The best way to check if you’re in Chinatown is by counting gold shops. If there’s not one on each corner, chances are you’ve taken a wrong turn. The shop signs are invariably yellow on red in Chinese characters, and the gold is of the extra-shiny variety that screams at you from the windows. Many of them are not technically shops but hangs: warehouse-size affairs with scales on the counters and turbaned Sikhs with pump guns on guard, all ablaze with neon light bouncing ferociously off the interminable stretches of gold Buddhas, gold dragons, gold belts, gold necklaces, gold bracelets. Clothing is the other industry: crowded narrow lanes made still narrower by stalls selling every kind of cotton or silk garment at astonishingly low prices.
The FBI has managed to get drunk on a few beers and stays my hand when I try to pay the cab driver. “Do you know I’ve never known simple joy? Darker, more complex emotions, yes, but joy, no. Nor have any of my friends. We were infected by the psychosis of winning at the age of five. But you know joy. That’s what blows me away. You’re the son of a whore, a pimp, you run a brothel, you’re an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, but you’re innocent. I’ve never broken a law, cheated, lied, or presided over a crooked deal in my life, but I’m corrupt. I feel dirty twenty-four hours a day. Does anyone on the planet recognize the significance of that apart from me? The material you’re made of is fifty percent lighter than ours. Why?”
“We don’t have original sin,” I explain as I hand a hundred-baht note to the driver. “That iron rod through the skull. We just don’t have it.”
Vikorn has posted a couple of plainclothesmen outside the warehouse. They recognize me and let us into Yammy’s studio, where Marly, Jock’nEd are sitting around discussing the Iraq war in white silk dressing gowns with crimson trimmings. I feel the FBI’s sexual frisson when she clocks Ed. Excuse me while I explain Jock’nEd:
They are a team, famous throughout the Bangkok porn industry, and the invariable performers whenever the script requires a farang male to flesh out the skeletal story line. Ed is, well, simply magnificent. A natural six-two male animal with superb pecs that gleam under the lights when rubbed with Johnson’s baby oil, power thighs that could do justice to a lioness, a rocky-handsome bone structure, one of those aquiline noses that emit erotic fire with every exhalation, relentlessly seductive baby-blue eyes, and a telltale cleft in the chin that is so distinctively American it could have been invented by Ford. (Actually, Ed is a Cockney who hails from Elephant and Castle.) On the other side of the karmic balance, lamentably-well, how can one put it? Even tumescent his dong is not of the Big Mac dimensions your randy granny in Omaha is accustomed to ogle over a TV dinner. He has to be supplemented, in other words, using the magical techniques of the silver screen we all love to be conned by. Enter Jock. He is a five-foot-nothing Scotsman with a consonant-free burr, bald, pot-bellied from a heroic beer habit, almost chinless, with slurpy lips you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be kissed by, but armed with-you guessed-a gigantic member of positively pneumatic obedience.
They are inseparable pals and true pros, who eye Kimberley up and down as if she were a mare in a horse market. The assumption that she has come to work is, in the circumstances, forgivable.
Now Marly: you will recall she works for us at the Old Man’s Club and was handpicked by Vikorn for her stunning visuals. Her excellent English enables her to understand Yammy’s stage directions-which, I am told, tend to be complex beyond the industry norm. Seeing a potential artistic rival, she does not immediately respond to Kimberley ’s big and somewhat inebriated woman-to-woman smile. I leave the FBI to launch a charm offensive-she is clearly fascinated by the boys, the girl, the bed, the lights, and the cameras (well, something is making her lips curl lasciviously) -to go find Yammy, who apparently is taking a creative break in his office in back. I find him huddled over a bottle of sake.
“Hello,” he manages from measureless depths of depression. “Come to make sure I don’t leave out the raw meat?”
“Don’t make it difficult for me, Yammy. I’m only doing my job.”
He gulps the rice wine straight from the bottle. “Listen, I have this fantastically surreal plot, with a cobra and a tiger cub, white kimonos, a Kyoto backdrop straight out of Hokusai…” Catching my eyes, he mimes futility with one hand and lapses back into despair.
“And? What’s the problem?”
“It’s so much more erotic with the kimonos left on, don’t you see? Sonchai, I’m begging you.”
I shake my head in total sympathy. “He won’t go for it. Look, it’s not his fault-blame the consumer. The big respectable hotel chains won’t buy it if it’s not brutally obscene.”
“I knew you would say that.”
“Can’t you do both? Subtle erotic with the kimonos on, then the standard stuff with them off?”
Shaking his head but resigned: “You lose aesthetic balance that way. It ends up like a dog’s dinner.”
“There’s no point in my trying to persuade him. He’ll say it’s all about money.”
Silence. Then: “I’ve been thinking. I’ve found a couple of investors in Japan. They’ll go fifty-fifty on a modest, fifty-million-dollar all-Nippon art flick. I just need to come up with the other half, twenty-five million.”
“Yammy, we’ve been through this before. It’s not that he’s against you-you simply don’t fit the profile.”
“So what the hell does a successful trafficker look like?”
I gaze at him for a moment: neurotic, twitches like a horse plagued by flies, desperate and hurtling toward middle age, the unmistakable stamp of jail in the hollow of his cheeks, the hardness under the eyes. “Not like you, Yammy. Any customs officer would get the sack for not searching you on sight.”
From experience I know there is no point sitting and trying to be persuasive. Yammy does everything in his own time or not at all. I return to the set, where the FBI is interrogating Marly.
“I would have thought a woman like you would have done fantastically in the States,” Kimberley is saying with an ambiguous smile. “What happened?”
“It’s not as easy as they make out,” Marly explains. “I did Third World Pathetic, I got a bleeding-heart eunuch. I did Thai Whore in a G-string, I got a geriatric on Viagra.” With a hint of aggression: “Why, what’s your game?”
“Postmodern,” Kimberley says. “I got a dildo.”
“We’re shooting in one!” Yammy yells as he exits from his office, suddenly oozing authority. Immediately Marly, Jock’nEd slip out of their dressing gowns and are now stark naked. Marly walks over to the bed and bends over it, careful to lean on her hands so her breasts dangle. “It’s okay, we can still talk,” she tells Kimberley. “It’s just a bum fondle.”
Right on cue, Ed begins with the oil on her apple-shaped behind, as if polishing a Greek urn. “What are you looking at?” Marly asks the FBI, then casts a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, Jock. He’s amazing isn’t he? You wouldn’t give him a second glance if you saw him in the street, but he’s such a pro, the best in the business. He can do that even when he’s drunk. It’s like he’s got an electric inflator or something. And it is gigantic.”
Kimberley seems to be suffering hormonal overload. Hoarsely: “Tell me, when you do this, d’you feel like you’re screwing the whole feminist matriarchy?”
“No,” says Marly with a frown. “I feel like I’m screwing the whole Thai patriarchy.”
Kimberley, nodding: “Even so.”
On a signal from Yammy the FBI steps back. “Scene twelve, take one,” Yammy snaps. Marly immediately starts moaning. “Cut!” yells Yammy. “He isn’t inside you yet, honey,” he explains. “If you start with the kettle drums, what’ll you have left for the crescendo?” He goes to a laptop on a table to check something. “And you’re not quite in position, Marly darling,” he says distractedly, working the mouse. “I’ve got your clitoris and the top of your pussy in the floor camera, but we’re going to miss half of Jock’s dick for the fuck cut. Shift your bum about half an inch backward. Good. Perfect. Now, get your body memory to lock onto that. Jock, are you drooping?”