“Why did you say it was his first idea?”
“Because a lot of people were already in the racket. There wasn’t that much opportunity left. You can’t compete with the Chinese when it comes to business-they never sleep. So he takes his idea a bit further.”
“How?”
“How d’you think? He’s got connections with Burma that go back decades-that’s where he’s got his meth factories. A lot of Burmese would line up to sell a kidney, a piece of liver, an eye, to get their hands on a few thousand dollars. Especially mothers trying to save their babies from disease and hunger. And there are all those executions the generals carry out. Zinna sells Burmese and Chinese body parts, and business is booming. They say it’s better than methamphetamine, and the best news is there’s no law enforcement, not even from the West. Smuggle a little marijuana, and they jump on you. Smuggle a liver that’s been ripped out of a political prisoner, and they wave you on.”
While we were talking, the katoeys came and went through the curtain. It was dark outside. That meant it was after seven o’clock and almost at the end of the rush hour. Now a farang in a business suit slipped in. He was the first genuine customer, so the katoeys made a fuss over him. He had been there before, though, and someone started calling out for Shirlee. Shirlee was a young katoey, perhaps twenty-two or — three, very slim and feminine looking. He was wearing a single-piece fawn-and-gold swimsuit and looked more vulnerable than any girl. He sidled up to the farang, who must have been some kind of lawyer or businessman in his late twenties. The young man in the suit grabbed and hugged the even younger man in the swimming costume. “I’ve been looking forward to this since nine this morning,” the farang said in a voice ripe with lust. He wiped out the dreary reality of the day with a great sigh.
“Are you going to pay my bar fine?” Shirlee asked in a cute-submissive voice.
“Tonight and every night, love.”
Lek, too, had noticed the romantic moment and smiled at me in a provocative way. I shook my head, laughing, and paid for the drinks. While I was waiting for change, a short, bald, and very nervous farang came in. Lek said, “Oh, my,” because it was obvious from his body language the new customer had never been in a katoey bar before. This was a closet breakout.
The katoeys were salivating. Two of them, one in a silver body glove and another in a leopard-skin tunic with short skirt, went up to him. They stroked his shoulders as if he’d been out in the cold too long; he immediately bought drinks. Lek’s eyes said, Insecure, lonesome foreigner fleeing callous whores and worse wives for the twilight world of transsexuals. In your language, DFR, you say, Out of the frying pan into the fire. We say, Escape the tiger into the mouth of the crocodile. By the time my change arrived, the little bald guy was on his third whiskey-and- Coke and was starting to believe the endless flattery he was getting from the two katoeys.
“Your tits are coming along,” I told Lek as I was leaving. “Better not let them show too much, I’m getting heat from Vikorn about you.”
“I know, I know,” Lek said.
My mind flipped back to the case. I paused for a second. “Zinna must have a go-between. He’s too brutal to work directly with Western surgeons and clients.”
“Sure. I even heard the name once, but I can’t remember it.”
“The Vultures. A two-girl team?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Vikorn told me.”
Outside the plaza was starting to hop. Just as I predicted, the rain couldn’t keep the johns away for long. The girls who were grooming one another before were grooming white men now, and those who’d bought new hairdos from the coiffeur at the corner were showing them off behind the bars. A dozen TV monitors were showing a dozen different shows, most of them soccer, and all the sound systems were blaring. Still the rain from Vietnam was flooding the streets; still the girls paused to wai the Buddha shrine and leave lotus buds.
4
I found a cab fast enough, but we got snarled at the mouth of Soi 4 where it exits onto Sukhumvit. In terms of human sexual activity, this is the busiest corner in the world. Traffic from Nana Plaza, consisting of older farang men accompanying girls they’ve just hired, meets traffic from the other brothels and street pickups, making toward the short-time hotels. Simultaneously newly-mets are arriving from the bars farther up Sukhumvit in the Pleonchit area, looking for somewhere air-conditioned where they can get horizontal for an hour or so.
To me, sitting in back of the cab waiting for the lights to change, the answer to the world economic crisis was obvious: legalize prostitution and tax it. At 15 percent per bang, deficits would shrink overnight. It would be safe to leverage as well. The worse things get, the more people bury their problems in sex. The better things get, the more people celebrate their good fortune with sex. It’s a tax revenue for all seasons, and with ever more sophisticated surveillance coming onstream, it won’t be long before governments will be in a position to tax sex between married couples. Hey, Obama, are you listening?
Out of boredom the cab driver switched on his radio. One of the chat shows reported that five women had complained separately about a stalker on Sukhumvit. It seemed a man with a grotesquely damaged face had been approaching women and scaring the hell out of them. Two complained to the police, but the police told them there was no law against being ugly. Now a bunch of people called to say they agreed with the police: What was Thailand coming to when people showed no tolerance for the afflictions of others? We were supposed to be a Buddhist nation, after all. Then one of the stalked women called in to say, “Have you any idea just how ugly this guy is? We’re talking about extreme mutilation, worse than any horror movie.” The story made me think of Zinna’s lover, whose face was smashed in that car accident; but of course he was in a monastery somewhere in Cambodia, so it couldn’t be him.
By the time we emerged from the jam, it was nine-thirty. A few more holdups kept me in the cab until we finally arrived at my little soi where my little hovel was waiting. I saw from the lights that Chanya was home, working in the corner of the room she calls her office. I called out “Hi,” and she said it back to me, without looking up from her monitor. I tried not to feel lonely, isolated, and rejected. I tried not to think of the nervous little bald guy who’d come into the Lonesome Cowboy a couple of hours before and was probably this minute being initiated into his new world in some upstairs room by those two katoeys who would have his money one way or another. I tried not to think of Burmese mothers selling their kidneys and their eyes to keep their babies alive for a few more years, or of all the other Asian women and men who had tried to help their families by selling body parts after the tsunami. It’s a beautiful, global world, so long as you keep your eyes shut.
The first thing I did when I arrived home was to grab a bunch of incense, light it, and hold it at eye level while I waied the electric Buddha we keep on a high shelf in the northeast corner. He’s quite gaudy with purple and red lights, which are kitsch enough to remind me it’s only a symbol I’m bowing at. On The Path, symbols are functional things, DFR; you really don’t want them to seduce you with their charm or resale value.
So I was practicing a gritted-teeth kind of husbandly tolerance when I went to the other corner of the room, picked up a bottle of red wine, poured her a glass, and set it in front of her keyboard, then poured another for myself. She was not a natural drinker; I’d started to insist on one glass per night, just to bring her down from that high-stress war with her supervisor whose name, inevitably perhaps, was Dorothy. I knew that if she didn’t have wine, she would hit a wall and slob out in front of the TV to watch her DVDs of Ice Road Truckers. You’d think there wouldn’t be much for a slender Thai girl to relate to in a series about great hairy white men driving massive trucks across frozen lakes in Alaska; the attraction of opposites, I guess.
She got the message and looked up apologetically. We clinked glasses. I said, “I have a new case.”
She struggled to emerge from her world into mine. “Really? What?”
“Vikorn’s decided to abolish illegal organ trafficking worldwide. At least while he’s running for governor.”
She searched my face for an explanation. I told her all about Vikorn’s election strategy and the latest ploy in his war with Zinna, and the black Amex card, which made her grin. “But isn’t it dangerous? If there’s so much money in that kind of trafficking, someone’s sure to try to kill you.”
“If I resigned, Vikorn would probably feel he had to bump me off. I know too much, and now that he’s running for governor, the stakes are much higher. Anyway, I’m a cop, how could I refuse a case like this?”
