Bangkok Tattoo (2 page)

“A large knife, as a matter of fact—looks like a military thing, solid steel with about a twelve-inch blade. I left it in the hotel room for now.”

“ ‘An enormous military-type weapon lying on a bedside table. He started to tell me what he would do to my body if I didn’t gratify his desires. He stripped naked and threw me on the bed, but he seemed unable to get an erection. He started to masturbate to make himself big, then made me turn over onto my front. It was then I realized that he intended to sodomize me. I begged him not to because I never do that sort of thing, and his member now was so big I was sure he would injure me. Still he insisted, without using a condom or a lubricant, and the pain was so great I started to scream. He became very angry and grabbed a pillow to try to stifle my screams, whereupon I completely lost control of my mind because I was sure he would kill me. Luckily I was able to reach the knife, which I swung around behind me while he was still inside me. By chance I seem to have severed his penis. He went into shock at first and stood up, hardly able to believe what had happened. He kept staring at his penis, which was lying on the floor near the bed (it popped out of me and must have fallen off him when he stood up), then he let out a terrible bestial yell and jumped on top of me. I had turned over onto my back, and unfortunately I was still holding the knife in both hands in a vertical position, and it penetrated his lower abdomen when he landed. His struggles only made the wound bigger. I did what I could to save his life, but it took some time to push him off me because he was very heavy. I was too much in shock to call the police, until I realized he was dead and then it was too late. All I could do to show respect was to pick up his penis and put it on the bedside table. My dress and bra had been on the bed and were soaked in blood. I had to put them on before I could leave the room. When I got back to the bar, I stripped off my clothes and ran up to the comfort rooms, where I took a powerful tranquilizer and lost consciousness.

“ ‘This statement was taken by Police Colonel Vikorn and Detective Jitpleecheep of Royal Thai Police District 8 while I was in full possession of my faculties. It is true to the best of my knowledge and belief, in testimony of which I hereby set my right thumb print.’ ”

I open the ink pad and roll her thumb over the ink, then onto the bottom of the paper. Vikorn, a consummate professional, has neatly ended her report without the need for a second page.

“Anything I’ve left out?”

“No,” I say in awe. The statement is a masterly mosaic of several standard stories from the Game, artfully interwoven with great economy of language. Still more remarkable in a cop who carries his legal scholarship so lightly, he has laid the foundations for an impregnable defense to a charge of murder or even manslaughter: she used only such force as was necessary to save her life and did not deliver the fatal blow; when she saw how badly he was wounded, she attempted without success to save his life; and she expressed sorrow and respect by her sensitive placing of his severed member in a position of honor. The dead
farang
’s standard-issue hatred of the opposite sex arising from bitter personal experience of his own countrywomen provides a motive for his aggression and his sexual preferences. “I think you’ve covered everything.”

“Good. Give her a copy when she wakes up, and make sure she memorizes it. If there’s anything she wants to change, tell her she can’t.”

“D’you want to visit the scene of the crime?”

“Not really. Anyway, it wasn’t a crime, so don’t prejudice justice by calling it that. Self-defense is not illegal, especially when by a woman on a Saturday night in Krung Thep.”

“Still, I think you’d better come,” I say. He grunts irritably but stands up anyway and jerks his chin in the general direction of the street.

2

T
he receptionist, already oozing servility thanks to the five thousand baht I gave him an hour ago, starts to stutter when he sees Vikorn, who is by way of being emperor of these
sois.
The Colonel switches on his five-thousand-kilowatt charm and hints at what a lucrative future awaits those who know how to keep their mouths shut at a time like this. (Positive-type stutters from the receptionist.) I take the key again, and we mount the stairs.

Inside the room the stench that invariably accompanies a competent disemboweling has grown stronger since my first visit. I switch on the air-con, which only serves to cool the stench without diminishing its potency. I can see Vikorn working himself into a rage with me for dragging him over here. “Look,” I say. I take out the dead
farang
’s passport from the drawer where I found it earlier. I am not an expert on our occult immigration practices, but the form of his visa disturbs me. The passport is the property of one Mitch Turner.

It disturbs the Colonel too, for he grows pale as he stares at it. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

“Because I didn’t know if it was important or not. I didn’t know what it is. I still don’t.”

“It’s a visa.”

“I can see that.”

“Good for two years with multiple reentry thrown in.”

“Yes?”

“They never give two-year visas. Never. Especially not with multiple reentry. Except in certain cases.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The visa has deepened our sense of tragedy, the violent loss of a relatively young life so far away from home. “CIA or FBI?”

“CIA. We let in about two hundred after 9/11. They wanted to keep an eye on the Muslims in the south on the border with Malaysia. They’re a pain in the neck because they don’t speak Thai so they have to have interpreters.” He looked at the corpse. “Imagine an overmuscled six-foot white
farang
with an interpreter trying to be incognito down in Hat Yai on a Friday night among our little brown people. Damn. I suppose it couldn’t have been Al Qaeda?”

“But we already have a statement from the perpetrator?”

“She could be persuaded to retract. You didn’t see any long black beards tonight?”

Is he serious? Sometimes my Colonel’s super brain is beyond my poor faculties of comprehension. “I really don’t see how that would help.”

“You don’t? Look, he’s CIA—they’ll lean on us from the top down. There are going to be footprints all over my shoulders, not to mention yours. They’ll want their own doctors to examine Chanya—no signs of abuse, and we’re in the shit. We could lose our most productive worker, maybe even have to close the club for a while.”

“How would it help if it was Al Qaeda?”

“Because that’s exactly what they’ll want to believe. They’re practically blaming the weather on Al Qaeda over there. Just say it’s Al Qaeda, and they’ll be eating out of our hands.”

We exchange a glance. No, it’s hopeless. It just doesn’t look like a terrorist castration/murder. So what to do about Chanya? I did not examine her private parts, but somehow one doubts that any man would dare to abuse her. Speaking off the record if I may, she’s as resilient as a wolverine and when cornered just as ferocious. I can tell by his expression that Vikorn shares my doubts. Whatever the truth of what happened in this room earlier tonight, it is unlikely to be on all fours with her statement, which she has not yet read. Now we are both staring at the
farang
’s face.

“Kind of ugly, don’t you think, even for a
farang
?”

I had thought the same thing myself but lack my Colonel’s fearless self-expression: an abnormally short neck almost as wide as his head, no chin, a mean little mouth—perhaps she killed him for aesthetic reasons? Vikorn’s eyes rest for a moment on the rose in the plastic cup. I know what he’s thinking.

“Doesn’t quite fit her statement, does it?”

Vikorn turns his head to one side. “No, but leave it. The key to cover-ups is to leave the evidence alone, make the story do the work. The trick is all in the interpretation.” A sigh.

“Bodies deteriorate rapidly in the tropics,” I suggest.

“They need to be incinerated as soon as possible for public health reasons.”

“Having taken a statement from the perpetrator and thereby solved the case, with no identifying documents on his person—we’ll have to lose the passport.”

“Good,” Vikorn says. “I’ll leave it to you.”

We both give the victim the honor of one more scan. “Look, the telephone cable has been stretched—the phone is on the corner of the bed. A last-minute emergency call?”

“Check with the hotel operator.”

“What shall I do about that?” I point.

Sophisticated practitioners, we have not troubled ourselves unduly with the murder weapon, which is lying in the middle of the bed, exactly where one would expect to find it if Chanya had killed him in the manner Vikorn says she did. I see this as a lucky sign and clear proof that the Buddha is looking favorably on our endeavors, but Vikorn scratches his head.

“Well, keep it. She did it, didn’t she? So her prints are going to be all over it. What could they find on the knife except his blood and her prints? It all points to her statement being true. We’ll give it to them as corroboration.” A sigh. “She’ll have to disappear for a while. Since it was self-defense, we don’t have the power to hold her. Tell her to change her hair.”

“A nose job?”

“Let’s not exaggerate—we all look the same to them.” A pause. “Okay, let’s go back to the club. You better tell me what really happened tonight, just so I can take precautions.”

3

S
tudents of my earlier chronicle (a transsexual Thai—M2F—murders a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras—standard stuff in District 8) will recall that my mother’s commercial talent invented the concept of the Old Man’s Club as a way of exploiting the hidden business opportunities of Viagra. The idea, which still fills me with filial admiration, involved blitzing every red-blooded Western male over the age of fifty (ideally, those most pissed by the options left them by their postindustrial utopia) with electronic invitations to screw his brains out in a congenial atmosphere especially tailored to the tastes of his generation. Photographs of Elvis, Sinatra, Monroe, the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, even the early Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Cream still adorn our walls, and our music pretends to emerge from our faux juke box (chrome and midnight blue, with a billion glittering stars). The sounds come out of a Sony audio hard disk hooked up to one of the best systems money can buy.

My mother saw Viagra as the solution to the management problem that has beset the trade since time began: how to accurately predict the male erection. Under her business plan, an old man would come ogle the girls, choose one he liked, then book her by telephone from his hotel room when he had swallowed the Viagra. The drug takes almost exactly an hour to reach full steam, so the logistical problem originally posed by nature was thereby solved. It ought to have been possible to use a simple computer program to work out which of the girls would be occupied almost from minute to minute. (At the height of our enthusiasm project management software was discussed though in the event not installed.) And guess what? It worked a treat, save for one small flaw that really could not have been foreseen by any of us, not even Nong.

What we had left out of account was that these sexta-, septa-, octa-, and even nonagenarians were not old men of the serene, humble, and decrepit genre we were used to in the developing world. No sir, these were former rockers and rollers, swingers and druggies, ex-hippie veterans of Freak Street in Kathmandu, San Francisco (when there were beautiful people there), Marrakech, Goa before it went mainstream, Phuket when there were only A-frame huts to sleep in, the world when it was young and LSD grew on trees along with magic mushrooms and a thousand varieties of marijuana. Scrawny contemporaries of Burroughs and Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, and Jagger (not to mention Keith Richards), these boys, doddering though they might appear, had once taken a tribal vow never to underdose. You’re only supposed to take half a Viagra to enhance performance, but would they listen? The hell they would. Some popped as many as three or four. Only a half dozen suffered heart attacks, despite dire warnings on the bottle, and of those only three actually expired. (Desperate times when Vikorn’s Bentley had to be requisitioned as an ambulance in the teeth of expletive-enriched objections from his irascible chauffeur, who doubted there was much Buddhist merit to be made in saving the lives of geriatric
farang.
) The others uniformly declared they’d gone to heaven without having to die first.

Now what was wrong with that? I’ll tell you. Gentlemen, take a whole Viagra (or more), and you kiss your natural flaccidity goodbye for eight hours or longer. (Forget about urinating for a day; questions arise as to how to carry out basic chores with that broomstick between your legs. Many report nostalgia for detumescence. Poetic justice: there’s nothing to do but screw, whether you want to or not.)

They wore the girls out, who started to leave in droves. My mother had promised full satisfaction and she hated to disappoint, which left us with no recourse but a relay system. One horny old codger could get through five or six healthy young women before the drug started to fade and he allowed himself to be carried back to his hotel in a condition best described as ecstatic catatonia (or rapturous rigor mortis). Profit margins shrank to paper-thin.

Something had to be done. At an emergency board meeting it was agreed to delete “satisfaction guaranteed” from the advertising and to appeal to a broader market. Overworked young men suffering from stress-related impotence were favored. We continued to be the destination of preference for the Western raver on a pension, and at the same time the more traditional customer began to favor us (Western ravers with no pension, basically), but we had lost our market niche. We were hardly different from all the other bars and as such suffered the seasonal downturns, not to mention the recession in the West. Suddenly we were running at a loss in a bear market. It was Nong who suffered most, for the club was her pride and joy, her brainchild and the vehicle by which she was to prove to the world that she was not merely an exceptionally successful whore (ret.) but also a full-fledged twenty-first-century businesswoman of international quality. She grew unusually religious, meditated at the local
wat
every day, and promised the Reclining Buddha at Wat Po two thousand boiled eggs and a hog’s head if he would save her business. Even Vikorn burned a little incense, and I went further in my meditation than ever before. With such mystic brain power working on our behalf, a miracle was inevitable.