The Bangkok Asset: A novel (14 page)

Now a drum roll while the presenter unwraps the lab results: “DNA does not lie, ladies and gentlemen: the man you see on the video screen over there is…
not
the father.” Astonishment and incredulity from the audience (
Man that bitch can act! Sure had me fooled
). The guilty mother collapses prone on the stage, sobbing her heart out: there goes the child support. Voyeurism that ancient Rome would have been proud to indulge at the Colosseum. At the bottom of the video clip:
Know the Father, it’s YOUR right.

After the clip came the demo: you send for the package, it arrives within days wherever you are in the world. There are two envelopes and a number of swabs like Q-tips. You take one of the swabs and roll it around inside the cheek of the putative father, then you take another and roll it around inside the cheek of the child. The envelopes are clearly distinguished with capitals, one with an enormous
PF,
the other with a
C.
Naturally, you need to make sure you put the right ensalivated swab in the right envelope; this is emphasized three times. Before you send off the envelopes you pay the fee using a credit card. In my case I sent off to Know the Father for three packs, just to be sure. Swabbing would be a cinch, since all three suspects were supine on hospital beds and not in a position to refuse. Anyway, at my age there was no risk of a claim for child support, and none of them seemed to be in long-term relationships, so they had nothing to fear. Best to do it while they were unconscious, though, just to be on the safe side. I took care to use Chanya’s PC and her e-mail account to order the kit.

M
y mother was slightly drunk by the time I arrived at her bar. She, who rarely drinks during the day, sat at a table where four empty bottles of Chang beer stood like soldiers and she was sucking at a fifth when I walked in. A Marlboro Red was sending a spiral of blue-gray smoke up from an ashtray. She was still a good-looking woman, but for me, right now—well, this might have been the first time she looked old.

She threw me a guilty look when I entered. That in itself was a first. She brought me up in the old way: I owed her my life, period. Any transgressions by her were automatically discounted by that unbeatable trump. Like most Thai kids, I took in this subliminal message without argument. Now she looked guilty.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Tell me about him—all of him,” I said.

She pulled out her smart phone to call her driver. “We’ll have to do it at my house.” She waved a hand around the empty bar. “It would be too depressing to talk about it here.” We sat in silence together while she finished her beer. A few minutes later we heard a horn outside the bar.

Nong’s Mercedes is large, black with tinted windows. It was Vikorn who insisted on it: a gangster’s chariot would scare off most of the local mafia, especially since they would assume it was a gift from the Colonel. In the car I sit back to enjoy the sheer comfort of this masterpiece of German engineering; you hardly hear the engine, hardly notice the wonderful acceleration; what you appreciate most is the silent, gentle, seductive air-conditioning: it’s nothing like a Toyota Sienna. At the same time I’m thinking,
What really is going on?
Am I on track to find my father, or am I merely a pawn in that global no-man’s-land where international gangsterism meets geopolitics?

Now we were turning off Sukhumvit in to a narrow side
soi
that was unexpectedly lined with ficus and other trees, not to mention a lot of big houses behind high walls and gates guarded by CCTV cameras.

When Mama Nong had accumulated enough savings from her European tours, she bought this piece of land in downtown Bangkok. I vaguely remember a time of great excitement combined with extreme stress: somehow, without documentation and handicapped by an unblemished fiscal virginity—she had never paid tax to any revenue department in any country anywhere (she still has not)—she persuaded a bank manager to grant a small mortgage over the land, but, given the nature of her trade, she was not sure she could always meet the monthly repayments. Somehow she managed, and the purchase turned out to be shrewd beyond her wildest dreams. Over the past thirty years land prices in the city have shot up more than a hundredfold and my mother had no difficulty in mortgaging the quarter acre in order to build a house on it. Personally, I would have preferred an old-style teak structure on stilts with a general hanging-out area under the house, a big garden with a Bodhi tree or two, plenty of flowering shrubs, tropical succulents, and vivid plants with weirdly shaped blossoms. But Nong had been to America and had other ideas. I did get the big garden, the plants, and—a reluctant concession since it made her feel
bannock
—the Bodhi tree. The house, though, albeit on stilts, was essentially a reinforced concrete imitation of something out of American suburbia, with a giant swimming pool, the dead chlorinated blue mass of which was rarely, if ever, pierced by a human form—least of all my mother’s, who never swam.

You can take a girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. Quite simply, once the house was finished, she reverted, called some female cousins and childhood acquaintances to form a rotating circle of
puans
(friends) with whom she liked to lie on futons and gamble with cards for small stakes, smoking Marlboro Reds, sipping a modest amount of beer and rice whiskey, and sharing gossip that provided reportage in extreme detail of the private lives of fellow villagers whom she had not seen for decades and probably never would again. No hypocrite when it came to exploiting her wealth, as soon as she could afford to she hired a maid from her home village whose lack of initiative and low IQ made it easy for Mum to underpay her at the same time as keeping her cooped up in a small room next to the kitchen where she slept, ate, watched TV, and did the ironing. Fortunately Maymay, the maid, was also devoid of sex drive, for not only would the owner of the Old Man’s Club forbid any kind of hanky-panky on her private premises, but she would likely forbid it even in a short-term hotel on Maymay’s day off, for Nong was quite Confucian in regard to slave control. As I’ve said, though, my mother knew how to pick women, and the faithful Maymay generally spent her free Sundays in her room sleeping, watching TV, eating, and ironing. I had a strong sense that for the first time since my birth, Mum was about to drop her tough, indomitable front and share something of her inner life. I was right. She did and the memory is present and vivid.

When we reach her house we ignore the main entrance and instead use a gate at the side that leads to the garden. Maymay is there, standing still, facing the Bodhi tree: a pure soul in a religious trance, or an idiot with a vacant stare? Nobody knows. Nong calls her softly, though, to be on the safe side, and orders an ice bucket with a bottle of Mekong and some glasses, then excuses herself and goes into the house. She emerges a few minutes later in a baggy housecoat and slippers. She is as happy squatting as sitting on a chair; now she descends to a rush mat set next to a low table, sits cross-legged, takes out a box of Marlboro Reds, and lights up. After a couple of tokes she says:

“So you have questions. Where would you like to start?” I shrug. “The question you haven’t asked, which I expected you to ask—which you should have asked by now, Detective, is—?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t I cut his dick off when I had the chance?”

I splutter. The punishment to which she refers is less common than it used to be in Southeast Asia. Nong, though, in her younger years, was just the kind of Thai girl capable of exacting that kind of revenge from a man who did her wrong, the logic being that he would not repeat the error in this lifetime. “Okay,” I croak. “Why didn’t you?”

She stares out over her garden, sighs. “A child is born, the first thing you worry about is how to keep it alive, feed it, take care of it, live with it for the next fifteen years. You don’t worry about unimportant points of history.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“That it was just easier to let you believe the simple version—the version everyone else also believes. That way you wouldn’t grow up confused. All along Soi Cowboy there are women around my age who had
leuk kreung
kids with
farang
men who disappeared as soon as they fell pregnant. All those women were on the game at the time. It was just easier to let you see it that way.”

“I don’t follow.”

She nods. “Naturally. That’s the whole point. If you can’t follow now, after fifteen years as a cop, how would you have been able to follow at age seven, or ten, or even fourteen? And after that there was no point, you were off having sex and stealing cars and doing drugs—you’d lost interest in your personal history. Like all teens you were only interested in your personal present.”

“Will you just get on with it? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Think about it. I had only just started in that bar in Pat Pong. The
mamasan
was going to hold an auction for my virginity, as was the custom. She expected to make a fat profit, half of which she would share with me—or one of my uncles would have killed her. It was that kind of arrangement. Considering my good looks, she was going to ask one hundred thousand baht—there are always men with a virginity fetish willing to pay that kind of money, not all of them Japanese. Then your father walked in. Fresh-faced, tall, handsome to die for, weirdly innocent, on five days R&R from Vietnam. He’d never hired flesh, least of all taken part in an auction for a virgin. He wanted me, though, without actually realizing what wanting me might mean. Just like America had to save the world from communism, so he just had to stop the
mamasan
from selling me, and the only way he could do that was by buying me himself. I’d never seen a man in such a state. All I did was sit with him for an hour, holding his hand, wondering when he was going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, while his face went through all those weird moods: you know, when men have the hots and feel guilty? He kept eyeballing me and telling me very earnest things in English which I couldn’t understand. All I could think of was how big he was and if his dick was in proportion, it was really going to hurt and maybe I should send out for some painkillers and K-Y Jelly in advance.”

Her cigarette has gone out. She lights another and contemplates her garden.

“He certainly seduced himself, though. By the time he was through with the eyeballing he was sobbing his heart out. He found another girl to interpret and said he’d never set eyes on a woman so perfect in body, face, and soul. Buddha knows where he got the
soul
part from. I think he was blown away by my being a virgin—it hit him in some special place. He told the
mamasan
that if she would only hold off for a couple of days, he would find the money. He went into the big performance and the
mamasan
agreed to wait for him to come back with the dough: there weren’t any immediate offers for my body from other customers at that price. So a couple of days later he’s borrowed the money, most of it from Bobby da Silva, his best friend. Now he pays the
mamasan,
and everyone, including me, assumes he’s going to take me upstairs to the cubicles, but when the
mamasan
tells him he can have a room without charge for an hour considering what a good customer he’s just become, he gets upset all over again. You have to bear in mind, Thais at that time had very little exposure to Western thinking. We had no understanding of the kind of man who would hire a girl just to gawp at her, like an exotic pet. As you know, the fee would have given him the right to have me whenever he wanted for a month afterward, any way he liked.”

Nong takes a long sip of Mekong and stares out over her garden. It is one of her contradictions that this consummate businesswoman never thinks of redeveloping her land to build an apartment building on it and make a big fat profit. She loves simply owning it.

“Even today it’s kind of unreal to me, how he wouldn’t touch me without my permission. But now I understand he was acting honorably according to his culture. There were times when I wished he’d just get on and screw me, instead of that sickly self-restraint they use to make themselves feel virtuous.” She sighs. “But that’s the way it was. After a couple of days, I had to ask, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ I couldn’t very well go back to the bar, after he’d paid all that money. And he had to return to the war.” She takes a toke on the Marlboro Red. “Screw me? Bust my hymen?—oh, no, that would be exploitative. So he has me undress in front of him ten times a day. He loves to take pictures, but he’s especially creepy about nude photos. He lets me see how he tortures himself about me. I am the sex toy he daren’t have sex with. In his fantasies he exploits every inch of my young body—but no sin is ever committed, apart from masturbation. Perhaps he wanted to be able to say that he never had sex with a prostitute. He even tells me that if I like, I can remain a virgin until the day we get married.”

I pause over my Mekong. “Married?”

Nong calls her maid again to ask for
that box.
Maymay returns with a container like a portable safe or a large jewelry box made of steel with a small key in the lock. I have never seen it before. Now she digs out a pile of yellowing correspondence and some old faded photos. She hands me one.

My mother, still very young, is standing wearing a sarong between two men. Her hair—and demeanor—are in the way of old Thailand, for the devastation of the late twentieth century had not yet ruined our culture. She is projecting fierceness and courage as she stands between two young American soldiers on R&R—one of them towering over her—who could have been on a jaunt to Coney Island to judge from their dumb grins. Bobby da Silva is a smooth-faced handsome young man with Latin features.

And now I think I understand the message Nong is trying to convey to me:
Imagine these three young people. Nothing they have done or suffered so far has really touched the innocence of their souls. If these two young men have killed, it must have been from a distance, under orders, with no real awareness of the darkness that is about to overwhelm them.

Now she chooses another photo from her collection and hands it to me. Two big male hands hold a newborn infant. There are signs that it was taken in a hospital, but the main point seems to be the date when I was born, which has been typed onto the picture in large characters at the top. Now she hands me another.

At first I do not understand the next photo. Unlike the previous two, it has been taken in haste, under battle conditions. With some effort I recognize the tall American in the first photo. His face is so distraught that even from this distance of nearly forty years I feel a pang that anyone of my blood should have suffered such a devastating blow. Now I can make out the scene a little better. There is plenty of smoke, but it is obvious that my father’s company has suffered a terrible defeat. Uniformed men are caught by the camera while they run to and from a helicopter whose tail can just be made out. And those two bloody objects in the foreground, with some of the cloth still clinging to them, are the legs of one Roberto Eduardo Santos Tavares Melo da Silva: there is a caption to that effect.

In the next picture, Nong and the tall American stand on either side of a wheelchair holding Bobby da Silva, minus his legs. On da Silva’s face there is a cripple’s look of extreme contempt for the world and its bitter disappointments. On Nong’s face is a grim determination that this, too, was something to be endured and overcome. I look up and stare at my mother, whose mood has changed now that she has begun to remember.