John Burdett - Bangkok Tattoo

"She didn't look you in the eye when she handed you her bar fine? That is unusual. I've seen her, she likes you, she always looks you in the eye and winks. I think she has a thing for you." My mother has picked up on this rather female detail. Vikorn is clearly back in Maigret mode, on a plane of lofty strategy beyond our reach. Nong and I wait for the pronouncement. He rubs his jaw.

"There's nothing more we can do tonight. Tomorrow we'll send in a forensic team to take pictures-nothing too thorough, though. Sonchai will arrange for removal of the body. He'll get the authorization for immediate incineration from-well, I'll find someone. He'll lose the passport. The farang was probably AWOL from some dreary little town in the South where he was supposed to be looking out for men with black beards wearing Bin Laden T-shirts, so the chances are no one knows where he is. She obviously got the opium from him and the pipe too, so it looks as if he's been in Cambodia. Looks like he was not entirely the weightlifting moron he pretended to be, either. He at least had the imagination to try a little poppy sap. It could be weeks before he's traced to here, though I expect they'll come calling eventually. I don't see any real risk, so long as we lie low and Chanya disappears for a month or so and changes her hair. I don't want them interrogating her. We don't know what she got up to in America." Turning to Nong: "You better talk to her, woman to woman, find out where her head is really at." Then turning to me: "Or maybe you should do that, since you two seem to get along so well. Try to get her in a good mood. We don't want you to wind up castrated, too."

My mother laughs politely at this incredibly tasteless joke-he is the major shareholder, after all. I go out into the street to call him a taxi because he doesn't want his limo to be seen again tonight on Soi Cowboy. All the bars are shut, but the street is now crammed with cooked food stalls, which invariably appear after the two a.m. curfew to fill the street with delicious aromas, serving exclusively Thai dishes to a thousand hungry hookers babbling to one another with stories of the night. It is a peaceful scene and one I have grown to love, despite the serious religious misgivings I have about working in the trade and making money out of women in a way that is expressly forbidden by the Buddha. Sometimes our sins are a compulsion of karma: the Buddha rubs our face in it until we are so sick of our error, we would rather die than go that way again. (But if that is the case, why do I feel so good? Why is the whole street in a festive mood? Did the rules change? Is monogamy an experiment that failed, like communism?)

Believe it or not, I don't spend any of the money. Vikorn's accountant wires my modest ten percent share of the profits into my account with the Thai Farmer's Bank every quarter, and I let it stack up, preferring to live on my cop's salary in my hovel by the river when I'm not sleeping at the club. To be honest, I've promised the Buddha that when I get the chance I'll do something useful with it. Does that sound pathetic to you, farang? It does to me, but there's nothing I can do about it. When I tried to take some money out of the account to buy a fantastic pair of shoes by Baker-Benje on sale in the Emporium (only $500), I was prevented by some mystic force.

After helping my Colonel into his cab, I stroll down the street, now entirely empty of farang. Some of the stalls boast electric lights, powered by illegal hookups to the illegal cables that grow up the walls of our buildings like black ivy, but most use gas lighting, which hisses and makes the mantles burn brilliantly. I see many beautiful and familiar faces dip in and out of this chiaroscuro, every girl ravenous after her night's work. In between the cooked food stalls, fortune tellers have set up their minimalist presentations: a table and two chairs for the well-to-do, a shawl on the ground for the others.

Each turn of the Tarot cards causes a female heart to leap or sink: marriage, health, money, baby, an overseas trip with a promising farang? Nothing has changed since I was a kid. To add to the festive atmosphere, a blind singer with a microphone chants a doleful Thai dirge with one hand on the shoulder of his companion, who carries the loudspeaker on a strap as they make their majestic progress down the street. I toss a hundred-baht note into the box, then, remembering Chanya and the need for luck, chuck in another thousand.

Everyone knows me: "Sonchai, how's business?" "Hello, Sonchai, got a job for me?" "Papa Sonchai, my beloved papasan," in a tone of playful satire. "When will you dance for us again, Detective?"

I'm very happy that Vikorn has saved Chanya from that crude and undiscriminating justice they have in America where, if they extradited her, they would never make allowances for her youth and beauty, the stress inherent in her profession, or the ugliness of her victim. Nor would she be able to purchase indulgences in the manner of our more flexible system. That remark about not knowing what she got up to in the United States, though-it is clear proof of the superior vision of his mind, not to say the paranoia that is a professional hazard for a gangster of his stature. Me, for example: I have never given her time over there a second thought. Didn't she simply work in a massage parlor like all the others?

All of a sudden I experience a dramatic slowing of my thoughts, a draining of energy after prolonged tension. I'm totally burned out, about to crash. I walk slowly back to the bar and mount the stairs to one of the second-floor rooms to lie down. It is eight minutes past five in the morning, and the first signs of dawn have popped out of the night one by one: the muezzin chanting from a nearby mosque, early birdsong, an insomniac cicada, new light in the east.

We Thais have our own favorite cure for emotional exhaustion. No pills, no alcohol, no dope, no therapy-we simply hit the sack. Sounds simple, but it works. In fact, in survey after survey we have admitted that sleep is our favorite hobby. (We know there's something better on the other side.)

It turns out that the Mitch Turner case has disturbed me at some deep level, however, for in my sleep my dead partner and soul brother Pichai comes to me, or rather I visit him. He sits in a circle of meditating monks who exude honey-colored glows and at first does not want to be disturbed. I insist, and slowly he emerges from his divine trance. Want to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.

I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That's Pichai at his most gnomic, I'm afraid. I guess I'll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?

B y the time I finally get up, it's early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.

Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He's been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.

Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit's call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. "With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon." Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.