Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

be seen as pure evil, seductive emissaries of Satan. Well, looks like that Malay and those girls are going to be merrily rolling in it for the next few hours, after which all participants will retire satisfied and sleep the sleep of the just. I do not explain to Mustafa that in the Game women often prefer to share their labor—they may even see it as a kind of perk in that they demand extra for doing less. It’s more fun, too, if you have a friend or colleague to chat with in your own language while you’re working the john. For country girls there’s an echo from the rice harvest, when everyone has to pitch in, and there’s a lot of chatting and flirting and you tell jokes to pass the time, hardly noticing what your hands are doing. I think of the big dark Malay laid out like a rice paddy while the girls work him and discuss the dollar-baht exchange rate across his erection. I pity Mustafa, who so resolutely rejects the simple dance of life, the humor. At the same time I wonder how Mitch Turner, the confused American spy, took it all.
    There don’t seem to be any cafés with spare tables and chairs, not with any privacy anyway, so we end up in the lobby of our hotel, which has been transformed into a kind of anteroom for a gigantic brothel. Girls are sitting on all the sofas, and as we watch, dark-skinned young men with pencil mustaches approach one or another. They are different from farang in that the deal is done so quickly, usually within five minutes. No romantic buildup, more an Asian-style business deal. The woman is happy enough with that, since it might mean she can fit in more than one customer tonight. Some of the couples start immediately for the lifts, but most wander out into the street in search of a disco, where the young gallant can demonstrate his expertise in karaoke and the lady will applaud with adulation in her eyes.
    Mustafa doesn’t want to look at it, so we find an empty table in a corner. He still has some explaining to do, so I give him the silent treatment.
    “You are wondering why we took such interest in one individual, when there are hundreds like him in Thailand?”
    “Yes.”
    “You must ask my father for a full explanation. According to him, the farang Mitch Turner was a fascinating product of the West. He said that just as intelligence agencies like to take terrorist bombs apart to see how they are made, so we should look into the soul of this strange fish, this human bomb, to see how it was made. After all, he didn’t invent himself—he was a creature of his culture.”
    “His naÏveté, confusion, lack of center?”
    “All those things, but what most interested my father was his spiritual agony. You must understand that although my father is very learned, he hardly ever meets farang, especially not American spies. My father is a great imam, which is to say a connoisseur of souls. Mitch Turner interested him a lot. Until he met Turner, I think he doubted that farang had souls. When he saw what a mess Turner was in, what he called the ‘great howl of agony’ at the center of this man, he felt he’d understood why the West is the way it is.” A ghost of a smile. “It was as if he’d cracked a code and now could read the Western mind.” Staring into my eyes: “He told me he would never have believed it was possible for a man to be so tormented and still live, still function.” Excited now, sharing a passion with me for the first time: “He also said that without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to turn itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.”
    “He reached these conclusions on the basis of one specimen?”
    “Why not? True knowledge comes from Allah. It does not need scientific method, only a clue, a hint for the spirit to follow.”
    As he speaks, I note that he is watching the action in a totally