Bangkok Haunts

the bottom and Tanakan is near the top, but it’s the same exclusive global pyramid. Dan Baker, the small-time hustler, belongs to a quite different low-rent pyramid, where he subsists somewhere near the bottom.
    Puzzling it through: something about Smith the lawyer attracts me—that modern British hysteria just below the surface, despite his brilliant mind and worldly wisdom. The man who lost his head more than once in a jealous frenzy may lose it again and again. I think about busting him, then decide to go to his office on a fishing expedition instead. Then I suffer from what one of my uncles calls “a touch of the seconds.”
    The problem is not normally featured in police thrillers, but it goes like this: How exactly does a low-ranking, humble, third-world cop go about browbeating a smarter, more powerful, better-educated, and, most daunting of all, better-connected, senior, respected lawyer? Yes, it’s called a sense of inferiority, but just because you feel like a victim doesn’t mean you’re not about to become one. I would like some concrete facts to confront him with, but when I think about his various cameo appearances, none of them adds up to much more than a mirage. Perhaps his fondness for brothels and prostitutes would count against him in a more hypocritical society, but, thanks to our natural openness, no one would doubt he was in the same boat as most other men who live here. I need something more, something that will at least give me more confdence, even if it isn’t a killer point. I sit immobilized by an apparently insurmountable reluctance and only slowly formulate a plan. It’s about six in the evening when I finally decide to call Lek over to my desk.
    “Lek, do you keep a skirt in the office?”
    Covering a smirk: “Of course not. Don’t you think I have enough to put up with?”
    “So go home and change into your Saturday-night best. Tight T-shirt or sweater to flash the estrogen, very short skirt, rouge, mascara, earrings—the whole works. Be as provocative as you like, but not too vulgar. The Parthenon is up-market, after all.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “I want you to go there asking for work again. This time look serious, and make sure they believe you. When you leave the premises, you will pass the doorman. Give him a scrap of paper with my name and cell phone number. Whisper,
Anywhere, anytime, any price.
”
    I put my feet up on my desk again and wait.

31
    “Chatuchak market, tomorrow, eleven-twenty, stall 398 in the northwest corner.” The caller, a young woman, hangs up immediately. I am thinking,
Smart, very smart.
Chatuchak, that vast, unfathomable labyrinth of covered market stalls, amounts to a city of open-air merchandisers, selling anything and everything from tropical fish, brightly colored birds, and exotic orchids—which rarely survive the journey home—to plastic pails, to offers of irresistible real estate opportunities on islands with dubious land titles—just about everything. You can even get your Toyota serviced while you’re browsing. Today is Friday, so it will be jam-packed. Hard to say, these days, who are in the majority, vacationing
farang,
trendy urbanites, middle-income Thais looking for genuine bargains, or the browse-only bunch who simply love markets. Anyway, I’m reduced to a shuffle-and-twist technique to get me through the narrow body-packed alleys that lead, finally, to stall 398 of section 57 in the northwest corner.
    I don’t know why I’m intrigued that the produce on sale consists of orchids and tropical birds; something in the back of my mind links these two, but I cannot remember the scam just at the moment. Two young women, pretty in their aprons with large money-pockets, are calling out to passersby, with particular interest in well-to-do
farang
families with that wide-open look which comes with one’s first arrival in the exotic East. Now I remember the scam and smile. When the young women take no notice of me, I go to a cathedral-shaped cage which is the prison of a particularly vivid crimson and yellow parrot, lick an index finger, and start to stroke the crimson crown on its head. That gets their attention real quick. “I am Sonchai,” I say, before they have a chance to scold. At the same time I hold up my index finger, the end of which is now slightly crimson. The older of the two whisks me through to the back of the stall, which is shut off from the front by a tarpaulin curtain. The doorman, wearing