He calls Lalita on her cell phone. They’d had no time to make love, but he’d paid her bar fine, so she was in the hotel room waiting for him.
“Get the hell out of there right now,” Magnus says. “Just get out right now.”
They meet at On Nut Sky train station. He tells her things have gone terribly for him. He doesn’t go into detail and she is too smart to ask. He tells her she is not to worry, he still has plenty of money and will look after her, but she must help him. He will pay whatever she wants for a week or so totally out of sight, out of play.
Lalita does not seem overly put out. Sure, she knows a place: her home in the country, near Surin, right on the Cambodian border.
He waits while Lalita calls her parents, tells them she is coming to see them with her fiancé. After all, these are respectable, pious country people, no way she can turn up with a man unless she is at least engaged to him. Magnus doesn’t mind. He guesses enough dough will settle ruffled feathers at the end of the day. Things are difficult, but not so difficult he would consider marrying a Third World whore.
Or would he?
The farm, Friday, March 4, 2005
It is interesting, Magnus muses after a couple of days, how an environment can change one. Lalita’s parents’ house is quite big, a wood structure on concrete stilts on a couple acres of land in a flat hot dry region that owns a peculiar beauty. Tall trees break up the landscape; to McKay’s astonishment, elephants graze in fields. Wild-looking young day workers with cloths tied around their heads, bundled up against the sun, race by in the backs of pickup trucks from time to time. Monks from the local wat make alms rounds at dawn. Lalita, her near-blind mother, and her seriously ill father take food out to the road every morning to offer to the monks. Lalita has explained that sex is out of the question. McKay has already gathered this from the fact that there are no rooms in the house, only one vast space upstairs where all domestic business is conducted, save cooking which takes place under the house where the sow lives. Yet surely they could find a way? Only by going through a Buddhist ceremony, Lalita tells him firmly. Lawyer McKay notes that she is not talking about anything legally binding.
In the meantime, he gets in touch with Samson Lee via a cheap cell phone, using one of a dozen SIM cards that Lalita has purchased for him. McKay will use each SIM card only once. A second cell phone fitted with the twelfth simcard he puts aside exclusively for Lee to use to call him.
Better stay where you are for the moment, till I sort this out,” was all Samson Lee would say on the first call. “It may take awhile. Don’t tell me where you are, just tell me if it’s secure for a month or two.”
“Month or two?”
“This will take some time.”
“Did they kill Hercules?”
“Of course they killed Hercules, what was left of him. His mother’s seriously pissed.”
McKay absorbs this information while, from an upstairs window, he watches Lalita’s mother pick rice. It doesn’t look so hard. You simply pull up a clump of the plant from the wet earth, bash it against the side of your foot, and chuck it in the basket. It’s hot though: The landscape turns into a mirage soon after sunup. And it cannot help to be almost blind. The old lady works mostly by feel.
On the second call on the second cell phone the next day, Lee tells him there is a whole gang of Colombians still in Thailand. They bribed the cops in advance, so no one is looking for them except Lee’s people. Lee’s people, though, have connections with senior police that go very deep. As a matter of fact, Lee is connected to almost everyone important in Thailand. The Colombians, who only had the know-how to bribe minor cops, are still at large, but they will find it difficult to leave the country. Magnus is probably not in imminent danger, he just needs to keep his head down until the Thai side of the war is won.
Magnus has to rethink his situation. A week in the country might be quaint, in a pinch, but a month or more is a different ballgame. Especially without sex. With the increased emotional need which is a function of insecurity, McKay finds it difficult to keep his hands off Lalita. Images from those two incandescent times he slept with her provoke almost continuous arousal. What to do? Furtive fumbling at night, or during the day when her parents are working the fields, is out of the question — Lalita has made that clear. On the other hand, he dares not take her to a hotel in Surin, not so much because the Colombians might be looking for him (though they might be), but mostly because Samson Lee would surely find out and Magnus is supposed to be incognito McKay doesn’t want to enrage Samson Lee at a time like this.
So what about a quaint Buddhist ceremony, as Lalita more or less suggested? Probably Lalita, considering her profession, will understand his pragmatism: get married Buddhist-style in order to make his sojourn in the country that much easier. Using his lawyerly knack of expressing himself in positive terms whilst playing down the counter arguments, he subtly lets Lalita understand that he will accept a Buddhist marriage with her, on certain terms which could be summarized as voluntary sex slavery on her part. He is not sure they are quite reading from the same hymn sheet, but does it really matter? He’ll take care of her and her parents, he really will solve all their money problems with a wave of his platinum Visa card. He knows you don’t get nothin’ for nothin’ in this world, and he is genuinely grateful to her. The way he puts it, the whole deal sounds eminently reasonable, although he’s not sure she’s fully understood his complicated logic in English.
He’s no sooner given this heavily nuanced “yes,” than her father appears as if from nowhere to discuss Lalita’s sale price. Her father is only a couple of years older than McKay, but to McKay he looks about eighty.
McKay has very little cash with him, but in Surin he can use his credit card to get money from an ATM. Except that he cannot go to Surin. To his astonishment, he realizes he can probably trust his fiancée. In these circumstances, the old man’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars for his beautiful daughter’s body for life does not seem unreasonable. (Maybe he’ll keep her indefinitely, a twenty-two-year-old sensual feast waiting for him in a sarong in the country — why not?)
Lalita rides to Surin in back of a pickup truck, and by using a number of ATMs manages to extract fifteen thousand dollars. Out of curiosity, McKay calls his bank to check: Yep, she took out exactly the agreed sum, not a penny more.
Next day, nine monks appear in their saffron robes, form a semicircle, join themselves together with a length of white string, and start chanting in Pali, while Magnus and his bride kneel with their palms held together near their chests for what seems to McKay like an inordinate period of time. Indeed, he is so tired from keeping his hands up after the first hour, and so bored with listening to the incomprehensible Pali, and at the same time so determined to show he has the stamina of any Thai man, that he is not paying very much attention to Lalita.
Like most Thais, Lalita understands quite a lot of Pali, thanks to the cultural influence of Buddhism. She knows that Pali is a dialect of Sanskrit, which is perhaps the only language on earth wholly dedicated to the sacred. Like most people in the world outside of the West, Lalita assumes that everyone, even McKay, has a God-shaped hole in his head, otherwise he could not be human at all, could he? She also assumes that the monks’ words are having the same effect on him as they are on her.
Of course, she knows he does not consciously understand anything, but this is a magical moment and these words are sacred. So sacred, indeed, that she finds she is undergoing that religious experience which she has always known would come to her sooner or later. Quite simply, this is the happiest day of her life and she has quickly forgotten the rather legalistic caveats that McKay tried to impose on their union. Indeed, as invariably happens when a soul begins to awaken, the spiritual experience is so powerful that she simply drops her former identity like a set of old clothes. Miraculously, but not unusually, she is able to forget she was ever on the Game. After all, as far as her community is concerned, in one smart move she has become a rich, respectable, powerful, married woman.