I turn to examine her face. “Do I need to ask you how you know all this?”
A shake of the head. “I’m quite popular with the X members. I talked them into making me mamasan so I didn’t have to go with the official members anymore. Better one big bastard once a week than a little jerk every night.”
“And Damrong?” I ask. “She was popular with the secret members too, no?”
She turns away and speaks to the wall. “Tell me what happened to her. Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Are you investigating for her family?”
“Not exactly.”
She turns to study me. “She wasn’t popular with everybody. A lot of men saw through her, and women didn’t think she looked special.”
“But the rest, among the X members?”
“Suppose she was popular with one of them, what about it? What difference if she’s dead?”
“It’s my job to investigate.”
A pause, then: “She was a kind of genius prostitute. The genius was all in her instinct, which was so fast, so accurate, she was more like a wild animal. She would know in a single glance if a man was going to fall for her or not. The ones she couldn’t reach in the first ten seconds, she ignored. They ceased to exist for her. That gave her time and energy to concentrate on the others. The suckers. She understood what a lot of girls don’t, including me.” I raise my eyebrows. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.” As she speaks, her left hand seeks out mine. “She was my friend, though. She was very kind to me. She protected me.”
Now we are looking at each other eyeball to eyeball. “From what?”
“A pig. I told her I didn’t think I could carry on with him. I was losing all self-respect-of course I was never told his name. He paid big money, but he was brutal. She seduced him herself, got him away from me. She didn’t seem to mind sadism. Maybe she was kinky that way. Or maybe I’m just too sensitive. She even shared with me the money he gave her the first time he had her. That’s the kind of woman she was. Jai dee mark mark.” Shaking her head: “But I didn’t think anyone could reach him the way she did. For me he was hard as diamond.”
“What does he look like?”
“Thai Chinese, tall, slim, about fifty, still very handsome in a vicious kind of way.”
I let a couple of beats pass. “I think you know who he is.”
“I found out.”
“Khun Tanakan?”
She seems reluctant to repeat the name and gives only the briefest nod.
“But at the same time one of the official members was crazy about her-the lawyer Tom Smith. You told me about him.”
“That moron. He has no idea how close he came to being bumped off by the Thai Chinese. He didn’t know who his rival was, or he would have kept his mouth shut. He would go crazy whenever he came to the club and she wasn’t available, started making threats. Farang are like boys-they have no self-control.”
“Did Tanakan know about Smith?”
“Sure. That kind of guy knows everything. He pays.”
“But he didn’t do anything about Smith?”
“Smith is still alive, isn’t he?”
“Did he do legal work for the Thai Chinese?”
“How would I know a thing like that?”
“Of course. Sorry.” I hold up the remainder of the banknotes. “Who organizes all this? There has to be someone in control?”
“The footman at the door. Take a look at him. He’s smart. He carries the names of every secret member in his head, and he’s the one who takes the girls to the assignations. The secret members pay him big bucks to keep his mouth shut. Of course, he wouldn’t dare to talk anyway.”
I’m holding out the wad of notes but clamp it between my fingers when she reaches for it. “Khun Kosana, the advertising mogul, he is an X member, isn’t he?”
She blinks for a moment and swallows. “Yes. He was a close friend of Khun Tanakan.”
“Was?”
“He’s disappeared. Everyone thinks he’s dead.”
“Did Tanakan do it?”
A flash of anger. “How the hell do I know?” Calming herself. “Khun Kosana was the main reason the club hired katoeys. I think he only pretended to like girls -I only ever saw him hire katoeys. He was a kind of slave to Tanakan. They say he didn’t really have a head for business, Tanakan had to bail him out plenty of times. But he was very clever with the media. Tanakan used him to buff his public image.”
I hand over the balance of her money, then peel off some more notes and hold them up. “Get me into the secret part of the club, where the escalator leads to the private members’ rooms.”
“What for?”
“Just to look.”
Now she has changed her mind about me all over again. “I think you must be a real cop. That’s where she was killed, isn’t it? In one of the private rooms.”
“How would I know without taking a look?”
She snatches the money out of my hand. “I would do it for nothing. Come to the club tonight. Call ahead to ask for me personally, and reserve a room for us.”
We leave the short-time hotel separately. Lek is calling me on the cell phone, asking if I’m coming back to the station because the duty calls are starting to come in. I say I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Sergeant Ruamsantiah is running the response teams today.
I’m in a cab when my cell phone starts to vibrate in my pocket. It’s Ruamsantiah with a bust. “It’s a damn funeral casino,” he says, his tone full of apology.
“I thought we stopped busting them.”
“Unofficially. We got a report from a cop-must be a disgruntled relative who wasn’t invited. It’s not something we can ignore. You can go as easy as you like, just make sure you take down names and keep notes so we can say we acted promptly on the information.” I call Lek to tell him to meet me at the Skytrain station nearest the address.
Sorry to lay a culture shock on you halfway through the yarn, farang; funeral casinos work like this:
You are a newly minted ghost all alone on the Other Side without a body, feeling understandably disoriented. There is still plenty of connection with your living relatives through subtle lines that science will not be able to detect for a few hundred years yet, but after your loss of vital functions, the communication operates largely through transfer of emotional energy: urges outlive reason. Without a body, though, you are dependent on a certain residual awareness filled mostly with separation anxiety. Now, what do you most not want? Answer: you most don’t want to be alone. Relatives who might have irritated you profoundly before you became a corpse now acquire an important-nay vital-function. It is the duty of close family to surround you with as many people as possible for the duration of the wake, which can go on for forty-nine days, at the end of which you will have found a new bivouac in someone’s -or something’s-womb. Now, there is one activity and one activity alone that will keep your average Thai coming to your home day after day for seven weeks, especially if they didn’t much like you in the first place. The other advantage to buying a few roulette wheels and offering a private gambling service is for the bereaved spouse to use the profits to pay for the monks, the food, and the roulette wheels and to put together a fistful of baht to see close family through the difficult postwake period.
All of which explains why Lek and I find ourselves outside Nang Chawüwan’s third-floor apartment in a modestly appointed building on Soi 26. Lek snooped around and confirmed there is a fire escape from the apartment by means of the back door. By banging loudly on the front door, therefore, and yelling, “Police,” we are able to cause an immediate evacuation. Sounds of Sunday-best shoes slapping on the wrought-iron fire escape on the opposite side of the apartment, excited whispers, some giggling. The exit goes on for about ten minutes, which probably indicates that more than a hundred guests are now legging it down the soi. We bang again on the door, and this time it opens on an exhausted, tearful, but spirited woman dressed in traditional Thai costume; Nang Chawüwan is all of five feet tall.