He’s walking around his small room, fidgeting with this and that, pretending the poster of Angkor Wat needs adjusting. My eyes rest on it: the vast, sinister jungle temple with its five phallic towers at the center. I think we have arrived at yet another psychologically interesting moment, when there’s a knock on the front door. Baker cannot disguise his relief and says with an apologetic smile, “That’s my lesson.” Hurriedly he grabs a T-shirt from a drawer and pulls it on.
I nod for him to open the door, and Lek and I both examine the new arrival: a slim Thai in his early twenties, respectfully dressed in white shirt, black pants, and polished black lace-up shoes, an innocence in his eyes that you rarely see in farang of that age. What unreal ambition has brought him here today, probably on his day off from some dreary office job? What stories has he believed about the global economy and language skills? When he sees me, he makes a respectful wai and says, in excruciatingly correct English, “Excuse me, am I interrupting a conference?”
“We’re just going,” I say in Thai. In English to Baker: “Perhaps we might return at a more convenient moment?”
Baker gives a helpless shrug to say, A Thai cop can make me do whatever he likes.
“Say seven P.M.?”
“Tomorrow evening would be better. I’ve got another private lesson at six, and then another at nine, plus I’m working at the school all day.”
Lek and I stand up. “Tomorrow then.” I cough apologetically. “Mr. Baker, I’m afraid I must ask for your passport in the meantime. I will return it to you tomorrow.”
The Thai student makes big eyes. He hadn’t realized I was a cop, and to see his respected ajaan hand over his passport suddenly changes the dynamics. He’s ready to flee from Baker, so I say to him in Thai, “Just an immigration matter,” and smile. He smiles back with relief. Downstairs I slip the guard another hundred baht on condition he keeps an eye out for Baker’s comings and goings.
In the cab back to the station, I check Baker’s passport, then pass it to Lek. We exchange a shrug. Baker was out of the country at the time of Damrong’s killing. It would seem he flew to Siam Reap in Cambodia, the nearest airport to Angkor Wat, several days before the event and did not come back until after the approximate time of her death. Damrong owned an American and a Thai passport; both documents indicate that she had not left Thailand for more than a year before her death. Forget Baker.
7
Without any leads other than Baker, I decide to spend quality time with the ladies in my life. I take my mother, Nong; Chanya; and the FBI for a buffet supper at the Grand Britannia on Sukhumvit, just near the Asok Skytrain station. A gay waiter charms Chanya with his concern for her condition and makes her laugh when he admits he envies her. The FBI also is solicitous and insists on fetching her whatever food she wants, while Nong casts a shrewd eye over the clientele.
“See that whore from Nong Kai? Her name is Sonja-she works at Rawhide. I’ve been trying to persuade her to work for us, but she’s happy where she is. You know how they are.”
“Friends are everything. If she has plenty at Rawhide, she’ll never come work for us. How can you blame her? They’re as lost as farang in Bangkok -even more so, since they don’t have any money.”
“Well, she certainly seems to have her customer under control. She’s giving him the marry-me treatment. Look, she’s brought her family down from Isaan to meet him.”
“Must be serious,” I agree.
A big muscular Australian in walking shorts, long white socks, and sandals, in his fifties with a gigantic beer gut, is bringing his plate back to where the girl, her mother, and a few other relations, who are probably siblings or cousins, plus a boy about five years old, have occupied the table next to us.
“That’s her son by a Thai lover,” Nong explains in a whisper.
The Australian tries to make conversation with the family who are keen to adopt him, but his true love is enjoying speaking her native tongue, a dialect of Laotian, and cannot resist gossiping with her family. Every now and then she casts the Australian a warm, comforting smile, presses his thigh with one hand, and says a few words to him in English, then returns with renewed enthusiasm to the gossip. The Australian perhaps does not realize it, but his future in-laws are behaving exactly as if they were at home in their wood house on stilts and sitting barefoot on the floor nattering, probably with the TV on at full volume and a dozen kids beating one another up in the background. Nong understands Laotian better than I do and has started to grin. When the FBI comes back with a plate of oysters for Chanya, my mother enthusiastically explains in English for Kimberley ’s benefit:
“Her aunt just asked what color the farang’s dick is, and her mother wants to know how they do it when he has that huge gut. The girl’s explaining that his dick is white most of the time, but after sex it turns bright pink. She says she asks him to take her from behind except on special occasions, because when he gets on top his flab kind of splodges all over her stomach like a ton of Jell-O and she gets indigestion in the middle of boom-boom. Anyway, it’s not usually an issue because most nights he’s too drunk and falls asleep on the sofa while she watches TV in bed. It has the makings of a successful marriage.”
While Nong is talking, the family bursts into raucous laughter. The FBI looks down at her oysters. “Is this, like, normal suppertime conversation?”
Chanya, Nong, and I share grins. “We are mostly peasants, children of the earth,” I explain. We all keep our heads down when the Australian starts to speak.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing what you and your family are talking about, Sonja,” he says to his girlfriend with just a touch of chagrin. She has no idea about Western etiquette so decides to tell him straight, word for word, in good but somewhat wooden English. He turns pale for a moment, finishes his beer, and orders another. I admire his power of recuperation, though, when he says, “You’re gonna do just great in Queensland, Sonja, just great. Ever seen a dwarf-throwing competition?” He explains the sport to Sonja, who has a bright gleam in her eye when she translates into Laotian. The family listen with big eyes, then bombard her with a dozen questions about dwarf-throwing, which she translates into English. Do the dwarfs get paid? How much? How short do you have to be? My aunt’s older brother is only four feet ten, does that qualify? Can you gamble on it? Can throwing dwarfs get visas easily? Her family had been quite bored with him, but now they are warming. Delighted that he finally has a topic that interests them-he had tried income tax, the world economy, standard of living, his new Toyota four-by-four, his giant refrigerator, health care and life insurance, the Middle East, et cetera, without much response-he launches into plain tales of the outback, including ‘roo-baiting and yarns about man-eating crocs and the lurid wounds inflicted by blue-ringed octopus and box jellyfish. Suddenly he’s a hit, and they have decided to welcome him into their hearts. “You’re half Isaan already,” the girl tells him. Beaming, he downs his beer in one gulp and orders another. Thailand ’s not so different from Queensland after all.
I stand up to fetch more seafood. Oysters, prawns, and shrimp sit in trays under an ice sculpture of a seahorse. Elsewhere in the middle of the huge room Chinese, Thai, Italian, French, Middle Eastern, and Japanese cuisine is piled high around a vast circular island. Standing near me are delegates to some convention with large name tags clipped over their hearts and Best Behavior software controlling their facial expressions. In their hygienic anonymity they form a quite distinct tribe, prompting me to ponder that perhaps Bangkok is located on some cosmic intersection where visitors from different galaxies mingle but never communicate. As I reach our table with a plate piled high with sushi and prawns, the FBI returns with ice cream for Chanya. She is fascinated by her, almost like a lover. I cannot take my mind off the case for long, though, and by coincidence (of course it’s not really coincidence, it’s cosmic intervention), just as I’m thinking about Damrong, my cell phone rings.