I feel a slight flutter when I see her making toward me. I suspect I wouldn’t give her a second glance when she’s on duty and dressed like a tart, but that no-frills naturalness is quite a turn-on. And it is a beautiful evening. When she sees me, she nods faintly toward a couple of deck chairs that have yet to be folded and stacked. She sits in one. I play along by letting a few beats pass before I join her.
She takes a pack of Marlboro Reds out of a down-market black handbag and puts one in her mouth without offering the box to me. She lights up at the same time as she says, “What did you want to know?”
“I want to know everything you know about Vulture Peak.”
She takes a long toke on the cigarette, inhales like a true addict, exhales, and starts to talk. “The owners of the Chung King House have connections with travel agents in China-that’s why they called it the Chung King. But it didn’t really work out. Maybe they’re ten years ahead of the curve. Most of the business is still farang, with some Japanese and Korean. But they keep up the connection with the Chinese, and every now and then a tour group comes to town. Usually they stay in one of the midrange hotels. Often the group is so big, they take over the hotel.
“Mostly it’s genuine sightseers, but sometimes it’s all men on the loose, looking for a good time. When we get the call, we girls pile into the van, sometimes up to five or six of us. One night about two years ago we got the call for eight girls. Eight is a lucky number for Chinese, right? But it wasn’t to a hotel. It was to that fantastic palace up on the hill. From the start everyone told us we would be well paid but we had to keep quiet about it. Never tell a soul where we went that night.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know why it had to be so secret. When we got there, we found about twenty Chinese men, all drunk. There were crates of cognac stacked up against a wall, and it looked as if they were having a stag party. There were also a lot of roulette wheels, mahjong tiles, and stacks of playing cards. A lot of banknotes all over the place, but not Thai baht-I suppose it was all Chinese money. They didn’t speak any Thai or English, but we managed to work out that one of them had recently had a serious medical operation and was celebrating his recovery.
“They were noisy with bad manners, but they weren’t really obnoxious. They wanted us to undress, to hang around naked. So we did. Of course we got groped mercilessly, but they were the kind of men-middle management with wives and kids, I guess-who are scared of girls like me. They didn’t want to screw any of us, just the endless groping, like curious boys.
“Then someone said it was time for a show. A woman appeared-a Chinese woman-who took us all into a big bedroom and gave us silver and gold bikinis to wear. Then she gave one of us a big solid gold ring which had to be hidden in one of the girls’ vaginas-she didn’t care who. She gave us all numbered buttons to wear. I was number seven. Then she led us out to the big room with pools and little streams of water, and someone turned some music on. It was a disco tune, and we all started to dance. The men were staring at us and gabbling furiously to one another, and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands. I got the feeling this was the high point of the evening.
“The Chinese woman told us to take off our bras, then our panties, so we were naked again. All the men were staring at our pussies, of course. And betting. They were more interested in the betting than in our bodies. Finally the music stopped and the Chinese woman who spoke English said that the girl with the gold ring in her vagina should come forward. The girl walked up and took out the ring, and the men went crazy. Those who had bet on number seven cleaned up. Some of the men looked really depressed, like they’d mortgaged their houses and lost everything. Then we were led out, told to dress, and the van took us back to the bar. They paid us all five thousand baht each, and the girl was allowed to keep the gold ring. That was quite a tip.”
She has finished the cigarette, which she stubs out on the sand. When she reaches into her bag I think it is for another cigarette. Instead she takes out a solid gold ring, which she hands to me to heft. It’s small, solid, and heavy. “I had it valued. It’s real gold, twenty-three carat. More than three baht in weight. At 13,800 baht per one-baht weight, that makes 41,000 baht. I had a feeling gold would go up sooner or later, so I kept it.” She smiles without humor. “That’s why I stay at that bar-it’s very lucky for me.”
I feel like a naive farang for the thumping in my heart, a sense of hurt. Some whores can affect you like that, even a part-time pimp like me. I don’t want to think about her at that party; she’s too beautiful. I watch a Thai couple walk past along the shore, the moon directly overhead now, a pure silver scythe. “You have no idea what business they might have been in, those middle-management-type men?”
She shrugs. “One of them who took an interest in me kept saying tanakan. I think that was the only word he knew in Thai.”
“Bankers?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to say he’d just been to the bank. He was drunk.”
“And the Chinese woman-she was the only woman there apart from you girls?”
“The only one I saw.”
“She was arranging the party?”
“I don’t know. We got there about eleven-thirty in the evening, so most of the party was over. We were the final show.”
“Can you describe her?”
“She was the tall, willowy kind of Chinese woman. Hard to say how old because she’d taken such great care of her skin-you could see how much money had been spent on her. She was HiSo for sure. Very elegant. She spoke perfect English and not bad Thai. I don’t think she was mainland Chinese at all.”
By the time she has finished speaking, she is on her feet. Anyone spying on us would assume I had sat down to proposition her and she had refused after a short polite conversation. So she’s not only beautiful and modest when off duty, she’s a smart operator too. And lucky. That was a decent chunk of gold. I give her five minutes to disappear, so nobody thinks I’m following her, then walk along the road opposite the sea until I come to a guest house with a ROOMS VACANT sign. I don’t bother to check out the room. When I lie down on the narrow bed next to the tiny window that overlooks the sea, I close my eyes, expecting to see Chanya there, where she usually is just before I fall asleep, nestled behind my eyelids. Instead I see Om.
When I wake up, a solid block of golden light is shooting through the window like something out of a space travel movie, as if a beautiful Venusian is about to materialize before my eyes. It’s quite blinding, and I have to draw the curtains for a moment, until I remind myself that light is good, light is what it’s all about.
The room rate includes breakfast, which is laid out buffet style in a room downstairs. I’m the only guest up at this hour, and there are no staff. The coffee has been stewing all night on a hot plate, the imitation croissants are inedible, and the granola is old and stale.
I already paid for the room, so I’m a free man, walking along the beach at seven-thirty in the morning, wondering what Chanya did last night. I find a small cafe near the sea that serves real coffee and not-bad pain au chocolat. I ask the kid behind the bar if he knows anything about the mansions up on the hill-you can see the peak from this part of the beach, but not the houses-and he says no. He’s a Muslim from Pattani, speaks standard Thai with a strong accent, and has only been here a week. The cafe was the only business he could find that was hiring workers and didn’t sell alcohol. He confides how disgusted he is with farang decadence, especially the alcohol-and the sex. He’s never seen anything like it. He understands why Allah sent the tsunami seven years ago, but nobody seems to have got the message. What will Allah do next, destroy the whole island?