And with that the imam rose and crossed the floor with great dignity, leading the others behind him. He paused at the door: “Mr. Turner, there are so many problems with Western society, but there may be one above all others that will destroy civilization. I speak of your inability to conceive that you might be wrong.”
Now Mitch Turner was alone. Down below in the huts around the police station the night was in full swing. Mitch Turner was shaking with shock. Pacing up and down his flat with his head reeling, it took him more than five minutes to notice a package on his coffee table done up in ornate green and gold wrapping and topped off with a gold ribbon. In the circumstances a booby trap was unlikely, but his nerves were in such bad shape, he fumbled time after time while opening it. Inside: a ball of dense black viscous opium, far bigger than anything Chanya had ever brought him.
He knew I have a death wish, he saw it, Mitch Turner muttered as he prepared his pipe.
42
Now Chanya couldn’t believe what a bad turn everything was taking. Mitch Turner was an opium addict, and it was all her fault.
A Thai shrug. Karma was karma. Perhaps she should not have introduced him to the drug, but the kind of obsessional behavior that turned it into a dangerous addiction came from his own background-she could hardly hold herself responsible for that. She had acted with the best of intentions, but as the Buddhists said, the only real favor you can ever do for another being is to help him or her on the way to nirvana. Everything else is mere indulgence. She felt it was about time she ended her own indulgence. In any event, she had now made the decision to come work for us.
With the simplicity of a Thai in a fix, she changed the sim card in her mobile telephone and stopped replying to his e-mails. With the determination of an American in the grip of an obsession, he found her after a few months at the Old Man’s Club.
Chanya had nothing against my mother’s bar, but it was a drag, frankly, to return to that sordid mind-set just when you thought you’d escaped. She had nothing against the johns either-in the whole of her long career, she had come across no more than five or six who’d given her trouble, and she knew how to deal with that. More than anything it was the indignity. Being twenty-nine simply was not the same as being nineteen. You couldn’t laugh it off as some game you were playing on the way to growing up. Whenever she could, she avoided fellatio. Nothing to do but to put a brave face on it all, though. A sad whore is a bankrupt whore. The johns come to be cheered up; generally they had problems of their own-why else would they be hiring flesh? It was a sad and fallen world, under the surface, just like the Buddha said: there is suffering. She could hardly believe it when she saw him sitting there in the Old Man’s Club that night.
She had already been with one customer, and it was her right to go home if she wished, but she was working at full power. She was taking it easy at that moment, though, and had just emerged from one of the upstairs rooms where she had been resting for half an hour, by which time the brooding farang was sitting in his corner, ignored by the rest of the girls. She caught my eye when she reached the bottom of the stairs and made it look as if she were following a hint from me to go and sit with him. She exercised all her powers of self-control, not because it mattered particularly that this customer was her lover, but because like all Thais she loathes any kind of public scene. She was thankful that Mitch understood enough about Asia to respect this. Indeed, she was impressed with his appearance. He seemed much healthier and mentally more together than when she’d last seen him.
His approach to her that night was quite new. He no longer relied on wacky humor to seduce her, but he obviously intended to impress her with his sobriety. Apparently he was able to drink a couple of beers without losing control. He was doing Cool with considerable success. He admitted to being lonely and to missing her badly, but strictly within the parameters of the sane. He wanted to try again, to show her that he was not nuts, that the thing could work. There was enormous charm in the humble way he told her how good she looked, how deeply he was in love with her, and offered to pay her bar fine.
He had rented a room in a reasonably clean hotel just a short walk from the bar. They held hands as they left, and on the way to his hotel she asked how he was managing to cope with the culture shock, the boredom, the lack of purpose down there in Songai Kolok, where frankly even she would feel lonesome.
“Stop,” I tell her. “I can’t stand any more of your lies.”
43
What lies?”
She is startled. Her narrative seemed to be going so well. Perhaps she had started to believe it herself.
“Lies of omission. The tattoo, darling. You have to tell me about that.”
She takes a deep breath. “I do?” Checking my face with an ancient question in mind: Can he take it? “Okay.”
Hard to say what happened first-Mitch’s interest in Islam, or his decision to finally go ahead with a large tattoo. Somehow they seemed a product of the same desperate impulse. Even then his conversation had begun to lack coherence. Putting it all together as best she can, it seems that the CIA spy befriended the very imam who had come to see him that night to warn him of the threat to his life by radical fanatics. Chanya’s memory of his conversation at this time is vivid but partial, like the intense but inexplicable images of an opium dream, which it may well be, for at this stage Mitch hardly left his room without smoking at least one pipe.
The imam lives out of town in a modest wooden house on stilts in the middle of a lush green hollow, of the sort his Arab brethren associate with paradise. An artesian well with the long crossbeam of former times joins land and sky. There are no electric or telephone cables here; this is an oasis undefiled by utility. Nestled still more deeply into the hollow and no more than five minutes’ walk from the cleric’s home: a mosque so cute, it might have been invented by a cartoonist. The dome’s compass is no greater than that of a large house; the minaret is less intimidating than a radio antenna. On his first visit Mitch found himself at the center of a small gang of bodyguards, one of whom spoke to a servant woman, who reported that the revered cleric was in prayer but would see him in due course. He sat cross-legged on a rush mat, drank sweet peppermint tea, and exchanged small talk with the bodyguards who, apparently convinced by intuition that he was harmless, did not search him. Then quite different men began to arrive. They were bearded, wore the long robes and skullcaps of Muslim clerics, and took no notice of him at all.