Bangkok Haunts

is now so fortified with his spiritual power, she has fished her cell phone from out of her costume and started calling the guests back before we’re out the front door.
    While we’re walking down Soi 26, though, in search of a cab, I’m starting to feel dizzy and have to stop at a café. Normally I don’t drink on duty, but I need a beer and order one. Lek orders a 7UP, then goes to a street vendor who is pushing his glass-and-aluminum trolley along the gutter. I watch while the vendor opens the hinged glass, stabs at a sour green mango, dunks it onto a cutting plate, and slices it up so fast his hands are a blur. Now he’s using the funnel end of the steel plate to slide the slices into a plastic bag. He chucks the first plastic bag into a second, into which he adds pink sachets of chili, salt, and sugar for the dip. The final touch is a cocktail stick with which to eat the mango slices.
    “What’s the matter?” Lek wants to know when he returns, chewing.
    I felt the blood drain from my face, and I’m sure my skin was gray as I sat down hard on a plastic seat outside the café. It’s a street that caters mostly to the housing needs of workers in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of
katoey
s around, a lot of
farang,
and girls in jeans and T-shirts on their way to work.
    “Death,” I say. “Every cop builds up a resistance from the first day on the beat. You can lose it, though, just like that.” I snap my fingers while he makes big eyes. He does not understand, and there is no way I’m going to confess to a shameful event of last night that the bust has brought back to mind. I swallow the beer quickly but fail to block the memory:
    I woke up with a jolt so hard, I could feel it in my joints. Chanya was my first thought, but she was already awake, staring hard at the ceiling. She only does that when she’s angry.
    “It was her again, wasn’t it?”
    I waited as long as I could before saying, “Yes.”
    “Sonchai, I don’t know how much of this I can take. I’d fight any living woman for you, but the dead? D’you know what you’ve been doing for the last half hour?”
    I was unable to answer.
    “You’ve been fucking her, haven’t you?”
    I turned my head away. “Yes.”
    “On and on. That’s the third time in as many nights. Then you came. You’re all sticky.”
    I didn’t realize. Now the whole dream came back to me. Except that it wasn’t a dream. It was a visit. I couldn’t move for trembling.
    With an effort my darling overcame her anger and went to fetch a damp cloth. She wiped me down as roughly as she could without removing surface skin. “A normal man has a real
mia noi.
You have to have a fucking dead one.”
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “This has been going on since you went to her apartment the last time, hasn’t it?”
    “I better have a shower.”
    “It’s the middle of the night.”
    I went out to the yard to hose myself down like an elephant. We couldn’t face each other this morning.
     
    I finish the beer and stare at Lek.
    “It’s the Damrong case, isn’t it?” he asks with that uncanny sixth sense of a
katoey.
I nod without meeting his gaze. “I want you to come to see my
moordu,
master, please?”
    Lek discovered his infallible seer about a year ago and has been trying to get me to meet her/him ever since. Lek is convinced that he and I have been circling around each other for hundreds of lifetimes, fulfilling various intimate roles for each other: mother/father, sister/ brother, husband/wife. What he’s particularly interested in finding out, though, is when I was last a
katoey
like him. It is a tenet of our Buddhism that all human souls go through the transsexual experience from time to time.
    “When I’m stronger, Lek,” I say, “not today.”
    While I’m paying for my beer and Lek’s 7UP, my cell phone buzzes with a text message. I fish it out, read it, then show it to Lek. It’s another from Yammy, the fifth this week:
    I’ve found a mule so I won’t have to carry myself. Please talk to the Colonel. I don’t think I can take much more of this. I must practice my art. Yammy.
    I groan, show the message to Lek, and put the phone away, only to take it out again because it’s bleeping. This time the message is from the FBI:
    You live in a magic-ravaged land.

19
    Nok ordered me to arrive after eleven P.M ., when the Parthenon would be at its busiest. The sofas are all occupied by men in dark suits with two or three overdressed girls