John Burdett - Bangkok 8

Not so Wanna. More traditionally Thai than Nong, Pichai's mother went to work in the bars soon after dumping Pichai's Thai father for being a "butterfly" (a technical expression amongst our women meaning he screwed anything that moved). She vomited the first time she slept with a farang and beheld that whacking great erection more suitable for a female water buffalo than a woman, and never really developed her skills to their full potential. Nong teased her that she belonged to the "dead body" school of seduction. Not that it mattered. Petite with pale flesh that was a gourmet delight to the touch, Wanna was-still is-exquisite to look at, and your farang is a sucker for the visuals.

Pichai divided his mother's customers into Masters and Slaves. What was peculiar, in his eyes, and gave rise to a profound doubt as to the soundness of the farang mind, was that his mother never altered her attitude of unconquerable indifference. A White Master who sought to protect her and dominate her (with assurances that her life was now saved) she rewarded with exactly the same shortlist of grunts and moans as a White Slave who would declare himself on the brink of salvation when she permitted him-quite literally-to lick her ass.

As her English improved she reported back to Pichai the substance of her customers' love babble. To look for nirvana in someone's crotch, now that really is dumb. For Pichai the horror was that these spiritual dwarfs were taking over the world. I think it was the profound disillusionment which arose from these insights that drove him onto the Path. He had about him the noble soul's willingness to act on even its most bitter perceptions; unlike me, he was never afraid to slash at the bonds, once he saw them for what they were. Maybe he didn't love me as much as I loved him?

Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious. Here I am back on Sukhumvit in an Internet cafe, having tapped out "Bradley/jade" on the AltaVista search engine. The web site is called "Fatima and Bill's Jade Window" and consists of a black background with white text, a slowly turning jade artifact in an oval in the center of the screen. One William Bradley confesses to being owner of the site.

The artifact is a parabolic phallus which glows softly with a green-gold light, a perfectly balanced shape rising from crude rock, tapering elegantly until it reaches a smoothly polished head. There is nothing more to Bradley's web page except an e-mail address and a short text extolling the mystic qualities of jade. The same text appears in Thai, above the English.

It is the finest penis I have ever seen, whether in stone or flesh. Now Bradley is beginning to intrigue me. Jade is the most spiritual of stones. Properly worked and polished, it gives a mystic glow which seems to come from its heart, an echo of nirvana. How would an American marine understand such a thing? True jade lovers tend to be Chinese.

It is easy to trace the Internet service provider, who is based on the other side of town, in Kaoshan Road, but it is three minutes to midnight on the day of Pichai's death and I need to drown myself in people. In the narrow soi outside the Internet cafe tarot readers sit cross-legged over the cards which their clients-invariably anxious girls who are not having much luck tonight-have drawn. I walk smartly past them to Nana Plaza, which is transformed. I cannot believe that Bradley was not a regular here, and who would forget a man like him?

"Handsome man, I want to go with yooo," a girl in a black tank top calls as she leans over the palisade of the first bar, when I'm turning into the Nana courtyard from Soi 4. The plaza is flooded with white men and brown girls. Australians with guts so huge they look about to give birth stand grinning with arms around girls no bigger than their legs. Americans reminisce loudly about the night before, Germans keep saying ja, ja and Dutch walk around like old hands. There are plenty of East Europeans and Russians, too; Siberia is directly north of my country, and ever since the fall of the USSR there has been a steady stream of men and women with pale skins and heavy vodka habits. The men come to buy and the women to sell.

"I don't like work here, but papa me have car accident, must send money," a girl is saying to a tall, skinny Englishman. "Oh, that's awful," he says, as he pats her butt.

The atmosphere is something between a festival and a hunting lodge. It's that time in the evening when the girls make an extra effort, before the 2 a.m. curfew when the cops close the place down, and the men sense the increase in intensity, like wildebeests sniffing lion. Everyone is drinking Singha or Kloster beer ice cold straight from the bottle, and wherever you look there are television monitors. Larry King's suspenders scream from a lot of them. Even the guy who sells fried grasshoppers from a stall near the Buddha shrine owns a TV monitor on which he plays old Muhammad Ali fights and scenes from the siege of Stalingrad. Mostly, though, the screens show Manchester United playing Leeds to the boom of every kind of music from a thousand speakers.

I squeeze past some excited Italian men to climb the stairs to the second tier, which is a U-shaped collection of go-go bars looking down on the courtyard. As I pass each bar a curtain is whipped aside to show naked or near-naked girls dancing on elevated platforms, usually to Thai pop. Girls in bikinis try to drag me in, but I'm focused now on the Carousel, which is one of the biggest.

There are two revolving platforms, and all the girls dancing on them are naked. At one of the stand-up bars a farang is arguing with a girl in traditional Thai costume.

"I tell you I tired, no have power mek boom-boom."

The man cocks an eye at me, then back to the girl. "And may I ask why you are so tired tonight?" The accent is Swiss German. With a twist of his head the man adds: "Why do I torture myself with such questions?"

I order a beer and watch the girl pull a sulky face. Gaunt and petite, about twenty-four, although to a farang she might seem sixteen. She catches my gaze and shrugs: farangs never understand anything.

"She was probably looking after her baby all night," I offer. Bar girls are rarely exhausted by twenty minutes of sex with a customer. The farang's eyes brighten.

"You have a child?" To me: "She never told me this."

Don't ask me why, but almost all the girls have one child, usually at age eighteen.

"Of course I have baby."

I watch the Swiss. Perhaps he took the girl out a couple of nights ago, made love to her casually-and finds himself haunted by her. His calculations so far have had to do with the practicalities of taking her back to Switzerland: the envy of his friends set against the disapproval of his mother; the pleasure of her body beside him every night against the social problem. And what about table manners? She probably sits cross-legged on most chairs and eats with a combination of fork, spoon and fingers.

As she turns the back of her head to me, I smile. Most of the girls are forever wrestling with their thick black hair. Often they tie it back in a ponytail, and a lot of them have taken to ripping the rings off condoms and using them as heavy-duty elastic bands, which is exactly what this girl has done; not a trick likely to win approval at the dinner tables of Zurich.

Now the Swiss has to factor in a child. But perhaps the child would not come with her?

"How old? Boy or girl?"

"Boy, him six." She beams proudly.

The Swiss looks at me with suspicion. "You know this girl?"

"Never seen her before." The Swiss is in his late thirties, balding and hurt. His face carries all the pain of a recent failure. Why has he come to Bangkok? To demonstrate continuing virility? For the simplicity of hired flesh? Now, within less than a week of landing, he is planning a relationship far more complicated than anything he's tried before.