Bangkok Haunts (3 page)

By way of answer, she takes my hand and places it on the Lump.
4
I have already checked out her apartment, where the security found her body, of course. It was a quick, cursory visit, though, and I have been feeling the need to return for a more thorough examination. I had plenty of time to do it yesterday, but that was a Wednesday, and you don’t mess with the dead on Wednesdays. If all roads in the West lead to Rome, then all superstitions in the East lead back to India; our Brahmin mentors left precise instructions on this and other points, including color coding for days of the week; if you notice a lot of us wearing pink on Tuesdays, that’s why. I don’t normally follow this tradition unless something has made me nervous. Today there’s a tint of Thursday orange in my socks, shirt, and handkerchief; better safe than sorry.
Damrong’s condo happens to be in a midrange apartment building in Soi 23, within easy walking distance of my mother’s bar, the Old Man’s Club, where I slept last night. (Okay, I confess, I didn’t want to bring bad luck to Chanya and Pichai on a Wednesday night, when the black god Rahu rules the skies; I figured if I was going to come under attack from Damrong’s ghost, it would be better to take the hit at the club.)
It’s late morning by the time I’ve finished getting the bar ready for tonight; most of the chores involve ordering beer and spirits, checking that the cleaning staff have done a good job, and taking care of the Buddha. He’s a little guy, no more than two feet tall, who sits on a high shelf above the cash register; he has a huge appetite for lotus garlands, however, and shuts off the luck pronto if I forget. Before I go to Damrong’s flat, I find a street vendor in a side soi with a trishaw piled high with lotus garlands, kreung sangha tan (monk baskets full of goodies like soap, crisps, bananas, sugar, instant coffee; you buy one and donate it to your favorite wat as a way of making merit), wind chimes, bamboo chairs, cut flowers. I buy three lotus garlands, take them back to the club, festoon our voracious little Buddha with them, light a bunch of incense that I hold between my hands as I mindfully wai him, and hope I’ve done enough to keep lucky today.
I wait half an hour or so for my mother to appear. She arrives in a BMW with tinted windows. Her driver stops just outside the club to let her out, then drives off to a private car park in Soi 23. She has put on weight recently, with the result that her bum-hugging black leggings and tit-hugging T-shirts have given way to looser, more conservative attire. She is wearing a long tweed skirt with matching jacket (Thursday-orange threads prominent)—top-of-the-range stuff but sadly middle aged—and plenty of gold. She is the very image of a middle-class professional and could easily be a university professor. I give her a sniff-kiss on the cheek when she crosses the threshold and notes with approval that I’ve fed the Buddha. She sits heavily at one of the tables in the club and lights a Marlboro Red.
“This place is so dated now, Sonchai,” she says, taking in the faux jukebox with its galaxy of twinkling stars, the Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra, Mamas & Papas, Doors, early Beatles, and Stones posters on the wall. “We’re going to have to do something to pull in the Johns. All the other bars have renovated. The girls are dancing naked in Fire House and Vixens. We’re losing customers.”
I frown and shake my head. The prospect of girls dancing naked strikes me as a step down the slipper)‘ slope toward a more calculated form of exploitation. My mother knows my reservations and frowns in her turn.
“Times are changing, Sonchai, and we have to change with them.
You’ve done well enough from the bar—you could never survive on your cop’s salary. It’s time you took off the rose-colored glasses. Nine out of ten girls who apply for jobs here want to dance naked. They know that’s the way to get customers. A John who isn’t sure if he wants to get laid, get drunk, or go to bed early to nurse his jet lag will weaken at the sight of nipples and pubic hair. The West is sinking under the weight of its own hypocrisy, and these days more and more Chinese and Indian men are visiting the bars looking for some no-frills action. Let’s face it, the girls are too poor to worry about their manners.“
“Aren’t you worried about what we’re going to become, chart na?”
“The next life is determined by how generous we are in this one, how much compassion we show, not by the extent to which we’re bent by market forces.”
I know she’s right, but I don’t want to talk about it right now. I hand over the keys, tell her how much beer and spirits I’ve ordered, and kiss her goodbye like a sad but dutiful son. Once out on the street I realize how nervous I am about visiting Damrong’s apartment again and think about calling my assistant, Lek, to come with me; I decide to be a farang-style man, though, and vigorously suppress the quaking in my stomach as I stroll down Soi Cowboy, where the girls who sleep upstairs at the bars are emerging in jeans and T-shirts, hungry for breakfast and digging into food from the stalls that line the street at this time of day. I emerge into Soi 23.
There are plenty of restaurants down at this end of the soi, catering to every Western taste, and a lot of cooked-food stalls catering mostly to Isaan tastes; almost all our working girls come from the poor north and never get used to Bangkok cooking. Farther along, past the Indian embassy, it’s mostly apartment buildings, some of them built with Soi Cowboy clientele in mind. Damrong’s, though, is of the clinically clean, no-nonsense style designed to attract middle-income locals. On the other hand, since the owners of the units are almost all Thai, quite a lot of attention has been lavished on the guards’ uniforms: white jacket, crimson sash, Turkish pantaloons, white socks, dress shoes, and a bijou cap with shiny peak. With that kind of sartorial elegance elevating ego, the guy at the door doesn’t allow himself to be too impressed with my police ID and takes a while to write down the number before he calls an equally overdressed colleague to take me up to the twelfth floor. In the lift the guard tells me the reason they broke into the apartment a few days ago: an endless string of men, mostly farang and Japanese, had been calling the desk downstairs to say they were worried they couldn’t get hold of her. It wasn’t like her to spurn business. When they broke down the door, they found the body.
He lets me into the apartment using a key card but won’t enter himself. He feels no embarrassment at fessing up to a ghost phobia. He even looks at me a little strangely; maybe it’s because I’m half farang that I’m prepared to cross the threshold all alone?
I close the door behind me and reexperience the same sense of desolation I felt on my last visit. I’ve been here many times before, of course, when the heat of passion had the power to turn the white walls rosy. Even then, though, I half notice the barrenness of the place. Every prostitute I ever knew owned at least one stuffed toy—except Damrong. There were never any pictures of her either, which is quite egregious in a beautiful woman.
They found her naked on her own bed with a bright orange rope about a centimeter thick still twisted tightly around her neck to the point where it was half buried in her flesh; I have to screw my courage to the sticking point to enter the bedroom.
A hundred clips of frantic, uncontrolled lovemaking fill my head, producing a stark contrast to the silent, sterile, white room. She was always scrupulously clean; except when in the throes of passion, she confessed to disliking the messiness of sex. When I step to the bedside and look at the opposite wall, I see the elephant is still there. A photograph of a great charging tusker which seems to be bursting out of the plaster; it is the only picture in the whole apartment. When I asked her what it was doing there, as I frequently did after lovemaking, she would laugh and reply with flagrant sarcasm, He reminds me of you.
I don’t miss her cruelty, but the loss to the world of that unconquerable spirit comes hard, especially when there seems no evidence of it left. The stark white pillow lies on the stark white sheet, folded back and tucked under the mattress like a bandage. She favored hard beds, so the mattress sprang back into shape the minute they took her corpse away. No flowers, no wallpaper, no dirt, no life. The clue is that there is no clue, I mutter to myself, feeling Zen-ish; it’s true though, in a way. If anything, the kitchen is still more pristine than the bedroom. I open a drawer where she kept cutlery and remember that she, who entertained so many men here, only ever had one of anything: one spoon, one fork, one set of chopsticks. And yet she was not miserly. Unusually for a Thai working girl, she liked to pay for meals when we ate together in restaurants. She managed to give the impression that she had more money than me; quite often I felt as if I were the whore. At the front door I examine the lock. No sign of forced entry. When the perps came with the body—surely it took more than one to bring her here surreptitiously—they must have used her key card. How did they do it? Was she bundled up in a carpet like Cleopatra, or held up between them like a drunk? Obviously someone bribed at least one of the beautifully dressed guards to look the other way. I doubt that will prove a fruitful line of inquiry, however. My guess is that the bribe was big enough to provide a prophylactic against interrogation, even assuming I can find the right one to intimidate. No, this is not a crime scene, and the presence of her body here was merely a decoy. I close the front door behind me, thankful to have avoided contact with her ghost.
The next step in forensic investigation should be a visit to Damrong’s family. She came from Isakit, the poorest part of our poorest region in the northeast, known as Isaan. I’m not ready for that journey, but duty requires me to get a local cop to make the call. I tell the switchboard to find the police station nearest to Damrong’s home village. Eventually a gruff country voice comes on the line. He knows the call is from Bangkok but insists on speaking in the local Isaan tongue, which is a dialect of Khmer, so that I have to ask him to translate into Thai, and he makes a cute little protest dance out of that. Eventually he agrees to send a constable to talk to the mother. According to records, Damrong’s father died when she was young. Her one sibling is a younger brother who, so far as we know, is still alive. The database shows he was convicted of possession and trafficking in yaa baa, or methamphetamines, about ten years ago.
If I didn’t already know about Damrong’s background, I might consider inviting her mother up to Bangkok for an interview, but I learned something about the matriarch during our brief affair which makes that strategy improbable. In the meantime I need to do some fairly intrusive investigating, using parts of the government database that will require authority from Colonel Vikorn, the chief of District 8. I’ve given him only a very general outline of the case so far, and I need to see him this morning. However, this is Thursday, and the Colonel and I have a curious ritual that takes place every Thursday.
Call it a consequence of globalism. Like many Thais (roughly sixty-three million, give or take a few freaks like me), Police Colonel Vikorn’s interest in Western culture could, until recently, have been described as tepid, to say the least. As he aged, though, and his core methamphetamine business came to involve more and more lucrative export contracts, he decided he ought to know something about his customers and appointed me to keep him informed of important developments in Europe and the United States, changes in the street price of yaa baa being chief among them. I found myself justifying my existence by exploring whatever cropped up in The New York Times using such keywords as meths, DEA, drug abuse, porn. Porn, in this exercise, was originally merely a way of relieving the monotony of the usual bleeding-heart stories of how drugs have criminalized families who formerly could have been relied upon to destroy themselves with alcohol. Something about porn stories intrigued Vikorn, though, who seemed to see beyond mere sleaze. He demanded to know more and more, so that just recently porn has been the flavor of the month. It so happened that I found a masterly article in The New York Times archives a few days ago.* I know that Vikorn is not much interested in the Damrong case, so I have to launch into the porn report as soon as I’ve sat down opposite him at his vast desk.
“Listen to this,” I say, and outline the article to him.
The Colonel is so intrigued, I have to translate word for word. In a nutshell, pom’s evolutionary spiral can be traced from dirty postcards to video shops to mail order to instant downloads from the Net, all in about a decade during which it grew from a disreputable million-dollar industry to a massive, and therefore respectable, multi-billion-dollar industry. (Seven hundred million rentals of hardcore porn occurred in 2000: that’s exactly two and a half movies per U.S.
*See Appendix.
citizen, all of which feature, on average, two or more penises penetrating an equal number of mouths or vaginas, which means that the average American vicariously participated in no less than five orgies in 2000, the year the article was published. Word is the number has more than doubled since then. I don’t have the figures for homosexual porn.) In other words, as an investment, porn became irresistible to certain grandmother corporations. Like Internet gambling, porn largely survived the dot-com bubble, thus proving itself, along with eating, sleeping, dressing, and dying, as one of those industries in which a young person starting out in life cannot go wrong.
By the time I’ve finished my translation, Vikorn, a normally laid-back sixty-year-old exuding cynicism, is sitting bolt upright like a man who has been injected in the left ventricle with adrenaline. The innocence of fresh revelation has smoothed his brow. He looks ten years younger.
“Read those numbers again,” he says; then, with a gasp of admiration, “Amazing. Farang are even more two-faced than the Royal Thai Police. You mean those mealymouthed little Western TV journalists, who get their knickers in a twist about our brothels, spend most of their lives in five-star hotel rooms paying to watch people fuck for money?”
“It’s a culture of hypocrisy,” I offer, sounding rather more judgmental than I intend.
But gangsters of Vikorn’s stature are masters at seeing opportunity where mere mortals see only darkness. He shakes his head as if I were a poor, challenged intellect incapable of picking up a half-billion dollars lying on the floor at my feet.