Bangkok Haunts

Club and was handpicked by Vikorn for her stunning visuals. Her excellent English enables her to understand Yammy’s stage directions—which, I am told, tend to be complex beyond the industry norm. Seeing a potential artistic rival, she does not immediately respond to Kimberley’s big and somewhat inebriated woman-to-woman smile. I leave the FBI to launch a charm offensive—she is clearly fascinated by the boys, the girl, the bed, the lights, and the cameras (well,
something
is making her lips curl lasciviously)—to go find Yammy, who apparently is taking a creative break in his office in back. I find him huddled over a bottle of sake.
    “Hello,” he manages from measureless depths of depression. “Come to make sure I don’t leave out the raw meat?”
    “Don’t make it difficult for me, Yammy. I’m only doing my job.”
    He gulps the rice wine straight from the bottle. “Listen, I have this fantastically surreal plot, with a cobra and a tiger cub, white kimonos, a Kyoto backdrop straight out of Hokusai…” Catching my eyes, he mimes futility with one hand and lapses back into despair.
    “And? What’s the problem?”
    “It’s so much more erotic with the kimonos left on, don’t you see? Sonchai, I’m begging you.”
    I shake my head in total sympathy. “He won’t go for it. Look, it’s not his fault—blame the consumer. The big respectable hotel chains won’t buy it if it’s not brutally obscene.”
    “I knew you would say that.”
    “Can’t you do both? Subtle erotic with the kimonos on, then the standard stuff with them off?”
    Shaking his head but resigned: “You lose aesthetic balance that way. It ends up like a dog’s dinner.”
    “There’s no point in my trying to persuade him. He’ll say it’s all about money.”
    Silence. Then: “I’ve been thinking. I’ve found a couple of investors in Japan. They’ll go fifty-fifty on a modest, fifty-million-dollar all-Nippon art flick. I just need to come up with the other half, twenty-five million.”
    “Yammy, we’ve been through this before. It’s not that he’s against you—you simply don’t fit the profile.”
    “So what the hell does a successful trafficker look like?”
    I gaze at him for a moment: neurotic, twitches like a horse plagued by flies, desperate and hurtling toward middle age, the unmistakable stamp of jail in the hollow of his cheeks, the hardness under the eyes. “Not like you, Yammy. Any customs officer would get the sack for not searching you on sight.”
    From experience I know there is no point sitting and trying to be persuasive. Yammy does everything in his own time or not at all. I return to the set, where the FBI is interrogating Marly.
    “I would have thought a woman like you would have done fantastically in the States,” Kimberley is saying with an ambiguous smile. “What happened?”
    “It’s not as easy as they make out,” Marly explains. “I did Third World Pathetic, I got a bleeding-heart eunuch. I did Thai Whore in a G-string, I got a geriatric on Viagra.” With a hint of aggression: “Why, what’s your game?”
    “Postmodern,” Kimberley says. “I got a dildo.”
    “We’re shooting in one!” Yammy yells as he exits from his office, suddenly oozing authority. Immediately Marly, Jock’nEd slip out of their dressing gowns and are now stark naked. Marly walks over to the bed and bends over it, careful to lean on her hands so her breasts dangle. “It’s okay, we can still talk,” she tells Kimberley. “It’s just a bum fondle.”
    Right on cue, Ed begins with the oil on her apple-shaped behind, as if polishing a Greek urn. “What are you looking at?” Marly asks the FBI, then casts a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, Jock. He’s amazing isn’t he? You wouldn’t give him a second glance if you saw him in the street, but he’s such a pro, the best in the business. He can do that even when he’s drunk. It’s like he’s got an electric inflator or something. And it
is
gigantic.”
    Kimberley seems to be suffering hormonal overload. Hoarsely: “Tell me, when you do this, d’you feel like you’re screwing the whole feminist matriarchy?”
    “No,” says Marly with a frown. “I feel like I’m screwing the whole Thai patriarchy.”
    Kimberley, nodding: “Even so.”
    On a signal from Yammy the FBI steps back. “Scene twelve, take one,” Yammy snaps. Marly immediately starts moaning. “Cut!” yells Yammy. “He isn’t inside you yet, honey,” he explains. “If