Vikorn holds up his arms. In a tone of confusion he says, “No.” I wait for the coda. “Sure, I can get it, of course, but it takes time. Nobody moves money around like that these days. It’s unheard of. Forty million in liquid, or as good as?” He smacks his forehead. “I was expecting to receive the stuff in installments, a million’s worth here, two million’s worth there.”

“Can’t you sell something? What about your row of chalets on Phuket? Or that strip of prime riverfront property on the Mekong up near Nong Kai?”

These sound like desperate measures, but I am factoring in the great carrot Tietsin has dangled: the money and the power to establish total dominance over General Zinna, to literally wipe him out.

“It’s the wrong time to sell real estate. Anyway, you can’t sell stuff like that overnight. And I’m not even sure I’d get forty million. Everyone’s shifting to Phnom Penh for real estate, and Sihanoukville, on the Cambodian coast. Thailand has screwed itself by being standoffish toward foreign investors. Apparently Cambodia is pristine and wide open, everyone’s scrambling to get in on the ground floor. Then there’s Vietnam and Malaysia. There’s even a rumor the Laos Socialist government is about to collapse, or do a quick double shuffle into unrestrained capitalism-imagine the profit for those who’ve already invested there.”

I stand with arms hanging. “So, why not tell him he has to wait?”

“I did. Politely. After all, he’s potentially a huge business partner, and I don’t want to offend him. But he’s not happy. Can he really deliver all that dope next week?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why is he in such a hurry?”

I shrug. “He didn’t say. He just said his movement needs the money.”

Vikorn’s eyes sharpen. “What’s he planning, the invasion of China?” I do not say, I wouldn’t put it past him. “Have you been watching the news recently?”

“No.”

“Those demonstrations in India and Lhasa, led by Tibetan monks. A hundred of them blown away by the Chinese. That wouldn’t be anything to do with him?”

“I have no idea. I think it’s inevitable, they’re trying to embarrass Beijing before the Olympic Games.”

Vikorn looks at me. “Yes. I guess if you’re a Tibetan, this is your big chance. Now or never.”

“They don’t have never,” I say with one of those superior smiles he hates so much, “only now.”

“Get out of here.”

When I reach the door, he says, “That Australian mule, have you followed up on her yet?” It is not a question. It is an order.

Back at my desk I call Lek over to tell him to find a taxi that will take us to the women’s holding prison over the river at Thonburi.

I’ve told Lek very little about my trip to Kathmandu; he is fascinated, like any katoey, by the spiritual dimension.

“It’s because you’re so spiritual yourself that the Buddha gave you the chance to go up there,” Lek says in the back of the cab, pushing his black locks back with both hands. As usual when alone with me, he has taken the liberty of applying just a touch of mascara, using a tiny hand mirror. “You must be so thrilled to be called like that. If it were me I would have felt like a pilgrim on hajj.”

“Lek, please, you must have guessed I only went up there to do some filthy job for Vikorn.”

“But that’s how the Buddha works, darling, you must know that by now. Maybe you’re a tad too proud. You have to bend your knee.”

“Lek, I feel as dirty as a glass roof in Thonburi. I feel like I’m covered in shit, inwardly, like my soul has one tiny source of light left. The rest is so caked in corruption and degradation and guilt and bad karma, if I do one more bad thing I’m going to die, I know it.”

Lek turns to me to make a high wai.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because everything you just said points to a man on the threshold of nirvana. Normal people don’t think like that. Normal people don’t worry about their souls. Only arhats like you and ladyboys like me.”

I sigh and give up. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have one human being on earth who still believes in my integrity.

We sit in the traffic jam at the Asok-Sukhumvit interchange in silence while a kid with a broken windshield wiper and a face streaked with dirt makes a token gesture of cleaning the window on my side. I wind it down to give him a hundred baht, which is about ninety baht too much. Lek is shocked at first, then gives me a great beam when he connects the gesture to my spiritual progress. The cabdriver says, “You shouldn’t have done that. He’ll tell his buddies and they’ll all come and one of them will get hit by a car. It happened right here last week.”

“I didn’t do it for him,” I retort, to Lek’s delight. That’s one of the great advantages of Buddhism, by the way, farang: it’s not results-oriented. There’s no way you can ever work on someone else’s karma, only your own.

Vikorn’s influence at the women’s holding jail is less than at most men’s prisons, and we don’t get much of a reception from the governor. In Thailand female prison officers tend to fall into two categories: bull dykes and morally aware housewives who feel they have a Buddhist duty to fulfill. Khun Kulakon belongs to the latter category. She is also shrewd in the ways of gangsters. She lets me know that she has been expecting a visit from Vikorn’s camp and takes me aside to whisper, “If anything happens to her after your visit, there’ll be trouble. I’ll keep at Vikorn even if he takes out a contract on my head. I don’t care how you deal with this, just don’t waste her while she’s with me.”

I whisper back, “It’s not like that, she doesn’t work for us, she’s one of General Zinna’s mules.” She frowns at me. I feel a little strange, explaining mafia politics to her, but, piety aside, she’s nosy as hell and keeps jerking her chin at me to get me to talk. “A third party busted her. It wasn’t us, but Zinna is going to assume it was Colonel Vikorn. I have to try to get to the bottom of it before Zinna declares war again, and you know what that means.”

Khun Kulakon knows. She is of a generation that remembers very well the secret civil war between cops and soldiers that endured for decades and reached a climax up in Chiang Mai in the fifties with a shipment of opium that the Kuomintang brought down from the Shan States with the connivance of the CIA. The two sides hung in an armed standoff at the railhead with a train loaded with the drug, until the director of police made Buddhist peace by promising to take the opium and dump it in the sea. Nobody posed the crucial question until decades later, for fear of more conflict. When a journalist finally asked a retired senior cop, “Well, did you dump it in the sea or not?” the answer came back: “Yes, but there was a ship in the way.”

The governor casts a few inquiring glances at Lek, who, now I think of it, has never been to a women’s prison before.

I say, “We’re only here to talk. Maybe we can save her life. Buddha knows what Zinna will do if she looks like she’s going to talk.”

She checks my eyes and manages a slight smile. “Thank you, Sonchai. Anything I can do to help?”

“How is she taking it?”

“She spoke to her best friend on the phone yesterday.” Khun Kulakon shrugs. “Apparently, in Australian culture best friends have a special significance-deeper than family, I think.” She shakes her head. “It’s tough to watch these cases, even after all these years. She’s just a stupid girl with a great body who was brainwashed by her culture to think she deserved more from life than she was getting. Corporal punishment would be so much more compassionate, but farang have made it out of style. As it is, even if the King pardons her eventually, which he will, she’ll be a basket case by the time she gets out. But you can’t see psychological scars on TV news, so that makes it all okay.”