“Your mother is brilliant, and she did it all for us. Just think, we can send Pichai to an international school, he’ll speak English without an accent, he’ll be a famous surgeon just like he wanted to be last time but couldn’t because his family was too poor. And if I have another baby we’ll be able to use international-quality hospitals, not that stupid pediatrician who couldn’t get the milk right so we had to put up with Pichai screaming with colic every night. And we’ll be able to buy a house in a gated community, no more worries about security.”

“You and Nong have already accepted on my behalf, haven’t you?”

She beamed and made eyes. I looked pointedly at Pichai. “It’s okay, my sister is coming back from the country this afternoon. She’s promised to take care of Pichai for a couple of days. We’ll have the night to ourselves.”

It was sexual coercion of the most despicable kind, of course. Chanya thought so too and was proud of it. After I came for the third time (actually, I didn’t really want to come three times, but she was on one of those missions to prove she was as good as she used to be; I was quite sore afterward, but I didn’t say anything), she said with undisguised triumph, “Was that a yes?”

“Honey, I don’t mind risking my life-”

She put a hand over my mouth. “I know you’d die a thousand times and commit a thousand crimes for us, but that’s not what we want of you, Sonchai. Being a consig-ee thing will be safer and better paid. Everyone thinks you’re his consig-ee thing anyway.” An utterly frank look: “Sonchai, since we’ve had Pichai I’ve grown up. In the country there are a thousand ways to be happy, but in the city only one: money. I can’t bear the thought of Pichai turning into some dope dealer, running all over town doing yaa baa-like you did with him in his last life. It’s very sick, but for his generation of boys it’s going to be education or drug running. Just as for girls it’s education or prostitution. Globalism and capitalist democracy aren’t going to allow anything in between. What are you doing?”

I was waving my right hand while pinching my thumb and forefinger together. “Waving an invisible white flag.”

As I recall, at this point we all sat back and waited to see how my Colonel would use me in my new capacity: what deeds of derring-do could possibly justify a quarter-million baht a month? It seems that Vikorn had it all worked out.

Or had he? I’ve witnessed so many brilliant strategies of Vikorn’s over the years that I’ve come to understand something of the nature of his genius: improvisation. His plans tend to be pretty general ideas designed to best his archenemy, General Zinna of the Royal Thai Army, which can be adapted to whatever circumstances occur on the ground. I don’t think even Vikorn ever contemplated anything as bizarre as a Tibetan named Tietsin.

It was at least a month since my appointment as consigliere to our cop godfather, and I’d even drawn my first paycheck, which amounted to the equivalent of thirty times what I was earning doing much the same sort of job without the title, when Vikorn’s black-hearted secretary, Police Lieutenant Manny, called me. I was sitting at my desk feeling guilty that I was so much richer, all of a sudden, than all the other straight cops; except there weren’t so many of them, so there was no real justification for the guilt, and I was simultaneously wondering if I’d inherited the farang disease of self-recrimination from my long-lost GI dad. But I realized I had to do something to earn my dough, even if it was illegal and bad and likely to land me in the drug traffickers’ hell for a couple hundred years. (A Sisyphic adaptation: you are forever pushing your rock up a hill toward the gigantic syringe at the top; just as you’re about to grab the smack, your strength gives out and you and the rock are at the bottom of the hill again; and that’s only for small-time dealers-I didn’t dare think what happened to heavy traffickers.)

“Get up here, the boss wants you,” Manny said.

I knocked somewhat peremptorily at Vikorn’s door, waited for his “Yeah,” entered, and found him standing at his window with an expression on his face I’d never seen before. Quizzical doesn’t quite describe it; he seemed to be suffering from the exquisite dilemma of deciding whether or not to believe in his undeserved good luck. He turned, stared at me, shook his head, and went to his desk without a word. I shrugged and sat opposite him without asking permission. For a long minute I was staring at the picture of His Majesty our beloved King that hung above a poster all about the evils of police corruption (which Vikorn was inexplicably fond of, perhaps because it showcased the source of his wealth and was therefore a comfort in times of stress).

“I’ve just had a call,” he finally said.

“Yes.”

“It’s the weirdest thing I ever heard of. Really the weirdest.” He seemed unable to develop the conversation further for a moment, the weirdness was too overwhelming. Finally he said, “The phone call was from Kath-mandu, in Nepal.”

Now I was starting to get a sense of what he meant. No one would dream of calling Vikorn on a matter of law enforcement, so who the hell from Kathmandu would want to talk to him? “The caller, was it a Thai or a Nepali or a farang, a he or a she?”

“None of the above.” He grinned. “It was a Tibetan who claimed to be a kind of lama. You know about this stuff, that’s pretty high up, isn’t it?”

“Spiritually at the top. The Dalai Lama himself often says he can’t match his lamas for technical accomplishment-you know, like living on a teaspoon of rice in a freezing cave for fourteen years while meditating naked in the lotus position and making purple rain. Lamas are those kind of guys.”

“But he could speak some Thai. Not well, in fact pretty badly, but somehow educated. Like he’d learned it all from tapes or something.”

A Tibetan lama who speaks Thai? That still wasn’t half as weird as a Tibetan lama who would want to speak to Vikorn. “What did he say?”

A frown passed over my master’s face, and he shook his head. “He said a lot.” He stared at me. “He knows all about us. He knows what we do. And he knows about the problem I have with General Zinna-our permanent feud. And he made an offer.” He looked up at me. “An offer which, if it’s real, we can’t refuse.”

“What sort of offer?”

“An offer to put Zinna out of business and allow me to clean up not only on the retail side, which we have pretty much under control, but on the supply side too.” Here came the crunch, and he took the moment to check my face. “He offered to solve all of our supply-side problems-all of them, transportation from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Bangkok.”

I shook my head. “So, it’s just someone trying to get a piece of the action while dealing in fantasy. You haven’t been able to solve your supply-side problems for thirty years. How could some religious fanatic in the Himalayas help?”

“I know, I know. So did he. That’s why he’s offering us first choice after demonstrating his credentials and effectiveness. If we say no, he’ll sell his services to Zinna.”

“This doesn’t sound like a spiritual personality.”

“If he was genuinely spiritual, he wouldn’t be of any use to us, would he?” Vikorn scratched the stubble under his chin. “But when I say he knows all about us, I mean it. He knows about you. He mentioned you. He wants you on the team. You are the only reason he is favoring us above Zinna. Buddha knows how he got his information. Anyway, he’s shrewd enough to point out that if we force him to go to Zinna, Zinna will get so rich he’ll be able to wipe us out in five years.”

“How do we know this isn’t some hoax, maybe by the anticorruption squad?”

“By following his instructions, which aren’t too difficult.”