John Burdett - Bangkok Tattoo

Her name was Chanya, and I still remember the day she walked into the bar asking for work. She spoke English fluently with a slight Texan drawl (but enough Thai in it to keep her exotic), having spent nearly two years in the United States until 9/11 forced her to come home. Post 9/11 was no time to be traveling on a false passport in America. You had to have grown up in the business to recognize her genius. My mother and I saw it instantly; Vikorn took a little longer to catch on. Within a week we were boiling eggs like crazy and taking them and the roasted hog's head to Wat Po, where the monks ate them or gave them to the poor. Let me explain.

First, farang, please dump those childish notions you harbor about our working girls being downtrodden sex-slave victims of a chauvinistic male-dominated culture; take it from me, there's nothing your media won't do to comfort you in your postindustrial despair to make you believe your culture is superior to ours. (Are they kidding?-I've been in Slough, England, on a Saturday night-I know what atomized basket cases you are.) These are all country girls, tough as water buffalo, wild as swans, who can't believe how much they can make by providing to polite, benevolent, guilt-ridden, rich, condom-conscious farang exactly the same service they would otherwise have to provide free without protection to rough drunken whoremongering husbands in their home villages. Good deal? Better believe it. (Don't look at me like that, farang, when you know in your heart that capitalism makes whores of all of us.) Most of the girls, being the sole breadwinners and therefore matriarchs, dispense the whole gamut of family business through the medium of the cell phone (generally in our staff toilet while changing into their working gear), from care of the sick to rental purchase agreements, from the chastisement of miscreants to the number of water buffalo to invest in this year, from marriages to abortions, religious duties, and grave decisions as to who to vote for in local and national elections.

But chemistry is at least as important for commercial sex as it is for the more art-house variety, which is where you start to differentiate between the supporting cast and the superstars. Here's the secret: your superstar makes the chemistry. She is a tantric master in a G-string, a topless sorceress, a dancing dervish with wicked allure. She knows how to turn herself into a mirror that reflects the many and varied fantasies of the men she seduces. Guess how many have come up to me to confide they've finally found her at long last, the woman of their dreams, the girl they've been waiting half a lifetime for, the one they are so sure of they will marry her tomorrow if only she'll agree, the saintly Chanya? Answer: roughly fifty percent of Chanya's customers. We have even employed a bouncer (known as the Monitor-like me, he doubles as a cop during the day) to protect us from attack by the brokenhearted. In short, Chanya saved our business, and we are not about to desert her in her hour of need. All genius has its dark side. In our preatomized society personal loyalty is still important, which is why even the wily Colonel Vikorn did not hesitate to interrupt his Saturday night in Bangkok (as the song says, it makes a proud man humble-and occasionally dead) when he realized our superstar was at risk. So here's what really happened.

I spotted him the minute he walked in the door. We are between mamasans at the moment, a lamentably common state of affairs, which means that as junior shareholder I have to fill in as papasan pending approval of a replacement by my somewhat demanding mother. (Like all ex-whores she has an inveterate loathing for mamasans and can never find the perfect one. I suspect her of manipulating to keep me as papasan.)

I have already described his face, which was not much improved when inhabited by his spirit. A nasty piece of work with the ridiculous arrogance of an iron-pumper. The girls all took the same view and kept away from him, leaving him isolated at a table on his own in a corner, growing ever more volcanic as he observed the girls favoring men older and less muscular than himself. He was drinking modestly (Budweiser beer, not Mekong whiskey, but one does not defile Vikorn's brilliant narratives with minor quibbles). I was loath to waste Chanya's porcelain talent on this earthenware vessel and really only intended for her to charm him out of our bar and into someone else's. We are fond of each other, Chanya and I, and understand each other. It took no more than a shift of my eyes for her to grasp what I wanted. At least (this moment in the narrative requires needlepoint accuracy) I think it was the shift in my eyes that sent her over to his table. Within a minute or so his mean little mouth was stretching itself into a smile of sorts, her hand draped lazily over one of his rocky thighs, and when she leaned forward to sip at her "lady drink" (a margarita with extra tequila), he fixated on her breasts. Yet another proud man was in process of being humbled.

He was the type whose libido required secretive intensity before it could switch to full alert. Chanya adapted herself in a second, and now they were talking conspiratorially (and intensely), almost head to head. To make matters worse, Eric Clapton was singing "Beautiful Tonight" on the faux jukebox. This irresistibly romantic song was the final straw. The iron-pumper's hand found its way to Chanya's nearest thigh. I checked the time by the clock on the fax machine. Less than five minutes had passed, and Iron Man was molten-something of a record even for Chanya. I decided to help her out by playing the Clapton song over again-or was I simply curious about the effect of an encore? Tiny tears appeared in the corners of his abnormally blue eyes, he swallowed hard, and the words "I'm so damn lonely" were recognizable as they emerged from that mean mouth, even at a distance of thirty feet, followed by the unbelievably inept "You look beautiful tonight, too."

"Thank you," says Chanya, modestly lowering her eyes.

Just then the rose seller came in. One admires this man's quixotic courage and that of his colleagues: the nut sellers and the kids who sell lighters. (Every bar tolerates them on the understanding they will be discreet and not stay long.) Can there be a greater optimism than a lifelong vocation of trying to sell roses to johns? I'd never before seen him sell a single flower, this rail-thin middle-aged man with a jaw deformed by a tumor he can never afford to have removed. Shyly, Iron Man beckoned him over, bought a single rose for which he paid far too much, and handed it to Chanya.

"I guess I'm gonna pay your bar fine, aren't I?"

Accepting the rose and feigning surprise mixed with gratitude (all the girls can do Oriental Humble on demand): "Are you? Up to you."

Exactly seven minutes, according to the clock on the fax machine, and she was about to score. By way of answer, he pulled a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and handed it to her. She put her palms together in a cute wai, then stood up to bring me the bar fine so I could record what was, now I remember, her second score of the evening. It was Saturday night, after all, and she was Chanya. The earlier customer had been a young man apparently without stamina, for she had taken less than forty minutes to return from his hotel.

The only unusual feature of the transaction with Iron Man was that she did not look me in the eye when she handed over the money and I made out her ticket. Nine times out of ten she winks or grins at me at precisely this moment, when her back is turned to the john. A minute later, and they were out the door. It didn't occur to me to fear for her safety; after all, she had clearly tamed him already-and she was Chanya.

"That's really the way it went, and there's no more I can tell you," I explain to Vikorn and my mother, back at the club. It is three-thirteen a.m. by the clock on the fax machine, and none of us are in the mood for sleep.