“But you did make love?”
“Of course. But only once, and I didn’t enjoy it because I was dealing with this feeling that I’d disappointed him, that he was looking for some kind of extra-exotic, freaky sex-I felt inadequate, I suppose.” She sighed. “Afterwards, just to please him, I asked if he wanted me to shoot darts.” She laughed. “I must have suspected that’s what he wanted, or I wouldn’t have brought my darts, would I? A woman like me, you never know exactly what men expect. I got the feeling he wanted me to perform for him, to be his sex toy, but he never asked me to do anything. He wanted me to know what to do. He was being like a woman, in a way. Shooting darts is the only thing I do that interests men.”
“Did you perform for him? Did he say yes?”
She nods sadly. “Yes. He came alive then. It turned out that he’d planned it. He’d even bought a dartboard and he positioned me on the bed-and he made a video, with close-ups and everything. He’d planned everything beforehand, but he hadn’t wanted to ask me. I don’t know if he was a gentleman or some kind of strange romantic. Everything had to be perfect, though, the lighting, the position of the camera-everything. That’s when he got most excited, but we didn’t make love again.” A pause. “What I remember most was the silk.”
“Silk?”
“Yes. Everything was silk, really nice quality with beautiful colors, and he tied a silk headscarf around my head, and tied one around his own head. He kept saying how good it felt on the skin, wanted me to feel it. It was quite nice on the skin, but it was just silk-it didn’t turn me on. It was like some Middle Eastern show, him being so black in this purple scarf, and when I left he gave me the scarf. He wanted to give me money, but I refused. I was pretty depressed-I suppose I was in love with him, and wanted it to go on a bit longer-and I was disappointed, you know, that he wanted to make that video, that he was like the others, only more so, in a way.”
I take a photograph out of my pocket and hold it for her. Kat winces. “I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard about her. I mean, you know what people are like, they love to see you suffer? About two years after that night with Bradley, people started telling me about this woman he’d been seen with. The way they described her, that must be her. There can’t be more than one in Krung Thep like that. What a body! You can’t blame him for preferring her to me, can you? I can say it, now that it’s so long ago: that’s a fantastic-looking whore.”
“You never heard where she worked, what she did?” She shook her head.
I’m about to leave when a whim makes me fish out the pictures of Warren. I show her the most recent: Warren with George W. Bush at a reception in the Rose Garden. Her eyes flicker between me and the photograph. Fear? More like consternation. She put a hand on my arm. “Is he involved? Sonchai, if he is you better forget about this case.”
“Why?”
“Did you ever hear the phrase ‘a special job’?”
“Of course. He’s one of those?”
“He’s the original special job. He used to be very well known in the bars. He would arrive once a month and the word would go round. He paid top dollar for any girl who would go with him, but none of them ever wanted to go a second time. They wouldn’t talk about it, but you can guess. Farangs don’t understand us Thais. They think if a girl sells her body, then she has no dignity, no limits. Actually, the opposite is often the truth. Women like your mother are very free spirits. Could you imagine Nong ever holding down a normal job? Or putting up with abuse from a man? A woman might sell her body because it’s more dignified and safer than being married to a violent drunk who goes whoring without protection. Well, anyway, nobody went with him twice, at least that was what I heard.”
“And he stopped going to the bars, all of a sudden?”
“In the middle of the nineties all those Russian women started appearing, from Siberia. The story was they would go with him time after time and put up with his things, whatever they were. They knew all about special jobs. Their pimps contacted him, so he didn’t need the bars anymore. Those Siberians are real tough women. Must be the weather up there.”
Kat’s hovel belongs to a project almost identical to my own, except that it is not near the river, or anything else of interest to the eye. I stand at the edge of a man-made desert, waiting for a cab, wondering if this wasteland is another Western import. Have we, in our headstrong grabbing of all things Western, inadvertently bought up pieces of the Sahara? Fortunately, I have brought my Walkman with me and listen to Pisit Sritabot’s phone-in radio show while I wait. A female professor of sociology is talking in such authoritative tones about prostitution that Pisit for once forgets to interrupt.
“It’s an unfortunate word in that everyone has a different definition. These days a huge percentage of young women studying at university and colleges are subsidized by so-called sugar daddies-men, often farangs but usually Thai, who pay their expenses, even a kind of salary, in exchange for the right to sleep with the students whenever they choose. It is not illegal, but the girl is certainly selling her body. If the sugar daddy isn’t rich enough to pay all her expenses, she’ll have to take on another, perhaps as many as three. Often the girl will own three separate mobile telephones, one for each lover so she doesn’t get the name wrong when one of them calls. Then you have the very naÏve rice grower from Isaan who has heard about the money to be made in the big city, who spends a weekend hanging out at the bars on Sukhumvit, perhaps finds a man or two who hire her, only to discover she has not the slightest clue about foreign men, speaks not a word of English. She may be horrified and mystified by the very idea of oral sex and catches the next bus home to her farm in the far north, never to visit the big city again. Then you have experts, very talented and attractive women who can literally wrap men around their fingers. Such girls often receive income from three or more foreign men, who live overseas and of course are unaware of each other, who are paying her to stay out of the bars until they arrive for their vacations. Of course, she continues to sell her body every night and is probably receiving a total income in excess of any middle-ranking professional, such as a lawyer or doctor. Then you have the girls who travel, often on false passports supplied by our local mafia, who also procure visas for countries like Britain and the U.S. Such girls, if they are gifted in their profession, may make as much as U.S.$180,000 a year in cities like London, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Paris, Hong Kong, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore. Of course they never pay tax, and usually they save a significant amount, so within a few years they return to join our wealthier classes. Then there is the girl who is caught in some loan scam, usually in order to pay medical bills for her mother or father, who finds herself trapped in a brothel in the country, or in Malaysia, who is in reality a sex slave all of whose earnings go to pay off the original loan, who may be required to service a man every twenty minutes while she is on duty, which may be for as long as twelve hours a day. Then there are the pool hustlers. Our girls cannot compete with Filipinas, who are world class, but they’re improving all the time.”
“What’s pool got to do with prostitution?”
“Thai pool. The game is used as a hook. Not every farang likes go-go bars or wants to spend an evening drinking beer. Pool mops up the remainder of the market-shy men like it too, it provides a lead-in, a hobby in common. It can seem almost like a holiday romance, which happens to last an evening instead of the usual week.”