“We didn’t do that,” the Thai says, pointing at the bruise. “We use telephone books -no signs of bruising. Only you barbarians do stuff like that.”

“So why couldn’t he walk last night when you brought him over?

You knew who he was. The only point of beating him up was to get more money out of him.“

When they have laid Baker in the front seat of the four-by-four, I check his pulse, which seems surprisingly robust. Other vital signs show promise, and now I’m wondering if he, also, is not engaged in some kind of strategic pantomime. Maybe his health is not as bad as he is making out? “Just lie doggo until we’re out of here,” I tell him in a whisper.

We take the same route back through the jungle and arrive at the rear of the Thai police station in five minutes. I watch while they drag Baker out and prop him up against a wall while they unload the mopeds. The Thais are looking pretty sour when the Cambodians take their remaining four-by-four back over the border. Suddenly the sergeant has got his balls back. “Get him out of here,” he says. “You’ll have to pay for a taxi -we don’t have any transport.” He looks dolefully at the mopeds.

Now I’m looking at Baker and wondering if he’s up to a twelve-hour journey back to Krung Thep. “I need some painkiller,” I say. When the sergeant merely scowls, I threaten to call Vikorn again.

“What about opium? It’s all we’ve got out here.”

I shrug. The sergeant pops back into the station and returns a few minutes later with a long pipe with tiny brass bowl, a wedge of black opium between two transparent plastic squares, and a few pills. The pills are paracetamol, which he grinds up with the opium to make the drug less viscous; then he places a tiny drop on the side of the bowl, heats it with a butane lighter until it fizzes and bubbles, takes one toke himself, then hands the pipe to Baker, who sucks on it with unexpected enthusiasm. Baker keeps up the malingering for fifteen pipes until he can no longer disguise the feeling of supreme well-being that has overwhelmed him. “I guess he’s ready to travel,” I tell the cop, who helps me slide him into the back of the taxi.

Baker is deeply into his opium dream by the time we reach the country station, and I have to pay the driver to help me drag him to the train and dump him on a bench in the first-class compartment. It’s a relief when the train starts and I pull the blinds over the door. A few hours later Baker shows no sign of forsaking paradise for this sterile promontory, so I insert the name Damrong into his dream by whispering it slowly and clearly over and over again in his ear. Suddenly his eyes open full of that light which has not been much seen in farang since the sixties, and says:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish.

“School play,” he adds with a smug smile. “I was Enobarbus.” And closes his eyes again.

It is not until we are on the outskirts of Krung Thep that the drug’s high tide begins to recede. He starts to rub the angry bruise under his eye and other parts of his body where they beat him. His mind seems to be working on a more powerful distraction than pain, though, when he begins to narrate his inner journey:

“Monochrome, shades of gray, white floor with gigantic tiles, maybe ten feet square, with black between them, like a giant chessboard. On each square a gray spiral staircase leading to a gray platform. She is color: gold and green mostly, dazzling, with dark purple, crimson, orange, a blaze of colored light in some kind of silk robe, stepping off the platform into the void. Go to the next tile. Again, spiral staircase, this time taller than the last; same thing, she is the only colored object, stepping off the platform into the void. And so on, for infinity, staircase after staircase, each one taller than the last, Damrong after Damrong- a different robe every time, do you see? Always about to step off into the void.” He grasps my forearm. “She comes to me every night, glowing gold-green. She controls my dick, my orgasm, everything. She can make it last for hours, literally all night, or make me come in five seconds flat. Every night, every night!” Digging his nails into my flesh: “I want to jump off into the void with her, but I just don’t have the guts.”

I have called ahead, so Vikorn has arranged for a police van to meet us at Hualamphong railway terminal.

14

We are tiny figurines hanging from the charm bracelet of infinity. When these bodies wear out, we will migrate to others. What will I be next, tinker, tailor, tiger, fly? Demon, Buddha, mountain, louse-all things are equal in their essential emptiness. But will there be a planet worth living on in fifty years’ time? Chart na means “next life,” and if you’re Buddhist you worry about it. Not only yours, but the earth’s too, for it, also, is a living being with its own karma with which our own is inextricably entwined.

Well, it’s getting hotter year by year-that’s finally official. Even scientists employed by the United States government now agree: we will be the only species in cosmic history deliberately to fry itself to extinction. I happened to be watching the BBC on our cable link this morning and half expected the newscaster to adopt an urgent tone, but he used the same smooth voice as for births, deaths, and football results. It’s not his fault, of course; he knows better than most how retro normality can be, but what is the appropriate reaction when the mind relies on denial to balance itself? Carry on as normal, I guess: just keep burning carbon. Environmental fascism will come eventually. When the Himalayas are melting, leaders of English-speaking countries will threaten to nuke to a crisp those third-world nations still relying on fossil fuels. That’ll help global warming.

So now the FBI and I are in a cab on our way at last to a warehouse in Chinatown by the Chao Phraya River, which Vikorn has rented and is in process of buying for the purpose of developing the arts side of his empire. It was, clearly, a blunder on my part to mention to Kimberley this amendment to my job description, for I happen to loathe this new role of mine and need a couple of beers before I can steel myself to enter Yammy’s atelier.

I order a Kloster at a riverside cafe, and to my surprise Kimberley joins me. We both spare a moment to take in the river, which as usual is roaring with human life. In the midstream brightly painted tugs tow barges with big eyes on the bows, while longtails with gigantic former bus engines mounted on davits with outboard propeller shafts about fifteen feet long roar up and down, packed with tourists. The river is still the only jam-free thoroughfare for a lot of people commuting to work and back, so the long, thin passenger ferries are packed; they arrive and depart the floating docks amid a frenzy of hysterical whistles from the pilots at the stern, who like to give the impression of catastrophe narrowly averted.

The FBI almost never drinks alcohol, but I know from various telephone conversations that she’s been in a strange state ever since she arrived. Why is she here, exactly? Sure, she’s interested in the case, and from what she has disclosed so far, it really does tie in with her work in Virginia. But even razor-sharp FBI agents don’t just jump on a plane overnight on the basis of a call from a friend. Delighted though I am to have her around, I’ve been wondering about her. As a matter of fact, our friendship went on hold for more than a year, before it restarted with one of those telephone calls farang make out of the blue: “Hey, Sonchai, how’s it going?” as if she were just around the corner and we’d been constantly in touch. It was the middle of the night, my time, and it took me a while to wake up. I had to take the cell phone out into the yard so as not to awaken Chanya and the Lump. (No, I did not say, “ Kimberley, do you realize it’s two a.m. over here?” Thai courtesy.) My attitude changed when I started to realize how unhappy she was. As her voice slowed and drooped, compassion kicked in. When she tried out a few amorous gambits, I had to tell her about Chanya and the baby; that gave her pause for a while. She didn’t quite admit that she’d been fantasizing about living happily ever after in Bangkok with that weirdo half-caste cop she’d sort of bonded with on the python case. (A transsexual Thai -M2F-murdered a black American marine with drug-crazed cobras and a giant python. We refrained from potting her/him for reasons of compassion.) Not quite, and anyway it started to emerge that her need was extrahormonal: “I’m hitting a wall over here, Sonchai. I don’t have a lot of friends outside the U.S. -only you, really. Just because America is a big country doesn’t mean the walls don’t close in on you from time to time.” We carried on like that, with middle-of-the-night chats, until the Damrong case gave us something practical to talk about. I really didn’t expect even a supercop like Kimberley to jump on a plane, though. So, the case aside, I’ve been waiting for signals that she’s ready for the deep and meaningful. It’s taken me a whole week-there are parts of the farang psyche with which even I am unfamiliar-to realize that under the tough, relentlessly extrovert, take-no-prisoners carapace, there lives quite a shy girl who doesn’t have a lot of practice in sharing her heart.