“Breasts as well?”
“Correct. Can you send this creep off on an errand before I punch him?”
“Go get us some coffee,” I tell the Monitor.
40
We are so accustomed to sitting together in the back of Jones’ hired car, it has become our equivalent of sitting on a sofa and watching TV together. We have progressed from flirtation to sexless tolerance with no passionate coupling in between. I think this might be an example of postindustrial romance. This thought is not canceled out by the Monitor, who sits in the front passenger seat munching fat pork sausages which he made us stop for at a cooked-food stall. He is like a nightmare offspring who was precipitated rather than conceived.
“If I’ve understood why we’re going to Pattaya, I’m wondering how you intend to sideline the Monitor,” Jones murmurs into my ear.
“I have a plan.”
“I thought maybe you did.” A yawn. “So what’s he like, this Iamskoy? Another urka gangster with Cyrillic tattoos on his forehead and a sales brochure that includes weapons-quality plutonium?”
“Not quite.”
Pattaya is a beach resort which would be about an hour’s drive from Krung Thep if it were ever possible to make the journey without traffic snarl-ups. It is also the place where the Industry reveals itself for what it is: the Industry. Jones has brought her Lonely Planet guidebook, from which she quotes:
The sex industry’s annual turnover is nearly double the Thai government’s annual budget. (Wow!) Only an estimated 2.5 percent of all Thai sex workers work in bars and 1.3 percent in massage parlors. The remaining 96.2 percent work in cafés and barbershops and brothels only rarely patronized by non-Thai clients. In fact most of the country’s sex industry is invisible to the visiting foreigner and it is thought that Thai-to-non-Thai transactions represent less than 5 percent of the total.
Jones closes the book and looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before: humility? “Prostitution was never my bag. I studied the law on it, of course, and know how to bust a streetwalker in the States, and I know a lot about the career of Gladys Pierson, but I never really went into it sociologically. This is one hell of a phenomenon you have over here. I wonder if it’s ever been this big, in the history of the world? I think it must have very complex sociological origins. I didn’t tell you, but when I visited Nana that time I saw a young American man, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, very very good-looking, a real pinup, except he’d lost both arms in an accident. The girls didn’t treat him any differently than anyone else. There was nothing forced about it either, they asked how he’d lost his arms, played with his stumps-broke all the rules of social etiquette-groped him and asked if he wanted to take them to his hotel. He was grinning like a cat and at the same time there were tears in his eyes. You didn’t need to be a psychology major to read his mind. He’d come halfway round the world to be treated like just another guy. I couldn’t detect an atom of physical revulsion or patronizing attitude in any of the girls. It’s like, I guess you don’t have the same problem with physical deformity as we do? Those were young, beautiful, perfectly formed women, and they didn’t bat an eye.”
I don’t really know how to reply, although this is an observation one hears from time to time. The amputee is a standard visitor to Nana. Not only amputees; men unacceptably short in the cultures of narcissism whence they hail will be snapped up by our accommodating women (who are likely to be as short or shorter). Chronic alcoholism might be a form of leprosy in your fastidious country, farang, with us it is the mildest of ailments, hardly worth a mention. Nor are buckteeth, false teeth, gray hair, no hair or clubfeet any impediment to admission to our Oriental Democracy of Flesh.
All of a sudden, just as we’re coming into the suburbs of Pattaya, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Jones lays a hand on mine. This is not a flirtatious gesture, although affectionate. I would say it was almost pitying. “Sonchai, I think I understand the case so far. Not as much as you do, but almost. You’re gonna have to tell me what you expect of me with regard to what happens next. That’s only fair. I’ve been thinking about you and about the case and about Thailand, and I’m still here. I haven’t fled back to the States, or complained about you to the head of the FBI, or shot you, or even kicked you in the balls. I’m still here. If you want me to stay, you better level with me.”
“You know who did it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know why she’s also innocent in every human definition.”
“But not in any legal definition.”
“I’m talking personal morality.”
“That’s exactly what we’re taught to avoid at the Academy. We call it getting creative. It’s a no-no. It’s the law that counts.”
“Culture shock. It’s getting creative that counts. Even Vikorn, whom you despise, he has a strong personal morality from which he never waivers. He’s led me in shoot-outs which could easily have gotten him killed. He’s a brave chieftain. Maybe he’s a dinosaur to you, but there are reasons why we love him. We don’t love cowards over here.”
“You want me to keep my mouth shut?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll give me Warren?”
“I don’t know if I can do that. Maybe he belongs to me. He didn’t kill your partner.”
“He didn’t kill yours either.”
“Karmically he’s responsible.”
“That’s an easy argument to make. It’s also easy to turn around. Maybe he killed me in a hundred previous lifetimes. Maybe he owes me this time. Anyone who hunts human beings will tell you, most of the time it’s not personal, but sometimes there’s that special chemistry. I want Warren, Sonchai. Do we have a deal?”
“I’ll think about it.”
We have turned into Pattaya and drift slowly in the stream of traffic along the main waterfront avenue.
“Did I really just see a bar called the Cock and Pussy Bar?” Jones wants to know. Her mood has changed dramatically, she seems angry. “Is there anything here not dedicated to sex?”
She has a point. Bar after bar line the street opposite the sea, and behind every bar a team of girls who will do anything you want for five hundred baht so long as it doesn’t hurt. We are a peace-loving people, we don’t like pain. We don’t like people who inflict it, either. We do not give law, sex and death more importance than those delusions deserve, but deliberately to inflict suffering is seriously un-Buddhist.
Turning away from the bars, back to me and the case, Jones says: “Have you any explanation at all for why Fatima should be in Warren’s shop?”