“Seventeen thousand baht.”

“Seventeen?”

“You want me out of the way with my mouth shut, right?”

“Right.”

In the store the Monitor starts into an arcane argument with a young shop assistant about the latest version of a game called Final Fantasy. The clerk, a boy about fifteen with ring-riveted eyebrows, shows disdain. It seems he favors Dragon Warrior VII, and even Paper Mario, rather than Final Fantasy, a position the Monitor cannot relate to. “Are you kidding? Paper Mario better than Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy is awesome.”

A shrug from the boy. “Look, I work here, what do you think I do all day? I play the games. What do you do?”

“I’m a cop.”

“So, how would you be at the same level as me? I’m telling you, DWVII is more awesome and you get a hundred hours.”

The Monitor is seriously nonplussed. “What’s the ending like?”

“Awesome.”

“What about shoot-outs, what’s the best in your opinion?”

“In my opinion? How can you do better than Unreal Championship. The guns…”

“Awesome?”

“Awesome.”

“How many games do you throw in with the machine?”

“Usually five, but since you’re a cop, you can have ten.”

The Monitor explains to me that the selection is going to take some time. “What about porn?” he asks the shop assistant.

“We have everything. What do you need, straight or gay? S &M? Lesbian? Whips and candle wax? Gang bangs? What race, farang, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Latino?”

“Latino? What is Latino porn like?”

“Awesome.”

The Monitor gives me the nod and allows the shop assistant to take him to one of the booths where a PlayStation 2 is already set up. I watch while the clerk loads a disc and the screen immediately shows a dark-eyed beauty naked on a park bench somewhere in Latin America. One by one muscular young men arrive color-coded in blond, black and auburn, no doubt to make them distinguishable. The Monitor fast-forwards like an expert, freezing moments of penetration which he examines with the eye of a connoisseur before continuing, discarding all padding. He is done with Latino porn in less than five minutes and the clerk loads the more serious entertainment of Dragon Warrior VII. The Monitor is immediately absorbed and seems to impress the clerk with his swordplay. The clerk returns to me and I pay for the machine. Outside the FBI is waiting in the car. She says: “That easy?” I nod. There was something akin to real intelligence on the Monitor’s face when he was doing battle with the dragon. I think there must be some cultural moral in that, but Jones never appreciates those kinds of thoughts. “What is he watching?”

“Latino porn and Dragon Warrior VII.”

“D’you think he is someone from humanity’s immediate future?”

“How is it you can say things like that and I can’t?”

“Are we going to have another one of those arguments?”

“No.”

“How did you explain to the Monitor the reason why you wanted him out of the way?”

“I let him think I was going to fuck you.”

“Doesn’t your Buddhist code stipulate that you’re not allowed to tell lies?”

“There’s relative truth.”

“Want to make it absolute?”

“We’ve been through that. We’re culturally and spiritually incompatible.”

“Meaning my abrasive American personality turns you right off, huh?”

“You are an excellent agent.”

“How about if I were to soften up? I hear Johnson’s baby oil can help in these kinds of situations.” She turns away from my paranoid gaze with a smirk on her face. “It’s the protocol,” she says to the window, “information-sharing. Your Colonel is pretty selective, but then I guess so are we.”

At the end of the waterfront strip we veer off to the left, then to the right. Halfway to Jomtien Beach, we take a left down a private road belonging to an upmarket block of condominiums. It’s upmarket for Thailand, anyway. No one has bothered to repave the road since I was last here a few years ago, and we have to sit and wait in the car for the security to come and open the main gate.

I have timed the journey, taking the likely traffic problem into account, so that we arrive at about noon, when all good Russians are somewhere between sober and drunk. It is 12:12 p.m. when we reach the penthouse apartment on the thirty-seventh floor of the condo building and I press the buzzer. I agonized over whether to call ahead or not and finally decided not to. If Iamskoy is compromised with a half dozen Siberian women without visas, or who have overstayed their visas, or are obviously on the game, he might be that much more willing to talk. A lot will depend on how drunk he is, though. Too drunk and he will pass out, the way he did last time. Too sober and he’ll be uptight, too far into himself with his Russian melancholy to communicate at all.

I think I might be in luck because a woman answers the door. She is about twenty-six, dyed blond hair, Caucasian, thick lips and a wolfish look which she clearly believes to be irresistible. She is wearing a black dress which comes an inch or two below her crotch and reveals a lot of cleavage. Her perfume is not up to my mother’s standards, but then I don’t think this woman has spent much time in Paris. She looks blank and about to close the door on us when I flash my ID.

“Andy,” she calls without anxiety. Instead of Iamskoy another woman appears in shorts and T-shirt. Then another. A fourth is dressed in a long nightgown done up firmly at the neck. “Is this a bust?” the first woman asks, more with curiosity than concern.

“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I want to speak to Andreev.”

Eventually Iamskoy appears from among the small crowd of females. He is tall and gangly and has kept most of his hair, which makes him seem younger than the fifty and some years he has spent in this body. He does a double take, then grins broadly. I think he has absorbed just the right amount of alcohol when he says: “Sonchai! So long it’s been! Come in, my good friend, come in.”

I’m checking Jones’ face as we enter, thinking she’ll be surprised, because apart from the collection of women this is not like the home of a pimp at all. It is very untidy and a major contributor to the untidiness are the books. They are everywhere, on shelves on the walls, on the carpet, stacked up in corners, under the legs of collapsing armchairs.

Jones is fairly wide-eyed, but mainly because of the women, who seem to be unnerving her with their glares and snippets of harsh-sounding Russian. In my humble opinion Jones is a lot more attractive than any of them, which could explain the glares. I don’t think she has seen the books at all, so I point them out. “Andreev is the most obsessive bookworm you’ll ever meet. Look at them! French novels, Russian, American, Italian, but that’s just light reading. Physics is his subject. He still keeps up with the latest developments, right, Andreev?”

This is not a diplomatic question on my part. His expression turns to bitterness for a moment, then he recovers and puts a forgiving arm around me.

“Thais are actually not sensitive at all, they just have this way of covering up through ritual politeness,” he explains to Jones. “If you cut away the wais and the other formalities, you find a people who really don’t give a damn.” His accent is thick, the grammar perfect.

“I think I’m finding that,” Jones says. She’s looking at the books now and, as I expected, warming to Iamskoy, whose eccentricities are so much more comprehensible than my own. She has read books about this stereotype, perhaps seen him in movies. Gently: “Are you really a retired physicist?”

“Unemployed. Sacked. Kicked out. Let’s not mince words. The boot was looking for me even while Gorbachev was in power, that world-class loser. It got me right up the ass when the economy collapsed under the terminal drunk Yeltsin. We pick our leaders, we really pick them.”