“Yes.”
“And fought boys younger than yourself,” he said. “In the Vietcong, an eighteen-year-old was a grizzled veteran. If he was still alive. And in the hill tribes of Burma, the children fight alongside their parents. The Shan, the Kachins. The Kareni.”
“Yes.”
“But childhood itself is a Western invention, don’t you think? Childhood as a time of innocence. Only the fortunate get to have such a childhood in this part of the world. The rest are not so innocent.” He lit a cigarette, pursed his lips, blew smoke at the ceiling. “You know how a Thai girl celebrates her eighteenth birthday?”
“How?”
“She puts her daughter on the street.”
I drank some more beer. I’d had Thai beer in New York, a brand called Singha, but I’d never even heard of Kloster, which tasted like a German beer – Beck’s, say – but lighter. It wasn’t bad.
I said, “On the river I was offered the opportunity to watch a seven-year-old girl have sex with a dog.”
“And you passed it up, eh?”
“So that I could meet with you.”
“I am honored,” he said. “But it is upsetting to many people, this business of child prostitution. For myself, I would not want a partner of such an age. I prefer a woman who knows what to do. Although some of these children learn quickly.”
“I imagine they do.”
“But for most of their customers they are best advised to appear ignorant and inexperienced. We get whole planeloads of men on organized sex tours, you know. Americans and Europeans and Japanese. Some want boys and some want girls and some don’t seem to care. It is curious, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, the U.N. wants to put a stop to it. And now I suppose the SPCA will stick its nose in as well, saying it is cruel to the dogs. You want another beer?”
“Not just now.”
“You go to Rangoon first thing in the morning, don’t you? Do you have a hotel yet?”
I didn’t have one because I wouldn’t need one, but he didn’t have to know that. “Out at the airport,” I said.
“The Amari? A good choice. Will you want to have an early night? Bangkok ’s twelve hours different from New York, so I don’t know how you stand on jet lag.”
“I’m all right.”
“You were able to sleep on the plane?”
“Off and on,” I said.
He stroked his vertical stripe of a beard. “Forgive me for saying so,” he said, “but you look a little peaked.”
“Probably jet lag.”
“You feel all right?”
“Well, I’m a little chilled,” I said, “but other than that-”
“Chilled?”
“A little, but-”
“But it’s a hot afternoon. The temperature is well over thirty degrees. That would make it close to ninety degrees Fahrenheit.”
“That sounds about right.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “you’re perspiring. So how can you be feeling a chill?”
“I’m sure it’s part of the jet lag,” I said. “And you’re right, it does feel warm in here, and I am perspiring. It’s more an internal sort of a chill.”
“Internal.”
“And it’s no big deal,” I said. “I can live with it.”
“What you need,” he said, “is spicy food. That is exactly what you need.”
“You’re probably right.”
“We will go to a place I know,” he said, “and we will drink beer and eat dog. How does that sound?”
“Uh,” I said.
“And then we will drink whiskey,” he said, “and then we will have some girls. But not children!”
“Certainly not,” I said.
“I know just the place,” he said. “The girls are twelve years old, possibly as much as fourteen. We won’t be robbing the cradle, and we won’t have the U.N. on our backs.”
“What about the SPCA?”
He laughed, got to his feet, left some baht on the table to cover the bill. “An inner chill,” he said. “My friend, after a plate of dog, a glass of scotch, and an hour with a pretty girl, you’ll be as warm inside as out.”
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Chapter 2
It all started… well, who knows when it started? When I was born, maybe, or when I was conceived, or somewhere in the dim dark past when my great-great-grandfather met my great-great-grandmother and decided he liked the way she combed her hair. Maybe it started on a numbered hill in Korea, where a shard of shrapnel from an incoming artillery round embedded itself in my skull, forever relieving me of the need to sleep. (No one knows exactly how the sleep center works, or why we need to sleep, but mine doesn’t, and I don’t.)
Maybe it started when I got home from Korea and started to make a life for myself. I found a way to earn a living, supplementing the monthly disability check I got from the government. And I found a way to fill up twenty-four wide-awake hours a day, and learned, too, to live out the fantasies other people use up in dreams. I studied languages, and I joined political movements, and I supported lost causes. I had adventures. Somewhere along the way I stonewalled my jailers in Washington by insisting I worked for a government agency and refusing to tell them which one. Then a guy showed up to claim me, evidently believing I worked for him. And, as the years went by, maybe I did. It’s not always easy to tell.
Enough. It all started on a Tuesday afternoon in October, in the pine-paneled basement recreation room of a house in Union City, New Jersey, where a man named Harald Engstrom poured me a glass of brandy.
“The trouble with Scandinavia,” Harald Engstrom said, “is we’re too bloody civilized. We used to be Vikings, for God’s sake! We were the scourge of Europe, more to be feared than the Black Death. We’d raid your coastal villages. We’d butcher your cattle and rape your daughters – or was it the other way around?”
“Well, either way,” I said.
“Exactly. We were a dangerous lot, Evan. And now we never go to war. We are peaceable and prosperous. All our citizens get medical care and education and a government that takes care of them from the cradle to the grave. Even the downtrodden, even those of us in southern Sweden, live a life the rest of the world would envy.”
We were speaking Danish. Harald was from Lund, in southern Sweden, but he did not consider himself a Swede, nor did he consider his homeland to be a part of Sweden. It had once been Danish – most of each of the Scandinavian countries had once belonged to or been a part of one or more of the others – and, as far as Harald was concerned, he and his neighbors and kinsmen were Danes still, and all that remained was for them to wrest control of their benighted province from the damnable (if benevolent) Stockholm government.
“It is difficult to stir up a rebellion against a welfare state,” he said with a sigh. “If we are successful, what happens to our pensions? Evan, I ask you. Would a Viking ask such a question?”
“It’s a problem,” I agreed. “You’ve got to get people to realize they’re oppressed before you can get them to revolt.”
“But you have some ideas.”
I did, and I began to run through them for him. For several years I’d been a member of SKOAL, an acronymic organization committed to restoring lost areas of Sweden and Norway to Danish control. (A fraction of SKOAL claimed Danish hegemony for all of Sweden and Norway, and for part of Finland as well, but I felt their claims were unjustified, and not terribly realistic.) I’d had some correspondence with members in Denmark and Sweden, but Harald was the first SKOALer I’d met face to face.
He nodded as I spoke. “You are truly committed,” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“And you believe you can get assistance from these other groups? The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization? The League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia? The Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society?”
He named some other outfits of which I’m proud to be a member, including one or two I couldn’t recall having mentioned to him. That might have made me suspicious, but who would be suspicious of a Danish Swede (or a Swedish Dane) in the basement of a suburban house in Union City, New Jersey?