“Me too.”
“But why and how the python? According to the autopsy, the python didn’t even hurt him, it just happened to be on the point of swallowing his head when you guys turned up.”
“Python and Khmer?”
“Python, Khmer and a video?”
Not for the first time Jones has surprised me with her acuity. I wait for her to continue the thought, but do not want to press the point myself. I think that after all she’s not as sharp as all that, when just as she’s about to drop me off at my project, she says: “Makes you wonder why Warren’s here at this time, doesn’t it? I mean, you’d expect him to stay away at least until you’ve finished your investigation.”
On an impulse I really ought to have suppressed, I took her hand and kissed it when I said good night. Her hand snapped over mine like a steel trap and for a moment she refused to let me go. I had to tug to escape, by which time a mean look had appeared on her face. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Sonchai, I’m just trying to get a hold on local customs, but would I be right in thinking that there weren’t too many professions open to you when you joined the workforce?”
“Whore or cop,” I snarl as I leave her.
42
A small bribe to the registration clerk at Charmabutra Hospital avoids those weeks of delays which attend upon inquiries through official channels. Now I have a photocopy of Fatima’s registration card: Ussiri Thanya, male, born in a remote village on the Burmese border in 1969, the year the Americans landed on the moon and Kissinger secretly met with North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris, desperate for a way out of the war. Ussiri’s official address in Bangkok was a remote suburb way off to the east: Room 967, Floor 12, Block E, King Rama I Building… Even on paper it sounded like a hovel. It’s the kind of journey best undertaken on a Sunday, when there’s not too much traffic.
It only takes me an hour and a half to reach the blocks of reinforced concrete which stretch for acres in every direction. Housing is a specialized racket, not really suitable for police entrepreneurs, who generally leave it to the Lands Department and planners. One of the most popular scams involves using an illegally low ratio of cement to sand. The building looks fine at first, but the concrete doesn’t have the resistance to the weather or, more importantly, to stresses and strains. Little by little holes appear, oxygen reaches the steel reinforcement, which starts to rust, someone in government has to decide on the optimum date for evacuation: as late as possible, obviously, since there will be a few thousand people to rehouse, but not so late that a big collapse causes too many deaths and an international scandal. I don’t remember ever hearing about this estate, which looks as if it contracted smallpox a long time ago. There are big holes in the walls of many apartments, bare steel visible in columns which surely must be on the point of collapse. No one has lived here officially for years, but there is a thriving community of squatters who seem to be camped out in the car parking areas. There are the inevitable card players sitting around cross-legged on the ground, women bent over cooking pots on gas burners, TVs hooked up somehow to the public lighting, men conscientiously downing mugs of rice whisky this sweltering Sunday morning, dogs with serious diseases, kids and washing. Nobody pays me any mind as I seek and find Block E and climb dangerously decrepit concrete stairs all the way to the twelfth floor-the elevators clearly gave out long ago. I’m breathing heavily by the time I arrive. Sweat drenches my shirt and pants. I’m itching all over from the heat, the exertion and perhaps some bugs endemic to old rotting buildings.
Room 967 is on a corner. The door yields to a single kick and I find myself in a familiar box. Somewhere there must be a government directive on exactly how little space a Thai can be expected to occupy without going insane or turning communist. The dimensions are exactly the same as my own hovel’s, but Fatima enjoyed the inestimable advantage of windows on two sides. From both the urban sprawl stretches to the horizon. The earth is flat and there are no real landmarks, only the inevitable combination of large housing developments and squatter-type shacks and small houses with tin roofs, all of them a little unreal and insubstantial in the haze. The room itself looks as if it was simply abandoned by the occupant, without any attempt at an orderly removal. I guess no thief was going to climb twelve floors to check out a poor boy-whore’s belongings. Fatima, at this stage in his life, slept on a bamboo mat, smoked Marlboro Reds and joints, and kept photographs of young men dying of AIDS. They are studies in black and white pinned up on the walls: gaunt, skeletal, faces and chests bearing the insignia of Kaposi’s sarcoma. One of them has it in his eye. If I squat in a corner opposite the door, I have this gallery in view in both directions. Now I am Ussiri, long before he became Fatima, my back against the wall, staring stoned at my inevitable future: the failure of the immune system, chest complaints rapidly deteriorating into pneumonia and lung cancer, failure of the body to heal itself inside and out, progressive loss of mental faculties, brain tumors, bewilderment: this was all for-what?
On the floor near the toilet I find a registration card for a medical clinic not far from Pat Pong. I know the clinic, which, like just about every clinic in that area, specializes in tests for sexually transmitted diseases. It’s where the whores go for their monthly checkups.
In Soi 7, off Silom, I sit patiently in the small waiting room while women, men and transsexuals between the ages of eighteen and thirty come and go, either to give blood samples or to receive the results of the samples they gave yesterday. The vast majority are women. I can read their faces without strain. Only a few took risks this past month-perhaps giving in to a client who didn’t want to use a condom (so many farangs complain it kills their erections)-or perhaps permitting some other abuse; most of the girls are quite jaunty, confident they took the right precautions: rubbers, cold-water showers before and after, Listerine mouthwash.
HIV is not that easy to catch and the girls are mostly fanatics for hygiene, now that the government has done such a good job of explaining the mechanics of contagion. Things were different ten years ago, of course, when young Ussiri Thanya took pictures of his dying friends and waited in his hovel for his own death. Then it seemed as if the mystery disease was stalking Thailand in particular-Nong and I made many sad visits to friends in those special hospitals which look like Victorian insane asylums, and which are allotted to the poor to die in. Perhaps we rubbed shoulders with Fatima without knowing it?
The clinic is owned and run by an energetic middle-aged Thai man who steps incessantly in and out of his surgery in a white coat. Everyone who deals with whores on a daily basis learns whorecharm, which is to say a particular way of talking to the girls which neutralizes their tendency to irritability and generally makes them feel good about themselves. The doctor has mastered this art, which no doubt explains the success of his clinic (he is known to accept payment in kind from time to time, if a girl is having a bad month). He asks them when they last “worked” in a serious tone, resonant with respect, counsels against overuse of their assets in a way that gives them the giggles, makes them promise for the thousandth time always to use protection, sells them some Listerine and contraceptive pills and congratulates them on a successful test-“See you next month.” I wait until the room is empty before flashing my ID and asking for his records relating to Ussiri Thanya. To my surprise he recognizes the name immediately and takes me into his surgery, which consists of a red upholstered couch, packs of hypodermics, test tubes and bubblepacks. There is a large refrigerator in one corner.
“He’s still alive?”
“That surprises you?”
A thoughtful pause. “Not exactly. Even ten years ago most people didn’t actually die, though everyone on the game half expected to. He was one of those who developed a real phobia about it-it was a common reaction at that time. I remember he came for a checkup once a week at some stage. I told him, ‘Look, the disease takes a while to manifest, you may as well just come once a month,’ but he was neurotic. The strange thing about him was that you sometimes got the feeling he wanted to be infected. That he hated the suspense. Maybe he wanted to join his friends. The male whores got hit even worse than the girls. It was pretty bad. Nowadays not many true professionals get caught-it’s the amateurs, the weekenders who don’t take proper precautions, who still get infected. Generally, AIDS has had a fantastic effect on our national health. Very little syphilis or gonorrhea around here these days-not even very much herpes. And of course everyone is fanatical about the checkups.”