Bangkok Haunts

compassion we show, not by the extent to which we’re bent by market forces.”
    I know she’s right, but I don’t want to talk about it right now. I hand over the keys, tell her how much beer and spirits I’ve ordered, and kiss her goodbye like a sad but dutiful son. Once out on the street I realize how nervous I am about visiting Damrong’s apartment again and think about calling my assistant, Lek, to come with me; I decide to be a
farang
-style man, though, and vigorously suppress the quaking in my stomach as I stroll down Soi Cowboy, where the girls who sleep upstairs at the bars are emerging in jeans and T-shirts, hungry for breakfast and digging into food from the stalls that line the street at this time of day. I emerge into Soi 23.
    There are plenty of restaurants down at this end of the
soi,
catering to every Western taste, and a lot of cooked-food stalls catering mostly to Isaan tastes; almost all our working girls come from the poor north and never get used to Bangkok cooking. Farther along, past the Indian embassy, it’s mostly apartment buildings, some of them built with Soi Cowboy clientele in mind. Damrong’s, though, is of the clinically clean, no-nonsense style designed to attract middle-income locals. On the other hand, since the owners of the units are almost all Thai, quite a lot of attention has been lavished on the guards’ uniforms: white jacket, crimson sash, Turkish pantaloons, white socks, dress shoes, and a bijou cap with shiny peak. With that kind of sartorial elegance elevating ego, the guy at the door doesn’t allow himself to be too impressed with my police ID and takes a while to write down the number before he calls an equally overdressed colleague to take me up to the twelfth floor. In the lift the guard tells me the reason they broke into the apartment a few days ago: an endless string of men, mostly
farang
and Japanese, had been calling the desk downstairs to say they were worried they couldn’t get hold of her. It wasn’t like her to spurn business. When they broke down the door, they found the body.
    He lets me into the apartment using a key card but won’t enter himself. He feels no embarrassment at fessing up to a ghost phobia. He even looks at me a little strangely; maybe it’s because I’m half
farang
that I’m prepared to cross the threshold all alone?
    I close the door behind me and reexperience the same sense of desolation I felt on my last visit. I’ve been here many times before, of course, when the heat of passion had the power to turn the white walls rosy. Even then, though, I half notice the barrenness of the place. Every prostitute I ever knew owned at least one stuffed toy—except Damrong. There were never any pictures of her either, which is quite egregious in a beautiful woman.
    They found her naked on her own bed with a bright orange rope about a centimeter thick still twisted tightly around her neck to the point where it was half buried in her flesh; I have to screw my courage to the sticking point to enter the bedroom.
    A hundred clips of frantic, uncontrolled lovemaking fill my head, producing a stark contrast to the silent, sterile, white room. She was always scrupulously clean; except when in the throes of passion, she confessed to disliking the messiness of sex. When I step to the bedside and look at the opposite wall, I see the elephant is still there. A photograph of a great charging tusker which seems to be bursting out of the plaster; it is the only picture in the whole apartment. When I asked her what it was doing there, as I frequently did after lovemaking, she would laugh and reply with flagrant sarcasm,
He reminds me of you.
    I don’t miss her cruelty, but the loss to the world of that unconquerable spirit comes hard, especially when there seems no evidence of it left. The stark white pillow lies on the stark white sheet, folded back and tucked under the mattress like a bandage. She favored hard beds, so the mattress sprang back into shape the minute they took her corpse away. No flowers, no wallpaper, no dirt, no life.
The clue is that there is no clue,
I mutter to myself, feeling Zen-ish; it’s true though, in a way. If anything, the kitchen is still more pristine than the bedroom. I open a drawer where she kept cutlery and remember that she, who entertained so many men here, only ever had one of anything: one spoon, one fork, one set of chopsticks. And yet she was not miserly. Unusually for a Thai working girl, she liked to pay