Bangkok Haunts

ex-wife, Mrs. Damrong Baker.”
    He seems uncertain how to proceed. A long moment passes, and then he comes out with it, in a kind of anger burst: “That bitch—what did she do now?”
    I raise my eyes and crumple my brow. “What did she do before?”
    A mistake on my part; my response was too smart by far. He quickly erases all expression from his face and shrugs. “I was married to her for a year. We lived together. You might as well ask what she didn’t do to destroy me—the list would be shorter.”
    I exchange a glance with Lek and nod at him. I know he is anxious to practice his interrogation skills—and his English.
    “Mr. Baker, how did you first meet your Thai wife?”
    Baker takes Lek in for the first time. There are not that many transsexual cops in Bangkok; as far as I know, Lek is the only one. On duty he takes measures to disguise his growing bosom and keeps the camp act to a minimum. When he talks, though, his body language says it all. There is shyness and female cunning in the way he does not look Baker in the eye. Baker experiments with an attitude of contempt, then thinks better of it after a glance at me. I jerk my chin:
Yes, you do have to answer that question.
    He grunts, and a native garrulity takes over. “I was early thirties, getting over a relationship, came here for a ten-day vacation, met Damrong, caught her disease.” I flash him a look. He waves a hand. “Just a manner of speaking. The disease in question used to be called passion. The only officially sanctioned form of happiness known to the West: being in love. What a con. I was gaga. Of course I sent her all the money I could so she wouldn’t rent her body to another man. Of course I believed every promise she made about that. Of course she lied her head off. Of course she fucked every dude who was willing to pay her price while I was trying to set up a computing business in Fort Lauderdale for us to live happily ever after. Of course I went through all the damned paperwork U.S. Immigration threw at me, of course I married her, of course she came to live with me in the States, of course it didn’t last a full year. Of course she’s the only woman who has ever reached me that deeply. Of course it’s because she had a better grasp of reality. Of course, of course, of course.” Waving a hand: “I’m Mr. Average
Farang.
I got caught the same way they all do, doesn’t matter if you’re French, Italian, German, British—whatever, it’s the same dumb story, over and over again. I don’t need to tell you that, right?”
    It seems to have been a genuine tantrum, with the usual moment of disorientation straight afterward:
Did I really just say all that?
He grinds his jaw with the determination of the righteous. “Yeah, that’s how it was with me and her. Mistress-slave syndrome. Want to know how I got along with my mother?”
    “No, thank you,” Lek says with a look of revulsion and a glance at me to take it from there. Estrogen doesn’t increase attention spans.
    “You sound very bitter, Mr. Baker,” I say with a compassionate smile which he disregards by turning his head away.
    “Comes with the territory, doesn’t it? Know any
farang
men in my position who aren’t bitter?”
    I shrug. “Cultural conflict has its casualties.”
    He turns to stare incredulously. “Cultural conflict? You mean between a Western man with his pathetic need for a safe womb to crawl into and a Thai whore looking for a gold mine to exploit? I guess you could call it cultural conflict if you were giving a seminar to anthropology students.” He scratches his head and shakes it. “Total fuck-up is what I call it. Of me, by her. Period.”
    I check Lek to see if he is as intrigued as me. I think he is. When a psyche is fragmented, it often experiments with different postures. What posture should we provoke now?
    “Mr. Baker, let me be frank. I have checked the national database here in Thailand and sought assistance from the FBI.” I smile.
    Knowing that I know causes a new Baker to emerge from the old. He snaps his head around to stare at me, then smirks. “The Bureau? They told you about her little scam?”
    “Only the criminal record part. I’d love to hear the details.”
    The smirk becomes a permanent fixture, proclaiming, I think, a defiant pride. “So I did six months’ jail time after remission, for pimping. She got deported. That’s how it panned out, but it wasn’t what I had planned when we married.” He pauses to