and gripping it with both her hands.
“Oh, stop it! That’s enough!” Khun Taworn was shouting as he closed his ears with his palms. “I told you that I can’t stand this kind of thing. And by the way, I told you never to get in touch with me by phone unless it’s an absolute emergency. You’re getting to be a real pain in the neck.”
“Then let me go! I’ll leave you in peace. I’ll let you have Pi Nok, even if it breaks me up. But I can’t share you with him or anyone else anymore. It killed me to see you with your wife the other day. I can’t live with jealousy. I just can’t. I’ll do something to myself that you’ll regret if you carry on treating me like this.”
Eventually she calmed down, but not before Khun Taworn agreed to let her have her freedom along with an interesting sum that would last her for a couple of years—a pittance for him, but a golden handshake for her. In gratitude she told him that she would arrange a farewell dinner, so that he could be properly reintroduced to her friend Pi Nok. It would serve as a kind of handing over ceremony. Khun Taworn, relieved that he was getting a hysterical, jealous girl off his hands and at the same time overjoyed that he was rediscovering a treasure he thought he had lost for good, accepted Nong Maew’s offer without hesitation. So a date was fixed.
If Nong Maew had been content with what she had achieved so far with her convincing theatrics, she might have had the freedom she desired the next day when Khun Taworn made the transfer to her account of the sum he had promised. But things had gone so well up till then that she was encouraged to carry her plan through to the final stage. In fact, by now she could not stop the momentum of her actions. For the first time in years she felt alive and creative. But apart from the existential high that she was enjoying, it came down to the fact that she wanted much more than she had been offered, and she was sure it was within her reach. This was why she had suggested the dinner.
The scenario that she had rehearsed in her mind over and over again required one outsider. This was an electrician she had befriended while working at the “Twilight.” He had already done some work for her when she had first moved in. She called him now and offered him a decent fee to set up a hidden camera system in the apartment. This was something that presented no problem whatsoever to him, and he managed to get it done in a couple of days. Nong Maew’s plan with the cameras was that on the night of the dinner she would find an excuse to leave the two men alone at some point. They would not think it strange, given the fact that she was playing the pimp for them. There was a special switch near the front door which would activate the cameras as she left. If everything that Pi Nok had told her was true, then they would be all over each other even before she had reached the ground floor in the lift. She planned to be away long enough for Khun Taworn to leave, with or without Pi Nok. He never stayed later than 9:30. If they were still there, Nong Maew was quite prepared for a threesome. She had covered all the possible scenarios. The only gamble, which seemed to her a sure bet, was that the two men would hit it off. The tapes that she was going to obtain from that evening of gay pleasure between a prominent member of Thai society and a handsome young hustler would set her up for life. She would not be too greedy. Like those Hollywood divorcees she had read about, Nong Maew would merely ask for, and receive, a monthly income from Khun Taworn that would keep her in her accustomed lifestyle in a different part of the city, or in another city in Asia—Hong Kong, perhaps, or Singapore—in a bigger and more luxurious apartment. In return she would agree not to sell the tapes to the other political parties or put them up on YouTube. And just in case he had any ideas of arranging for her disappearance from the face of the earth, she was taking out insurance, so that if anything happened to her, the tapes would be immediately made public.
It seemed foolproof.
On the night in question everything went even more smoothly than she had envisaged. The food came from an Italian restaurant and was beautifully presented. The wine, Brunello di Montalcino, cost $200 a bottle. Khun Taworn had asked for it especially. It was his party, and he wanted the best. Over dinner she noticed that Pi Nok was already tickling Darling’s leg with his toe under the table—a good sign for things to come. As for Khun Taworn, he was aglow with lust, and the Brunello di Montalcino made him more verbose than usual. When she brought the dessert into the room, Nong Maew suddenly gave out a convincing cry of regret.
“Oh, I am so sorry. I forgot the Patron tequila in the lobby of the Oriental. I was having tea there this afternoon, and I must have left it on a table.”
Patron tequila was Khun Taworn’s favourite drink.
“And this is such a special occasion, this lovely reunion. Look, if you two gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll just nip down there. I won’t be more than twenty minutes. It’s just up the road. Of course I could call them and ask for the concierge to send it… but I’m sure you’ll have a lot of catching up to do while I’m out…”
Neither Khun Taworn nor Pi Nok objected to her suggestion. By now they seemed so besotted with each other that they were only too pleased for her to leave them alone. So, making sure that she flicked on the switch as she left the apartment, Nong Maew left the two of them to what she knew was going to be a torrid renewal of friendship.
Precisely an hour later Nong Maew returned to the apartment, having collected the bottle of tequila, not from the Oriental Hotel, but from a nearby bar in Sathorn Road where she often went. There she had ordered a dry martini in anticipatory celebration and flicked through a fashion magazine, all the while allowing herself to daydream of the clothes she would buy, of the places in the world that she would visit, of the freedom that she would finally have. When she returned to the condo she was mildly surprised to find that the men were still in the bedroom. She could hear the sound of their lovemaking as she walked through the front door, and it was so abandoned that it made her blush for a moment. And yet a second later she registered that there was something wrong. Her eyes scanned the living room. Clothes were strewn everywhere. She looked over to the bedroom and saw that the door was slightly ajar and a light flickered from inside. The sound of sexual pleasure was now pulsating. Instinctively she hesitated before taking another step forward. Just then a fit-looking young man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a pink polo shirt and chinos stepped out of the room in such a nonchalant way, as though he lived there in the apartment, that Nong Maew suddenly felt she was in a dream, dislocated somewhere between the familiar and the unexpected. Then, as she began to open her mouth to speak, she saw a gun in his hand that was pointed directly at her heart, and her whole being went cold. The man nodded slowly as though he understood how terrified she was.
“I’m sorry, sister,” he said, as the sounds of love from the bedroom subsided. “It’s just a job.”
Khun Taworn’s wife sat on the edge of the bed, wearing a cream silk dressing gown. Her wig was off, and she was rubbing moisturizer slowly over her pale, bald cranium. When she finished, she wiped her hands on a small towel, leaned over to the bedside table and poured herself a glass of tequila. When the mobile phone shuddered to life, she did not rush to answer it but stretched her free hand behind her to pat the body that was stirring—the beautiful, naked body of the young actress she was grooming to be a star.
“I have to answer this, darling.” She too used the English word but pronounced it correctly. “Go back to sleep.”
Now she picked up the phone and took a sip from her glass.
“It’s done,” said the man’s voice on the other end.
“No hitches?”
“None. But the girl was making a home movie. That’s why she called the electrician from the “Twilight” the other day.”
“Then he has to go too. And get rid of the tapes.”
“No problem.”
“Tell me. How was it? My husband?”
“He promised me the moon.”
“He was always a bad liar.”
“The gay boy cried. The girl tried to talk her way out of it. She wasn’t making sense. She kept on saying that all she wanted was her freedom.”
“She should have taken the money and run. Why are people so greedy? Anyway, now she’s free.”
“The papers will have a field day.”
“Yes, it’ll be juicy. You’ve done well. Thank you.”
With her drink in her hand she walked to the window with its view of the city stretching south. Her sad eyes looked down at the lights twinkling in the streets below and at the giant billboards on the sides of the tall buildings, then slowly towards the horizon, where the glow of the city gave way to the dense, dripping dark of the tropical night. Then they started to fill with bitter tears.
