Patong, about two miles from Vulture Peak, is the down-market play area in Phuket. On the right night it’s a lot more festive than the Bangkok hotspots, which tend to have a no-frills air in comparison. Here on Bang La, Patong’s main street, you get the full farang fantasy of unrestrained orientalism. Adolescent elephants come up from behind and lay their trunks on your shoulder, begging for sugarcane, which you can buy from the mahout. In one of the pavilions you can watch some kind of snake-charming gag with a full-size cobra, which has had the venom removed, naturally. If anything, the katoeys on Soi Crocodile are even more flamboyant than in Nana, and there are girls everywhere. They don’t have to exaggerate anything, they are young, beautiful, and friendly in bikinis and will do anything you want so long as it doesn’t hurt and you use a condom.
I arrived a couple of hours ago at about eight P.M. and spent time at a few bars watching the street and deciding what to do. I came on a hunch. My reasoning is simple: Vulture Peak was built for pleasure, but it’s high on a hill, a good couple of miles away from any live entertainment. Soi Eric here at Patong is the nearest center for fun, including takeaway. What I can’t figure out is exactly who to ask, or how to frame the question. Naturally, I checked in with the local police force and received mostly a stonewall. I have a feeling the entire station has taken a vow of silence with regard to Vulture Peak. The best I can obtain is the promise of an interview with two constables before they go out on patrol tomorrow morning. Now after two hours on the street I’ve made no progress and I’m starting to feel restless, so I take a stroll.
Things have livened up. They were pretty lively before, so I guess you could say the place is reaching that strangely predictable level of hysteria typical of a certain kind of mass-market farang tourism at around eleven-thirty in the evening. Couples with teenage kids they don’t know what to do with hang out in the less outrageous bars while small gangs of drunken young pink men, who can hardly believe the good time you can hire for a thousand baht, are nevertheless daunted by the feast of flesh and instead channel their nervous lust into a familiar drinking routine with their mates who support the same soccer team. Maybe tomorrow they’ll take the plunge and get laid. More serious older men look for the perfect female form on which to spend the sperm they saved up during the boring flight over, while longer stayers hang out talking to the girl they know they will eventually take back to the hotel, because that’s what they’ve done every night since they arrived and they don’t really like change.
The mahout and the elephant still tramp up and down, and there are three snake shows at the open-air pavilion instead of the former one. The katoey quarter is farther up the street, where lack of authenticity is compensated for by elaborate stage costumes with long ostrich feathers that soar over hairdos of every color except black. It’s noisy, cheap, but not unfriendly. The trouble is: so many bars and so little time.
I buy a beer at a tiny place served by one pleasant-looking young woman who I suppose will have to close the shop if ever she finds a customer who wants her body. I take out a five-hundred-baht note and ask where slumming millionaires are most likely to look for someone to love, and without hesitation she jerks her chin at one of the bars behind the first cobra show.
“Any particular reason?”
“It’s the first big bar you come to if you’re arriving from the hill, and they pay more, so the girls are more beautiful and speak better English. Also, they have a takeaway service.” She giggles. “I mean they have a van with a driver. If somebody knows which girl they want, they can call or e-mail.”
The name is Chung King House, so I guess they get a lot of Chinese customers, or maybe the owners sought the advice of a seer who read the future. It’s twice the size of most of the other bars and lacks the personal touch. I order a beer and ask about the takeaway service. The bartender tells me that anything can be arranged, but I need to speak to Khun Nong. He picks up a cell phone, presses an autodial number, and hands me the phone.
A soft voice from far away says, “Good evening, sir. How can I help you?”
“By meeting me at the bar in five minutes.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m a cop. I have some questions for you. If you cooperate, I won’t be any trouble.”
The phone goes dead, but a door behind the bar opens and a woman in her forties appears. She flips up a section of the bar top and comes to sit next to me on a stool, just as if she’s expecting to be picked up. Her face is blank when she says, “Do you have Colonel Naradom’s permission to ask questions? My bosses make a lot of contributions to the Phuket police retirement fund.”
“I don’t need permission to investigate a triple killing with bells and whistles.”
She seems relieved. “Oh, yes, I heard about that, but it hasn’t been on the news.”
“We’re keeping it under wraps until we’ve had a chance to investigate.”
She nods, thinks about it, then gives me the phoniest smile I’ve ever seen. “How can I help?”
“You send girls to hotels and private homes in a microvan. You’re the only bar that does that. The house on the hill is a couple of miles away. It’s built for pleasure.” I stare at her.
She touches her hair. “I’ve only been in the job a few months. I’ve never had a call from any of the houses on Vulture Peak. Most of the business is to hotels hereabouts. It’s all about farang men who think they’re respectable and don’t have the guts to be seen leaving the bar with one of the girls. So they pay the bar fine, give the name of their hotel and the room number, and I arrange the rest. Usually in such cases the hotel is upmarket, so we have to negotiate. Most of my job is keeping up friendly connections with the concierges. Generally the van takes the girl to the tradesmen’s entrance, and someone leads her to the lifts.” She shrugs. “Discretion pays.”
“But there must be occasions when a farang or some other foreigner who owns a flat or house requires your services. How about parties with dancing girls?”
“It’s rare, but it happens.”
I think I understand her body language and take out my wallet, but she puts a hand on my wrist. “I promise I don’t know anything. Nothing like that has happened while I’ve been here, and most of the girls don’t stay more than six months, usually less. Either they find a farang husband in that time, or they go back to their villages. There are only two girls who have been here longer than me. I think one of them may be able to help. Her name is Om, and you can get her number from the barman. Please don’t tell anyone you got her name from me.”
She gets up, stone-faced, and retreats to her office behind the bar. I signal to the barman and ask for Om’s number. He gives me a business card with a heart on it: OM, AT YOUR PERSONAL SERVICE.
I call the number. “Hi, Om, I’m Sonchai, I’m at the Chung King and wondered if you’d allow me to buy you a drink.”
“I’m off duty, darling. Time of the month, I’m afraid. If you haven’t found a friend by Monday, please call. Thanks for thinking of me.” She closes the phone. I press the repeat button on my cell. Now she sounds a little weary. I say, “It’s worth a thousand baht. I don’t want your body, just your company.”
There is hesitation in her voice when she says, “It’s late, honey, and I’m very tired.”
“Two thousand, just for a half-hour chat, any bar you like.”
“Okay, but not the Chung King.” She gives the name of another bar down the street. • •
Now I’m sitting with my third beer in half an hour, waiting for Om. When an attractive woman in her late twenties appears in jeans and T-shirt, no makeup, hair clean and combed but without coiffure, I don’t make the connection with the voice on the phone. Even when she sits next to me, I can’t believe this is the professional I spoke to a few minutes ago. There seems to be no side to her at all. A good clean Buddhist girl.
“Hello, Mr. Sonchai. I’m Om. How can I help?”
She’s so normal, so much the Thai girl next door, no frills, confident of her beauty but modest just the same. I guess when she says off duty, that includes the personality. It’s always a dangerous sign when you like someone you’re interviewing with respect to an atrocity.
“Somebody told me you once did some entertaining up on the hill, more than a year ago.” I flash my cop’s ID.
She takes in the mug shot on the plastic, flashes me a glance, and says, “Up on the hill?”
“Vulture Peak.”
Another change of personality. Not paranoia exactly-let’s say a sudden attack of extreme caution. “Not here. Meet me on the beach in twenty minutes.”
“Where on the beach?”
“The big T-shirt stand next to the green parasols.”
It doesn’t sound like a very precise direction, but when I reach the beach, I see what she means. The T-shirt stand is still doing a roaring trade at nearly midnight, and although the green parasols are all folded like cypress trees, you can’t really miss them. There are plenty of people about, mostly farang couples who came for romance in the exotic East, some farang men with Thai girls with whom, I suppose, they are trying to have a relationship, and some young Thai couples holding hands. You can’t see the stars for the light pollution from the town, but the moon is up and bright.
I feel a slight flutter when I see her making toward me. I suspect I wouldn’t give her a second glance when she’s on duty and dressed like a tart, but that no-frills naturalness is quite a turn-on. And it is a beautiful evening. When she sees me, she nods faintly toward a couple of deck chairs that have yet to be folded and stacked. She sits in one. I play along by letting a few beats pass before I join her.
She takes a pack of Marlboro Reds out of a down-market black handbag and puts one in her mouth without offering the box to me. She lights up at the same time as she says, “What did you want to know?”
“I want to know everything you know about Vulture Peak.”
She takes a long toke on the cigarette, inhales like a true addict, exhales, and starts to talk. “The owners of the Chung King House have connections with travel agents in China-that’s why they called it the Chung King. But it didn’t really work out. Maybe they’re ten years ahead of the curve. Most of the business is still farang, with some Japanese and Korean. But they keep up the connection with the Chinese, and every now and then a tour group comes to town. Usually they stay in one of the midrange hotels. Often the group is so big, they take over the hotel.
“Mostly it’s genuine sightseers, but sometimes it’s all men on the loose, looking for a good time. When we get the call, we girls pile into the van, sometimes up to five or six of us. One night about two years ago we got the call for eight girls. Eight is a lucky number for Chinese, right? But it wasn’t to a hotel. It was to that fantastic palace up on the hill. From the start everyone told us we would be well paid but we had to keep quiet about it. Never tell a soul where we went that night.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know why it had to be so secret. When we got there, we found about twenty Chinese men, all drunk. There were crates of cognac stacked up against a wall, and it looked as if they were having a stag party. There were also a lot of roulette wheels, mahjong tiles, and stacks of playing cards. A lot of banknotes all over the place, but not Thai baht-I suppose it was all Chinese money. They didn’t speak any Thai or English, but we managed to work out that one of them had recently had a serious medical operation and was celebrating his recovery.
“They were noisy with bad manners, but they weren’t really obnoxious. They wanted us to undress, to hang around naked. So we did. Of course we got groped mercilessly, but they were the kind of men-middle management with wives and kids, I guess-who are scared of girls like me. They didn’t want to screw any of us, just the endless groping, like curious boys.
“Then someone said it was time for a show. A woman appeared-a Chinese woman-who took us all into a big bedroom and gave us silver and gold bikinis to wear. Then she gave one of us a big solid gold ring which had to be hidden in one of the girls’ vaginas-she didn’t care who. She gave us all numbered buttons to wear. I was number seven. Then she led us out to the big room with pools and little streams of water, and someone turned some music on. It was a disco tune, and we all started to dance. The men were staring at us and gabbling furiously to one another, and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands. I got the feeling this was the high point of the evening.
“The Chinese woman told us to take off our bras, then our panties, so we were naked again. All the men were staring at our pussies, of course. And betting. They were more interested in the betting than in our bodies. Finally the music stopped and the Chinese woman who spoke English said that the girl with the gold ring in her vagina should come forward. The girl walked up and took out the ring, and the men went crazy. Those who had bet on number seven cleaned up. Some of the men looked really depressed, like they’d mortgaged their houses and lost everything. Then we were led out, told to dress, and the van took us back to the bar. They paid us all five thousand baht each, and the girl was allowed to keep the gold ring. That was quite a tip.”
She has finished the cigarette, which she stubs out on the sand. When she reaches into her bag I think it is for another cigarette. Instead she takes out a solid gold ring, which she hands to me to heft. It’s small, solid, and heavy. “I had it valued. It’s real gold, twenty-three carat. More than three baht in weight. At 13,800 baht per one-baht weight, that makes 41,000 baht. I had a feeling gold would go up sooner or later, so I kept it.” She smiles without humor. “That’s why I stay at that bar-it’s very lucky for me.”
I feel like a naive farang for the thumping in my heart, a sense of hurt. Some whores can affect you like that, even a part-time pimp like me. I don’t want to think about her at that party; she’s too beautiful. I watch a Thai couple walk past along the shore, the moon directly overhead now, a pure silver scythe. “You have no idea what business they might have been in, those middle-management-type men?”
She shrugs. “One of them who took an interest in me kept saying tanakan. I think that was the only word he knew in Thai.”
“Bankers?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to say he’d just been to the bank. He was drunk.”
“And the Chinese woman-she was the only woman there apart from you girls?”
“The only one I saw.”
“She was arranging the party?”
“I don’t know. We got there about eleven-thirty in the evening, so most of the party was over. We were the final show.”
“Can you describe her?”
“She was the tall, willowy kind of Chinese woman. Hard to say how old because she’d taken such great care of her skin-you could see how much money had been spent on her. She was HiSo for sure. Very elegant. She spoke perfect English and not bad Thai. I don’t think she was mainland Chinese at all.”
By the time she has finished speaking, she is on her feet. Anyone spying on us would assume I had sat down to proposition her and she had refused after a short polite conversation. So she’s not only beautiful and modest when off duty, she’s a smart operator too. And lucky. That was a decent chunk of gold. I give her five minutes to disappear, so nobody thinks I’m following her, then walk along the road opposite the sea until I come to a guest house with a ROOMS VACANT sign. I don’t bother to check out the room. When I lie down on the narrow bed next to the tiny window that overlooks the sea, I close my eyes, expecting to see Chanya there, where she usually is just before I fall asleep, nestled behind my eyelids. Instead I see Om.
When I wake up, a solid block of golden light is shooting through the window like something out of a space travel movie, as if a beautiful Venusian is about to materialize before my eyes. It’s quite blinding, and I have to draw the curtains for a moment, until I remind myself that light is good, light is what it’s all about.
The room rate includes breakfast, which is laid out buffet style in a room downstairs. I’m the only guest up at this hour, and there are no staff. The coffee has been stewing all night on a hot plate, the imitation croissants are inedible, and the granola is old and stale.
I already paid for the room, so I’m a free man, walking along the beach at seven-thirty in the morning, wondering what Chanya did last night. I find a small cafe near the sea that serves real coffee and not-bad pain au chocolat. I ask the kid behind the bar if he knows anything about the mansions up on the hill-you can see the peak from this part of the beach, but not the houses-and he says no. He’s a Muslim from Pattani, speaks standard Thai with a strong accent, and has only been here a week. The cafe was the only business he could find that was hiring workers and didn’t sell alcohol. He confides how disgusted he is with farang decadence, especially the alcohol-and the sex. He’s never seen anything like it. He understands why Allah sent the tsunami seven years ago, but nobody seems to have got the message. What will Allah do next, destroy the whole island?
I check the clock on my cell phone. Eight-thirty. If I take it slowly, I’ll be at the police station around nine, when the two patrol cops start work.
I sense nervousness in the desk sergeant, which is not unusual. No provincial police force likes visits from the big city; very often the business models are incompatible. He cannot prevent me from seeing Constables Hel and Tak, but he is able to slow me down quite a bit. He says the interview room isn’t ready, and the two cops are preparing to go out on patrol, so when the interview room is ready, they won’t have much time for me, maybe ten minutes at best. I wonder if I should try to bribe him, then think better of it.
“Look, Sergeant,” I say in my best let’s-be-straight-about-this voice, “this isn’t just any old murder. It’s not sex-related, and it doesn’t look like a drugs vendetta. When the story breaks, it will be all over the world. Everyone who checks the news on their Internet account will see headlines like ‘M URDER AND O RGAN T HEFT IN S UNNY P HUKET, T HAILAND. ’ People very very high up in government will want to be sure the Phuket police have done all they can to cooperate.”
He’s about fifty and has been on the local force about thirty years, which in itself says survivor with no scruples. That character trait is confirmed by a sloe-eyed cynicism and a way of looking into the distance as if I’m a pain in the neck who has to be tolerated, but not for an unreasonable length of time. Now he turns his best blank stare onto me, lets a beat pass, then says, “Those houses have protection.” He shrugs. The shrug is a reference to my future: do I really want to challenge the protector of the houses-or not?
I stare back without saying anything. I guess I don’t always come across as a law enforcement fanatic, but I can get into the part when I need to. He shrugs again, picks up the desk telephone, speaks so softly I can’t hear what he says, then leads me to an interview room and tells me to wait. About five minutes later two cops walk in: overweight, dumb, and probably honest in the context of local cops. The sergeant is with them and looks like he intends to stay during the interview.
“If you don’t get the fuck out, I’ll say in my report that you refused to permit these men to speak freely,” I say in an even voice with a smile. That’s quite a no-frills challenge, and the atmosphere congeals. He gives me that look again, with a touch of pity in it this time, but he turns to leave the room and closes the door softly behind him.
Like simple men the world over, Constables Hel and Tak decide to obey whatever superior is standing before them at the present moment. They look at me politely and expectantly.
“Just tell me all you know about the mansion on Vulture Peak,” I say, already weary.
Hel and Tak look at each other. “It has protection,” Hel says and looks at Tak, who nods.
“But do you ever go up there?”
“Only when someone invites us.”
“About once a year.”
“Have you been this year?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“About five months ago.”
“What happens when you visit?”
“A Thai man, a manager, welcomes us. He’s very polite and makes us feel welcome.”
“A really nice guy.”
“Is he alone?”
“Twice he’s been alone, three times there have been people there.”
“What kind of people?”
“Chinese people.”
“We don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t know that. Looked like Chinese people.”
“What were they doing, the Chinese people?”
“Playing mahjong.”
“Not always mahjong.”
“Sometimes cards.”
“Gambling?”
“We don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t know that.”
I stare at them, then turn away to look out the window. It’s frustration, not technique, that suddenly turns me on my heels to stare them in the face, one by one. “Where does the protection come from?”
“The army,” Hel says, taken by surprise. Tak nudges his elbow. Hel stares at his partner, then looks scared.
“You don’t know that,” Tak says.
“Everybody knows it,” Hel says.
“General Zinna, by any chance?”
Hel and Tak lose the color from their cheeks and stare at me as at a condemned man. “We don’t know that,” they say in unison.
I’m in a cab on my way to the airport when I remember I’ve forgotten to call Chanya this morning. She could be feeling a tad insecure, with me all alone in Phuket-always assuming those rumors are untrue. There’s also something troubling me; I refer to a kind of telepathy between a man and woman who live together. In the back of my mind is that sweet shot of weakness I felt last night, that love-twinge which passed in the twinkling of an eye, but which remains as an afterthought. I have no intention of calling Om tonight or any night, but the memory of her sitting in that deck chair under the moon has yet to fade.
At exactly the moment I’m thinking that thought, my phone whooshes:
Hi there, you okay? C.
I text back: Sure. You?
Okay. Where did you stay last night?
Cheap hotel
Who with?
Alone
Don’t believe you