John Burdett - Bangkok 8

"At least let me pay your bar fine and take you out to dinner," he tells the girl. "I want to talk to you. I want to know something."

"What you want to know?"

He stares at her, blinking self-consciously behind his thick spectacles. "I want to know why I've been thinking about you for the past forty-eight hours."

The girl brightens. "You think of me? Me too, I think of you." Not a bad performance. Nong would have made more of the moment, though, I reflect loyally. My mother still possesses the trick of projecting instant warmth. She would never have allowed herself to get as skinny as this girl, who looks like a yaa baa fiend, nor would she have been so slow to see an opportunity for an overseas trip.

I give the man a congratulatory nod. You wanted her, now you've got her. What more could one possibly ask of life?

I take a photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and watch while the mamasan tells the Swiss how much he has to pay for the beer and the girl.

"It's strange the way they call it a bar fine," he shares with me, "as if one is doing something wrong."

When the Swiss has paid up the mamasan takes his five-hundred-baht note and brushes all her girls with it, for luck. I nod to the mamasan to come over. She looks at the picture. Not a man one could easily forget: huge, black, shaved head, good bone structure, a pleasant mouth and a brilliant smile. American, not African. No, she's never seen him before, she's sure she would have remembered, but she's not been here all that long.

Turnover of labor is going to be a problem. Bradley was in Bangkok five years and had probably made his own private arrangements with women a long time ago. Men grow tired of Nana surprisingly quickly. Girls come and go.

I doggedly try all the bars, showing Bradley's picture to mostly older mamasans who look as if they've been around for a while. No one remembers Bradley and I'm tiring by the time I return to the Carousel. The huge bar is packed with the usual collection of Caucasian men and Asian women. On a TV monitor on a wall bracket two white women are serving a gigantic black phallus. On the big screen which covers one wall Manchester United are playing Real Madrid. Those girls who are not attending to a client are watching the football. There's a yell of female approval as Beckham scores from an impossible angle for the second time in five minutes.

All the men are watching the show on the largest revolving stage, where a woman in her early forties, naked except for a pair of cowboy boots, lies on the floor shooting darts from an aluminum tube she has inserted in her vagina. Customers hold up balloons for her to hit, and she rarely misses. Her name is Kat, a friend of my mother who lived with us for a while when I was young. When her act is over she makes a tour of the bar, still naked but holding a cowboy hat upside down for tips. The hat is full with twenty-, fifty- and hundred-baht notes by the time she reaches me. I toss a fifty into the hat.

"Can I talk to you backstage?"

She smiles. "I have another show at the Hollywood in twenty minutes. Come round to the changing room as soon as I've finished here."

I watch her finish her tour, which she completes with great dignity, as if she were doing a job of work as valid as brain surgery-or law enforcement. As soon as she has disappeared through the artistes' door, I follow, pushing my way through a crowd of naked women who are waiting to go on. By the time I reach the changing room Kat is already dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a tiny pack on her back, that same professional expression on her face.

"How is your mother? I keep meaning to visit, but Phetchabun is so far away."

"Five hot hours in the bus. I don't go as often as I should myself." I take the photograph of Bradley out of my pocket and hold it up. I'm sure I see a flash of recognition before the inscrutable professional mask returns. "You know him?"

She purses her lips, shakes her head. "No, I don't think so. I'm sure I would have remembered a face like that."

I put the photo back in my pocket. "That's what everyone is saying, everywhere I go."

"What happened, did he murder someone?"

"The other way around."

A tensing of her facial muscles. "Ah! An American?"

"A marine."

"Then the FBI will be all over the city. You can sit back and relax, let them do all the work."

"They have to work in conjunction with me. They don't have any investigative rights in Thailand."

"You could have fooled me. I thought America bought the country years ago, it's just that no one's told us yet. Well, you must excuse me, Sonchai, fame and fortune await me at the Hollywood."

I follow her out of the dressing room and back down the corridor full of breasts and buttocks. I continue to follow her out of the bar onto the terrace and call her name. She turns and I make a face. Her features harden, but she delves into her black backpack and takes out a card. Without looking at me she scribbles an address on the card and gives it to me. She turns to smile. "I live way out in the sticks these days-city rents were killing me." She walks quickly away from me.

The card is printed in Thai and English and reads: "Kat Walk Enterprises, Private Entertainment, Floor Shows, Cabaret with a Difference." There is a telephone number which carries the local prefix and is probably that of her agent, and her web page address. The address she has scribbled on the back is of a very distant suburb, hardly Krung Thep at all.

I walk along the balcony which looks over the courtyard. The bar on the corner is dedicated to transsexuals, who like to make up in public at mirrors on a table on the balcony. I catch a glimpse of a long feminine neck, softly molded moon face, hard bitchy eyes as I slip past and down the stairs to the courtyard. There are so many half-naked bodies now, white male and brown female, it is difficult to move. "Hello darlin', how are you? Are you lonely?" It is one of the transsexuals, full-bosomed and pouting. I shake my head.

Lonely? An incurable state, unfortunately. I push past sweat-drenched T-shirts to the street, consider with weariness the task which lies ahead. Nana Plaza is only the seed at the center of the mango; there are thousands of bars in side sois and disused lots in every direction, particularly on the other side of Sukhumvit all the way to Asok, which is to say one stop on the sky train: about five acres of brown flesh for rent to a similar quantity of white. East meets West. How can I disapprove when I owe my existence to this conjunction?

It is forty-one minutes past 1 a.m., hot, muggy. With resignation I take one of the yaa baa pills from my pocket. I've lost touch with the market, but as far as I can remember the blue pills tend to be laced with heroin and give a pleasant, opiated high. The crimson ones are mixed with fertilizer and produce a lot of energy at the expense of making you more than a little crazy, with a poisonous hangover the next day.

I return to the plaza to order a bottle of Singha beer, which I use to swallow the pill. It's crimson. There's a lot of night left.

They came from the north and the south, the east and the west. Krung Thep was not only the biggest city, until recently it was the only modern city we had. They came from the plains and the hills. Most were ethnic Thai but many were tribespeople from the north, Muslims from the south, Khmer who sneaked over from Cambodia, and plenty were technically Burmese who lived on the border and never paid it any mind. They were part of the greatest diaspora in history, the migration of half of Asia from country to town, and it was happening at an accelerated speed during the last third of the twentieth century. Men with iron muscles and the dogged heroism of unmechanized agricultural labor, women with bodies ravaged by continual pregnancies, they possessed in full measure all the guts, all the enthusiasm, all the naIvete, all the hope, all the desperation necessary to make it in the big city. The only thing they left out of account was time, of which they knew very little apart from the rhythms of nature. The sadistic vivisection of life into hours, minutes, seconds was one of the few hardships never inflicted by the soil. Deadlines, especially, were the source of a new kind of anxiety. Stress? Its urban version was strange, alien, insidious and something they had no way of dealing with. Yaa baa was a poison whose time had come.