Bangkok Haunts

that, though, I want to check out Baker’s laptop. I tell Manny I’m going to the river on a special assignment for Vikorn and I’m not to be disturbed. I call the FBI at the Grand Britannia, who has just received the gadget she calls the can opener, then call my partner, Chanya, on her cell phone. She is just returning from the temple so she should be back by the time I get home.
     
    As it happens, both women have arrived at our little house before me. This is the first time they’ve been alone together for any length of time, and I’m curious to see how they’ve been relating. So far each has been in awe of the other. Chanya can hardly believe that a woman can cope with the world in such a masculine way and achieve such authority and power; the FBI still gapes at the effortless elegance with which Chanya walks, talks, and smiles; she really cannot understand why my true love isn’t in Hollywood making billions. Nor is she sure her serenity is entirely terrestrial.
Nothing bothers her,
the FBI complained after the first couple of meetings.
She has the sangfroid of a leopard.
And then, of course, Chanya is heavily pregnant, which mystic state the FBI seems to find disturbing.
    Sangfroid
translates literally as
luak yen:
same phrase, same concept. I thought about that. The two most important women in my life have
luak yen
to an unusual degree: my mother, Nong, and Chanya. The thought leads naturally to the Third Woman. Damrong possessed an effortless sangfroid: cruel, enticing, immense, a real leopard. But there was nothing petty about her. Both my mother and I expected her to act superior to the other girls when she first came to work for us, because she so obviously outclassed them; not so. She humbled herself, bought them presents on their birthdays, showed many kindnesses, gave free advice to those who wanted to ply their trade overseas, loved them. The general consensus was that she possessed
jai dee,
or good heart, in great measure. My stomach is fluttering because I don’t know how I’m going to react to scenes of her naked and performing for other men. “Hi,” I say, “I’m home.”
    At some level I was expecting them to be talking about me. It’s a little humbling to find them huddled together in the kitchen listening to the radio. The program is called
Thinking in Modern Ways,
and for Chanya listening to it has become a religious ritual. She is translating for the FBI: “You see, instead of just starting cooking and then looking for all the ingredients, you gather all the ingredients together first and put them in proper order on the bench. Now they’re talking about washing clothes. Instead of just putting all the clothes in a pile, you use three laundry baskets: one for whites, one for colors, one for delicates. See?”
    Chanya turns to Kimberley with a triumphant beam. The FBI has trouble hiding her confusion. She knows Chanya is no fool, so why is it necessary to have instructions on such primitive time-and-motion issues? “Great,” she says. “Efficiency makes life easier.” She’s relieved that I’ve appeared and looks at me expectantly. How to explain that a nation which has been surviving on intuition and custom for a thousand years doesn’t pick up Aristotelian logic just like that? The revelation that “A cannot be not-A” does not come naturally to undivided minds.
    It’s easier to change the subject. I go to a suitcase in the space under the stairs where I have locked Baker’s laptop. Both women stop to stare when I take it out. I bought a charger for it in Pantip Plaza so now I plug it into a socket in the living room. So they
had
been talking about me after all. The FBI has explained that the laptop will likely contain clips of Damrong performing with other men. The looks on their faces are a fine expression of puerile curiosity:
How’s he going to take it? How much suffering are we going to see?
We don’t have any chairs, so they huddle around me on the floor at the coffee table on which I have placed the computer. The FBI fishes a gadget out of her pocket that is about six inches long with a plug that fits into the USB port of the computer. The FBI switches on the gadget at the same time as pressing the boot button on the laptop. An LCD display on the gadget, which has space for about thirty digits, starts racing through numbers, letters, and punctuation marks at lightning speed. Eventually it stops at: {{jack***rongdam\\\29===forty. I never would have thought of