The girls are not usually local Muslims; they tend to be Buddhists from all over Thailand, especially the poor North, who have decided to specialize in this niche market. It doesn’t pay nearly as well as the farang market in Bangkok, but it’s a lot more reliable. Every weekend and most weekdays great hordes of pious young Muslim men from Malaysia cross the border here and leave their piety on the other side. They come in expensive four-by-fours, on cheap Honda motorbikes, in buses or minibuses. Some even come by bicycle. Some come on foot. Right now, for example, the town is flooded with them. The girls have all learned Malay, and the ringgit is an accepted currency. Young men are standing or sitting in every one of the huts, purring while the girls charm them. In a way they can be more civilized than farang. They don’t come just to get laid-they want the full debauch, including alcohol and a huge cavernous disco with karaoke. The sex comes at the end of the evening, so long as they’re still sober enough.
With my professional eye I spy one beauty who owns an elegance you do not generally see outside of Krung Thep. She surveys me with a blink almost imperceptible to a nonprofessional, sees my Thai style of dressing, and discards me as a possibility. It says a lot that a woman like that is working here. It doesn’t say nearly as much as the police station, though. No one familiar with Asia can doubt that the cops charge the girls rent for the use of the perimeter wall against which to lean their huts.
As I walk, my orientation acquires ever greater accuracy. The flesh trade is everywhere, it is the economy of this town, there is really nothing else. I think of Mustafa: what an affront it must be to him; what torture to his pure soul to walk through this town day after day. In every hotel lobby, every café, restaurant, and street corner, there’s a huddle of women somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age. Usually they look past me, for they have trained themselves to specialize in Malays, but most seem amenable to persuasion, should I weaken. Not exactly a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism: I think any Al Qaeda evangelist would be laughed out of town. Muhammad himself couldn’t incite these local guys to a jihad: they’re in Islamic heaven already.
I try to think of the farang Mitch Turner hanging out here month after month. Well, it seems he bolted for Soi Cowboy at least once. I can see why. Prostitution aside, this is a small, claustrophobic town.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a young Muslim man pull out a cell phone and speak into it. Did I imagine that involuntary jerk of the chin in my direction? While he is talking, I pull out my own cell phone and call Mustafa: engaged. That would prove nothing to a properly trained cop, but to a third-worldy working on intuition, it’s pretty conclusive.
As soon as the young man closes his phone, I call Mustafa again: it rings.
“Sonchai, where are you?”
“You know where I am.”
A pause. “I’ll come now.”
He arrives on foot within ten minutes. I’m seeing him in context now, his context, this serious young man of Islam. I want to observe his reaction to the prostitutes who are responsible for the town’s economy: his town, his economy. But he seems hardly to notice them. A mission of some kind has usurped his imagination. He looks grimly ahead, walking tall, straight-spined like his father. There is no denying the beauty of his surrender to Allah-no serious meditator could fail to approve-but the Buddha gave us the middle path; I see no golden mean in Mustafa’s. Without his father’s restraining hand, he could clear the town with a bomb and hardly notice. We do not wai each other; without the old man our recognition is neutral, like enemies who find a common purpose for a moment, before resuming an ancient feud.
“I have the key,” he says, not looking at me and fishing in his pockets.
“Not on the street, Mustafa,” I say. I guide him into a café, where I order a 7-Up and he drinks water. He is uncomfortable here, even though the café does not serve alcohol. I think he would be uncomfortable in any surrounding designed to induce congeniality. I see it in tantalizingly vague and elusive mental images from many centuries ago: even then he was impaled by that same single-mindedness that is a form of tunnel vision. Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.
“Relax,” I tell him. “Open your mind. I need information.”
“What information?” He is startled and defensive. For him, our meeting here was circumscribed with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He has no idea how Western this quaint shrinking of reality is.
“Well, how about the address?”
A blink: “I was going to show you, but you insisted on coming in here.”
“Good. In a minute you will show me where Mr. Mitch Turner lived. That is the future, Mustafa. Let’s stay in the present. Don’t you like it here?”
He looks around and shrugs. “It’s just a café.”
I cannot penetrate this iron skull. But I was his teacher once, and he loved me with the very same fierceness, the same passion, the same blindness. “Mustafa, let me tell you something: you are brilliant at what you do. It’s really not that easy, even in a small town like this, to have someone followed, to know where they are minute to minute. But your network has been on my tail since I arrived. I didn’t notice myself until I saw one of your people with his cell phone, and even then it was just a hunch on my part.”
“So? My father has to know what is going on at all times. I told you that in Krung Thep. It is his network, not mine. He says-” He breaks off, scared of saying too much.
“What? What does your father say?”
“He says there is nothing more threatening to the modern world than a moderate Muslim. The fanatics hate us because they think we are heretics and cowards, and the West hates us because we have a morality it lost a long time ago-many farang are converting to us, especially in America. I have to protect my father.”
“So you run the network that he put in place?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably know more about Mitch Turner than anyone on earth. At least, the Mitch Turner who lived here in Songai Kolok for however many months.”
“More than eight months.” He catches my eye and allows the faintest trace of a smirk. “Eight months and two weeks.”
“Your people followed him wherever he went, didn’t they?”
“My father told you, we were trying to keep him alive. The only way to do that was to keep an eye on him.”
“Did he know?”
A shake of the head. “He was very stupid.” He looks me in the eye. “No, that is not the word, but he was a typical farang, lost, confused, pulled in a thousand directions like a man consumed by demons. He lived in his head and saw very little of the outside world. I could have had ten men following him in a line, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Of course, being farang he thought he was the only one doing the spying. He deteriorated after the first month. A whore came to see him from Bangkok from time to time. He used drugs. He went through a bad patch, he thought he was undergoing a religious conversion. That’s when he went to see my father. But it was just his Western psychosis. Why do farang think that God loves crazies? Allah loves men of steel.”
“A whore? D’you know who?”
“No. She never stayed long enough for us to find out.”
“You didn’t get a picture?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We didn’t need to. He kept a picture of her in his apartment. If you had not insisted on coming into this café, you could have been looking at it right now.”