Bangkok Haunts

put my head under water, where the sound is still more haunting; a liquid pleading for a borderless eternity whose center is everywhere.
    She nods with a grave expression and picks up where the conversation left off. “Oh, yes. He’s smart enough to realize that even a whore needs something to go on if the affair is going to last six months. He’s quite good at sharing his heart.” Her left hand emerges from the water for a moment, caresses my chest, before giving up and returning to the water. “That’s the other side to him, what makes you forgive his rage when he fucks you. You have to understand, he’s no charging bull. More like a python waiting to strike.”
    “So, who screwed him up?”
    “I think Thai society did. His father was a Chinese businessman who operated on the borders between Thailand, Burma, Laos, and China.”
    “Opium?”
    “I think so. Tanakan didn’t go into specifics, I think his father traded whatever he could sell. Jade was one of his principal plays.” She waves a hand at the high shelves. “Tanakan is a world authority on jade.”
    “I see. And his mother?”
    “A Thai whore, of course. She was third or fourth wife, I can’t remember which. All the wives lived together in a big house in Chiang Rai, and he and his mother came last in the pecking order. He showed me a photograph of her. I thought that meant he was really serious about me, but when I checked with the other girls who had been with him, they told me he showed them the picture as well. She was incredibly beautiful. You can see it, even in the snapshot. One of those Isaan girls, you know?”
    I nod. The rare Isaan beauty, product of hardship like a wild rose growing out of a crevice, is one of those phenomena people in the Game often talk about. It is as if nature takes revenge on a thousand years of feudal repression by occasionally producing fruit of a quality no upper-class girl ever comes near.
    “According to him, she was hard as nails. She didn’t show a lot of affection, but she knew how to get enough dough out of his father to send her son to the best schools. Of course, everyone in his class knew what his mother was. He developed a need to win at any price.” She waves an elegant hand to take in the priceless vases on the shelves, the jade, the astonishing opulence. “He’s proud of that. He thinks his mother made a real man of him, a warrior. He doesn’t think she screwed him up at all, merely prepared him for reality as she saw it. Maybe she was right. How should a woman like that—like me, for example—bring up a boy, knowing what we know about the world? Should we pretend it’s all Disney?”
    “My mother was on the Game too,” I confess.
    She wrinkles her brow. “Somehow I knew that.”
    “Statistically, it’s quite likely. Prostitution has been a major industry in Thailand for three hundred years. Most family trees are dominated by courtesans.” I want to stop her needy hand from sliding any farther down my body, so I say, “Excuse me, I have to pee,” and get out of the Jacuzzi.
    The bathroom is at the far end of the room and crammed with shiny stainless-steel gadgetry. I examine the power shower for five minutes to kill time and control myself: that’s quite a stalk she was provoking. When I try to leave the bathroom, though, I find the door locked. Gently at first, then with greater ferocity, I pound on the door, kick it. Finally I ram it with my shoulder, and it bursts open. When I reach the Jacuzzi, she is floating facedown. Somehow the jets have turned themselves on again. At first I think she must be listening to the music.
    I squat down by the edge of the water, waiting for her to raise her head. Little by little the color of the water turns to a delicate churning rose. I turn wildly and run naked around the huge room. I can find no entrance other than the one we used, but this is a smart bedroom, with clever devices everywhere. At the pad near the door I press a rectangle named “water jets,” and the turbulence stops. A long diaphanous pink stream emerges from her throat in harmony with the infinite yearning of the Zen flute. I slip into the water to turn her over and examine the fatal gash just under her Adam’s apple.
    Fresh corpses are hard to maneuver. It takes me more than ten minutes of clumsy clutching and sliding before I can get her onto the side of the Jacuzzi. The best I can do is to lay her out respectfully with her arms crossed and to cover her with a