He takes the T-shirt in both hands and presses it against me. I have to hold it up as he stands back. “Farangs go for this sort of thing? It’s so… so ugly.”
“It’s the way they are. If you give them a traditional Thai men’s club they’ll be intimidated.”
“Really?” For a moment he stands confused, stranded in an alien psychology. “It’s not important that some of the customers will actually look like that?”
“That’s the point. It makes them feel more secure.”
A slow nod of understanding, or at least acceptance. “By the way, your mother and I are giving you ten percent of the shares in the business. She wants you in as a family member, and I can see the advantage of not having you passing heavy judgments on us when you go through one of your devout phases.”
“I’m afraid I cannot accept. Making money out of women in that way is expressly forbidden by the Buddha.”
“So is smoking dope. Anyway, I’m ordering you. Disobeying a superior is also proscribed from the Eightfold Path.”
“Then I accept.”
I take off the T-shirt and fold it on his table. He unfolds it to take one more look, then, reassured-if aesthetically challenged-the Colonel nods and lets me go. After all, Mother is the one who took the WSJ course on the Net. When I reach the door, he calls to me. “Sorry, I forgot. This fax came through from the American embassy a couple of days ago. It’s just one of those dumb profiling things they do in Quantico. I had it translated into Thai, but it’s the usual crap. Stuff you would know just by thinking about it.”
I find a quiet corner of the station. The profile is only three pages long and surprisingly free of technical jargon.
Report from the Department of Criminal Profiling,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Quantico, Virginia
Category of document: Confidential, for distribution only to interested parties (permission is granted for this report to be shared with the Royal Thai Police)
Subject: Fatima, a.k.a. Ussiri Thanya, a transsexual who underwent gender reassignment in her late twenties, born and brought up in Thailand. Father an unidentified African American serviceman (probably a draftee during the Vietnam War); mother a prostitute of tribal origin in northwest Thailand, a member of the large Karen group who reside in the border areas. Within the Thai tradition, the subject is believed to have been brought up by her grandmother in the tribal area on the border with Myanmar while her mother continued to work as a prostitute in Bangkok…
Just as Vikorn said, the report is nothing one could not work out for oneself. I skip to the last paragraph.
Save for those who experience a deep, personal and lifelong craving for gender reassignment, the long-term effect of surgical removal of the genitals is likely to be of the most appalling psychological devastation.
The subject’s suspected reaction in murdering Bradley in an elaborate, sadistic and clever manner is entirely consistent with our expectations. However, it is highly unlikely that the subject’s rage has been assuaged. She turned Bradley into a savior figure, the only human being who differed sufficiently from the others to the extent of being basically benevolent. To him she sacrificed the only possessions to which the world apparently attached value: her genitals. With her betrayal by Bradley she would most likely have ceased to be capable of trust in any form. If to date her behavior (absent the murder of Bradley) has been relatively normal, we believe that she is simply acting from memory, or pursuing a plan of some kind which must be essentially sociopathic. The need to do to the world what the world did to her will be irresistible.
45
The Correctional Services and Immigration Departments collude to keep a foreigner in quarantine the moment he is released from prison, pending bundling him on a flight back to his own country. The reasons are unclear, for why would a farang ex-con be more of a threat to society than the hundreds of Thais who are released from jail every week? The rule is strict, though, and no amount of arguing and pleading on my part gained me access to Fritz while he waited in the Immigration building for the bureaucrats to arrange his ticket. The best I could do was to ascertain that he would be on the next Lufthansa flight to Berlin, which left at ten in the evening. Even at the airport he was fenced in by Immigration officials and police.
In a fake Armani jacket, his remaining tufts of hair carefully shaved, prison tattoos on his neck, and in white pants, he could have been just another middle-aged tourist trying to be hip in Krung Thep, except for the large Band-Aid above his left ear and the walking stick. He saw me coming long before his minders did, but instantly looked away with that prison reflex. I had to use my influence to follow him airside, where the Immigration people decided their duties were completed and disappeared. Close up, I saw how strange and brand new the world now appeared to him. I was put in mind of a creature with lightning reflexes and restless habits, perhaps a sable or a mink, panicked and fascinated by the straight lines and smooth surfaces of the human world. He sat next to me on a bench near the gate where his flight would board and his eyes scanned while he spoke: “The operation at Dao Phrya Bridge is officially moonshine. Only a few of the squatters know about the yaa baa. The headman uses the contacts they made for the moonshine to distribute the meth. After all, if you can metabolize that rice whisky you can probably handle yaa baa. They’re major distributors in Bangkok and they’re run by a real big shot.”
“Who?”
“A cop of course. A police colonel.”
“Did you get a name?”
“Vikorn.”
“You’re sure?”
“If the information wasn’t accurate they wouldn’t have needed to beat me so much, would they?”
“I guess not. Nobody mentioned Suvit? The squatters are in his district.”
“No. Vikorn was the name. The way I heard it, he runs a very big operation. The squatters are only a small part of it. Maybe this Suvit works for him?”
“Anyone talk to you about the way the marine was murdered? How it was done?”
“No one knows how those snakes were organized so well, but everyone knows it was that katoy, the ladyboy, who did it.”
“How are they so sure?”
“She was seen by one of the squatters. Some Khmer on motorbikes met the Mercedes before it drove down to that slip road. Maybe they were summoned by cell phone. The marine hardly spoke Thai, so he wouldn’t have known even if she said: ‘Come kill the bastard now.’ She was seen going off with one of them. They actually escorted the marine down that slip road-they had guns, so probably the marine didn’t dare open the door even if he could.”