Believe it or not, I don’t spend any of the money. Vikorn’s accountant wires my modest ten percent share of the profits into my account with the Thai Farmer’s Bank every quarter, and I let it stack up, preferring to live on my cop’s salary in my hovel by the river when I’m not sleeping at the club. To be honest, I’ve promised the Buddha that when I get the chance I’ll do something useful with it. Does that sound pathetic to you, farang? It does to me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. When I tried to take some money out of the account to buy a fantastic pair of shoes by Baker-Benje on sale in the Emporium (only $500), I was prevented by some mystic force.
After helping my Colonel into his cab, I stroll down the street, now entirely empty of farang. Some of the stalls boast electric lights, powered by illegal hookups to the illegal cables that grow up the walls of our buildings like black ivy, but most use gas lighting, which hisses and makes the mantles burn brilliantly. I see many beautiful and familiar faces dip in and out of this chiaroscuro, every girl ravenous after her night’s work. In between the cooked food stalls, fortune tellers have set up their minimalist presentations: a table and two chairs for the well-to-do, a shawl on the ground for the others.
Each turn of the Tarot cards causes a female heart to leap or sink: marriage, health, money, baby, an overseas trip with a promising farang? Nothing has changed since I was a kid. To add to the festive atmosphere, a blind singer with a microphone chants a doleful Thai dirge with one hand on the shoulder of his companion, who carries the loudspeaker on a strap as they make their majestic progress down the street. I toss a hundred-baht note into the box, then, remembering Chanya and the need for luck, chuck in another thousand.
Everyone knows me: “Sonchai, how’s business?” “Hello, Sonchai, got a job for me?” “Papa Sonchai, my beloved papasan,” in a tone of playful satire. “When will you dance for us again, Detective?”
I’m very happy that Vikorn has saved Chanya from that crude and undiscriminating justice they have in America where, if they extradited her, they would never make allowances for her youth and beauty, the stress inherent in her profession, or the ugliness of her victim. Nor would she be able to purchase indulgences in the manner of our more flexible system. That remark about not knowing what she got up to in the United States, though-it is clear proof of the superior vision of his mind, not to say the paranoia that is a professional hazard for a gangster of his stature. Me, for example: I have never given her time over there a second thought. Didn’t she simply work in a massage parlor like all the others?
All of a sudden I experience a dramatic slowing of my thoughts, a draining of energy after prolonged tension. I’m totally burned out, about to crash. I walk slowly back to the bar and mount the stairs to one of the second-floor rooms to lie down. It is eight minutes past five in the morning, and the first signs of dawn have popped out of the night one by one: the muezzin chanting from a nearby mosque, early birdsong, an insomniac cicada, new light in the east.
We Thais have our own favorite cure for emotional exhaustion. No pills, no alcohol, no dope, no therapy-we simply hit the sack. Sounds simple, but it works. In fact, in survey after survey we have admitted that sleep is our favorite hobby. (We know there’s something better on the other side.)
It turns out that the Mitch Turner case has disturbed me at some deep level, however, for in my sleep my dead partner and soul brother Pichai comes to me, or rather I visit him. He sits in a circle of meditating monks who exude honey-colored glows and at first does not want to be disturbed. I insist, and slowly he emerges from his divine trance. Want to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.
I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That’s Pichai at his most gnomic, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?
4
By the time I finally get up, it’s early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.
Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He’s been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.
Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit’s call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. “With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon.” Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.
“Have you spoken to your mother yet?” He has managed to make his head lower than mine so that his delicate face is turned up to me like a flower, his hazel eyes oozing charm. In a feudal society everything is feudal, which is to say personal. I am not merely his supervisor, I’m his lord and master, and his fate rests in my hands. He needs me to love him.
“Give me time,” I say. “With women the mood is everything. Especially with Nong.”
“Are you going to speak to Colonel Vikorn?”
“I don’t know. It’s a judgment call.” I have the cab stop at the junction of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit.
The story of our errand goes like this. Once upon a time, not more than five or ten years ago, every side soi on Sukhumvit boasted at least one stall that sold fried grasshoppers, but with the relentless blanket bombing of our culture by yours, farang, we grew somewhat self-conscious about this quaint weakness of ours, with the result that-in Krung Thep, anyway-our insect cuisine was driven underground. At the same time, though, avant-garde farang cottoned on to this culinary exoticum with the enthusiasm of the pretentious, so that now the one place where you can buy fried grasshoppers is the farang-dominated Nana Plaza.