“Rosie, you have a Nepali visa in your passport. This interests me. I’d like to know more about your visit to Kathmandu.”

She shrugs. “It’s on the circuit, i’n’it? Backpackers go up there. Some go trekking, some go for the dope, most go for both. I don’t do trekking, myself.”

“You smoked dope up there?”

“Sure.”

“Where did you stay?”

“Why d’you want to know that?”

“Rosie, if you hold out on me I might not come back. I’m your big hope for an early pardon, Rosie.”

She gives me a fed-up kind of a look, as if I’ve prevailed upon her to sin against her will, but the sacrifice is not excessive. “The Nixon Guesthouse. Everybody knows it. It’s on Freak Street.”

“I thought nobody used Freak Street anymore.”

“It’s fairly extreme. A lot of sixties nostalgia. I’m old-fashioned.”

“I wouldn’t have put you down as nouveau hippie, Rosie. I think you had a reason to stay in such a place.”

She sighs. “Okay, so, it’s the place to go if you want business. But don’t ask me for names ’cos I haven’t got any. You just go there, you hang out for a while, you put a certain look on your face, you use body language-if you don’t dress like some clapped-out freak, if you put a bit of makeup on and show you know how to look respectable, but at the same time you hang out with that look on your face, sooner or later someone’s gonna come up to you and make a proposition. See, the word is, they have the safest circuits. The safest suppliers. I’ve met people been financing their travels for years that way, bought houses, flats, fast cars-I’ve spoke to them, seen the way they live in Sydney. That’s what I thought I was getting into, the respectable set. Now look.” She jerks her chin at the prison yard.

“They actually give you contacts in Thailand? And the choice between working for the army or the police?”

“Yeah.”

“And the people who come up to you, are they Nepali, Asian, Westerners-what?”

“You can’t say. See, it’s all rotating all the time. Maybe a Westerner will be up there for two months and he or she will do a lot of dealing for the main man and you’ll think the Westerner is an important player, then the Westerner disappears, goes home or goes trekking, and it’s someone else doing all the business, maybe an Indian man, or a Nepali woman, could be a Tibetan refugee-or a Thai. Course, you never meet the main man. Never. Nobody does. There aren’t even rumors about who he is.”

“There are Thais involved?”

“Sure, there are quite a few Thais in business up there, mostly in restaurants. And there are a lot of Tibetans looking for money. Not all the refugees are monks and nuns. Not all the monks and nuns are straight.”

I say, “Thanks, Rosie,” and try to slip her another thousand baht, but she stays my hand.

“Look, mate, there’s something you can do that’s important. Get me a little Chanel No. 5 makeup set? I know it sounds ridiculous, but just for me self-respect, mate, and I’ve worked out my own little hideout for it-it’s just soze I don’t feel like I’m going native, see?” I look around the yard, taking in the big Nigerians, and she catches my thought. “Don’t worry, mate, I ain’t gonna put it on in public. Only when I’m all alone at night. Look, look at what I got hold of last week, just in case. I’ve got to dream, mate, or I’ll end up like those two mad bitches over there.”

I like the healthy triumphalism on her face when she shows me a shard of a lady’s hand mirror. I tap her on the shoulder: “On yer,” I say, hoping I got the ’strainism right.

I ask Khun Kulakon’s secretary to call a cab to take us back to Krung Thep. Once we’re on the road, the obscenity of the women’s jail, and Rosie McCoy’s disintegration, weigh on both of us, though I suspect for different reasons. I pay little attention to the unusual number of times the driver looks in the rearview mirror, though I’m vaguely aware of his nervousness.

Lek, like most Thais, assumes that farang are a different order of being, like extraterrestrials, whom it is ridiculous to try to understand. Rosie’s performance has only reinforced this impression. The idea of committing a grave crime in order to have a better life and be a better person also is incomprehensible to him. In Thailand people become criminals because of bad karma from previous lifetimes; to actually choose, of your own free will, to blacken your karmic future without compelling reason seems quite Martian. I, on the other hand, understand only too well. I wonder how I would react if they told me I was to spend the next twelve years in a Thai jail?

“D’you think Zinna will kill her?”

“I don’t know. If he hears she’s lost control of her mind and her tongue, he’ll have someone slip her something to make it look like an overdose. Exactly what Vikorn would do.”

“Excuse me, I have to take a pee,” the cabdriver says, and turns off into a rest area near a clump of trees. I watch him walk toward the trees with a hand on his fly, then he starts to run. I react too slowly. The army truck that has been following us, an open-backed five-ton model used to transport troops, comes to a halt immediately in front of the cab, and suddenly we are surrounded by brawny young men in camouflage fatigues. An energetic fellow with lieutenant’s stripes walks toward us accompanied by a couple of kids-they are hardly more than that-holding assault rifles at the ready. Now they are pointing them at us on either side of the car. “Get out, please,” the lieutenant says.

I cannot help casting a glance at Lek. He and soldiers don’t mix too well. “Look,” I say, “I can guess what this is about. He doesn’t know anything. He’s just my assistant, hardly more than a cadet. Why don’t you let him take the taxi back to town?” The soldier looks closely at Lek, takes in the mascara, the long black hair, the unmistakable femininity, and leers. “Let him go,” I hiss, which only increases the leer; obviously the military mind has concluded Lek and I are lovers. They are going to have fun on the way back to base.

And so they did. By the time I’m standing outside General Zinna’s command suite in the military compound, my ears are ringing with Lek’s screams, including the unbearable: What have I done to offend you? prior to a squeal of pain. I decide to use the line on General Zinna.

He dismisses the two armed guards as soon as I’m shown into his office. He may be about five inches shorter than me and more than twenty years older, but there’s no doubt about how easily he would beat me in a fight. He possesses one of those enormous chests and outstanding musculature with which the Buddha sometimes compensates the short. I envisage him deciding what to be when he grew up and narrowing the short list down to two: army general or operatic baritone. Except he wouldn’t have considered the second. The irony of it all is his notorious lust for young men; but he belongs to that section of the gay community for whom erections are a kind of nightstick with which to beat the lover-victim, which makes it all okay, whereas Lek is all about love, hardly does sex at all, and is therefore despicable.

“What have I done to offend you?” I ask.

His hair is gray and so close cropped it is almost shaved; at his height he cannot help but strut. He stands up and walks around his desk, making the flagstones ring with his steel-tipped boots. When he is standing about an inch from me, he pokes my chest with one index finger, as if to push me over with it. Only the rage I feel on Lek’s behalf gives me the courage to grab it and turn it back. Instead of flinching he stares into my eyes, waiting to see if I will have the guts to break it-then what? Go on, his eyes say, make my day. I hurt him as much as I dare, stopping just short of breaking it, before letting go. I have to admit his pain threshold is a lot higher than mine. He looks at his hand curiously for a moment, then nods at me to sit down on a crude wood chair while he stands.