In a lust-thick tone: “Just ask her, if you wouldn’t mind, if there’s anything she doesn’t do?”
A brief discussion between me and the girl in Thai. “No, there’s nothing she doesn’t do. Don’t hurt her.”
She snaps her head around to face me. “Did you say that because I’m American, or because I’m female, or because I’m gay?”
“I always say the same thing to men,” I reply with a smile.
The three of us leave together. I find Elizabeth a taxi and watch her disappear into the back with her trophy. They are moving away when all of a sudden she makes the driver stop, and she rolls down her window in back. Beckoning to me, then holding my arm when I’m close enough: “I appreciate this. I confess I’m not proud of what I’m doing.” A pause. “I need air.”
I smile: “I understand.”
As she rolls up the window: “This is not what I generally do.”
The girl beside her, now dressed in a low-cut black silk blouse and short white skirt that reveals her long brown legs, searches my eyes: Problem? I shake my head. No problem, just another gasping, life-starved farang. The taxi moves off.
It’s one-fifteen a.m., which is to say forty-five minutes before the curfew. The street is alive with bodies already half conjoined on their way to the hotels all around. There are a few Western women with local girls, but the vast majority of the trade is heterosexual. Pat Pong is only a couple minutes’ walk from the gay bars on the other side of Surawong, however. In the Grand Finale Club the format is much the same as in Pat Pong, except that the people on stage are all men. Most of them, in underpants, are late teens, early twenties, but quite a few are older, harder, tougher. And tattoos are everywhere.
I walk across the street to a gothic black door encrusted with nails that forms the almost-discreet entrance to the No Name Bar, a resort so sought after and so exclusive it never needs to advertise. You don’t get to simply walk in without introduction, either. A child of the street knows the formula, though, and the burly, tattooed doorman lets me through.
Sure enough, the seats that surround the stage support a fair proportion of female backsides, most of which are Japanese, although quite a few are Thai working women on girls’ nights out. The rest of the customers are gay, white, and male. The men on the stage are all naked and hand-picked either for their youth and beauty; for their testosteronic postures, the dimensions of their cocks; or for the quality of their decorations.
It happens that I’m just in time for the last act. The house lights dim, “Nights in White Satin” plays over the sound system, and a naked figure in black executioner’s mask strides onto the stage; everyone, especially the Japanese women, gasps at the quality of the tats, which shine brilliantly under the spotlight. A naked boy and girl arrive to kneel and work his member. Soon, as the haunting sound track reaches its crescendo, the Battle of Midway arises magically from out of flaccidity. I have no idea if he has seen me or not, but even if he has, we both know it will make no difference.
I leave the club within ten minutes of entering. Back on Pat Pong the street is now so crammed with refugees from the curfew, it is hard to walk. I pause in the entrance to one of the bars to pull out my cell phone and press an autodial number. “If I give you my heart, will you give me yours?” I ask.
“Not if you’re going to die.”
“We have to stop him. You do know that.”
A long pause. “This isn’t easy. What do you want to do?”
“Live with you. Sleep with you.”
Doubtfully: “Will that do it?”
My heart in my mouth: “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”
A groan, then she closes the phone.
39
I believe it is intrinsic to your cockeyed morality, farang, that when a man and woman engaged in law enforcement are forced to pretend, for strategic reasons (say, a decoy-stakeout situation), to be lovers, they must be scrupulous in preventing their false embraces from developing into full-blown copulation-correct?
Well, fuck that. Chanya and I, in our tiny love nest on Soi 39, which is the best I can afford in this expensive part of town, go at it like rabbits. Not only is she beautiful, she is also generous. Who am I not to love her? Her extraordinary beauty might not be of her making, but that tactile friendliness, that gentle concern that expresses itself in soft touches, sweet caresses, premeditated kindness-that is all from her soul, and I would have needed to be stone. Nevertheless, it is part of the job to parade our passion up and down the soi, especially in the evening when the Japanese clubs are open and the mamasans stand on duty outside, checking the street. During the day our duties are more practical.
It is a traditional little apartment, which is to say ablutions are performed courtesy of a great tub of water out in the yard. There is a double gas cooking ring also in the backyard-oh yes, and a single rickety cupboard. There is no bed, so I bought a couple of futons that we keep side by side. I love her best in the mornings when, still sleepy, she rolls over onto her side to admit me from behind. Or do I love her best when she is horny late at night? Or is it when she’s washing out in the yard, using her sarong to conceal her body from the neighbors? Don’t ask me. Love is a form of insanity that pervades every fiber. It is also much increased by the knowledge that one stands a good chance of dying within the week. We keep our mobiles charged, and I check the Net every day at the local Internet café. Day after day, night after night, there is still no word, no attack. Perhaps we are growing complacent. When I remember I’m a cop, I try to elicit relevant information. Generally, she’s happy to oblige but with heavy editing. Her story of the second half of her relationship with Mitch Turner is like the story of Othello without a single mention of Iago.
Chanya had returned to Thailand when the world was mesmerized by two office towers collapsing over and over on its television screens. She owned over one hundred thousand dollars and had no intention of selling her body ever again. She was twenty-nine and a little old for the Game in any event. She built a new house for her parents, set them up with twenty buffalo, which they used for breeding-a definite improvement on the hard labor of rice growing-sent her two young brothers to the best schools money could buy in Thailand, and already had proudly put her brilliant younger sister through a biology course at Chulalongkorn University. When all bills were paid, she did not have very much left, but then she didn’t need much. Sometime toward the end of her Washington sojourn, beset by homesickness and self-doubt, she had determined to redress the karmic imbalance caused by her unseemly trade by dedicating her life to the Buddha. She was to be a maichee-a Buddhist nun. She was the queen of her village, the idol of her parents, almost a goddess figure to anyone who knew anything about rural Thailand.