Lek shudders in revulsion. “Mushy peas? Oh, you poor thing.”
“I never really had a family,” says Greg, “grew up all by meself. I’m like the product of a Saturday night bunk-up. You’re the only family I’ve got-that’s the god’s honest truth.”
“How awful. Don’t worry, love, we’ll take care of you.”
“I love the girls-they’re terrific. They do more for me in an hour than anyone else ever did for me in thirty-nine years.”
“Well, that’s because you’re all man, dear,” Lek says.
“Am I? You’re looking pretty good from where I’m sitting right now.”
“You’re drunk, love.” He giggles. “Don’t do that-you can’t have me, darling. I’m a cop.”
“You’re rejecting me?”
“Me? I don’t reject people, darling. I’m at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom – getting rejected is my role. Don’t make me jealous, now.”
Having won on the horses today, Greg is feeling generous and doesn’t mind buying drinks for Henri, who is nursing his thousandth rejection by Marly. It doesn’t take long for them to rebond in the medium of alcohol (they had a fight last week that neither remembered the next day), and as they get drunker, their voices get louder. I’m pinned to my seat at the table with Marly and Nong, who try not to look at me while my guts are laid out for public consumption by the two drunks.
“D’you remember her?” Greg asks Henri. “She worked here a few years ago.”
Henri glances quickly over his shoulder, apparently believing we cannot hear him. “Of course, she wasn’t a common prostitute. She was a born courtesan, a creature of the Belle Epoque stranded in this age of functional barbarism. I felt a certain camaraderie, but she was so formidably elegant, I didn’t dare even speak to her. I was afraid of what her starting price might have been.”
“I did. I saved up. She was terrific between the sheets, but she had a way of screwing your head up. After the second time I was depressed for a week. She was way out of my class.”
“Shush. The boss’s son had her too.”
Greg is surprised. “Sonchai? He never goes with his girls.”
“He fell for her. It was the original coup de foudre, avec bells and whistles.”
Greg says conspiratorially, “The beat on the street is there’s a snuff movie. That’s how she croaked.”
“Mon Dieu, I didn’t know that.”
“Sonchai, why don’t you check upstairs to see if the cleaners did their job properly today?” Nong says, avoiding Marly’s eyes and casting a furious glance at the backs of Greg and Henri.
I go upstairs to lie down on one of the beds to let my mind wander. Musing: prostitutes were the world’s first capitalists. The ancients understood very well that men need sex more urgently than women. It was natural, therefore, that this imbalance should be redressed by means of cash, which hitherto nobody had had any use for. Later, of course, whores found other things to sell, and many were reincarnated as lawyers, doctors, dentists, merchant bankers, presidents, sweetshop owners, mayors, et cetera. Commerce was born, and war became just a tad less fashionable. Hey, if it wasn’t for prostitution, the human race would never have got beyond the siege of Troy. Many haven’t, of course.
I didn’t intend to do anything more tonight-I was in lazy-Thai mode-but Henri and Greg have stirred up a gut full of bile, and now I’m restless. When I check my watch, I see it’s only eight in the evening. There won’t be any airplanes flying to that part of the Cambodian border where they are holding Baker, but there will be plenty of buses. I don’t think I can quite stand a long, hot, uncomfortable bus ride tonight, though, so I make a call to Hualamphong railway station and manage to book a first-class overnight sleeper. It’s one of those third-world treats I like to accord myself from time to time, and I’m quite excited when the train starts and the uniformed orderly comes around with his crisp white sheets to make up my bunk. Suddenly I’m a boy again taking a first-class trip up north with Nong, who is flush with dough from our sojourn in Paris with the ancient Monsieur Truffaut. Clickety-click, clickety-click, I might not have the most respectable mum in the world, but I definitely have one of the smartest. Clickety-click, clickety-click, we have money in the bank and medicine for Granma’s eyes, and we’ve paid the rent-nothing to worry about for at least a month. Clickety-click. To know how to cheer oneself up is a first step to enlightenment. It’s fun to be disobeying Vikorn, who thinks I’m checking out Yammy at this very moment.
I wake up to a dawn in cleaner air. It’s a two-track, two-platform country station, but there are a few cabs waiting for passengers. I agree on a day price with a driver, and off we go for a picnic in the country.
13
Sleepy Elephant village is a large hamlet with no municipal buildings at all. You distinguish it from the countryside because there is a slight increase in the density of population. The police station where they are holding Baker is hardly more than a large shophouse with a five-cell jail attached and a half acre of land, where a silver buffalo is inexplicably tethered. The young cop behind the desk is feeding a pet monkey when I walk in. I flash my ID and tell him I’m investigating the murder of one Damrong Baker, which doesn’t ring a bell with him at all. I tell him the farang Baker, her ex-husband, is a key suspect in my investigation. He blinks at me: So what?
“Immigration,” I explain. “You are holding a farang who tried to cross the border illegally yesterday. They don’t have any holding cells-that’s why Baker is in one of yours.” His brow is like a piece of wood with fixed furrows. It occurs to me that stupidity can be exaggerated for strategic reasons.
The problem with rural policing is that there is no such thing as a rural policeman: the best you can hope for is boys and girls who can wear the uniform without getting themselves into too much trouble.»heir loyalties are always local, however, and I’m from the despised big city. By all the rules I ought to bribe him, but I resent the idea. Anyway, he’s too young to help. I decide to concentrate on the monkey for a moment. It’s a baby and emotionally dependent on the young cop. It looks at me with big moist eyes, then scuttles away to cling to his neck, then climb up on his head, holding his hair in bunches in its tiny hands.
Now the cop with the monkey on his head is finally looking directly at me. He’s not at all sure I’m safe to talk to, and I’m not at all sure he can speak standard Thai; all I’ve got out of him so far is a few mumbles in the local Khmer dialect. I’ve got his attention, though. “Get the boss,” I say softly. He nods and picks up a telephone to say a few words.
Just as I thought, the boss was on the other side of a door, listening. Now he appears, doing up the buttons on his sergeant’s uniform, wiping his lips. He’s in his midforties and looking at me with drunken belligerence.
“Are you holding a farang in this station, a farang named Baker?”
He is at the point of shaking his head, so I intervene with a narrowing of the eyes and a concentration of the sixth chakra. When that doesn’t get his attention, I say, “Colonel Vikorn, Chief of District Eight, Bangkok, is going to be very angry with you if you took his money and then double-crossed him. Did you let Baker bribe you last night?”
The sergeant was not expecting to be put on the spot in this lifetime. His survival strategy in this body has been to take money and then kick the can a little farther down the road for someone else to pick up-or kick. His police station is ten miles from the smallest, most obscure, least used, and technologically most backward immigration post in all Thailand, so he’s had plenty of opportunity to develop this MO into an art form. Now he’s having trouble with the sudden delivery of the karmic bill about two hundred years before he expected it.