John Burdett - Bangkok 8

"I don't want to feel like an ice cream."

"Huh?"

"Look at them." I wave a hand at the other tables. "Those girls don't speak English as well as I do. They don't surf the Net. They've probably never been abroad. They don't realize they're a new flavor from Haagen-Dazs. Anyway, they're professionals."

Jones swallows hard. I feel sorry that I've brought her close to tears. She's tough, though. "That's how you see me? Another Western sleazebag, just like the farang men?"

I don't say anything for a beat or two. Then: "No one escapes their own culture. It's hardwired in us, from birth onward. A consumer society is a consumer society. It may start with washing machines and air-conditioning, but sooner or later we consume each other. It's happening to us too. But you see, the Buddha taught freedom from appetite."

"Him again." A sigh. Now she is determined not to let me off the hook by changing the subject, or even talking at all. I start to grin. "What are you laughing at?"

"The beauty of the Buddha. Look how perfectly he described cause and effect. Your ego is injured, so you won't talk to me. Perhaps I will retaliate by not talking to you. Then we become enemies. If we had guns perhaps we would shoot each other, over and over again, in lifetime after lifetime. Don't you see how futile it all is?" I've made her unhappy, far more than I expected. It is as if I've kicked her in the pit of her stomach, just when she was offering love. A crime against life. "Kimberley-"

"Don't."

"Kimberley, when my mother was sixteen years old she offered herself to a mamasan she'd been introduced to in Pat Pong. Nobody forced her to do so, her parents were not those kind of people. Nobody was going to stop her, though-they were dirt poor. The mamasan put her on display at her club every night, but postponed selling her until a good offer came up. Virginity is supposed to be most highly prized by Japanese and other Asian men, but the highest bid in my mother's case came from an Englishman in his forties. There are plenty of men who would understand the special pleasure in deflowering a child, but I don't. He paid forty thousand baht, an astronomical sum. My mother insisted that her best friend accompany her so she would not feel so terribly alone. The friend sat in the toilet while the event took place. He was kind to her, in a manner of speaking. He used a lubricant, tried not to hurt her too much, and burst into tears when it was over. My mother and her friend stared with great wonderment at this man who was more than twice their age. As the Third World said to the First World: If it makes you feel so bad, why do you do it? They felt sorry for him. It was my mother's blood on the sheets, but the agony was all his. He did not appear to be rich, so he must have saved up. Forty thousand baht was a lot of money, even for a Westerner. It was a very special occasion for him, a kind of feast. Perhaps it was his birthday. When we are in the grip of hunger we think only of eating. Then, when the banquet is over, we see the evidence of what we really are."

Something is happening behind her eyes. I wonder if I've succeeded in reaching her latent Buddhahood. A Thai woman would simply have thrown a tantrum and walked out, but there is American Will here, that grim hanging on.

Quietly: "You've never slept with a Western woman?"

"No."

"If you did, you would be that virgin on the bed, being raped by a pig?"

"She wasn't raped. She knew what she was doing. She was proud that she commanded such a good price. Of course, she gave almost all of it to her family. That's what innocence looks like over here."

"The legal age is eighteen in this country. In the States it would have been statutory rape. He could have been sent away for twenty years." A long silence during which the atmosphere freezes and I realize how naIve I'm being. No latent Buddhahood in the FBI, merely the cold fury of a will deflected, an appetite frustrated: no ice cream in the fridge tonight: damn.

"Did you ever think your meditation might not be such an asset in the craft of detection?"

"How so?"

"NaIvete. A luxury no cop can afford, frankly. The way you see it, Warren, Bradley, what they did to Fatima, what they did to the Russian whore-what they planned to do to a bunch of other boys and women, that's peculiarly Western, isn't it?" The expression on my face says: Yes, obviously. "That kind of existential crime without meaning, without profit motive, has to be just an extension of Western self-indulgence, doesn't it? A variation on the theme of the guy who raped your mom? Let's get the bill, I wanted us to eat here tonight for a reason. Let's say it's reality sandwich time for both of us."

She makes no attempt to extract the arrogance from the gesture when she calls for the bill. She pays with a gold AmEx card and I follow almost at a trot as she strides across the floor, leading me around by the pool between great mountains of bougainvillea, crimson hibiscus nodding in the evening breeze. We wind up at the Bamboo Bar, the hotel's famous jazz venue. Jones checks her watch before leading me inside. She asks the maitre d' for a discreet table for two near the window. The seats are woven wicker with luxurious cushions, the air-conditioning glacial, the margaritas perfect with viscous ice, salt glittering around the rim of wide glasses, generous shots of tequila. We are just in time for the first act. The maitre d' anounces "the incomparable, the spectacular, the truly magnificent Black Orchid." Enthusiastic clapping from the old hands in the audience, the small band plays a couple of bars and she walks on.

The song had to be "Bye Bye Blackbird," didn't it? Corny perhaps, but wonderful, too, with a depth of melancholy I've never heard before. I wouldn't have guessed she could even sing like a woman. Jones is enjoying the shock on my face.

"She's not bad. Not a professional of course, and jazz outside the States is always a bit of a disappointment, but she's not bad."

I realize that Jones is deaf to a specific quality in Fatima's voice. Let's call it heart: build the fire, light the light, I'll be home late tonight, blackbird, bye bye.

Let's not call it heart. The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the thoroughly dispossessed. "No," I say, and sip the margarita, "not as good as an American, but not bad."

"Now look to your left at about ten o'clock. Don't move your head, just your eyes."

"I already saw them." Warren and-a triumph for Jones to judge by the expression on her face-Vikorn. She doesn't know that the short dapper Thai man sitting with them is Dr. Surichai until I tell her. Together the threee of them make a half-moon around a large round table. They are all absorbed by Fatima and have no inclination to look behind them, but the diva in the long purple silk gown and heavy pearl necklace glances in our direction. Our eyes meet for a moment and she misses a beat. Not a professional at all. She recovers quickly and the band covers her mistake, but not before that total blackness has intervened behind her eyes. A few seconds later and she's got a better idea. She cocks her head slightly to one side and engages my eyes mercilessly while she sings: No one there to help or understand me, oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me…

"I want to go," I tell Jones, sounding just like a girl who is out too late and-I'm afraid-covering a single sob by leaning over and coughing. We wait until Fatima has finished her song, when the clapping masks the noise of our departure.

"Pretty well as soon as Kennedy decided to send military advisers to Laos, the CIA realized they had a problem," Jones explains in the back of the cab. "It was the CIA who ran the war there, by the way, from beginning to end. The problem was the opium. When the French ran Indochina it didn't bother them at all, they ran it as a state monopoly, complete with bonded warehouses in Vientiane and Saigon. When America got involved the obvious knee-jerk reaction was: no more opium. Just like us to try to reinvent the wheel, right? That noble idea lasted maybe ten minutes and here's why. The Laotian armed forces had this unique characteristic: they didn't fight. Not anyone, anywhere, anytime, and most of all they didn't fight the North Vietnamese regular army, which scared the shit out of them. The only people who would fight were the Hmong, the indigenous mountain tribe up in the north, whom the Laotians were happy to see annihilated by Ho Chi Minh. Americans like guts, we love to fight and we love fighters, and the Hmong were that. They became the CIA's favorite exotic pets, but the drawback was they depended entirely on the opium crop to survive. Of course, the French would have explained all this to us if we'd asked them, but-well, we were Americans, weren't we? The only answer, though, was to help the Hmong sell their opium. Being fantastic hypocrites-like all masked avengers-we didn't want to get our hands dirty. The Agency tried to keep its involvement to a minimum. Basically they would use anyone they could disown afterwards. They preferred non-Americans. Your Colonel was hardly more than a kid at the time, but he caught on real quick. Coming from Udon Thani, he also spoke Laotian fluently, so after he'd done a stint as short-order chef he got the job of organizing the Hmong's crop up in the mountains and getting it to the airstrips. With the Hmong you have to realize we're talking Stone Age-people whose idea of commerce was trading pigs for wives. Vikorn was fine up there in the hills, but even he wasn't that sophisticated when it came to dealing with the Chinese. It was the Chinese traders-specifically the Chiu Chow clan, who originate in Swatow-who brokered the product when it reached the cities. Of course. The Chiu Chow are the finest businesspeople in the world, then, now, and for maybe a thousand years past. They run this country-hell, they practically run the Pacific Rim. The Agency didn't want to be in the business at all, but they had to accept that since they were in it, it was in their interests to make sure the Hmong didn't get too burned. They needed a dealer who was a match for the Chiu Chow."