19
“What am I, an idiot?” The Colonel is drunk and has launched into his favorite topic—the difference between East and West—without answering my question.
“Don’t I know I’m vulnerable to an inquiry anytime? Don’t I know that some army bastard or muckraking journalist, or some a*shole who wants my job, can start digging anytime and find stuff—my boat, my little house up north, my handful of bungalows on Samui—and start pointing the finger? Wouldn’t I be happier with less assets and more peace of mind? Why d’you think I keep that stuff where everyone can see it, when I could just sell up and put the money in a bank in Switzerland? Why?”
“Because this is Asia.”
“Exactly! If I’m to do my job properly I have to have face. And my enemies have to see the war chest. You just don’t survive at the top of the greasy pole if you’re a humble little cop piously shuffling files around. Someone’s bound to defame you, and then what d’you do if you don’t have the money to pay lawyers? If you don’t have money to buy senators and M.P.s, how the hell are you going to defend yourself? How are you going to fight back at all?”
“Very difficult.”
“I envied you and your late partner from the start, because you guys made a decision never to rise in the force—how could you if you never take money? I admired it. You made no contribution to the common pot, but I put up with that. I defended you against those who said you’re not pulling your weight. I said: Look, every district needs at least one cop who doesn’t take money, we’re lucky, we’ve got two. We can wheel them out as shining examples, pure Buddhists, half monks, half cops. Besides, I said, Sonchai speaks perfect English, what a prize for a district like ours to show off to the foreign press. How many times have you spoken to the foreign media?”
“Hundreds.” Dozens anyway. Every time there’s a big enough scandal in District 8 to fascinate people overseas—the extravagant execution of those fifteen traffickers was a good example—the Colonel drags me out in front of the cameras to send my mug zinging around the international networks.
“And you do it brilliantly. What’s that favorite phrase of yours? I love it.”
“Whilst Thailand is a humane Buddhist society committed to human rights and the dignity of its citizens, the wealthier countries of the world must appreciate we do not always have the resources to meet those high standards of law enforcement which, frankly, are a luxury afforded only by those countries which industrialized first.”
The Colonel claps his hands in delight. “Brilliant. Did I ever tell you the Director of Police himself said what a good front man you are?”
“Yes, you told me. But it won’t get me a promotion. You told me that too.”
My Colonel sighs. “Sonchai, the difference between us, the only real difference, is that you are a man of the future, I am a man of the present. The present is still, unfortunately—” He cuts himself off to watch a girl who brings more Mekong, more snails, more sticky rice, a whole chicken fried in honey and chili sauce and shredded, two bottles of Kloster clouded with condensation. She wais respectfully, and slightly flirtatiously, to the Colonel. She is the most beautiful of the bar’s girls and the one who most frequently serves her boss, who waves a hand toward her and laughs before he continues. “The present is as it is. It’s not only your enemies you have to have face for, it’s your friends, too, perhaps even more than your enemies. What kind of district do we serve? Is it populated with upwardly mobile yuppies, Internet fiends, law-abiding sandwich-class lawyers, doctors and dentists?”
I miss my cue because I’m cramming chicken into my mouth with large quantities of sticky rice. The chicken is to supply nutrients, the sticky rice to absorb the alcohol and chili. I have never felt so surely on the point of being dangerously ill.
“No, it’s not. It’s a sewer and the rules which apply to sewer workers are not the same as those which apply to stockbrokers. My people would never forgive me for being as small as life. Of course, I do not fool a man of your intelligence, I don’t try to, I’m not a superman, but my people need a superman and that requires—” A yacht, a hundred bungalows, et cetera—I recite the list to myself as he falls into a rant. “There are gangsters who give millions to the poor, honest people who talk compassion and give nothing. Tell me, wise one, who do the poor prefer?”
“The gangsters,” I manage to croak. I’m so drunk now, the feeling in my stomach so lethal, that I’m afraid I’m going to have to make a dash for the toilet before the punch line. It comes just as I’m standing up. “Sonchai, I swear to you I know no woman of the description you gave to me. If I did, if she was as good as you say, I would have invited her for a week on my boat—you know me.” The old man grins and waves a hand to excuse me. As I rush toward the sign marked GENTLEMEN I look back once and catch an image of an attractive military figure brimming with health and contentment as he pats the backside of his favorite, who jumped to fill his glass as soon as I left the table.
I am a long time in the toilet, and when I return to the bar the old man has gone. It is like the Colonel to offer this subtle compassion, just when one least expects it; he has cut short the lunch which he was clearly enjoying and given orders for me to be taken upstairs to the room the girls use to service their short-time clients. I don’t want to sleep here, don’t want to look on this girl showing me the way up the stairs and see my mother twenty-five years ago, but I know I couldn’t make it out in the street. Fearing I might soil the bed in my sleep, I lie down on the floor in the upstairs room and fall asleep there, just like a whore. After such a banquet what would I dream of if not Paris?
At a big café near the Opéra, with a glass extension that took up three-quarters of the sidewalk and waiters even ruder and more arrogant than elsewhere in the city, my mother said: “If only he were a hundred years younger.”
Only a slight exaggeration. I had watched Monsieur Truffaut in the mornings as he crossed the great spaces of his Cinquième Arrondissement mansion flat in his paisley dressing gown, looking exactly like the undead. It was as if he’d left his mind in the grave during the night and did not catch up with the fact of being alive until after twelve o’clock, when he swallowed his collection of pills.
Nong reported that her bedtime duties were not heavy. He was one of those Frenchmen who had enjoyed a young female body next to him in bed all his life and saw no reason to give up the habit merely because his biology was failing.
It was hardly a strain to fit in with the old man’s rituals. Nong and I had the mornings to ourselves. The old man would spend the hour between 12 and 1 p.m. digesting his pills and the daily newspapers with increasing vigor as the drugs took hold, then we would march off to one of the world-class restaurants at which he was treated like the Roi-Soleil. Maxim’s, Lucas Carton, the restaurant at Fauchon, Le Robuchon; these shrines from the gospels of cuisine were everyday events for the bar girl and her son. With true Parisian discretion, the waiters neither nodded nor winked behind the old man’s back. They called Nong “Madame” in reverential tones, and I was “Monsieur.”
Truffaut’s afternoon vigor lasted long enough to give me an English lesson, interspersed with French, and here was revelation. To the old man the only reason for learning English was to win arguments with Englishmen and Americans, preferably without their noticing it. He taught the finer points of the language: the effective use of sarcasm, the acid two-word cap on a bore’s monologue, how to tell the other guy he was a jerk in a way that everyone except the jerk understood; it was the English of a fencing master, and I loved it.
He also taught pleasure. A lunch or dinner at a place like Lucas Carton was to be approached with reverence, as one would seduce a beautiful woman. The pleasure of food was more reliable than sex—a wink at Nong, ironic and self-mocking, which made her smile. “Paris is an old whore, but a five-star one.”
One took a stroll before the meal, then an aperitif at one of the pavement cafés. “Choose a place full of life, for god’s sake, full of intrigue and adultery. Then make your way slowly to the temple of pleasure.”
Everything about the old man told me what I was going to miss out on: urbanity, the cultivated conversation of the demimonde, that special sort of job which was an extension of one’s social contacts. Like the Colonel, whom I had not yet met, Truffaut was one of life’s golden ones, a member of a special tribe to which I knew even then I would never belong. There was something else about him, though, an authenticity to which Vikorn would never aspire. Every day after my English lesson Truffaut, in a state of rapture, read two pages from a book by someone called Marcel Proust. Nong noticed it too—the authenticity, not the Proust. I think she would have settled for twenty years younger, for they shared a passion for life cleansed of illusion. More than once I saw her reach out, but they both knew there just was not enough of him left. Oh yes, we could have been happy in Paris, and for several months we were.
The inevitable happened during our fifteenth week. In the middle of the night my mother felt obliged to call a number the old man had given her, and the emergency services arrived with oxygen and drips.
It was not a serious stroke, but it brought a small army of bequest-minded relatives, one of whom was delegated to tell Nong it was time for her to go. The old man had been persuaded to agree—he was hardly in a condition to argue—but true to his code, he insisted that mother and son return to Thailand in style on a first-class ticket on Air France, with whom he had family connections. An Air France official met Nong and me at the airport and during the flight we were treated as if we were Siamese celebrities, perhaps of a new generation of brown-skinned billionaire entrepreneurs. Nong groaned when we emerged into the muggy heat of Krung Thep and joined the taxi line. Going back to the bars was going to be especially tough after Paris.
I awake to a familiar ghost gnawing at my feet.