“He knew everything. Every damned thing. Even the numbers of the rooms we use. He must be FBI or CIA. He’ll close me down if you don’t do what he wants. It’s up to you-you can run away, or you can see him. He claims he only wants to get to know you better, have dinner a few times, no sex, just give him a chance. He’s weird enough to actually mean what he says. What will you do?”

“Tell him I’ll have dinner with him once. That’s all. No sex. If he wants more, I’ll run away-or he can have me deported if he wants. Up to him.”

Yip nods, his big oval face of many chins concentrated in puzzlement. “Just tell me one thing. He seems like a good, clean-living American with a strong career-the kind of man women like you come to this country to marry. Why do you keep rejecting him?”

Chanya looks into Yip’s face and sees only money, greed, stupidity. “Because I’m a whore.”

Yip nods again. He isn’t so stupid after all. He is just testing to see how smart she is. “You’re right. An American like him could never forget or forgive. Once the first months of passion were over, he would torture you with it for the rest of your life.”

“Worse than that, he would torture himself.”

The Chinese grunts. He’s worked with whores all his life. The way they are able to read men at a glance still astonishes him from time to time.

Mitch Turner takes her to a Thai restaurant in Adams-Morgan, just off Columbia Road. She is impressed that he knows not to take her to an upmarket Thai place, where the chile is diluted and the food virtually tasteless. This one is budget to mid-range and frequented by Thais. The food, although not quite the standard of a Bangkok food stall, is not at all bad. One of the waiters happens to be a young Japanese, and for the duration of the evening she is convinced Mitch Turner brought her here to show off. When she gets to know him better, she will revise that view, but she is impressed. He looks so totally American, the kind that might boast he doesn’t own a passport, but his fluency and obvious familiarity with Japanese manners causes her to revise her estimation upward. What she likes most is his deference to the young waiter’s background, even to the point of bowing. Very few farang can call on such courtesy. She allows him one of her more generous smiles. He is as delighted as a schoolboy. There is no need to sleep with this man to have him in the palm of her hand-he is safely nestled there already.

He hardly drinks at all, which disappoints her a bit. Thanee taught her to enjoy a bottle of wine over dinner, and the tension in the air could certainly do with some help from alcohol. Unfortunately, he seems afraid of it. She settles for a single glass of red wine; Turner drinks mineral water.

Another surprise: he’s not bad at small talk. Not as good as Thanee, of course, who could talk amusingly about soap bubbles-there is a self-consciousness in the way Turner chats about Washington, this and that-but he’s not nearly as heavy as she feared. In return she confides how much she loves The Simpsons, in the enthusiastic tone of a recent convert. He smiles. Giving nothing of his profession away is clearly second nature to him, however. The meal is almost over before he comes to the point.

“I’m sorry I put the heat on Yip. I was desperate. Now you’ve done what I wanted, and you’re having dinner with me. I’m a man of my word-anyone who knows me will tell you that-so I won’t be bothering you again. If you say no next time I ask to see you, I’ll take that as final. Just do one little thing for me. Read this.” He hands over a book-sized package that she has already noticed. “It’s in Thai. If you don’t have a lot of time, just read the New Testament, especially the four gospels.”

She looks at the package in bewilderment.

When he drops her at her apartment building, he says: “I don’t want to sleep with you. Not till we’re married. I just want to see you from time to time.” A painful smile. “I want to court you. I’m very old-fashioned.”

She stares at him, holding the book in one hand, her Chanel handbag in the other. She admits that for a full minute she is seduced by the prospect of a simplified, safe, clean, scrupulously moral existence with a strong, honest, devout man who will never let her down, who will provide for her and their children and generally enable her to live happily ever after. Then she realizes she’s thinking about soap opera, not life. His timing has certainly added to the unreality. Is it part of American culture to virtually propose on the first date?

Her revised opinion is that this is a very dangerous relationship for one of them. As an illegal immigrant, she can only suppose the victim will be her. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that he has won this round. She will not refuse to see him again. But there is one thing he has to understand: “No way am I going to get close to you without sex. Whatever your God thinks about that, you better tell him: no courting a Thai girl without a lot of sex. Tons of it, till it’s coming out your ears.”

She ignores the pained expression on his face as she turns to walk to the lifts. She had decided not to turn again to look or wave at him, and he is quickly obscured by a concrete pillar. When she reaches the lift doors, she stops in her tracks. The voice of Homer Simpson calls out: “Chanya, say Chanya, I got tickets for the Springfield Isotopes game next Saturday, wanna come?” She turns quickly, even tries to search for him in the parking lot, but he is gone. She is gaping in wonder. That was not merely the mimickry of a gifted amateur, that was a perfect, professional-quality imitation, and more than a little eerie.

As she ascends to her apartment, she is thinking:

Chanya catches strange fish this time. Twenty minutes in bed with him, and Chanya will know everything. His face not so bad, but he’s ashamed of it. Wants to be pretty American boy. Something unreal, like movies. In Amerika everyone in the movies. Maybe he can’t get it up?

What a disaster that would be, to marry a man only to find out he’s useless between the sheets. But why has she decided to see him again at all? Financially she’s doing extremely well at the sauna, and she could hook any number of Asian men whom she knows in the diplomatic corps and who are constantly calling her, all of whom would understand her so much better than the farang. Karma is a weather system too complex to analyze.

Once in her apartment, she dumps the Bible on a table, still in its package, and forgets all about it.

So who is Mitch Turner? Chanya would have been surprised to know how many people have asked themselves this question. She realizes after the first supper that he has told her nothing personal about himself at all. Even the Thai translation of the Bible, which could seem a charming and intimate gesture by a pious man, was clearly a contrived event, something not quite what it seemed, as if the piety were all in the acting.

He waits a whole three weeks before asking her out again, this time to the Iron Hearth near Dupont Circle. No chiles here, it’s high-end romantic, with lamb chops in paper garters at finely laid tables around a blazing fire. Did he realize he was setting himself a trap? It is not the kind of restaurant where you can decently not drink wine. He makes a good, knowledgeable choice of a Napa red, which is fine by Chanya, but he hardly takes more than a couple of sips from his glass. Halfway through the meal the bottle is three-quarters empty, and Chanya puts down her glass to stare meaningfully at him. She has done almost all the drinking but is only slightly tipsy. Self-consciously he takes three or four sips, then puts his glass down. She continues to stare. He picks the glass up again to drink a little more. She doesn’t let him off the hook until he has drunk all of it. Apparently satisfied, she allows the waiter to empty the remains of the bottle into her glass.