Bangkok Haunts

on the screws. Why did you disobey orders?”
    Looking away: “Who trusts anyone in this town?” A pause, then: “I didn’t think about it all that clearly. Like you say, I was looking for leverage.”
    “You took a great risk for an illusory security. Fear? Yes, I can see how that might work. Perhaps you were too used to her tantrums, her shifts of plan, her sadistic way of playing on your heartstrings. Yes, I can see how the revelation that you have kept a life-threatening record of her performance with a
jao paw
might swing things your way at a crucial moment in time. And there was the Englishman too. I guess she must have been blackmailing him?”
    He shrugs. “Some yuppie jerk who kept his brains in his dick. No great challenge. Especially not for her.”
    I place a finger against my nose, not for the posture but because I’m torn between two paths. I know the Englishman has twice been to look for him at his apartment over the past few days until one of the guards divulged that Baker was in jail. Instinct chooses reticence. I cough and change the subject. “The
jao paw,
though—he was different?”
    He almost sniggers. “I’ve never seen her even slightly nervous before. She was with
him,
though. You saw the clip. She pulled out all the stops for him. I’ve filmed her working a hundred times—I never saw her perform like that before.” Giving me a suddenly less fearful look: “Send me down. I’m not buying into your game. You can’t scare me the way he can, whoever he is.” His jaw is set, his mind made up.
    What I have to say next will cost me a lot, but I find I don’t have a lot of choice.
    “She wasn’t a woman, she was a disease,” I say, still pacing, “a disease that infected the blood of half the men she ever serviced.” He raises his head to stare at me. “In her hands your body was a penny-whistle that she could play anything on. But it wasn’t what she did to your body alone, it was what she did to your heart—right? She knew how to set it on fire. She was an addiction worse than crack, worse than
yaa baa
—worse than heroin. Isn’t that the way you put it at our first meeting?” He seems to be daring me to carry on. I pace the cell, allowing my anguish to show. “How did she do it? Is the sex instinct in men really so all-powerful? Or are we talking about something else, I ask myself, something even more fundamental? Had she discovered something most women are only vaguely aware of? Had she found a way of suggesting, ever so subtly, that she could cure even the base anguish of being alive? That between her thighs you would find the peace you crave? That she actually
understood you
? The holy grail, in other words, that no man ever really finds?” I pause to stare at him. “Was it really the sex, Dan, that hooked you, or was it the surprising, uncanny way she had of soothing you, as if she understood your problem?”
    He is staring at me in amazement. Perhaps I should stop here, but once you’ve started on the path to crucifixion, you may as well suck it all up. “Of course, the final experience was the very opposite of that. What you got was a lethal dose of heartburn after all, when you realized she’d been playing you along like the top-notch pro she was, right? How sorry are you that she’s dead?”
    His features have quite altered. Malice has returned to his eyes. “So it
was
you. I figured it might be, but it seemed too much of a coincidence. You’re that cop who fell for her like a sack of potatoes?”
    “I want to find the people who did this, Dan,” I say, avoiding his gaze. “Even if you were an accomplice, you were pretty minor. There’s money and organization here, Dan, way beyond anything you’re capable of. I would bear that in mind when the time comes to prosecute. I could probably make sure you didn’t do more than five years, and I’d try to make sure it was somewhere, shall we say, survivable? With luck you would even be able to avoid rape, HIV, and tuberculosis.”
    With sudden contempt: “You don’t know what you’re asking. The interview’s over.”
    He turns away, so I have to go up to him to twist his head around. “He hasn’t come to see you while you’ve been down here, has he?” To his look of blank incomprehension, I add, “Of course, you didn’t expect him to. Strange, though, don’t you think? You’re on excellent terms with a Brit called Tom who dresses too much like a lawyer not to be one—unless of course he’s