By way of small talk I say, “Can you get me some more dope? I’m totally out.”
Sergeant Ruamsantiah opens his cheroot tin and picks one of the thin dark sticks, which he holds to his nose and rolls as if it were a Havana. The girl behind the bar looks unhappy because he’s already given her a big tip and a lot of smiles so she doesn’t want to tell him he’s not allowed to smoke in here, but Ruamsantiah takes out his police ID and the girl looks at it and grins. Everyone likes to have at least one cop as a friend. She even finds a butane lighter behind the bar, which she holds for him.
Now the sergeant is merrily puffing on the cheroot, making the other smokers in the bar jealous as hell. Nobody says So how come he’s allowed to smoke and not me? because they’ve all guessed why the girl lit the cigar. One farang lifts his nose and tries to follow the fragrant trail as it diffuses. It’s not often you see a Westerner awed by a local boy, but this guy would also love to be able to walk into any bar in town and light up without fear of getting yelled at. Maybe it would be less cruel if the sergeant were smoking something tiny and apologetic with low tar: the full aroma of the unfiltered cheroot is making that forbidden statement about power, manly badness, indifference to death-and to hell with the anal-retentive white mafia-esses who would like to kill anything big and hairy that has the balls to turn an entire bar into a crowd of passive smokers. After a few minutes the gasping farang can no longer maintain resistance; he goes out into the street for a puff on a Marlboro Light.
“Okay,” the sergeant says, not noticing the distress he has caused. “Do you want export quality? It’s quite expensive, even at cost.”
“Can you get Thai sticks?”
The sergeant makes a face and frowns. “How many times do I have to tell you, they just don’t make them anymore.”
“But it’s depressing,” I say. “And it affects our international reputation. Thai sticks, from the best marijuana stock in the world, grown under tropical conditions and laced with opium-it was the greatest high terrestrial life had to offer.”
“Too much fucking law enforcement,” he says. “It’s this farang obsession with detail. You have the law on the books, okay, that means you can control the trade and make sure only the more responsible traffickers survive, the ones who don’t mind paying a little tax to the cops, which is like community service in advance of conviction. So why would you need a conviction? Why all the expense of a court case when the cops have already imposed the punishment? This is natural village capitalism. But nowadays, thanks to Pressure, they’ve got us checking every damned truck or car coming out of Isaan. It’s killed businesses, broken up families, and destroyed the quality of our dope. It won’t be long before they criminalize the chili in our somtam. This is not my fault. No, I cannot get Thai sticks, not even for you.”
I use techniques drawn from Buddhism to cope with this depressing news. I focus on a beautiful beach on an ocean without a shore; it’s better than one hand clapping. “Okay. Supposing I wanted to make some Thai sticks myself, how d’you do it?”
“Easy,” the sergeant says. “Opium sap is water soluble, so the best way is to add a solution of sap and water while you’re drying the weed. So when the weed is dry, it includes a deposit of opium. Set fire and inhale.”
“So why can’t they do that today?”
“They’re balancing risk. If they get caught with cannabis, they’re on the five-to-ten prison scale. If the dope includes opium, they risk the injection. Since farang these days don’t know the difference, why take the chance? Want me to get you some raw opium so you can make the sticks yourself?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Let me know how you get on-we might want to sell the product. We could even package it as a retro thrill, put it in a box with an old Chinaman smoking an opium pipe on the lid: nostalgia for the good old days, full of Eastern promise. Start off selling it at around the same price as that damned hay we’re getting from Laos, then when they get addicted, charge like a wounded elephant.”
“It doesn’t worry you that a lot of people would become addicts?”
“If they become addicts, it’s because they’re suckers. Why should they be exploited by someone else’s capitalism? Why not mine?”
“You ever think of getting a job on Wall Street?”
The sergeant is playing me along. He knows I didn’t invite him out tonight just to ask if he can get dope. Dope is his sideline, an SME that he runs independently of the Colonel. I could have ordered some by phone. I think he knows exactly the question I want to put to him, but for some reason he slides away from me just when I’m getting close. “Sergeant, there’s just one-”
“Tell you what,” he says. “Shall we change bars?” He checks his watch. It’s eight P.M. When we met at around seven-fifteen, the go-go bars were not yet in full swing. There were no girls gyrating around the poles on stage because they were using the stage as a table while they ate their evening meals, just like the katoeys in Nana. The bar we are in, which boasts no stage and traffics only in alcohol, is just a pit stop until the action starts. The sergeant lets me pay for the drinks with Vikorn’s black Amex, then snatches the card when the girl returns it to me. He shakes his head, indicating naked jealousy. “What’s it like, having one of those in your pocket?”
“It’s better than a gun, a Ferrari, or an erection,” I say. “You can take it into any hotel, office, or department store and get treated like the sultan of Brunei. Even ATM machines work faster.”
Outside on the street we can hardly move for traders, tourists, pimps, and whores. Ever since Pat Pong achieved worldwide fame, merchandisers have been annexing territory, so now you have the whole street taken up with stalls selling clothes, watches, videos, incense, and other tourist junk, which creates an interesting sociological study: farang who arrive in a family group for the safe, clean crime of buying a couple of fake Rolexes to show friends at home maintain a strict seclusion from those farang men who arrive as lone wolves and hardly notice the stalls in the middle of the street because they’re focused on the girls in shiny swimming costumes and long silver cloaks who beckon them into the bars. Farang wives watch curiosity work their husbands’ libidos, no matter how good a boy they married; farang husbands don’t notice the curiosity their wives also feel. Respectable women, who would die a thousand deaths rather than sell their bodies, wonder for a moment exactly what it must be like to do such a thing. I see a mother cover the eyes of her son of maybe nine years: too late, the kid saw his dad’s pupils dilate in a most undadlike way at a glimpse of a forbidden world.
Ruamsantiah pays no attention to the stalls, though, as he pushes between bodies to get to the other side of the street where the Shangri-La bar is situated.
Like my mother’s bar, the Shangri-La is known for the extra care it takes with the pay and selection of its girls. As a result, you have maybe the most beautiful women in the world strutting their stuff and inviting offers: gracious smiles greet us at the same time as loins gyrate and chests inflate. Ruamsantiah goes for the back seats and sags into one with a sigh. I know he’s been here before and that he was looking forward to this moment, which replicates an earlier moment, and so on all the way back to puberty. “It’s always the same,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t a single one I don’t want to fuck. I could sit here all night and still not make up my mind.”
“You remember the run-in you and the Colonel had with that Chinese general in Yunnan a few years ago?”
He orders a bottle of Mekong whiskey with ice and water on the side, now brought by one of the staff, also a beautiful young woman who can be hired, though for an extra premium because a replacement would have to be found to serve drinks. The sergeant gives her a long, appraising look, accompanied by a magnificent smile, and tells her to give the chit to me. He is pretending he didn’t hear my question. I groan. I won’t get any sense out of him for hours, and we’ll both be drunk by then. Such is his plan.
It’s 1:25 A.M. The evening went pretty much as I expected, and now I’m in a cab on the way home.
Ruamsantiah kept inviting girls down off the stage and buying them drinks, so that after a couple of hours we were buying drinks for six girls, all of whom had lightly groped, and been lightly groped by, the sergeant, who with every grope given and received was that much further away from deciding which two he would take with him to the short-term hotel. He told me he needed to leave the bar for a while to clear his head, and we strolled across to Pat Pong II, where we climbed the stairs to the Wallabi bar. He sat in a corner where he got a blowjob by twin sisters who shared the labor fifty-fifty while he sent me to buy him Viagra. I walked across the street to the pharmacy where the owner, a Thai woman in her fifties, threw two blue pills into a tiny brown paper bag with a big sneer and charged five hundred baht per pop. I wondered if she’d ever thought of going on the game or trading in heroin to cheer herself up. How about body parts? By the time I got back to the Wallabi, Ruamsantiah had already ejaculated and the twins had disappeared somewhere to gargle with Listerine while he lit up another cheroot without bothering to flash his cop ID, because as a general rule the upper floors are lawless anyway.
The sergeant popped a whole Viagra when half is the recommended dose and ordered a beer while he waited for his next erection. I tried to start up the conversation I had invited him out for, but he was reliving the experience he’d just had and didn’t answer while a smile of obscene gratification played over his lips. By that time I was resigned to playing his game, whatever it was, and even felt a certain relief when he reported the drug was starting to have effect and maybe we should return to the Shangri-La. I guess the chemical was building up quite a bit of steam by the time we got back to that bar, because with shocking speed the sergeant chose two of the girls he’d formerly been entertaining and had me pay for their services on the credit card. While they were changing into street clothes, he leaned over to me and said, “Yeah, I do remember. How could I ever forget? It’s at times like that you find out what leadership means. I was scared shitless, but the Colonel never turned a hair-didn’t faze him at all.”
Then he admitted he’d known from the start that I would want to talk about Mr. To, but he was afraid that if he spilled his guts earlier on, I’d disappear with the BlackAm, but now that the evening was building toward its second climax, he was ready to talk, and anyway he needed something to distract him while he suffered the sweet torment of gratification delayed: bar girls are known to take an age to put on the couple of bits of clothing they need to cross the street to the short-term hotel where they take them off again.
“But you know what happened. You went to talk to the bank’s number-one enforcer with guanxi in Beijing. So there was the Colonel and me in a barrack cell, with armed guards outside, thinking this might just be the end, when there’s a whole brain-bending show of the latest military disorientation devices going off outside the cell: noise, zinging like you wouldn’t believe, flashes to blind you, quite a few real-sounding bullets from small arms, a few glimpses of some very serious-looking soldiers dressed in black, like Chinese special forces. Then our cell door gets busted open with a small explosive device, and we’re dragged out and frog-marched to a light aircraft. I just have time to see a few bodies on the tarmac before we’re thrown in the plane, and next thing you know we’re over Thai airspace and about to land in Bangkok. On the plane they told us that a special services agent of your build pretended to deliver the dough about five minutes before the attack. They needed the evidence for the prosecution. But you must have guessed all that.”
“Yes, I guessed all that. But the deal with To-that sounds like a very expensive operation. Vikorn must have mortgaged more than his Bentley.”
The sergeant looked at me with a frank expression that seemed to ask for counsel: had I pampered, spoiled, and indulged him to the point where it would have been unreasonable for anyone to expect him to keep the secret-or should he have held out for more? I didn’t know how to signal that I’d spent more than a thousand dollars on him, and no way anyone could seriously expect him not to share his most intimate secrets with me after accepting such hospitality, but he sagged anyway. “The deal? It was open-ended.” I blinked. “You know how the Chinese work: they leave one enormous favor on the table, which they remind you of from time to time-until the moment comes for payback.”
“Vikorn pledged to do just about anything, when the time came?”
Ruamsantiah shrugged. “We were in a tight spot. No matter what face the Colonel put on it, and he really is made of steel, there was only a fifty-fifty chance of getting out of there in one piece. Sure, he promised the world-because he knew that was the price.”
“And am I right in thinking it’s Beijing, through To, who forced him to run for governor?”
Ruamsantiah stared me in the eye for a long, serious moment; then his girls started to arrive, and he relaxed.
There are women so beautiful, the glittering bikinis they wear on stage only distract from their charms, and it’s not until you see them in plain old skintight jeans, T-shirt, and flip-flops that your jaw really drops. I was jealous as hell of what he was about to do with her and for a wobbly moment wondered if I should use the BlackAm to hire a couple of girls for myself, but he had managed to choose the two most beautiful in the bar, so no matter what I did, he was going to end up as alpha-male apex feeder.
At that moment the sergeant and I were sitting next to each other on a padded bench with our bodies touching, so I was able to decipher his movements as he undid the waistband of his pants, reached down to rescue his member, which had stiffened in an awkward position and was now stuck painfully between pocket and inner thigh, then did up the button again, all while beaming with appreciation at the first half of his forthcoming orgy.
“Well?” I said.
Ruamsantiah stopped grinning at the girl in jeans and T-shirt long enough to say, “I don’t know. Let’s say I was very surprised when he told me he was going to run, and I came to the conclusion that it was not a decision he made all on his own. Khun To is a wild card, a money genius with guanxi, ganqing, and renqing coming out of his ears, but he may be out of control. They say he plays hard and weird.”
Then the second girl arrived. If anything, she was even more stunning in her street clothes than the first, but my libido had switched off. I watched in a distracted way as he led them out of the bar.