I think I understand her body language and take out my wallet, but she puts a hand on my wrist. “I promise I don’t know anything. Nothing like that has happened while I’ve been here, and most of the girls don’t stay more than six months, usually less. Either they find a farang husband in that time, or they go back to their villages. There are only two girls who have been here longer than me. I think one of them may be able to help. Her name is Om, and you can get her number from the barman. Please don’t tell anyone you got her name from me.”
She gets up, stone-faced, and retreats to her office behind the bar. I signal to the barman and ask for Om’s number. He gives me a business card with a heart on it: OM, AT YOUR PERSONAL SERVICE.
I call the number. “Hi, Om, I’m Sonchai, I’m at the Chung King and wondered if you’d allow me to buy you a drink.”
“I’m off duty, darling. Time of the month, I’m afraid. If you haven’t found a friend by Monday, please call. Thanks for thinking of me.” She closes the phone. I press the repeat button on my cell. Now she sounds a little weary. I say, “It’s worth a thousand baht. I don’t want your body, just your company.”
There is hesitation in her voice when she says, “It’s late, honey, and I’m very tired.”
“Two thousand, just for a half-hour chat, any bar you like.”
“Okay, but not the Chung King.” She gives the name of another bar down the street. •
Now I’m sitting with my third beer in half an hour, waiting for Om. When an attractive woman in her late twenties appears in jeans and T-shirt, no makeup, hair clean and combed but without coiffure, I don’t make the connection with the voice on the phone. Even when she sits next to me, I can’t believe this is the professional I spoke to a few minutes ago. There seems to be no side to her at all. A good clean Buddhist girl.
“Hello, Mr. Sonchai. I’m Om. How can I help?”
She’s so normal, so much the Thai girl next door, no frills, confident of her beauty but modest just the same. I guess when she says off duty, that includes the personality. It’s always a dangerous sign when you like someone you’re interviewing with respect to an atrocity.
“Somebody told me you once did some entertaining up on the hill, more than a year ago.” I flash my cop’s ID.
She takes in the mug shot on the plastic, flashes me a glance, and says, “Up on the hill?”
“Vulture Peak.”
Another change of personality. Not paranoia exactly-let’s say a sudden attack of extreme caution. “Not here. Meet me on the beach in twenty minutes.”
“Where on the beach?”
“The big T-shirt stand next to the green parasols.”
It doesn’t sound like a very precise direction, but when I reach the beach, I see what she means. The T-shirt stand is still doing a roaring trade at nearly midnight, and although the green parasols are all folded like cypress trees, you can’t really miss them. There are plenty of people about, mostly farang couples who came for romance in the exotic East, some farang men with Thai girls with whom, I suppose, they are trying to have a relationship, and some young Thai couples holding hands. You can’t see the stars for the light pollution from the town, but the moon is up and bright.
I feel a slight flutter when I see her making toward me. I suspect I wouldn’t give her a second glance when she’s on duty and dressed like a tart, but that no-frills naturalness is quite a turn-on. And it is a beautiful evening. When she sees me, she nods faintly toward a couple of deck chairs that have yet to be folded and stacked. She sits in one. I play along by letting a few beats pass before I join her.
She takes a pack of Marlboro Reds out of a down-market black handbag and puts one in her mouth without offering the box to me. She lights up at the same time as she says, “What did you want to know?”
“I want to know everything you know about Vulture Peak.”
She takes a long toke on the cigarette, inhales like a true addict, exhales, and starts to talk. “The owners of the Chung King House have connections with travel agents in China-that’s why they called it the Chung King. But it didn’t really work out. Maybe they’re ten years ahead of the curve. Most of the business is still farang, with some Japanese and Korean. But they keep up the connection with the Chinese, and every now and then a tour group comes to town. Usually they stay in one of the midrange hotels. Often the group is so big, they take over the hotel.
“Mostly it’s genuine sightseers, but sometimes it’s all men on the loose, looking for a good time. When we get the call, we girls pile into the van, sometimes up to five or six of us. One night about two years ago we got the call for eight girls. Eight is a lucky number for Chinese, right? But it wasn’t to a hotel. It was to that fantastic palace up on the hill. From the start everyone told us we would be well paid but we had to keep quiet about it. Never tell a soul where we went that night.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know why it had to be so secret. When we got there, we found about twenty Chinese men, all drunk. There were crates of cognac stacked up against a wall, and it looked as if they were having a stag party. There were also a lot of roulette wheels, mahjong tiles, and stacks of playing cards. A lot of banknotes all over the place, but not Thai baht-I suppose it was all Chinese money. They didn’t speak any Thai or English, but we managed to work out that one of them had recently had a serious medical operation and was celebrating his recovery.
“They were noisy with bad manners, but they weren’t really obnoxious. They wanted us to undress, to hang around naked. So we did. Of course we got groped mercilessly, but they were the kind of men-middle management with wives and kids, I guess-who are scared of girls like me. They didn’t want to screw any of us, just the endless groping, like curious boys.
“Then someone said it was time for a show. A woman appeared-a Chinese woman-who took us all into a big bedroom and gave us silver and gold bikinis to wear. Then she gave one of us a big solid gold ring which had to be hidden in one of the girls’ vaginas-she didn’t care who. She gave us all numbered buttons to wear. I was number seven. Then she led us out to the big room with pools and little streams of water, and someone turned some music on. It was a disco tune, and we all started to dance. The men were staring at us and gabbling furiously to one another, and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands. I got the feeling this was the high point of the evening.
“The Chinese woman told us to take off our bras, then our panties, so we were naked again. All the men were staring at our pussies, of course. And betting. They were more interested in the betting than in our bodies. Finally the music stopped and the Chinese woman who spoke English said that the girl with the gold ring in her vagina should come forward. The girl walked up and took out the ring, and the men went crazy. Those who had bet on number seven cleaned up. Some of the men looked really depressed, like they’d mortgaged their houses and lost everything. Then we were led out, told to dress, and the van took us back to the bar. They paid us all five thousand baht each, and the girl was allowed to keep the gold ring. That was quite a tip.”
She has finished the cigarette, which she stubs out on the sand. When she reaches into her bag I think it is for another cigarette. Instead she takes out a solid gold ring, which she hands to me to heft. It’s small, solid, and heavy. “I had it valued. It’s real gold, twenty-three carat. More than three baht in weight. At 13,800 baht per one- baht weight, that makes 41,000 baht. I had a feeling gold would go up sooner or later, so I kept it.” She smiles without humor. “That’s why I stay at that bar-it’s very lucky for me.”
I feel like a naive farang for the thumping in my heart, a sense of hurt. Some whores can affect you like that, even a part-time pimp like me. I don’t want to think about her at that party; she’s too beautiful. I watch a Thai couple walk past along the shore, the moon directly overhead now, a pure silver scythe. “You have no idea what business they might have been in, those middle-management-type men?”
She shrugs. “One of them who took an interest in me kept saying tanakan. I think that was the only word he knew in Thai.”
“Bankers?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to say he’d just been to the bank. He was drunk.”
“And the Chinese woman-she was the only woman there apart from you girls?”
“The only one I saw.”
“She was arranging the party?”
“I don’t know. We got there about eleven-thirty in the evening, so most of the party was over. We were the final show.”
“Can you describe her?”
“She was the tall, willowy kind of Chinese woman. Hard to say how old because she’d taken such great care
