few days ago.* I know that Vikorn is not much interested in the Damrong case, so I have to launch into the porn report as soon as I've sat down opposite him at his vast desk.
'Listen to this,' I say, and outline the article to him.
The Colonel is so intrigued, I have to translate word for word. In a nutshell, pom's evolutionary spiral can be traced from dirty postcards to video shops to mail order to instant downloads from the Net, all in about a decade during which it grew from a disreputable million-dollar industry to a massive, and therefore respectable, multi- billion-dollar industry. (Seven hundred million rentals of hardcore porn occurred in 2000: that's exactly two and a half movies per U.S.
*See Appendix.
citizen, all of which feature, on average, two or more penises penetrating an equal number of mouths or vaginas, which means that the average American vicariously participated in no less than five orgies in 2000, the year the article was published. Word is the number has more than doubled since then. I don't have the figures for homosexual porn.) In other words, as an investment, porn became irresistible to certain grandmother corporations. Like Internet gambling, porn largely survived the dot-com bubble, thus proving itself, along with eating, sleeping, dressing, and dying, as one of those industries in which a young person starting out in life cannot go wrong.
By the time I've finished my translation, Vikorn, a normally laid-back sixty-year-old exuding cynicism, is sitting bolt upright like a man who has been injected in the left ventricle with adrenaline. The innocence of fresh revelation has smoothed his brow. He looks ten years younger.
'Read those numbers again,' he says; then, with a gasp of admiration, 'Amazing. Farang are even more two- faced than the Royal Thai Police. You mean those mealymouthed little Western TV journalists, who get their knickers in a twist about our brothels, spend most of their lives in five-star hotel rooms paying to watch people fuck for money?'
'It's a culture of hypocrisy,' I offer, sounding rather more judgmental than I intend.
But gangsters of Vikorn's stature are masters at seeing opportunity where mere mortals see only darkness. He shakes his head as if I were a poor, challenged intellect incapable of picking up a half-billion dollars lying on the floor at my feet.
'It's a culture of masturbation,' he corrects, rubbing his hands together and assuming the posture of a country schoolmaster. 'So, what are you waiting for? Let's make a movie.'
I shake my head wisely. 'No way. You don't understand. American porn may be full of silicone tits and lipstick on pricks, the acting may be even worse than ours, and most of the women may have pimples on their bums'-Yes, I have added ten dollars to my hotel bills from time to time-just like you, hey, farang? — 'but the camerawork is first class. The guys behind the viewers once believed they were going to make art-house movies for posterity. They do angles, pauses, use more than one camera, long shots, pans, slow-mo, graphic inserts, unexpected close-ups of bits of your body you've never seen yourself. They're top-notch pros,' I explain with satisfaction. 'Mr. and Mrs. Jerkov of Utah aren't going to buy stuff shot in a back room on Soi Twenty-six with a single Handycam. They're used to quality.'
A pause while my master rubs his jaw and stares at me with those frank, unblinking eyes. 'What's an art- house movie?'
I scratch my head. 'I'm not sure, it's a phrase they use in the industry. Something that hopes to sell itself by pretending not to be commercial, I guess.'
'Where have I heard the phrase before?'
I am about to answer that question, for I know exactly where we both first heard it. Then I realize how far ahead of me the Colonel already is. We exchange glances.
'Yammy,' I say. 'But he's in jail awaiting trial, at which you've made sure he'll be sentenced to death.'
Vikorn raises his hands and lifts his shoulders. 'The best moment to pitch him a deal, don't you think?'
With resignation I realize I've blown any possibility of carrying the Damrong case further today. Sorry, farang, I feel a digression coming on.
5
As the detective responsible for prosecuting him, I carry the whole of the Yammy file in my head as I sit in a cab on the way to Lard Yao.
He was born into a lower-middle-class family in Sendai; his father was a salaryman for Sony and his mother a traditional Japanese housewife who cooked whale and seaweed like a demon. Decisive in Yammy's early years was his father's access to Sony prototypes, especially cameras. Our hero learned to point and click soon after learning to walk and as a consequence never fully mastered verbal communication. In an introverted culture, that didn't matter much, but his written Japanese was also poor. Never mind: his father, all too aware of the depressing consequences of a life spent toeing the line, saw genius in his son's defects. Sacrificing much, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Yammy's educational flaws went unnoticed. As soon as possible his father sent him to film school. All was going well until the family took a sightseeing holiday in San Francisco, where Yamahato senior was the only tourist in two decades to manage to get run over by a tram. His mother used the insurance payment to finance the rest of Yammy's film education but refused to stay a minute longer in America. All alone with his genius and without his mum's famous seaweed-wrapped whale steaks, nevertheless Yammy had little difficulty in rising in the ranks of Hollywood cameramen.
'You're terrific,' his favorite director told him. 'You have this Asian attention to detail, your ego doesn't get in the way of business, and you understand perfection in art. You're gonna go a long way in advertising.'
'I don't want to go a long way in advertising,' Yammy replied. 'I want to make a feature film.'
The director shook his head sadly. He also had once wanted to make feature films. So had the first, second, and third cameramen, the gaffer, the sound engineer, and the dolly grip. 'It ain't easy, kid,' the director said, 'and it doesn't have a whole lot to do with talent.'
Yammy already knew this. If the studios appreciated talent, they wouldn't make the same old junk year after year, would they? Sure, sometimes even Hollywood did something right, but Yammy wasn't interested in the American market. He had plans to go home once he'd honed his talents to a razor edge. His heroes of the silver screen included Akira Kurosawa, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bufiuel-cinematic geniuses whom most people in Hollywood had never heard of, not even in film school. And he knew there was another, probably insurmountable, social impediment to his success in California. After all, at that particular time he and his team were filming in Colombia for a perfume advertisement that could just as economically and a lot more easily have been filmed on a mountain in Colorado. As Yammy put it in his faxes to his chums at home in Sendai, 'Firstly, I do not snort cocaine, secondly I do not use coke, thirdly I do not do snow. Everyone thinks I'm an FBI plant.'
Every night after filming, he and the director went through the same ritual conversation while the director arranged extravagantly long lines of white powder on a marble tabletop.
'It's about money,' the director said. 'To make an independent art-house movie, you need investors who can get hold of as much dough as they need whenever they need it so they don't have to worry about losing a few tens of millions on a risky venture. D'you know who fits into that category?'
'Yes,' Yammy replied.
'Dealers,' the director said while closing one nostril with a forefinger and bending over the table. 'And d'you know who runs the dealers?'
'Yes,' said Yammy.
'And d'you know who runs the mob in LA.?'
'The Bureau,' said Yammy.
When they returned to California, the director decided to give the talented young Japanese his big break. The party was at an obscure and secret mansion located in the desert and well known to everyone who was anyone in the film industry. Yammy remembers women and men with eyes the size of flying saucers staring at a white mountain, in the middle of a banquet table, that even Yammy knew was not a wedding cake. Near-naked women, boys, and dozens of spare bedrooms were available for anyone to use, but most could not take their eyes off the white mountain. Within five minutes everyone except Yammy was enjoying impregnable self-confidence while
