Bangkok Haunts

his one pal in the film industry in Tokyo, who had managed to make a feature film about a psychotic body piercer who murders everything that moves except his pet hamster, which he ends up dying for. The film had flopped, but so what? At least he’d made one feature film in his otherwise meaningless life. Yammy paid him a visit in the Shinbashi area of Tokyo.
    “Listen,” his pal said after five bottles of sake, “there’s only one way to make a film these days, and that is to find the kind of investors…”
    Yammy finished the sentence for him.
     
    Well,
farang,
I know you’ve guessed the rest, although it happened in Jap Time, which is to say that dear Yammy slumped into alcoholic depression for nearly a decade before he succumbed to the inevitable. To be fair to Yammy, he came very close to running a successful business operation, but like a lot of beginners in my country, he made the fatal error of choosing to buy from the army instead of the police. Worse, he bought his modest ten kilos of smack from Vikorn’s arch-enemy General Zinna, which, to cut a long story short, is why Vikorn had him banged up and had the boys produce a watertight case that will inevitably get Yammy the double injection. (We changed from the bullet last year in recognition of current fashions in the global execution industry; Buddha knows why, nobody ever felt the slug enter the back of the skull. It wasn’t a question of humanity, simply new-wave squeamishness. Personally I would much prefer hot lead in the cerebellum to a slow suck into the big sleep by chemical means. What d’you think,
farang
?)
    So, things were not looking so good for Yammy until five minutes ago. Here’s my heroic visit to him in his cell in Lard Yao (our biggest, holds nine thousand prisoners, built by the Japs as a concentration camp in World War II):
    Imagine a long hot ride to a tropical middle-of-nowhere. Suddenly a not-displeasing display of lush vegetation announces the beginning of the penitentiary’s extensive estate. Hold it, though—what is that terrible stench? Oh, that’s the raw sewage vat in which they make difficult prisoners stand up to their necks for hours, sometimes days. Not a great place to drown. Hold your nose, and we’re being patted down by the rock-faced screws and led to the visitors’ room, where we sit on a single wooden seat while they bring in Yammy in cuffs and leg irons: a slim, rather handsome Japanese in his midforties with an attractively receding hairline and the sullen determination of a true artist, in an age when true art is beyond the cultural pale. There’s no seat for him so he has to stand. I am delighted to be the bringer of fantastically good news and feel that I must be well in with the Buddha, since I am the instrument of his salvation. Imagine my consternation, therefore, when, after I have outlined in broad strokes Vikorn’s irresistible business plan, he says, “No.”
    “But Yamahatosan,” I say, “perhaps I have not expressed myself with sufficient accuracy. Let me be clear. In a few short weeks from now your case will come to trial. It makes no difference if you plead guilty or not—the evidence against you is overwhelming. And even if it wasn’t, Colonel Vikorn knows how to get a conviction. You will be sentenced to death, and while spending the usual few years on death row, you will be gang-raped by
farang
and thereafter deemed an unlucky pariah by the Thais, who will cut off your supply of fresh cockroaches, thus depriving you of your only source of protein. You will probably be terminally sick long before they strap you down and get you ready for the long needles—”
    “Stop!” says Yammy. “You can’t scare me. I’ve decided to kill myself.” He makes a samurai-like gesture with his left thumb across his lower intestine. “I’ve got the knife already.”
    “But Yamahatosan,” I say, “I thought I’d already explained, you don’t need to kill yourself. I’m here to get you out.”
    “I don’t want to get out. What’s the difference? You Thais know nothing of honor. I was going to kill myself anyway if I couldn’t make a feature film. If you let me out, what will I be?”
    “A well-paid pornographer.”
    “I don’t want to be a fucking pornographer.
I’m an artist.
”
    Flabbergasted, flummoxed, exasperated—and impressed—I fish out my cell phone to call the Colonel.
    “So let him be artistic,” says Vikorn. “He can use ten cameras at the same time if he