Bangkok Tattoo (15 page)

Ruamsantiah has returned with a disposable plastic syringe still in its germ-free packet, a small oil lamp, and some aluminum foil. He lays it all out on the crude wooden table at the back of the cell, while Chaz watches intensely. Ruamsantiah lays the packet of smack next to the syringe. Now the sergeant and I are both looking at Chaz.

“A Thai army general,” he says in a broken voice.

“Name?”

“Zinna.”

“Tell me more about General Zinna. How many times did you meet him?”

“Once.”

“She produced him just the once to convince you she was kosher?” A nod. “You must have been impressed.”

“He came in uniform, with soldiers.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“How do I know? She took me somewhere, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Describe the place.”

“Big house, three stories, lot of land, dogs, monkeys.”

When I translate, Ruamsantiah stares at me. “He’s talking about Khun Mu.”

Chaz Buckle has recognized the name: “Yeah, Mu, that was it.”

I nod. “Can you manage to cook on your own, Chaz, or shall we get someone to help you?”

“I’ll do it.”

I watch while the sergeant drags the table over to where Chaz is taped to the bars by his ankles and wrists, then releases Chaz’s wrists. He immediately hunches over the table, pulls off a strip of aluminum foil, and starts to shake out the smack from the packet, oblivious to all human emotion, including his own shame. I leave him with Ruamsantiah.

20

I
n a jam at the intersection between Asok and Sukhumvit—that black hole where time gets lost—I ask the driver to switch off his Thai pop CD so Lek and I can listen to Rod Tit FM. Pisit has invited none other than my mother on the show in her capacity as Thailand’s most famous, and vociferous, ex-prostitute.

These are sad times for sleaze,
farang.
Our government is going through one of its puritanical phases and has decided to impose an earlier curfew. Starting next month, all the bars will have to close at midnight. Naturally, the flesh industry is outraged, the whole of Soi Cowboy has been mobilized, no
farang
is allowed to pass by without signing a petition. Pisit’s first guest is a
katoey
who works the bars. Lek listens, riveted.

The
katoey
with deep voice maintains that she intends to sue the government for the cost of her operation and the ruination of her life. She had the whole shooting match cut off for purely commercial reasons. She grew up as a boy in Isikiert, one of the poorest regions in the poorest part of the Northeast, with five sisters and one brother. Her mother is blind from cataracts, her father’s health is broken from rice farming in the tropical heat twelve hours a day, her sisters are all mothers of infants by drunken Thai men who don’t pay child support, and anyway none of the girls were likely to make a fortune in the Bangkok flesh trade for aesthetic reasons. Her only brother suffers from Down syndrome and requires constant supervision. As the cutest of the brood, she was nominated (unanimously) as the one to solve the family’s financial problems in the big city. Borrowing as best they could and pooling everything they had, they just about scraped enough together for the operation that turned her into one of the sexiest-looking whores on the Game. It was a onetime, high-risk capital investment that, after apainful lead-in period, is finally beginning to yield a reasonable return, and now the government is sabotaging the fledgling cottage industry with this early-closing nonsense. Everyone knows the major part of the business of the Game is conducted between midnight and two p.m., when the johns’ resistance has been properly ground down by alcoholand the attentions of near-naked young women (or
katoeys
). What maniac in government had this bright idea? Obviously they care nothing for the poor. If she has no money to send home, is the Interior Minister going to take care of her family?

Pisit turns to my mother, who needs little launching:

The government isn’t merely killing the goose that lays the golden egg—it is ruining the only wealth-distribution system we have in this feudal society. This government has no common sense at all. Do they seriously think we’ll get rich by becoming as sterile as the West? I’ve been to Paris, Florida, Munich, London—those places are museums populated by ghosts. The bottom line is that for more than three decades the people of Isaan have been kept alive by what little cash their daughters in Bangkok have been able to send home. There are whole towns, roads, shops, farms, water buffalo, cars, motorbikes, garages—whole industries that owe their existence to our working girls. These courageous young women are the very essence of the female genius for sustaining, nurturing, and honoring life with life. They are also everything that is great about the Thai soul, with their selfless devotion and sacrifice. They ask for no help or gratitude, they don’t expect admiration, they gave up looking for respect decades ago, but they are the heart of our country.

Pisit: How much of our government’s attitude is influenced by Western media, do you think?

Nong: Well, I must say I don’t know what the Western TV networks would do without a brothel in Southeast Asia to point their cameras at. Of course our government is influenced, but it’s just a question of the TV networks improving their ratings. They never trouble to really understand us. What can you do? This is the ersatz morality of the West.

Pisit: Does this crackdown spell the end of the sex industry in Thailand?

Nong: I don’t think so. After all, it’s been illegal for nearly a hundred years, and look what we’ve achieved. Also, there’s a lot of investment from the West these days because the upside potential of investing in a well-run go-go bar is much greater in my view than, say, investing in General Motors. Our girls charge far less per hour than in most societies, yet at the same time they are among the most sought-after women on earth. Rates have not increased in real terms since I myself was active.

My heart swells with pride at my mother’s mastery of a vocabulary usually reserved for the ruling classes, but the taxi driver twists his head around. “That’s your mom? She must have been a real goer in her day.”

“You may go back to your Thai pop CD now,” I instruct.

When the jam finally starts to ease, Lek says: “Have you seen the new stuff from YSL? It’s in the Emporium; some amazing dresses.”

“I haven’t kept up with the fashions this year.”

“Armani and Versace still have the best colors, though.”

“Italians have the best eye for color.”

“But I still prefer the Japanese designers. Junya Watanabe’s stuff this season is out of this world. Dusty grays in satin and velvet. Such a shock at first, you know, then you think: perfect. So did you speak to your mother?”

I swallow, then cast a glance at his ink-black hair, the hue of youth still on his flesh, the buttery glow in those high cheeks, the innocence still in those eyes. I’ve been mulling the thing over in my mind for days, wondering if my mother’s wisdom had deserted her in middle age. It seems almost against nature to introduce this angel to Fatima. Then it clicks.
Initiation
is the word. My mother is right, as usual. Not only will Fatima be good for him—she is exactly what he needs for experience and survival. Also, Fatima is very rich. If she decides to adopt him, he’ll be set up for life.

“Actually, she suggested a friend of mine who I’d just not thought of in connection to you. I haven’t seen her in over a year, but it won’t be difficult to look her up. I’ll see what I can do.”

Lek beams happily and throws me one of those grateful swooning looks of his. “Remind me again, where are we going?”

“We’re going to see Khun Mu, Lek.”

21

T
ake a poor Thai girl out of her third-world village, throw money at her, and what is the third thing she wants, after the three-story wedding-cake mansion and the lurid Mercedes? Louis Quinze furniture in acrylic tones, as a rule. Even beige is garish at this level of light reflection, and the green carpet is like something you might play tennis on, but Khun Mu somehow fits the decor.

A word about Mu. Before Vikorn shot him, her husband Savian “Joey” Sonkan used to boast that he’d spent more money renovating her body than he’d spent on the house and the five-car garage, but Mu began sculpting her body before she met him. She was what was known as a late developer. Most of her friends left the Isaan village at around eighteen to work in the big city, and many of them returned for holidays to boast about the money they were making out of dumb
farang
men who hired their bodies for ludicrous prices. (You could buy a fully grown buffalo for what those guys spent in a night at the bars.) For years these stories seemed not to affect Mu overly much, until one fine day she stole the family savings from under her parents’ bed and blew everything on silicone breast enhancements and a new wardrobe, then fled to Krung Thep to make her pile. As luck would have it, she found her destiny not with Western men (the rigid echoing bosom and the pink body stocking proved resistible, despite assurances from her consultants) but with a home-grown
jao por
—a young drug baron who appreciated a woman whose taste was as bad as his own.

Joey didn’t just deal drugs—he lived with them. After my Colonel took him down, we found whole cupboards full of
yaa baa,
the matrimonial mattress stuffed with heroin, bales of ganja in the garage. Vikorn, who had long grown out of shoot-outs with desperadoes and would have been happy to come to some arrangement (say, a modest seventy percent tax on Joey’s gross profits), never wanted to kill him, but Joey’s other passion, apart from drugs and modifications to his wife’s body, was chase movies, the more violent the better. He wanted to die like Al Pacino in
Scarface,
and after years of provocation Vikorn finally granted his wish.

My dead partner Pichai was there at the stakeout, as were I and half the cops from District 8, not to mention all the TV networks. Joey appeared unarmed on the bedroom balcony, insulting Vikorn’s manhood and goading him into a duel, while Vikorn crouched behind one of the police vans clutching a hunting rifle with infrared aiming device, which he fired before Joey finished proposing his rules of engagement. Maybe Joey had expected some such foul play, for he had placed himself at the very edge of the balcony, thus providing for a telegenic fall, including a backflip before the final splat. A few minutes later Mu appeared on the balcony waving a frilly Louis Quinze white handkerchief and smiling for the cameras. She held no grudges, she explained, beaming. After all, the house and cars were hers now, not to mention the furniture. A couple hours later at the station we discovered, to our astonishment, that the dumb moll who could hardly read and write possessed total recall. She was also apparently fearless and listed a total of three hundred and twenty-one names of her husband’s business associates (a selective list even so: none of them were cops), while maintaining the same eager-to-please smile on her face and pointing her pyramids at us. With very little encouragement (well, an offer of immunity from prosecution, to be precise) she was able to confirm that, despite appearances, Joey had been secretly (and invisibly) armed and that Vikorn was correct in claiming he’d shot in self-defense, thus silencing bleeding-heart critics in the media. Her negotiating skills also proved superior to those of her late husband. Before she left the station, she pointed out to Vikorn that her life was now worth maybe one baht and that if she didn’t have protection for the rest of it, she had as good as committed suicide by giving us that list of suspects.

“You need money” was Vikorn’s response.

“Exactly.”

“Okay,” Vikorn said. Mu took this single foreign word as permission for her to continue to trade with the army. He also let her keep about ten percent of the drugs in the house. After all, the remainder was more than ample for the ritual photo-op with Vikorn standing in full Pol Colonel uniform smiling before a table laden with heroin, morphine, meth, and ganja, the street value of which was enough to buy a fleet of airliners.

All that was a few years ago. We still consult Mu now and then. Vikorn is no mean negotiator himself, and part of the deal was that she should remain an informant—particularly against Zinna, who was Joey’s principal supplier. To keep her alive, our visits to her are restricted to no more than one a year, and total anonymity is required.

Money and time have shown her to be by nature neither a whore nor a crook but a true-born eccentric. Despite the security risk, she has refused to vacate the mansion, the grounds of which she has turned into a refuge for stray dogs and monkeys, which she feeds personally three times a day, usually in a blinding pink housecoat, except on anniversaries of her husband’s death, when she wears mauve, Joey’s favorite color. (One of the Roll-Royces is also mauve.) Armed and uniformed (mauve) security guards are everywhere and constantly patrol the perimeter of the grounds. There is even a sentry box where I had to flash our IDs, and a digital camera that enabled her to examine my and Lek’s faces before letting us in.

Now we’re standing on the tennis-court carpet in the main reception room while she sits on a glittering beige five-seater sofa, fondling a young and very sleepy female Dalmatian. I happen to know, for Vikorn likes to keep tabs, that she has no regular lover, unless it is one of the security guards, which is unlikely. She is like a billionaire nun with a weakness for animals. The solitude has all but dissolved self-consciousness, and the unrestricted play of emotion across her face, from sad to gay and back again, is quite childlike.

Lek is in shock at the vulgarity of the decor and stands rooted to the spot.

Mu says: “I remember you. You are the half-caste who was at the shoot-out. Did you kill my husband?”

“You know very well it was Colonel Vikorn.”

“Ah, yes. At least, he took the credit in the media, but he’s a very cunning man. Perhaps it was you or one of your colleagues who pulled the trigger.” I say nothing. “Would you like to see him?” I cough. “Come along, I’m sure he’ll be delighted.” She lays the Dalmatian down in one of the lounge chairs, then casts a glance at Lek. “Is the beautiful boy coming?”