“Ah wah jus’ wai’in‘ on hold,” says Jock, looking down.
“Okay now, when you enter her, don’t use too much thrust, or you’ll push her out of position, and all we’ll get is your hairy balls. Make it look merciless, but don’t use any real horizontal pressure. Smoothly controlled grinds come out best on the celluloid. Clear?”
“Och aye,” says Jock.
“Good man.” Yammy’s mood has swung. With the Promethean will of a true artist, he has conquered despair. He casts me a grin. “I wish mine was that reliable. Okay now, Marly love, you have this gorgeous Ed here polishing your ass like it was Sung dynasty, and you know what’s going to happen next, but you don’t know when, and he’s teasing you to the point of madness. Anticipation agony in every facial muscle, please. Good, keep that. Now give us a little tongue-no, don’t stick it all out, we want only the teeniest pink tip sneaking between those hungry lips. Perfect. Okay, take two.”
Take two is the penetration shot, starring Jock. I cast a glance at the FBI. “Can we go now?” Kimberley groans. “I need to sit down somewhere cool, or find a man.”
It is as we are leaving that I see the tall athletic forty-something Englishman for the first time. He is sitting in a far corner of the studio in a plastic chair, watching everything, wearing smart casuals of impeccable cut; his open-neck linen shirt reveals a filigreed gold chain. I already know what he looks like naked and that his name is Tom. I feel exactly the same jolt of sexual jealousy as if Damrong were still alive:
Tom, you’re just amazing. I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.
Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?
Why is he here?
On the way back to Sukhumvit I tell the FBI I have to pick Lek up from the hospital, where he has his monthly check. Kimberley immediately assumes he must be HIV positive and considers taking precautions, like getting out of the taxi and taking another, so I explain he’s in perfect health. The checkup has to do with his gender reassignment. Basically, the procedure is not to cut his goolies off all at once but to ease him into his new identity using the estrogen. The surgery is almost the last stage. Now the FBI is a helpless doomed creature caught in an overwhelming mudslide of curiosity and cannot help staring at him when he gets into the backseat next to her. “You’re so beautiful,” she tells him, taking in his long black hair parted in the middle, his big oval eyes with just a hint of mascara, his gaunt high cheeks, the adolescent litheness that is still upon him.
“Lork?” says Lek, trying to catch my eye.
As she gets out of the cab at the Grand Britannia, there’s a catch in her throat: “My first angel.”
Back at the station I’m thinking about the Englishman named Tom and trying to work out what the hell he was doing at Yammy’s atelier, when my cell phone rings.
“It isn’t going to happen,” the FBI says.
“What?”
“We’re not going to let him go through with it. I’m having nightmares about the knife, and I’m not even asleep yet. Ugh!”
“Of course he’s going through with it. For a true transsexual, the surgery is the most important day of his life. It is the birth of his real self.”
“It isn’t going to happen,” the FBI says in that tone Americans use when they intend to bomb the future into submission. “He’s too beautiful. Give me his phone number.”
“No,” I say, and close the cell.
15
Next day Lek comes to see me at my desk at about four in the afternoon. He has something of the weary professional about him, which he manages to feminize by passing his hands deftly through his long inky hair and shuddering. He has not been able to resist adding a touch of rouge to his cheeks. He takes out a yaa dum aromatherapy inhaler and sticks it into his left nostril.
“I’ve been chasing leads all day,” he explains, switching nostrils, “and it’s hot and stinky. That whore has been everywhere, really everywhere, but she never stayed long. I tried to follow what her ex-husband, that American Baker, told us about her, and he was basically right. She was steadily working her way upmarket.”
“Was she attached to any bar at the time she died?”
“That’s what I’m coming to. She’d done Soi Cowboy, Nana, and Pat Pong, where she was one of the best earners on the street. Then she moved to the Parthenon Club.” A pause while he searches my face.
“The Parthenon,” I repeat, swallowing. I guess it was inevitable, but it hardly simplifies the case.
He looks at me to make sure I’m aware of possible obstructions to further inquiries.
“And? Who did you talk to there?”
“I needed a disguise, didn’t I?”
“Lek, what did you do?”
“Pretended I was looking for work. How else was I going to get anyone there to talk to me? If I’d told them I was a cop, you would have had the male half of Bangkok ’s HiSo on your back.”
“They take on katoeys?”
A proud pout. “Of course. No bar is complete without us these days.”
“Who did you talk to?”
“A low-ranking mamasan. I told her Damrong was my cousin, and I was using the connection to look for work. She told me Damrong worked there for the last two months. She said she didn’t know why Damrong hadn’t turned up for work recently-she assumed it was because Damrong had found a highflier to look after her. That’s what all the girls and boys at the Parthenon are looking for, of course.”
“You didn’t find out which members she’d been with? Anyone special in her life?”
“I had to keep it all on a gossipy level, you know, emphasizing my cousin’s amazing success in her work. The mamasan didn’t exactly spill her guts, but she did let on that Damrong had been the favorite of two club members.”
“Farang or Thai?”
“One was farang, the other Thai. ”
“You got their names?”
“No. If I’d started asking questions like that, I would have blown my cover.”
“Right.”
“By the way, that female farang in the cab yesterday-is she a hundred satang to the baht?”
“The FBI? Why?”
“She got hold of my number from the station switchboard and says she’s interested in gender reassignment and wants to take me out to lunch to discuss it with me. I told her F2M is very complicated and nothing I’m going through has any relevance to her case, but she insisted, and out of greng jai to you, I said I would go.”
I am blinking rapidly. “When’s the date?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’d like a full report,” I say, not meeting his gaze.
I’m pondering and frowning, not sure if there is going to be any way to penetrate the Parthenon Club without committing professional suicide and wondering if this is the case that will finally reveal my secret martyr complex, while I take the stairs down to the cells. The word from the turnkey is that the farang Baker is more than ripe for interrogation.
He is sitting in a peculiar position at the end of his bunk with his forehead pressed so hard against the bars, he seems welded to them.
“He’s been like that for hours,” the turnkey says. “He stopped eating and drinking. I think we’ve broken him already.”
I nod for him to open the cell door. I tell him to leave it open and to disappear from view, while keeping an ear out in case the farang turns violent. When a personality splits like this, you never know which way the particles are going to fly.