“Not if you’re going to die.”

“We have to stop him. You do know that.”

A long pause. “This isn’t easy. What do you want to do?”

“Live with you. Sleep with you.”

Doubtfully: “Will that do it?”

My heart in my mouth: “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

A groan, then she closes the phone.

39

I believe it is intrinsic to your cockeyed morality, farang, that when a man and woman engaged in law enforcement are forced to pretend, for strategic reasons (say, a decoy-stakeout situation), to be lovers, they must be scrupulous in preventing their false embraces from developing into full-blown copulation-correct?

Well, fuck that. Chanya and I, in our tiny love nest on Soi 39, which is the best I can afford in this expensive part of town, go at it like rabbits. Not only is she beautiful, she is also generous. Who am I not to love her? Her extraordinary beauty might not be of her making, but that tactile friendliness, that gentle concern that expresses itself in soft touches, sweet caresses, premeditated kindness-that is all from her soul, and I would have needed to be stone. Nevertheless, it is part of the job to parade our passion up and down the soi, especially in the evening when the Japanese clubs are open and the mamasans stand on duty outside, checking the street. During the day our duties are more practical.

It is a traditional little apartment, which is to say ablutions are performed courtesy of a great tub of water out in the yard. There is a double gas cooking ring also in the backyard-oh yes, and a single rickety cupboard. There is no bed, so I bought a couple of futons that we keep side by side. I love her best in the mornings when, still sleepy, she rolls over onto her side to admit me from behind. Or do I love her best when she is horny late at night? Or is it when she’s washing out in the yard, using her sarong to conceal her body from the neighbors? Don’t ask me. Love is a form of insanity that pervades every fiber. It is also much increased by the knowledge that one stands a good chance of dying within the week. We keep our mobiles charged, and I check the Net every day at the local Internet café. Day after day, night after night, there is still no word, no attack. Perhaps we are growing complacent. When I remember I’m a cop, I try to elicit relevant information. Generally, she’s happy to oblige but with heavy editing. Her story of the second half of her relationship with Mitch Turner is like the story of Othello without a single mention of Iago.

Chanya had returned to Thailand when the world was mesmerized by two office towers collapsing over and over on its television screens. She owned over one hundred thousand dollars and had no intention of selling her body ever again. She was twenty-nine and a little old for the Game in any event. She built a new house for her parents, set them up with twenty buffalo, which they used for breeding-a definite improvement on the hard labor of rice growing-sent her two young brothers to the best schools money could buy in Thailand, and already had proudly put her brilliant younger sister through a biology course at Chulalongkorn University. When all bills were paid, she did not have very much left, but then she didn’t need much. Sometime toward the end of her Washington sojourn, beset by homesickness and self-doubt, she had determined to redress the karmic imbalance caused by her unseemly trade by dedicating her life to the Buddha. She was to be a maichee-a Buddhist nun. She was the queen of her village, the idol of her parents, almost a goddess figure to anyone who knew anything about rural Thailand.

Chanya did her best to make up for the lost years by spending as much time as possible with her parents, especially her father, a devout Buddhist with whom she had always been close. “To want nothing is ecstasy,” he told Chanya. She knew that for him the farang drugs that would give him another decade on earth were a mixed blessing; they brought more obligation than joy. He really did not understand the purpose of extending his life artificially; he took the drugs out of politeness, to make her happy. She bought a Honda motorbike and took him to the wat most mornings for chanting, filled with envy for his innocence and vowing somehow to retrieve her own.

When she did not go to the wat, she woke before dawn to watch her cousin, whom she had known almost since birth. Jiap was the same age as Chanya and no less beautiful, but she had never been tempted by money or ambition. She lived in the timeless zone of subsistence agriculture; Chanya watched the twenty-nine-year-old mother of three take the buffalo over the paddy fields in the dawn mist singing softly to the animals in the Isaan dialect, exactly as she had when they both were children and with the same weightless joy. The distance was no longer geographic; Chanya was separated from Jiap not by time or miles but by an invisible glass screen. In America, Chanya had generally felt light and free in comparison to the people she met; here she felt heavy, decadent, lost.

Gloom, though, could not squat long on her shoulders, and during the rest of the day quite different forces seemed to invade her mind. In particular there was the little problem that no one in the compound had dared mention, so it had taken a delegation from a neighboring compound to come and explain it to her one afternoon. Well, not a problem exactly, something really rather positive. The delegates, clearly, were adherents to the more worldly side of the Thai mind.

Quietly and with an infuriating reluctance to come to the point, they explained to Chanya just how brilliant her sister really was. Consistently top of her class every time, and with that extra little thing that was more than just brilliance, it was Buddha-inspiration definitely. Sure, with a little help here and there, a little sponsorship, she could get through Thai medical school, no problem. But let’s face it…

Tired of watching them beat around the bush, Chanya finished the sentence: Thai medical school? The country’s best doctors all spoke English fluently because they had been educated in the United States or the United Kingdom. It would take money, a quite exorbitant amount, but look what it would do for the country, to have a Thai woman from a dirt-poor background who understood the medical needs of the poor, boasting the very best medical education in the world. It would help the status of women, too.

Chanya understood very well what all the more worldly villagers were thinking, for she still thought that way herself from time to time: she had a couple more good years in her when she could make the kind of money most Thais could only dream of. After that there really were not going to be any more opportunities. Not for an uneducated girl from Surin-especially not for an ex-whore.

Chanya did her sums. She didn’t want to leave Thailand again, but she reckoned that with what she had saved and maybe another year or so on the Game in Bangkok, she would have enough. What difference would one more year make in the scheme of things, especially if she made merit by turning her sister into a first-class doctor? She convinced herself the Buddha would approve and believed she could prove it mathematically. She used a calculator, and the arithmetic went roughly as follows: an average of three men per week for ten years equals 1,560, at a rate of two screws per john (one at night, one the next morning to put him in tipping mood) equals 3,120 units of negative karma. To achieve neutral karma her sister would have to effect an equal number of medium-to-heavy healings, which Chanya guessed would easily be achieved in a year or so. In other words, in return for her sponsoring her sister, the Buddha would liberate her from the karmic consequences of her trade within about a year of her sister’s qualifying.