The police shut down the market, bars and clubs an hour and a half ago, but the street knows me from the old days. Somehow they already know that Pichai is dead and it’s like being that kid all over again. I’m mothered by a hundred whores. There is a price to pay, though. I have to dance.
“Sonchai, Sonchai, Sonchai.” They clap steadily, insistently, and motion at the stage with their chins. This is what I used to do, to earn my supper. Day after day at home I watched my mother practicing her erotic bum-thrusts and tit-wobbles to the disco music of her time, and she never realized how well I’d learned until she came in one night from a session with a client to see me all alone up on the stage, a twelve-year-old boy-whore dancing for life.
I’m pretty far gone, of course. The yaa baa has fried my brains, and on top there has been beer and ganja. The mamasan turns the music up real loud and I’m dancing a blue streak. Dancing like a tart. Dancing like Nong the goddess, Nong the whore. I’m better than Jagger in his prime, better than Travolta, maybe even better than Nong. The mamasan plays Tina Turner’s “The Best” on the sound system and everyone screams, “Sonchai, Sonchai, Sonchai…” The girls, mostly dressed in jeans and T-shirts and ready to go home, roar and clap me on and on into the oblivion I’ve been searching for all night.
I call you, I need you, my heart’s on fire
You come to me, come to me wild and wired
Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak the language of love like you know what it means
Mmm, it can’t be wrong
Take my heart and make it strong
You’re simply the best, better than all the rest…
Pichai.
Nobody remembers Bradley, or if they do I don’t remember them remembering. I am very very stoned.
13
Needless to say, the yaa baa was a serious failure and I find myself in Kaoshan Road at about eight-thirty the next day, not having slept at all. I am sitting in a café opposite the offices of the Internet server, drinking black coffee, while the kaleidoscopic night replays in my head. I seem to remember talking to five hundred women, none of whom remembered Bradley. I remember my dancing in Pat Pong with extreme embarrassment. Now, with the sun already hot, it is as if the night were repeating itself. The street is filling with white-skinned foreigners.
This is a different scene from Sukhumvit. Indeed, the place is so bizarre it is hardly Krung Thep at all. Thais themselves come here as tourists, to gawk and judge.
Here the farangs are often in couples, girls and boys, far younger than the clientele of places like Nana Plaza, kids on their so-called gap year between school and university, or university and reality.
Kaoshan offers the cheapest accommodation in the city, dormitory beds for a few dollars a night in conditions even I would find squalid. Here the feeling of party-party-party never dies, not even in early morning. The street is lined with stalls selling pirated DVDs, videos and CDs, and travel guides to Southeast Asia, cooked-food stalls, junk stalls, sandal stalls, T-shirt stalls. Between the stalls and the cafés there is hardly room to walk; tourists with massive backpacks turn and twist to pass, having just arrived on some long-haul flight from Europe or America, in search of the very cheapest accommodation, hoping to preserve their funds for the duration of their vacation, perhaps as long as a year. Remember the Chinatown scenes in Blade Runner? My people quickly learned how to produce Balinese masks, Cambodian sculptures, puppets from Burma, batik from Indonesia -even Australian didgeridoos. You can change money, have your body pierced, play bongo drums, watch a video or check your e-mail. It is a long way from Thailand.
A black man looking for a low profile would be smart to choose Kaoshan Road.
Now a Thai arrives on a motorbike to open the offices of the Internet server. I give him a few minutes before crossing the street.
This man is in his early thirties, clearly one of that industrious, switched-on new generation of Thais who have seen the opportunity offered by the Internet technology. He gives me a swift glance and knows immediately I am a cop. I show the photograph of Bradley.
The man recognizes him immediately and leads upstairs to where his machines sit on trestle tables and buzz and whir from all sides of the room. Anyone renting an Internet service is legally obliged to fill in a form issued by the government under the Telecommunications Act, and the man takes a file out from one of the filing cabinets and quickly finds Bradley’s form. The form is printed only in Thai script, and most of the information supplied by Bradley is also in Thai.
“You helped him fill in the form?”
“No. He took it away and brought it back like this.”
“Did he speak Thai?”
“Only a little. I don’t think he could write in Thai. ”
“Ever see anyone with him?”
“He only came to the shop twice, once to collect the form, once to bring it back. He was alone both times.” The man hesitates. I encourage him with a nod. “I think I saw him once, though, walking down the street. He was hard to miss. He was with a woman.” I nod again. “Well, I mean, quite a woman. At first I thought she was African American like him, then I saw she had eyes like us, and her skin was more brown than black and her hair was basically straight, even though she’d frizzed it out a bit. Tall, much taller than most Thais, but not as tall as him of course. She came up to his shoulder.” The man grins. “I came up to his rib cage.”
“What was her hair like?”
“Dyed different colors, green, orange, you know? But well done, the two of them sauntering down the street was like a fashion show. She was incredibly sexy, like something out of a film. Everyone turned their heads, I think people wondered if two film stars had arrived from the United States. She looked like she was enjoying the attention.”
“And him?”
“I think he was a serious guy. He looked like a serious American, you know? She looked more frivolous. But as I say, I only saw them once, and from a distance, it might not even have been him. I think it was because there aren’t many like that in Krung Thep.”
This is my first real lead and I want to reward this man. I copy down Bradley’s address as it is written in Thai on the form and say: “Listen, sooner or later some agents from the FBI will come here asking to see this form and asking the kind of questions I just asked.”
“So?”
“They have no investigative powers here. You’re not obliged to tell them anything.”
“What d’you want me to do?”
I smile. “If I were you, I would let them bribe you.”
The man nods. The suggestion does not surprise him at all. “What would be a good price?”
I think about it. I am strongly in favor of redistribution of global wealth from West to East. “If I were you I might hold out for a thousand dollars.” He makes an instant calculation: forty-five thousand baht, not a fortune but a considerable windfall. He places his palms together near his forehead and wais. “Thank you, Detective.”
“You’re welcome. And if you ever see the woman again, you’ll let me know.”
Out on the street I suddenly feel faint. The meth has leached every nutrient from my blood, and I’m failing rapidly. My brain thuds with the rhythms from a nearby music store and I believe I’m going to vomit. The world is inclining by about thirty degrees by the time I find the narrow soi where Bradley’s apartment is supposed to be.
14
To my surprise, Bradley’s address is not an apartment but an old teak house on stilts. I kick my shoes off, climb the wooden staircase to the main door and examine a bellpull. It is old, brass-an antique curiosity, perhaps seventy or more years old. Underneath, a name also in brass: William Bradley.