“Where are they based?”
“Everywhere. The ladies speak a thousand languages, own a thousand faces. I think you’ll have a lot of fun with this case. Don’t worry if you have to do things that threaten your marriage. I’ll corroborate it’s all in the line of duty.”
3
My first thought after leaving his office with shoulders slumped was to rush home to my partner, Chanya, a former whore who’d worked in my mother’s bar, the Old Man’s Club, where we fell in love. We’re not legally married but went through a Buddhist ceremony, which is what counts in the country area where Chanya hails from. A few years ago our only child, a son, died in a traffic accident, and the event changed my darling forever. She grew serious, studied sociology from a distance-learning institute, followed up with a master’s in the same subject, and now works day and night on her Ph. D. thesis, which, naturally, is all about prostitution in Thailand, with a special emphasis on Bangkok. Let me be specific: she conducted almost the whole of her research in Soi Cowboy, where my mother’s bar is situated. All was going well until the university in its wisdom replaced one of her Thai supervisors with a farang woman, with whom Chanya did not get along. For a year it had been one long High Noon between the two of them, each trying to outresearch the other. I didn’t think I was going to get the reception I needed by going home right now.
Instead, I checked the open-plan office where I have a desk to see if my assistant, Lek, was still there. But it was six-fifteen in the evening, and he’d long since left work. I doubted that he’d gone home, though. I pressed an autodial number on my cell phone. When he answered, I could hear a plaintive Isaan folk song in the background and a lot of semifemale voices. When he is among his own kind, Lek turns pretty much totally fag.
“Where are you, Lek?”
“Master, darling, is it really you? Soo wonderful of you to think of me.”
“Lek, I have a new case you’re going to have to help me with.”
“Anything, Superman, anything you say.”
“Be serious for a moment. You have a good connection in the army, don’t you?”
A snigger. “I do love your discretion, master.”
“There’s a General Zinna angle to the case. I need to talk to you.”
Lek dropped his fag performance. “Zinna?”
“Just tell me where you are, I’ll come.”
“I’m in the Lonesome Cowboy in Nana Plaza. Do hurry, I can’t wait to show you off to my friends.”
Now I was outside the police station, facing the long row of cooked-food stalls, which would be illegal if they didn’t cater to cops, and I was of two minds about whether to grab a cab or walk to Nana. I knew that if I decided to walk, it would start to rain, and that if I grabbed a cab, it would not. Just to prove that I could predict the future, I started to walk. By the time I got to the end of the soi, the heavens opened; call me Nostradamus. The drops were light enough at first, and of course it was about thirty degrees Celsius, but this was the remnant of a typhoon that had been lashing Vietnam for four days, and now the sky had turned black and all of us on the street were hit with great plashing drops of warm water that soaked you from top down and also from bottom up because the rain bounced off the sidewalk to a height of maybe twelve inches.
By the time I reached the Sukhumvit/Soi 4 interchange, the calves of my pants were wet rags. The roads had started to flood and turn into shallow brown rivers. I decided to wait in a doorway with a clear view of the traffic jam. Cars, trucks, and buses pumped carbon monoxide into the warm rain; an old diesel bus with no air-conditioning stopped right in front of me. Rows of Thai faces stared implacably into the bad weather. A couple of whores and a katoey who were hanging around looking for customers had also taken refuge in the doorway, so it was quite cozy. The katoey was by far the most beautiful of all of us, but given to pouting. By the time I decided to make a dash for it, I had offended all three of my new friends by declining to hire any of their bodies.
I reached Nana soaked through. Farang don’t like to get wet, not even in the tropics, so the plaza was almost without customers, the outside bars awash with water, the girls huddled together under the extended roofs that are supposed to look like country pavilions. I knew the rain wouldn’t last long, though, and even if it did, lust and loneliness would bring the white men out to play sooner or later; anyway, these were mostly Isaan girls, conditioned from childhood to take a contemplative attitude to life: they have a hundred ways of passing the time, mostly by grooming one another. At the Crazy Elephant three girls were looking for lice in the hair of three other girls, and the remaining “waitresses” were making up in mirrors. The Isaan hairdresser in the corner was doing a roaring trade as usual, and as the girls wandered in for work, they waied the Buddha shrine next to the Forbidden City bar, sometimes bringing lotus and other offerings to lay under the saffron-robed statue. As recently as five years ago there were only heterosexual bars here, but the katoey market has grown inexplicably in recent times. Is something happening in farang land you need to tell me about, DFR? Don’t you like girls so much anymore? Is it feminism that has turned you off or something latent in the soul, so long denied, that is emerging in this new century of enlightenment?
I’d not been to Nana for years, so for me this was a trip down memory lane. When I saw that the Lonesome Cowboy was on the ground floor at the back of the plaza, I had to smile to myself. It used to be called the Catwalk; my mother, Nong, worked there when I was about twelve years old. I used to take a motorbike taxi early in the evening to come and ask for money for food; sometimes, when I got lonely, I would arrive in an emotional mess as late as one or two in the morning. If Mum was with a customer, her friends would take care of me. According to the head experts, I should have quite a few problems, shouldn’t I? Well, I can report that in my case I do have one unusual quirk: I adore whores. Generally speaking, they are the most honest and generous of women, and the only ones who have a clue about men.
The entrance to the bar was covered by a red velvet curtain and guarded by four katoeys (in shimmering silver body gloves or gold one-piece swimming costumes with white daisies at the bosom). They gazed upon me as a prospect and undressed me in their imagination as they let me in; I saw about twenty more katoeys in bikinis and faux-ermine shawls busy eating their evening meal. They were using the stage as a table and discussing silicone inserts with reference to the price/quality tradeoff. There was no sign of Lek. I nodded at the mamasan, a katoey in his midforties who remembered my mother from the bar’s earlier incarnation; he nodded back.
Now I saw that Lek was sitting at a table in a dark corner and had been watching me with an excited grin on his face since I walked in. The other katoeys watched jealously as I strolled over, just as Lek intended. He was right to be discreet-all katoeys are compulsive gossips; but they are also a sub-subclass: no one listens to them, no one accords them the right to be taken seriously. I’m fond of Lek, perhaps I love him, but I don’t appreciate his fag persona, so I went stern, just as he started to tease me about being in a katoey bar.
“General Zinna,” I said, and he immediately got the message. He nodded humbly. Now he was a doormat who would take any punishment from the master he loved. “I only heard the story about his accident tenth hand. He’s into body parts, all of a sudden?”
“It was such a terrible shame,” Lek said with a sigh. “That young fellow was tall, strong, and handsome like a dream.” Lek shook his head. “The most beautiful soldier in the army, they used to say. And an ace marksman.”
“Zinna was driving?”
“Of course. He used to love to drive his Ferrari down lonely country lanes with his latest beautiful boy by his side. He doesn’t do that anymore. They say he sold the Ferrari.”