"Bangkok Haunts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burdett John)

18

I sit upstairs in Starbucks on a sofa with a good view of the street, waiting for Nok. I am only vaguely aware of other patrons; I'm pretty much glued to the window. I know what she thinks our meeting is all about, and I'm feeling guilty to be deceiving her, but at the moment she might be the only real lead I have. I'm also feeling disloyal to Vikorn, who would obviously prefer that I don't investigate the Damrong video too carefully. Amazing how easy it is to divide one's own mind. There's a fanatic in me who will not rest until I've got to the bottom of that snuff movie; he lives in the same house as the other guy, who would be happy to go along with Vikorn's game plan and live happily ever after with his pregnant wife. The fanatic is winning.

Now I see her and know exactly what she expects by the way she is dressed. In tight jeans and T-shirt, she could not be further from the eighteenth-century mamasan of last night. She has assumed that because I've chosen the Nana area, with its profusion of cheap short-time hotels, we'll go straight into sex: no need for her to dress up. There's a bounce in her step: anticipation of making a little on the side in what will probably be a pleasurable encounter that may lead to something more enduring: maybe I'll even make her my mia noi, or minor wife; give her a salary and a room to live in. Also, since I seem to have decided to betray my wife after all, I must have found her irresistible: pride and dominance in her quick smile at me when she arrives.

"Did you know we were raided last night, just after you left?"

I shake my head. "Really? Did they find anything?"

"No drugs, but they took away the computer with the member list. The boss has been on the phone all day talking to members who are scared the press will get hold of the list. Someone called Colonel Vikorn is taking money. Fuck cops."

"Right," I say, giving up on the idea of coming clean. "Well, it's not your problem."

She smiles. "Not right now anyway." She waits expectantly. When I do not begin bargaining regarding the price of her services, she examines my face more closely. Maybe I'm one of those confused men who got into a marriage he's not enjoying but is not sure if a mistress is really what he wants? I have not prepared properly for this interview, and I'm conscious of exceeding my authority. I feel more like a bandit than a cop when I take out my wallet and start to lay out some thousand-baht notes on the coffee table. There's a flash of anger at my indiscretion which diminishes as I continue putting the money on the table. She has counted ten thousand baht and now checks my eyes. No one except a farang would offer that kind of money for a midday romp: Okay, I'm special, but I'm not that special. I roll the money up into a tight ball.

"Let's say I'm an investigator," I say. "I work with banks."

Her shift into the new reality is pretty well immediate. "You're trying to protect the members? That's why you were there last night and didn't want to do it? The bankers are paying you?"

"No. Someone else is paying me."

I make a face that she construes as affirmation of her suspicion. Her features have hardened, and there is a new clarity in her gaze. "I'll want more than that."

"I'll double it."

"More."

"No."

"Then I'm not talking."

I puff out my cheeks. Twenty thousand baht would probably be what she averages per month. Most girls would grab it-unless they were frightened.

"Look," I say, "how do I know you have the information I'm looking for?"

"I can guess. If you're not working for the bankers, then you're into some kind of blackmail scam. I don't want to get involved, but I need the money. I'll talk for fifty thousand."

There's finality in the tone. "Okay. I'll have to go to an ATM."

"We'll go together, then we'll go to a short-time hotel. That way everyone who sees us will think you're hiring my body." She pauses to look around the cafe. Three middle-aged white men are sitting with girls they probably picked up in this area the night before. The others are mostly farang men and a few farang women taking a break from the third world and reading newspapers and magazines over a caffe latte or machiatto. We go to the nearest ATM, where a couple of young farang men with eyebrow hatpins watch with amusement while I take out a wad of notes with my whore standing beside me.

She knows the Nana hotels better than I do because she worked some bars here before she went upmarket to the Parthenon. We take a cab to a drive-in, where there are curtains to draw around your car if you brought one, and a hastily constructed set of rooms that give directly onto the underground car park. I pay a guard three hundred baht. Once in the room he asks if I want to watch porn on the DVD player while I'm humping, but I tell him no. Meanwhile Nok has started to feel horny. She sits on the double bed with a teasing smile and looks up at us in the ceiling mirror. I smile and shake my head. She holds out her hand. I give her ten thousand baht and promise to hand over the balance if she has useful information.

There is a gynecological chair in one corner. In use, it must offer access to the captive vagina from virtually every point of the compass. Nok jerks her chin at it with a complex smirk: Look what we could be up to if you didn't insist on asking stupid questions; maybe we could multitask? I shake my head again. She sighs and lies flat on her back. I join her, so we are both looking at ourselves in the ceiling mirror, which distorts somewhat. Perhaps the purpose is erotic, for everything appears longer.

"What do you want to know?"

"How the Parthenon really works."

Her elongated features in the ceiling mirror give me a shrewd look. "Why don't you tell me what you know so far?"

"I know that there are only a hundred and fifty official members. The subscription fee is not that high, and there's no way such a small number can keep a place like that going. A membership that small couldn't even keep you in your silk gowns."

In the mirror a female demon nods gravely. "You're pretty shrewd. So how do you think it works?"

"Secret membership," I reply. "There are some impressive names on the membership list, but not half as impressive as they could be."

She nods. "Correct. Not many people know about it, not even the girls. Nothing is written down."

"Tell me how it works."

"We call them the X members. Actually, they are the founders. It's their money that keeps the place going. For them it really is a private club. They get the pick of the girls, anytime, anywhere, any kind of service, on call 24/7. One of the mamasans gets a message from the manager: such-and-such a girl is to go to such-and-such an address at such-and-such a time. The girl does as she's told-she doesn't know anything about X members. She doesn't mind because she gets paid double and is given the next night off. Sometimes the assignation is upstairs at the club. Usually she won't know who she's sleeping with. We're all simple country girls-we don't know much about HiSo."

"You mean a private room like we used?"

"No. These are the real private rooms. You get to them by private elevator."

"Who are the X members?"

"Who do you think? The highest fliers in Thailand-senior army officers, very senior cops, bankers, businessmen, politicians. Pretty much the same sort of men as the official members, but much more senior."

"So the official members are basically fall guys?"

A shrug. "They get their money's worth. Very often they're business associates of the secret members, so it pays for them to join."

I turn to examine her face. "Do I need to ask you how you know all this?"

A shake of the head. "I'm quite popular with the X members. I talked them into making me mamasan so I didn't have to go with the official members anymore. Better one big bastard once a week than a little jerk every night."

"And Damrong?" I ask. "She was popular with the secret members too, no?"

She turns away and speaks to the wall. "Tell me what happened to her. Is she dead?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. Are you investigating for her family?"

"Not exactly."

She turns to study me. "She wasn't popular with everybody. A lot of men saw through her, and women didn't think she looked special."

"But the rest, among the X members?"

"Suppose she was popular with one of them, what about it? What difference if she's dead?"

"It's my job to investigate."

A pause, then: "She was a kind of genius prostitute. The genius was all in her instinct, which was so fast, so accurate, she was more like a wild animal. She would know in a single glance if a man was going to fall for her or not. The ones she couldn't reach in the first ten seconds, she ignored. They ceased to exist for her. That gave her time and energy to concentrate on the others. The suckers. She understood what a lot of girls don't, including me." I raise my eyebrows. "The bigger they come, the harder they fall. I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes." As she speaks, her left hand seeks out mine. "She was my friend, though. She was very kind to me. She protected me."

Now we are looking at each other eyeball to eyeball. "From what?"

"A pig. I told her I didn't think I could carry on with him. I was losing all self-respect-of course I was never told his name. He paid big money, but he was brutal. She seduced him herself, got him away from me. She didn't seem to mind sadism. Maybe she was kinky that way. Or maybe I'm just too sensitive. She even shared with me the money he gave her the first time he had her. That's the kind of woman she was. Jai dee mark mark." Shaking her head: "But I didn't think anyone could reach him the way she did. For me he was hard as diamond."

"What does he look like?"

"Thai Chinese, tall, slim, about fifty, still very handsome in a vicious kind of way."

I let a couple of beats pass. "I think you know who he is."

"I found out."

"Khun Tanakan?"

She seems reluctant to repeat the name and gives only the briefest nod.

"But at the same time one of the official members was crazy about her-the lawyer Tom Smith. You told me about him."

"That moron. He has no idea how close he came to being bumped off by the Thai Chinese. He didn't know who his rival was, or he would have kept his mouth shut. He would go crazy whenever he came to the club and she wasn't available, started making threats. Farang are like boys-they have no self-control."

"Did Tanakan know about Smith?"

"Sure. That kind of guy knows everything. He pays."

"But he didn't do anything about Smith?"

"Smith is still alive, isn't he?"

"Did he do legal work for the Thai Chinese?"

"How would I know a thing like that?"

"Of course. Sorry." I hold up the remainder of the banknotes. "Who organizes all this? There has to be someone in control?"

"The footman at the door. Take a look at him. He's smart. He carries the names of every secret member in his head, and he's the one who takes the girls to the assignations. The secret members pay him big bucks to keep his mouth shut. Of course, he wouldn't dare to talk anyway."

I'm holding out the wad of notes but clamp it between my fingers when she reaches for it. "Khun Kosana, the advertising mogul, he is an X member, isn't he?"

She blinks for a moment and swallows. "Yes. He was a close friend of Khun Tanakan."

"Was?"

"He's disappeared. Everyone thinks he's dead."

"Did Tanakan do it?"

A flash of anger. "How the hell do I know?" Calming herself. "Khun Kosana was the main reason the club hired katoeys. I think he only pretended to like girls -I only ever saw him hire katoeys. He was a kind of slave to Tanakan. They say he didn't really have a head for business, Tanakan had to bail him out plenty of times. But he was very clever with the media. Tanakan used him to buff his public image."

I hand over the balance of her money, then peel off some more notes and hold them up. "Get me into the secret part of the club, where the escalator leads to the private members' rooms."

"What for?"

"Just to look."

Now she has changed her mind about me all over again. "I think you must be a real cop. That's where she was killed, isn't it? In one of the private rooms."

"How would I know without taking a look?"

She snatches the money out of my hand. "I would do it for nothing. Come to the club tonight. Call ahead to ask for me personally, and reserve a room for us."

We leave the short-time hotel separately. Lek is calling me on the cell phone, asking if I'm coming back to the station because the duty calls are starting to come in. I say I'll be there in twenty minutes. Sergeant Ruamsantiah is running the response teams today.

I'm in a cab when my cell phone starts to vibrate in my pocket. It's Ruamsantiah with a bust. "It's a damn funeral casino," he says, his tone full of apology.

"I thought we stopped busting them."

"Unofficially. We got a report from a cop-must be a disgruntled relative who wasn't invited. It's not something we can ignore. You can go as easy as you like, just make sure you take down names and keep notes so we can say we acted promptly on the information." I call Lek to tell him to meet me at the Skytrain station nearest the address.

Sorry to lay a culture shock on you halfway through the yarn, farang; funeral casinos work like this:

You are a newly minted ghost all alone on the Other Side without a body, feeling understandably disoriented. There is still plenty of connection with your living relatives through subtle lines that science will not be able to detect for a few hundred years yet, but after your loss of vital functions, the communication operates largely through transfer of emotional energy: urges outlive reason. Without a body, though, you are dependent on a certain residual awareness filled mostly with separation anxiety. Now, what do you most not want? Answer: you most don't want to be alone. Relatives who might have irritated you profoundly before you became a corpse now acquire an important-nay vital-function. It is the duty of close family to surround you with as many people as possible for the duration of the wake, which can go on for forty-nine days, at the end of which you will have found a new bivouac in someone's -or something's-womb. Now, there is one activity and one activity alone that will keep your average Thai coming to your home day after day for seven weeks, especially if they didn't much like you in the first place. The other advantage to buying a few roulette wheels and offering a private gambling service is for the bereaved spouse to use the profits to pay for the monks, the food, and the roulette wheels and to put together a fistful of baht to see close family through the difficult postwake period.

All of which explains why Lek and I find ourselves outside Nang Chawuwan's third-floor apartment in a modestly appointed building on Soi 26. Lek snooped around and confirmed there is a fire escape from the apartment by means of the back door. By banging loudly on the front door, therefore, and yelling, "Police," we are able to cause an immediate evacuation. Sounds of Sunday-best shoes slapping on the wrought-iron fire escape on the opposite side of the apartment, excited whispers, some giggling. The exit goes on for about ten minutes, which probably indicates that more than a hundred guests are now legging it down the soi. We bang again on the door, and this time it opens on an exhausted, tearful, but spirited woman dressed in traditional Thai costume; Nang Chawuwan is all of five feet tall.

I don't want to cause offense at her time of mourning, so I let her play for time while the last of her guests make their getaway, then she leads us into the flat. She has not troubled to hide the roulette wheels; there are five of them. Cleverly, she has left small piles of cash next to one of the wheels. She glances from the cash to me to Lek to the cash.

"This is a very serious offense that carries a prison sentence," Lek tells her sternly, while taking a peek at the deceased, who is lying with his arms folded over his chest in a brightly varnished pine coffin: the gaunt, humble face of a workingman. Indeed, he is so gaunt, I'm wondering if Nang Chawuwan starved him to death. An ignoble thought, perhaps, but that is one skeletal cadaver.

"Sorry," Nang Chawuwan says.

Unable to maintain stern for very long, Lek stares with infinite compassion at the corpse. "Poor thing's lonely already," he says, "I can feel it."

A sniff from Nang Chawuwan. "That's why I did it, I had to make it worth everyone's while to keep him company. How else was I to fulfill my obligations as a wife?"

Lek finds this question too troubling and turns to me for instructions. I am afraid I am somewhat transfixed by the corpse, like a cadet with his first cadaver. Death is hitting me strangely this week.

"Take the money," Nang Chawuwan says, losing patience and jerking her chin at the cash next to the wheel.

"We don't take money," Lek says, again checking my eyes.

"That's right," I confirm. I smile. "Better put it away-it's a little incriminating lying there like that."

Nang Chawuwan makes big eyes. "You don't take money?" A grin breaks over her features. "I knew my Toong was a good man, but I never knew he had that kind of karma. Imagine, busted at his funeral by two cops who don't take money!" She shoves the cash down her bra for now. "He was practically an arhat, a saint, and this proves it."

"You'll have to give us your ID card," I say, "and if anyone asks, this was a serious bust that went wrong because we didn't know there was a fire escape."

"Right."

"And you're never going to do this again, are you? I mean, you're not going to call around to all your guests to tell them the coast is clear as soon as we're gone, right?"

"Of course not."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Just this time then.", Locking eyes with me for a moment: "Are you sure you won't take some money? I would feel safer."

"No," Lek says, all firm again and pointing a long finger at her. "You'll have to trust us."

Old Toong's excellent karma has her all excited. She's remembering all over again what a fine man she married and how well he took care of her, even after death. It's not often a ghost gets so lucky at his own funeral casino. Indeed, Nang Chawuwan is now so fortified with his spiritual power, she has fished her cell phone from out of her costume and started calling the guests back before we're out the front door.

While we're walking down Soi 26, though, in search of a cab, I'm starting to feel dizzy and have to stop at a cafe. Normally I don't drink on duty, but I need a beer and order one. Lek orders a 7UP, then goes to a street vendor who is pushing his glass-and-aluminum trolley along the gutter. I watch while the vendor opens the hinged glass, stabs at a sour green mango, dunks it onto a cutting plate, and slices it up so fast his hands are a blur. Now he's using the funnel end of the steel plate to slide the slices into a plastic bag. He chucks the first plastic bag into a second, into which he adds pink sachets of chili, salt, and sugar for the dip. The final touch is a cocktail stick with which to eat the mango slices.

"What's the matter?" Lek wants to know when he returns, chewing.

I felt the blood drain from my face, and I'm sure my skin was gray as I sat down hard on a plastic seat outside the cafe. It's a street that caters mostly to the housing needs of workers in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of katoeys around, a lot of farang, and girls in jeans and T-shirts on their way to work.

"Death," I say. "Every cop builds up a resistance from the first day on the beat. You can lose it, though, just like that." I snap my fingers while he makes big eyes. He does not understand, and there is no way I'm going to confess to a shameful event of last night that the bust has brought back to mind. I swallow the beer quickly but fail to block the memory:

I woke up with a jolt so hard, I could feel it in my joints. Chanya was my first thought, but she was already awake, staring hard at the ceiling. She only does that when she's angry.

"It was her again, wasn't it?"

I waited as long as I could before saying, "Yes."

"Sonchai, I don't know how much of this I can take. I'd fight any living woman for you, but the dead? D'you know what you've been doing for the last half hour?"

I was unable to answer.

"You've been fucking her, haven't you?"

I turned my head away. "Yes."

"On and on. That's the third time in as many nights. Then you came. You're all sticky."

I didn't realize. Now the whole dream came back to me. Except that it wasn't a dream. It was a visit. I couldn't move for trembling.

With an effort my darling overcame her anger and went to fetch a damp cloth. She wiped me down as roughly as she could without removing surface skin. "A normal man has a real mia noi. You have to have a fucking dead one."

"I'm so sorry."

"This has been going on since you went to her apartment the last time, hasn't it?"

"I better have a shower."

"It's the middle of the night."

I went out to the yard to hose myself down like an elephant. We couldn't face each other this morning.

I finish the beer and stare at Lek.

"It's the Damrong case, isn't it?" he asks with that uncanny sixth sense of a katoey. I nod without meeting his gaze. "I want you to come to see my moordu, master, please?"

Lek discovered his infallible seer about a year ago and has been trying to get me to meet her/him ever since. Lek is convinced that he and I have been circling around each other for hundreds of lifetimes, fulfilling various intimate roles for each other: mother/father, sister/ brother, husband/wife. What he's particularly interested in finding out, though, is when I was last a katoey like him. It is a tenet of our Buddhism that all human souls go through the transsexual experience from time to time.

"When I'm stronger, Lek," I say, "not today."

While I'm paying for my beer and Lek's 7UP, my cell phone buzzes with a text message. I fish it out, read it, then show it to Lek. It's another from Yammy, the fifth this week:

I've found a mule so I won't have to carry myself. Please talk to the Colonel. I don't think I can take much more of this. I must practice my art. Yammy.

I groan, show the message to Lek, and put the phone away, only to take it out again because it's bleeping. This time the message is from the FBI:

You live in a magic-ravaged land.