The conversation, at this minute, however, is not about her mood but mine.

“It’s kind of funny how much you dislike pornography-you know, considering,” the FBI says.

“That I’ve been involved in the Game all my life and run a brothel? It’s just not the same thing.”

“What’s the big moral difference?”

I search for words. Actually, moral difference is the right way of putting it. “Spontaneity. A girl arrives in Krung Thep from Isaan feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, poor. A middle-aged man arrives from the West feeling lonely, terrified, inadequate, rich. They’re like two halves of a coin. All my mother’s bar does is facilitate their inevitable congress, supply the beer and the music, the short-term accommodation, and rake off a little profit. The whole thing is driven by a good healthy primeval human need for animal warmth and comfort. In all my years with the Game I’ve only come across half a dozen serious cases of abuse of one party by another, and I figure that’s because the whole thing works perfectly as an expression of natural morality and grassroots capitalism. The way I see it, we’re like a real estate agency that deals in flesh instead of earth. Setting it all up artificially, though, in a film set, choreographing the whole thing so flabby overweights in Sussex and Bavaria, Minnesota and Normandy, can jerk off without having to tax their imaginations-that strikes me as downright immoral, a crime against life almost. I guess the real difference is that in the bar people actually do it. There’s a reality input.”

She smiles and shakes her head. “You’re just too much, Sonchai. Some people would say you were slightly insane. But when you come out with that kind of stuff, it makes sense, at least for the moment that you’re saying it. How did your mind get so free? What happened to you? Are all Thai pimps like you?”

“No,” I say. “I’m strange, I guess.”

She has drunk a bottle of Kloster rather quickly and seems to be sinking into depression. She orders another, though, and drinks it rapidly, straight from the bottle. “Actually doing it,” she says in a musing voice. “I guess that’s exactly what we’re not good at. Maybe that’s why we love war so much: reality starvation.”

Now she’s giving me one of her most puzzling looks. “You’ve changed,” I say. “Big time. What happened?”

Another gulp from the bottle. “I hit thirty-five. The midway point. It finally dawned on me that my whole description of reality was secondhand. My generation of women never rebelled-we felt we didn’t need to. We inherited a message of hate and simply elaborated it a bit. I never saw much of my father-my mother made sure of that. I think I went into the only important relationship of my life in order to be a bitch. In order to express hate. Isn’t that sick?”

How to answer that? By changing the subject. “Why did you come to Bangkok, really?”

A sigh. “I think I came for this conversation. We don’t have them at home anymore, you know? Maybe it’s modernism: we trade tribal sound bites so we can feel we belong to something. I came for your mind, Sonchai. Chanya can have your body-she deserves it. That is one very smart woman. I can hardly stand to see the two of you together. The cozy, unspoken, genuine love makes me want to have you both arrested. I don’t think it exists stateside. There’s a very powerful taboo against it. Think of all the hours you spend loving when you could be making money.”

I say, “Let’s go.”

“I want another beer.”

“No.”

In the cab we enjoy silence for a while, then: “I did marry. I lied to you.” A pause. “And divorced, of course.”

“Any kids?”

“One. A boy. I let his father keep him. His father said if the baby stayed with me, I would destroy him. I was like a smart bomb programmed to destroy anything male. I was afraid he may have been right.” Another long pause, then: “It was a hell of a long time ago. I was barely out of my teens. When it all fell apart, I joined the Bureau. I figured if I was a natural-born man-killer, I might as well get a license.”

Somehow she sneaked an extra can of beer into the cab, which she opens. Raising the can to her mouth: “I don’t know, Sonchai, the minute you start to search for meaning, you’re lost. But without meaning, we’re lost also. Who am J, where do I come from, where am I going? Fuck knows. I can’t handle marriage-that’s way beyond my tolerance level. But a lover who lasts more than a weekend might help my emotional stability.” She takes a swig of the beer. “So now I masturbate,” she says with Tragic Mouth, “every fucking night. Maybe I need a toy boy?”

The best way to check if you’re in Chinatown is by counting gold shops. If there’s not one on each corner, chances are you’ve taken a wrong turn. The shop signs are invariably yellow on red in Chinese characters, and the gold is of the extra-shiny variety that screams at you from the windows. Many of them are not technically shops but hangs: warehouse-size affairs with scales on the counters and turbaned Sikhs with pump guns on guard, all ablaze with neon light bouncing ferociously off the interminable stretches of gold Buddhas, gold dragons, gold belts, gold necklaces, gold bracelets. Clothing is the other industry: crowded narrow lanes made still narrower by stalls selling every kind of cotton or silk garment at astonishingly low prices.

The FBI has managed to get drunk on a few beers and stays my hand when I try to pay the cab driver. “Do you know I’ve never known simple joy? Darker, more complex emotions, yes, but joy, no. Nor have any of my friends. We were infected by the psychosis of winning at the age of five. But you know joy. That’s what blows me away. You’re the son of a whore, a pimp, you run a brothel, you’re an officer in one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia, but you’re innocent. I’ve never broken a law, cheated, lied, or presided over a crooked deal in my life, but I’m corrupt. I feel dirty twenty-four hours a day. Does anyone on the planet recognize the significance of that apart from me? The material you’re made of is fifty percent lighter than ours. Why?”

“We don’t have original sin,” I explain as I hand a hundred-baht note to the driver. “That iron rod through the skull. We just don’t have it.”

Vikorn has posted a couple of plainclothesmen outside the warehouse. They recognize me and let us into Yammy’s studio, where Marly, Jock’nEd are sitting around discussing the Iraq war in white silk dressing gowns with crimson trimmings. I feel the FBI’s sexual frisson when she clocks Ed. Excuse me while I explain Jock’nEd:

They are a team, famous throughout the Bangkok porn industry, and the invariable performers whenever the script requires a farang male to flesh out the skeletal story line. Ed is, well, simply magnificent. A natural six-two male animal with superb pecs that gleam under the lights when rubbed with Johnson’s baby oil, power thighs that could do justice to a lioness, a rocky-handsome bone structure, one of those aquiline noses that emit erotic fire with every exhalation, relentlessly seductive baby-blue eyes, and a telltale cleft in the chin that is so distinctively American it could have been invented by Ford. (Actually, Ed is a Cockney who hails from Elephant and Castle.) On the other side of the karmic balance, lamentably-well, how can one put it? Even tumescent his dong is not of the Big Mac dimensions your randy granny in Omaha is accustomed to ogle over a TV dinner. He has to be supplemented, in other words, using the magical techniques of the silver screen we all love to be conned by. Enter Jock. He is a five-foot-nothing Scotsman with a consonant-free burr, bald, pot-bellied from a heroic beer habit, almost chinless, with slurpy lips you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be kissed by, but armed with-you guessed-a gigantic member of positively pneumatic obedience.