We arrive at Nana just when the various hunting lodges, known as go-go bars, are shifting into top gear. “Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in black tank top calls out to me over the palisade of one of the beer bars, but Lek’s star is far brighter than mine. Neither the girls nor the katoeys (transsexuals to you, farang) can take their eyes off him as we push our way past mighty Caucasian bodies in sweaty T-shirts and walking shorts, half drunk more with the sexual opportunities than with the alcohol, although everyone is knocking back ice-cold beer from the bottle. This evening every TV monitor, and there must be about five hundred, is tuned to a tennis match between our very own Paradorn and someone nobody cares about in the French Open. There’s no commentary, however, because the ten thousand sound systems are all booming out the usual combination of Thai pop and Robbie Williams.
Finally we reach the far end of the plaza, which is dominated by katoeys who drool at the sight of Lek. In a serious breach of authenticity the stall owner at the back of the plaza has labeled his various products in English: waterbug, silkworm, mole cricket, ant mix, dried frog, bamboo worm, scorpion, grasshopper. I load up on grasshoppers for me, waterbugs, silkworms, mixed ants, and dried frogs for Mum. While the vendor is pouring ants into a paper cone, Lek and I spare a moment to watch a ritual that is far more ancient than Buddhism. Young women in short frilly dresses-this is a bar where the schoolgirl fantasy is intermittently and imprecisely invoked-are standing behind one another in a line with their legs apart while the girl at the front draws elaborate shapes on the ground with a large wooden phallus. When the luck god has been summoned, she sends the phallus skidding across the floor between the girls’ feet, then bangs loudly on the door to the club. Straightening herself with the air of a job well done (if that doesn’t bring in the johns, I don’t know what will), she leads the girls back into the bar and the twenty-first century.
Back at the club I make sure that Lek carries the little bags of insects and hands them to my mother, who has not yet opened for business. (She was waiting for supper.) We all sit down in the bar to eat what, I suppose, is breakfast, and for twenty minutes there is silence save for the snapping of legs and the squirting of guts. When I’ve finished, I leave Lek with my mother while I climb the stairs with the last packet of grasshoppers.
Chanya is awake and beautifully rested after her prolonged sojourn in the arms of Morpheus. She is wearing an outsize T-shirt and nothing else, sitting in a half-lotus on the bed with her back against the wall. I offer her the open packet, and she delicately picks out a fat one to munch. She flashes me a comradely smile marred only by the remains of a hairy leg in the corner of her mouth, apparently suffering no ill effects from her killing spree beyond a touch of nervousness in her eyes as I hand her her statement. (The advantage of a culture of shame as opposed to one of guilt is that you don’t start to feel bad until the shit hits the fan.)
She reads it carefully, then looks up. “You wrote it? This is your writing.”
“The Colonel dictated. I simply wrote it down.”
“Colonel Vikorn? He must be a genius. This is exactly how it happened.”
“Really?”
“Every detail is correct, except he drank Budweiser, not Mekong whiskey.”
“A minor detail. Let’s not bother to change it. I’ll corroborate Mekong if it comes to that. I was behind the bar, after all.”
That iron-melting smile: “That’s fine then.”
I cough and try not to look too sadly at her long black hair. “Just one thing-you’ll have to cut your hair and disappear for a while. Do something else, be someone else for a couple of months, until we can see how the land lies.”
A shrug and a smile. “Okay, whatever the Colonel says.”
“We’ll bring you back to work as soon as we can. We have to know what the Americans are going to do when they find out what’shisname is dead. How heavy will they get? How valuable was he to them? You see the problem?”
“Of course. I’ll probably cut it all off-I’ve always wanted to meditate in a nunnery. Maybe I’ll do a meditation course upcountry somewhere.”
“That’ll be fine,” I say, although the thought of her losing all her hair almost moves me to tears. A slightly awkward silence. “Chanya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if there’s anything you did in the States when you were over there that you think we should know about…”
She searches my eyes. In hers I see only innocence. “I worked of course. The money was fantastic, especially in Las Vegas. It’s a wonderful country, but a bit bland. I got bored after a while. I was planning to come home as soon as I had enough dough to build my own house in Surin, and enough to retire on, but 9/11 ruined my plans. I came home sooner than I intended and for family reasons I needed more money. I stayed here because you’re a good papasan, and your mother’s been a good boss. It’s fun. I like your club.”
The temptation to ask her exactly what happened last night is very strong, but my professional discipline, learned at the feet of my master Vikorn, enables me to resist. That was one hell of a disemboweling, though. Even for a Thai, her coolness is a little unusual, not to say downright scary. I fear my smile was just a tad alienated when I left her alone with her statement and the packet of crickets. I didn’t even ask about the opium since that did not officially exist. I noticed she’d got rid of the pipe.
Downstairs my mother has Lek cleaning glasses. I check the time, then switch to the radio on the sound system to listen to Rod Tit FM. Every cop in District 8 will be listening at this moment, for Pisit has told us he has a scoop on the eternal and notorious battle between our beloved Colonel Vikorn and that blackguard General Zinna, who has just emerged unscathed from a court-martial in which he had to explain his apparent involvement in large-scale trafficking of heroin and morphine. His claim that he was framed by the police, in particular Vikorn, was tacitly accepted by the court.
Pisit begins by reminding us that this drug rivalry between the army and the police is not new. Every Thai has heard about, and some still remember, the great standoff up in Chiang Mai in the fifties when civil war seemed about to break out over a dispute between the two services as to who exactly owned a massive shipment of opium that the Kuomintang (with the connivance of the CIA) had sent into Thailand by train. The standoff lasted three days before a compromise was reached: the entire shipment would be dumped into the sea. According to legend, the dumping of the several tons of opium was organized by the Director of Police, who arranged for a ship to be in the way. Now the perennial battle seems to have fallen onto the shoulders of Vikorn and Zinna. What Pisit didn’t tell us in advance is that his source today is none other than Zinna himself.