Bangkok Haunts

than king size, waits about ten yards away. What impresses, however, are the LCD monitors, some of them enormous, that populate the walls like paintings. I see there are plenty of closed-circuit cameras too. I guess that armed with a remote one could zoom in on genital activity, whether one’s own or someone else’s, from any point in the room. We exchange a glance, Nok and I.
    “This is Tanakan’s room,” she confesses, finally bringing herself to pronounce her tormentor’s name.
    I’d not heard her attribute any of the three private rooms to any particular member before; now that she has done so, many things clarify. I want to ask more, but she takes my hand to the edge of the giant Jacuzzi and starts to undress me. “We can at least bathe together,” she says. I want to refuse, but her tone has changed from erotic banter to sad and needy. When I am naked, she quickly strips herself, leaving her gown in a heap by the side of the Jacuzzi, and pulls me behind her into the warm water.
    “He brought you here often, didn’t he?”
    She looks away. “You’re so intuitive. That’s how you survive, isn’t it? Pure instinct. I believe you when you say you come from a poor background. Only the poor and people in jail develop such instincts.” She sighs. “Yes, a lot. At one time I was his favorite. He has a kind of clockwork lust. Each girl lasts almost exactly six months, before he dumps her and finds another.”
    “But I thought—”
    “I know what I told you. I have my pride. He was a sadistic bastard, but he was also”—she waves a hand—“incredible.”
    “Damrong took him away from you?”
    She gives me a sharp look. “It doesn’t work that way with the X members. The men call the shots.” A sigh. “I was coming to the end of my six months anyway. The
mamasan
told him about a new girl. I got the push the next day. But Damrong was very gracious about it, and she did give me half the money he gave her on her first night. A real pro and a good heart. It was a joke between us that she took my Saturday-night whipping for me.”
    Suddenly, without warning, the water jets all around the circumference of the huge Jacuzzi switch on at full power. My heart rate doubles, and Nok is in my arms, naked, wet, scared, pressing her face into my shoulder. “It’s okay,” I say. “We must have triggered a switch or something.”
    She clings to me for a full minute before I can disentangle her and set her down again. I have to let a few beats pass while she recovers. “You don’t know him,” she says by way of explanation.
    I let a couple more beats pass. “Six months is quite a long time to be intimate with someone. You must have talked about more than the price of massage oil.” Her pain is haunting and far more attractive than her standard seduction routine. I hold one of her fingers under the water, which causes her to flash me a glance. “You were in love with him, despite his sadistic tastes?”
    “He knows how to do that. How to make a woman have strong sexual feelings toward him. How to make her lust for him.”
    “A lot of men would like to know how to do that.”
    “With his money and power, it’s not so difficult. Little by little he takes over your whole life until there is nothing but him. You become obsessed with him, whether you want to or not. A lot of women like to be forced to focus. I suppose I’m one of them.” Looking away at the reclining Buddha: “I guess what makes it all bearable is feeling his pain, even while he’s hurting you. It’s a kind of twisted love, I suppose.”
    “Is that what happened to Damrong?”
    A wan smile. “No. She was different. She was stronger than him.” A quick glance at me, then away: “That’s why she had to die, isn’t it?” She suddenly decides to duck down, then rise up again with the water dripping from her body, as if she has been baptized.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “That’s why I’m here. I think Tanakan’s psychology is the key. You must have learned something about him.”
    “Wait,” she says. I watch while she gets out of the Jacuzzi. As with the exquisite vases and jade works, her body and limbs are in perfect proportion, just like Damrong’s. “Let’s have some music.” She goes to an electronic touchpad near the door, and a long, low note seems to emerge from everywhere. I recognize a Zen flute, with its long, dry, haunted yearning for infinity. She comes back to the Jacuzzi, smiling. She beckons for me to