“Superficially, Thailand can seem like a male chauvinist culture; scratch the surface, and you’ll see we’re all controlled by Mother. I sure as hell am.”
“That’s really why you work in your mother’s brothel, against all your finer instincts?”
“Yes,” I confess, unable to look her in the eye.
“And when I see all you Thais running around as if everyone is a successful business center, what they’re actually doing is working out how to get a favor out of A to use to pay back a favor owed to B maybe from childhood, et cetera?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Wait a minute-what about the girls who work the bars? Are you telling me they’re paying back the debt to Mother by selling their bodies?”
“Yes. That is exactly what they’re doing.”
“And the mothers know?”
“There’s an omerta about it, but in reality everyone knows.”
Kimberley is looking at me over the rim of the pint glass of beer she just ordered. She shivers as she puts the glass down. “Wow.” She shakes her head. “They may not be cut out for the Game at all. It’s emotional blackmail pure and simple? They dump their chances for a successful marriage, childbirth, everything?”
“Now you’re going too far. What chances? We’re talking poor, Kimberley.”
“But how does this apply to the case? I thought Damrong and her brother hated their mother.”
“That’s the point. Gatdanyu is very practical. You owe the one who actually does the favor. In reality, the fact of birth aside, Damrong was her brother’s mother. She is the one who saved his life over and over and put him through school.”
“And she wasn’t a girl to stint when it came to reminding him of how much he owed her?”
“We don’t know, but that would be my guess.”
“Programmed him from early childhood?”
“Probably.”
“My god, that boy must have some problems.”
“So do we,” I say softly, and jerk my chin toward the Mekong. Tom Smith, also in smart casuals, is strolling along the river this morning. He suffers no culture shock when accosted by the kid and his quadriplegic brother, however. The smiles and pleading eyes freeze on their faces as he gives them the brush-off with a snarl. Since he is wearing short sleeves, it is easy to spot the burnished brown bracelet on his left wrist. I haven’t told the FBI about Smith’s client the Chinese Australian yet, so I tell her now.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Kimberley says when I’ve finished.
“Why?”
She shakes her head. “He’s a consigliere, Sonchai. That Chinese Australian, I know who he is. So do a lot of FBI agents with international experience. This is exactly the international dimension I’m over here to check out.” I wrinkle my brow. “We think he’s the front man for a syndicate of rich psychos. We call them ‘the invisible men.” They seem to be behind a lot of things: gladiatorial fights to the death in the Sonora desert, snuff movies filmed in Nicaragua with the victims picked off from helicopters just for the hell of it, sadomasochism for sale in Shanghai, boys from broken homes kidnapped in Glasgow and shipped off to the Middle East for the pleasure of oil sheikhs-the kind of stuff that never gets investigated because it happens offstage as far as America and the West are concerned and the people behind it are too rich and important to be captured.“
I’m not entirely surprised, but I don’t see why we need to panic and say so. “Even if Smith is here on the same business as us, it doesn’t mean he’s going to call up an assassination squad.”
The FBI shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m reading this place better than you. Don’t you get it? It is lawless. Lawless. Know what human beings do when there’s no law? They waste other human beings who are in the way, or look like they are going to be in the way, or have potential to be in the way. It’s called Cain’s First Law of Survival. Think about it: you are the consigliere to a powerful international syndicate whose public face happens to be mainstream pornography but whose premier product is for the delectation of psychotically morbid billionaires. Know what kind of power that gives you, to have the goods on a dozen or so of the richest perverts in the world? Imagine what’s at stake here. Smith’s people made that video of Damrong; now they’re very nervous because the costar did himself in less than a mile from here. About thirty minutes from now Tom Smith will bribe the same cops we bribed and go see the place where Kowlovski butchered himself. On the way the same cops we bribed will tell him about our visit. Tell him we checked out the crime scene. Tell him we are still here. Tell him we plan to be here until tomorrow. What does Smith do in a country where there are about two hundred thousand retired Khmer Rouge on the breadline? How long would it take to put a small squad together? Hell, he’ll probably use the cops as recruiting agents- they could call up a dozen contract killers in ten minutes. Maybe the cops are contract killers themselves, who like to do a little policing now and then. Don’t you see? He’s got to hit us here in Cambodia. It’s an opportunity a guy like him can’t afford to miss. Look what happened to Nok. Sonchai, let’s say I’ve been here in a previous life, I know where I am, okay?”
“It wasn’t here,” I say. “It was Danang in Vietnam. You were male then, of course. And black.” I smile sweetly while she looks at me in shock. “You’d better fly back to Bangkok. I need to check out Dam-rong’s home village, and it’s easier to do that by going overland and crossing the border at Surin province.”
We decide to stroll by the Mekong; everyone does. Blood-brown, myth-laden, I guess it means something different to all people. Even the FBI carries a piece of it inside her-deeds of derring-do by Navy SEALs thirty years ago, perhaps; it’s our Ganges and was created by a dragon, naturally. There is none of the traffic you see on the Chao Phraya, though; at Phnom Penh the Mekong is still a quiet, lazy liquefaction that merges into the red earth at sunset in a blaze like a fallen firework writhing in mud. It sustains a dozen dilatory fishing craft during the day; most of the canoes don’t have engines, and those that do are so small and quiet that, what with the motionless heat and the Pleistocene fishermen throwing skeins, you’d think that peace had prevailed here for a thousand years. That’s maya for you.
“I love him,” the FBI declares softly, looking away downstream, reserving the right to deny what she has just said, but high for a moment, having first dared herself to say it. “Sorry,” she adds, with a hand on my shoulder reasserting control. “I’ve never been sixteen before. It won’t last long.”
“You’ll be with him by tomorrow,” I say with a smile.
“Tonight,” she corrects, still looking away. “I just text’d him.” She allows her hand to drop so that it first brushes, then grasps mine. “You don’t know how clairvoyant you really are, Sonchai. I had the most vivid dream of my life last night. Vietnam. Danang. You’re right, I was black and about nineteen years old. The only thing I thought of as I lay dying was a girl in Saigon. All I cared about in the world was that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I died staring at a passport-size snapshot of her.”
“Lek?”
“To the last nuance, as you would say.” She looks me full in the face for a moment, then faces upstream, toward Laos. “You’re the one who is always explaining that we humans are simply the visible ends of karmic chains, intimately interwoven with others, that stretch back thousands, even millions, of years. You just didn’t want to apply that to an American in love, did you?”