do with the desperate and the damned. This man had firsthand experience of what shits the gods can be and, unlike the timid majority, intended to tell them so face-to-face when he met them.
That was it. I never saw him again and there was no reason at all to keep the memory in the foreground—until now. I am quite certain that old man is one of the old men in the hospital ward. On the other hand, throughout my life absolute certainties have turned out to be misleading products of despair, so I’m probably wrong. It would be nice to know, though, for sure.
—
The memory of the “Rainbow Man” continued to haunt me into the next morning. Nowadays there is a way of finding out who your father is, of course; or, to be more precise, who he is not. For a while I thought about enlisting the skills of the forensic team at the station, but decided it would have been too embarrassing. The news would have spread like a computer virus.
A quick search in YouTube using the key words DNA Paternity Testing Kit revealed that there existed a quick, shame-free solution provided at low cost by Know the Father Laboratories Incorporated, based in Kentucky. Part of the sales strategy of Know the Father involved a clip from a reality TV show where a sobbing, torn-apart young woman swears on every holy book she’s heard of that the child is his (pointing at the image of a man on a ten-foot video screen beamed in safely from another county), while the putative father on the screen darkly mumbles that he doesn’t believe her and she is a lying whore.
In the video clip the presenter ratchets up the drama and illustrates the power of the product by pushing the distraught mother to her limits: “We need the truth now, Jeanie, if you have any doubts, anything you want to say, honey, that you haven’t said already, any little indiscretion you’ve covered up till now, this is the moment.”
“I swear by Almighty God I’ve been faithful and true, may I be struck by lightning and go to hell if I lie.”
Groans, cheers, and great roars of empathy from the audience. Everyone’s on her side, including me. Cut back to the giant screen where simmers the jealous bastard who is in the process of ruining a perfect marriage and losing a faithful caring wife along with his beautiful bouncing baby through Stone Age possessiveness (it doesn’t help that he’s a three-hundred-pound slob with a black walrus mustache and shaved head): “I’m tellin’ you the kid ain’t mine. That ain’t my nose, it ain’t my chin, and they ain’t my eyes.” Boos and jeers from the indignant audience.
Now a drum roll while the presenter unwraps the lab results: “DNA does not lie, ladies and gentlemen: the man you see on the video screen over there is…not the father.” Astonishment and incredulity from the audience (Man that bitch can act! Sure had me fooled). The guilty mother collapses prone on the stage, sobbing her heart out: there goes the child support. Voyeurism that ancient Rome would have been proud to indulge at the Colosseum. At the bottom of the video clip: Know the Father, it’s YOUR right.
After the clip came the demo: you send for the package, it arrives within days wherever you are in the world. There are two envelopes and a number of swabs like Q-tips. You take one of the swabs and roll it around inside the cheek of the putative father, then you take another and roll it around inside the cheek of the child. The envelopes are clearly distinguished with capitals, one with an enormous PF, the other with a C. Naturally, you need to make sure you put the right ensalivated swab in the right envelope; this is emphasized three times. Before you send off the envelopes you pay the fee using a credit card. In my case I sent off to Know the Father for three packs, just to be sure. Swabbing would be a cinch, since all three suspects were supine on hospital beds and not in a position to refuse. Anyway, at my age there was no risk of a claim for child support, and none of them seemed to be in long-term relationships, so they had nothing to fear. Best to do it while they were unconscious, though, just to be on the safe side. I took care to use Chanya’s PC and her e-mail account to order the kit.
16
My mother was slightly drunk by the time I arrived at her bar. She, who rarely drinks during the day, sat at a table where four empty bottles of Chang beer stood like soldiers and she was sucking at a fifth when I walked in. A Marlboro Red was sending a spiral of blue-gray smoke up from an ashtray. She was still a good-looking woman, but for me, right now—well, this might have been the first time she looked old.
She threw me a guilty look when I entered. That in itself was a first. She brought me up in the old way: I owed her my life, period. Any transgressions by her were automatically discounted by that unbeatable trump. Like most Thai kids, I took in this subliminal message without argument. Now she looked guilty.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Tell me about him—all of him,” I said.
She pulled out her smart phone to call her driver. “We’ll have to do it at my house.” She waved a hand around the empty bar. “It would be too depressing to talk about it here.” We sat in silence together while she finished her beer. A few minutes later we heard a horn outside the bar.
—
Nong’s Mercedes is large, black with tinted windows. It was Vikorn who insisted on it: a gangster’s chariot would scare off most of the local mafia, especially since they would assume it was a gift from the Colonel. In the car I sit back to enjoy the sheer comfort of this masterpiece of German engineering; you hardly hear the engine, hardly notice the wonderful acceleration; what you appreciate most is the silent, gentle, seductive air-conditioning: it’s nothing like a Toyota Sienna. At the same time I’m thinking, What really is going on? Am I on track to find my father, or am I merely a pawn in that global no-man’s-land where international gangsterism meets geopolitics?
Now we were turning off Sukhumvit in to a narrow side soi that was unexpectedly lined with ficus and other trees, not to mention a lot of big houses behind high walls and gates guarded by CCTV cameras.
When Mama Nong had accumulated enough savings from her European tours, she bought this piece of land in downtown Bangkok. I vaguely remember a time of great excitement combined with extreme stress: somehow, without documentation and handicapped by an unblemished fiscal virginity—she had never paid tax to any revenue department in any country anywhere (she still has not)—she persuaded a bank manager to grant a small mortgage over the land, but, given the nature of her trade, she was not sure she could always meet the monthly repayments. Somehow she managed, and the purchase turned out to be shrewd beyond her wildest dreams. Over the past thirty years land prices in the city have shot up more than a hundredfold and my mother had no difficulty in mortgaging the quarter acre in order to build a house on it. Personally, I would have preferred an old-style teak structure on stilts with a general hanging-out area under the house, a big garden with a Bodhi tree or two, plenty of flowering shrubs, tropical succulents, and vivid plants with weirdly shaped blossoms. But Nong had been to America and had other ideas. I did get the big garden, the plants, and—a reluctant concession since it made her feel bannock—the Bodhi tree. The house, though, albeit on stilts, was essentially a reinforced concrete imitation of something out of American suburbia, with a giant swimming pool, the dead chlorinated blue mass of which was rarely, if ever, pierced by a human form—least of all my mother’s, who never swam.
You can take a girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. Quite simply, once the house was finished, she reverted, called some female cousins and childhood acquaintances to form a rotating circle of puans (friends) with whom she liked to lie on futons and gamble with cards for small stakes, smoking Marlboro Reds, sipping a modest amount of beer and rice whiskey, and sharing gossip that provided reportage in extreme detail of the private lives of fellow villagers whom
she had not seen for decades and probably never would again. No hypocrite when it came to exploiting her wealth, as soon as she could afford to she hired a maid from her home village whose lack of initiative and low IQ made it easy for Mum to underpay her at the same time as keeping her cooped up in a small room next to the kitchen where she slept, ate, watched TV, and did the ironing. Fortunately Maymay, the maid, was also devoid of sex drive, for not only would the owner of the Old Man’s Club forbid any kind of hanky-panky on her private premises, but she would likely forbid it even in a short-term hotel on Maymay’s day off, for Nong was quite Confucian in regard to slave control. As I’ve said, though, my mother knew how to pick women, and the faithful Maymay generally spent her free Sundays in her room sleeping, watching TV, eating, and ironing. I had a strong sense that for the first time since my birth, Mum was about to drop her tough, indomitable front and share something of her inner life. I was right. She did and the memory is present and vivid.
When we reach her house we ignore the main entrance and instead use a gate at the side that leads to the garden. Maymay is there, standing still, facing the Bodhi tree: a pure soul in a religious trance, or an idiot with a vacant stare? Nobody knows. Nong calls her softly, though, to be on the safe side, and orders an ice bucket with a bottle of Mekong and some glasses, then excuses herself and goes into the house. She emerges a few minutes later in a baggy housecoat and slippers. She is as happy squatting as sitting on a chair; now she descends to a rush mat set next to a low table, sits cross-legged, takes out a box of Marlboro Reds, and lights up. After a couple of tokes she says:
“So you have questions. Where would you like to start?” I shrug. “The question you haven’t asked, which I expected you to ask—which you should have asked by now, Detective, is—?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t I cut his dick off when I had the chance?”
I splutter. The punishment to which she refers is less common than it used to be in Southeast Asia. Nong, though, in her younger years, was just the kind of Thai girl capable of exacting that kind of revenge from a man who did her wrong, the logic being that he would not repeat the error in this lifetime. “Okay,” I croak. “Why didn’t you?”
