I shake my head. “It doesn’t make sense. If the point was to kill him, why not just shoot him?”
Fritz in turn shakes his head. “To answer that question, just spend a few months in a Thai jail. Death is just too ordinary for most vendettas-the point is to maximize the terror.”
His scanning eyes saw from a monitor that his flight was boarding. He held out a hand for me to shake. Our eyes locked. He looked away. “You’re better than me. I shat on you and your mother and you saved my life. I wouldn’t have bothered, but thank you. When you go to the Buddha you can tell him you cured a German of his racist superiority complex. From the bottom of my black heart, thank you” were the last words I heard Fritz utter. I left him to return to the departure lounge.
One should not exaggerate, at least two-thirds of the people waiting for flights were normal couples, singles, families: Western, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African. The other third consisted of Western men usually over forty-five with Thai girls invariably under thirty. What we don’t realize, we Thais, is just how simple life is in the West. Too simple. The most modest of contributions-a forty-hour week at the least demanding of mechanized tasks-earns one a car, an apartment, a bank account. Other gifts of the system-a spouse, a child or two, a small collection of friends-arrive automatically and gift-wrapped with support of every kind. A whole hemisphere, in other words, lies dying from event-starvation. It must be a subconscious demographic drive that sends these men to us; each one of those beauties hanging on their arms is a time bomb of demonic complications and explosive events. Hey, let’s hear it for Thai Girl, selflessly taking her message of love, life and lust to a jaded world!
Complications come naturally to us, we are never without them, like our traffic jams. Like Vikorn. If only one could package him for export.
46
Last night the FBI invited me to supper at the Italian riverside restaurant at the Oriental hotel. With great compassion she told me not to dress up. She wore a generic pair of white linen shorts, open-neck white short-sleeved shirt, open sandals: simplicity itself, I gratefully observed. I ordered antipasto misto and calf’s liver to follow. She copied me with the antipasto and ordered a baked lasagna for herself. When the waiter came with the wine list she gave it to me, because I had told her about Truffaut and his meticulous education of my palate. I ordered a simple Barolo and made a great fuss of holding the glass to my nose, sipping decorously, then chasing the wine round my mouth with my tongue, while the wine waiter-a Thai-stared at me, before I gave Kimberley a big wink and knocked the wine back with a vulgar gulp. It was only a Barolo after all. We both realized that this was the first time I had made her guffaw, a dangerous moment in the ritual of seduction. I am ashamed to admit I did not turn off the charm as resolutely as I ought to have done, and she muttered darkly about my being too damn cute for words. I was asking for trouble.
“Sonchai, why do you hate me?”
“I don’t.”
“But you pretend not to find me attractive? A stupid woman would decide you were gay-lots of women protect their egos that way-but I’m not stupid. You’re not gay, sometimes you’re attracted, at least on a physical level, but you veer away. Time after time. Like a wild animal that sees a trap. I’m curious.”
I cast my eye over the other patrons. Three middle-aged Western couples who were probably staying at the hotel, and at least four tables consisting of a young Western man and a Thai girl. What a good life we must offer to any young farang with a little money. An evening spent trawling the bars will secure you that beautiful young goddess of your dreams for as long as you care to rent her, and you may play out a romantic evening or two with her in an expensive restaurant under the stars with the certainty of bedding her afterwards. And all without petulance or temperament, or obligations which stretch into the future. Tip her well and she will even come to say goodbye to you at the airport. Love à la carte must surely be an improvement on the fixed menu?
“I don’t want to feel like an ice cream.”
“Huh?”
“Look at them.” I wave a hand at the other tables. “Those girls don’t speak English as well as I do. They don’t surf the Net. They’ve probably never been abroad. They don’t realize they’re a new flavor from Häagen-Dazs. Anyway, they’re professionals.”
Jones swallows hard. I feel sorry that I’ve brought her close to tears. She’s tough, though. “That’s how you see me? Another Western sleazebag, just like the farang men?”
I don’t say anything for a beat or two. Then: “No one escapes their own culture. It’s hardwired in us, from birth onward. A consumer society is a consumer society. It may start with washing machines and air-conditioning, but sooner or later we consume each other. It’s happening to us too. But you see, the Buddha taught freedom from appetite.”
“Him again.” A sigh. Now she is determined not to let me off the hook by changing the subject, or even talking at all. I start to grin. “What are you laughing at?”
“The beauty of the Buddha. Look how perfectly he described cause and effect. Your ego is injured, so you won’t talk to me. Perhaps I will retaliate by not talking to you. Then we become enemies. If we had guns perhaps we would shoot each other, over and over again, in lifetime after lifetime. Don’t you see how futile it all is?” I’ve made her unhappy, far more than I expected. It is as if I’ve kicked her in the pit of her stomach, just when she was offering love. A crime against life. “Kimberley-”
“Don’t.”
“Kimberley, when my mother was sixteen years old she offered herself to a mamasan she’d been introduced to in Pat Pong. Nobody forced her to do so, her parents were not those kind of people. Nobody was going to stop her, though-they were dirt poor. The mamasan put her on display at her club every night, but postponed selling her until a good offer came up. Virginity is supposed to be most highly prized by Japanese and other Asian men, but the highest bid in my mother’s case came from an Englishman in his forties. There are plenty of men who would understand the special pleasure in deflowering a child, but I don’t. He paid forty thousand baht, an astronomical sum. My mother insisted that her best friend accompany her so she would not feel so terribly alone. The friend sat in the toilet while the event took place. He was kind to her, in a manner of speaking. He used a lubricant, tried not to hurt her too much, and burst into tears when it was over. My mother and her friend stared with great wonderment at this man who was more than twice their age. As the Third World said to the First World: If it makes you feel so bad, why do you do it? They felt sorry for him. It was my mother’s blood on the sheets, but the agony was all his. He did not appear to be rich, so he must have saved up. Forty thousand baht was a lot of money, even for a Westerner. It was a very special occasion for him, a kind of feast. Perhaps it was his birthday. When we are in the grip of hunger we think only of eating. Then, when the banquet is over, we see the evidence of what we really are.”