“I meant, how did you find the project?”
“Oh, right. Well, I’ve hired a car with driver. It’s incredibly inexpensive here. The Bureau’s paying, anyway. It’s part of my job to look after you, but I’ll go if this is a bad moment.”
She is looking over my shoulder. I step aside. “Come in.”
She takes the step over the threshold. “This is…”
“This is where I live.”
It is not difficult for me to see with her eyes. My cave is a windowless box ten feet by eight feet with a flimsy shacklike structure at one end to conceal the hole in the ground. Ventilation comes from a black hole in the rear wall which gives onto a shaft which services all the other apartments. On a windy day I know what every one of my neighbors is having for lunch. There is a picture of the King on one wall, and a narrow set of bookshelves where any normal person would have placed a television. The books are all in Thai script, so I explain to Jones, who tries to examine them: “Buddhism. I’m a Buddhist bookworm.”
The only furniture is a futon on the floor. Jones is clearly dumbfounded. To her credit she makes no attempt at concealment. “I… I don’t know what to say, Sonchai. I’ve never seen… I mean…”
“You’ve never seen such a hovel?” I feel hard toward her. I would like to rub her nose in this reality, but my depression has miraculously disappeared.
She looks me in the eye. “No, I’ve never seen such a hovel. I’m sorry.”
“Welcome to the Third World.”
Sex is an odd thing, isn’t it? A power that can transform your mood like a drug. She stands there, glowing with health and some kind of anticipation, and the images of immediate coupling are surely flooding her mind as well as mine. We both cough at the same time. She smiles with those vivid wet-look lips.
“I figured you might need some cheering up, so I bought two tickets for the kickboxing at Lumpini Stadium tonight. It’s Saturday. I hear there’s a big fight. Maybe you want to take me? I see it as part of my orientation. If you don’t want to, though, if you’d rather stay here and get suicidal…”
The car is a white Mercedes. In the back seat Jones says: “I tried watching Thai TV last night. I think I got a soap, but not a soap like I’ve ever seen before. People kept dying and being reborn and carrying on the conversation they were having just before they died, and there were ghosts and a bunch of wizards who could defy gravity and lived in some enchanted land about five miles above the earth. Would you say that represents the Thai mind?”
“Five miles high is about right. But you left out the skeleton.”
“That’s right, there was a nifty human skeleton following the lead couple all over the place. What was he doing?”
“You have to bear in mind we are a holistic people. We cannot take little bits of life, like lovers walking off into the sunset, and pretend that’s the final word.”
On the way to Lumpini I feel the need for a cultural lecture: “You shouldn’t call it kickboxing. Kickboxing is a synthetic sport that had to be invented after those Bruce Lee movies. Muay Thai is something else.”
“Oh, it is? What are the rules?”
“Actually, there are none.”
A grunt from Jones. “Why am I not surprised?”
“At least there weren’t, until we had to invent some to make it acceptable to international television. Now the boxers wear those ridiculous gloves. In the old days a boxer would dip pieces of gauze in a pot of glue, then wrap them around his fists and drizzle ground glass over them.”
“Nice.”
“We’re talking about national defense. Until relatively recently our wars with Burma-we’re always going to war with Burma-consisted mostly of hand-to-hand combat. Primitive in the extreme, no? On the other hand, there were no civilian casualties, no deaths from friendly fire, nobody lost their home. In fact, it was rare for more than a thousand or so men on either side to die in a full-scale war.”
“I get the point. The world has come a long way since then, right?” She leans back, sinking down into the seat like a kid.
“Muay Thai really came into its own in the seventies when martial arts black belts from Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong challenged our boys. The cream of karate, kung fu, judo and all the others came over for a grand tournament.” I pause for effect.
“Okay, I’m hooked. What happened? I guess the other guys lost, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”
“None of the other guys lasted a full minute in the ring with a Thai boxer. They just weren’t used to being kicked in the face. Our boys get kicked in the face from the age of six, when they first start to train. The other guys looked more like dancing masters than fighters.”
“Let me guess the moral. Don’t mess with a Thai, right?”
“It’s a mistake to make us mad.”
We fall into silence for a full five minutes. My mood starts to revert.
“Want to talk about it?” Jones asks without looking at me. “In the States we always say it’s good to talk about things that are weighing on your mind. I’ll be straight with you, Sonchai, you really freaked out Tod Rosen with your little comment when you first met him. He would feel a lot better if you and I got to know each other.”
“I did? Did I make some social faux pas?”
“You said you were going to snuff out whoever was responsible for the death of your partner. That didn’t matter so much when it looked like a local gangland murder. Now that the hallowed name of Sylvester Warren has come up, Tod’s nervous.”
“Do American cells have windows?”
“You don’t give a shit, do you? I’ve never yet met a man I couldn’t figure out. But you…” She shakes her head.
“I think Rosen is nervous about many things. Why is he here? Bangkok isn’t exactly a good career move for a man like him. He screwed up, didn’t he?”
“His third marriage failed and he developed a drinking problem. He’s a good man, very fair, and people like to work for him.”
“And Nape?”
“Nape? Jack Nape is one of those Western men who arrive in Bangkok one day and by the next have vowed never to leave. I guess you could call him a refugee from feminism. He married a local woman, and the minute the Bureau recalls him Stateside is the minute he resigns. He’ll probably get a job with some American law firm with an office here. He’s very bright, knows a lot about your country. They say his Thai isn’t bad.”
I do not explain that Rosen was a doctor last time around, who suffered an appalling nervous breakdown which he is still trying to deal with. Nape was a woman, a housewife who poisoned her husband. Jones was a man, a gangster and womanizer of enormous appetite. He was the one Nape poisoned, which is why they have come across each other again this time around, with much of the previous hostility.
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Why have you changed your image? I thought you were committed to American pie?”