“Do women experience extreme passion the way men do?”

“Total psychic dissolution, identity annihilated, ego shot, not sure if you’re one person or two, no sense of security when you’re not in bed with them, precious little when you are? Sure.”

“And how does it end, usually?”

“The one who is suffering the most ends up with a simple choice: kill the other or get the hell out while you still can.” A quick look. “You’re a cop-you know better than most there’s no violence like domestic violence.”

Her harsh farang truth-telling stuns me for a long moment. I wasn’t expecting to come to the climax quite so early in the evening. I think maybe ten silent minutes pass before I can get it out:

“After that first night I made her swear she would not go with any John. She would just serve drinks and flirt, and I would make up for her loss in income, whatever it was. A classic case of a gaga John buying his girl’s chastity. She kept up her side of the deal for at least ten days. Then she got tipsy one night with a muscular young Englishman. He paid her bar fine and took her upstairs in front of my nose.” Another long pause. “It’s like you say, either you kill them or you get out. I held my guts together for as long as it took to call my mother to have her take over the bar for the rest of the night. The other girls had to tell her what had happened. I took a two-week vacation on Ko Samui. When I got back, my mother had gotten rid of her.”

Kimberley shakes her head. A compassionate smile, spiced with wicked humor, plays on her features. “So Mom saved you after all?”

I nod. “Yes, but not only her. When I got back from Samui, Chanya had started to work for us. Spend time with the morbid, and you develop a taste for the wholesome. I don’t think I would have appreciated Chanya so well if I hadn’t gone out of my mind with Damrong. The universe is composed of pairs of opposites.”

In the taxi on the way back to Sukhumvit, the FBI says, “That night, when she went off with the English john in front of your nose, you very nearly went upstairs to the room where they were? You were almost out of control?”

“Yes. My gun was in its holster under the register. I became very aware of it.”

“Then when you were on Ko Samui for those two weeks, what you were doing was fighting homicidal fantasies?”

“All the time. They would come in waves. Mornings were my only strong time, when I could handle them. The rest of the time I used alcohol and ganja.”

“And what about her? Why did she do that? Wasn’t it self-destructive? You were her boss, after all.”

“The dirt poor don’t actually have selves to destroy. When they get a little power, they know it’s only for a moment. They have no practice in preparing for the future. They generally don’t believe they have one.”

The FBI ponders this. “Is that true?”

“For the poor, birth is the primary disaster: owning a body that has to be fed and sheltered and looked after, along with the drive to reproduce, to continue. Everything else is kid stuff, including death.”

She sighs. I know she is thinking of the Damrong video when she says, “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”

When I drop her off at the Grand Britannia, she says, “She would have let you do anything, right, anything at all, any perversion or degradation, just to capture your soul?”

I answer with silence. There is one other little thing, though, that the FBI wants to get off her chest before going to bed tonight.

“That little hobby of Dr. Supatra’s-is it typically Thai, or am I right in thinking she’s a little eccentric?”

I cough. “All Thais are eccentric, Kimberley. Nobody colonized us. We don’t have much sense of a global norm to follow.”

“But you’ve seen that stuff yourself, right? I mean, it wasn’t just phantoms fornicating. There were really grotesque things going on, with demons and, like, subterranean creatures. I’m talking seriously bestial. It was very clever but very morbid.”

I shrug. “She’s been a forensic pathologist for more than twenty years. Imagine what her subconscious must look like.”

The FBI nods at this convenient explanation, which fits her own cultural prejudice. There’s something nagging at her, though. “Son-chai, I’m getting a feeling that there are levels here, levels below levels. Are you being totally straight with me? I mean, if that stuff Supatra has on her hard disk, if that was for real, she would be world famous by now, right? There would have been investigations by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, Scientific American, all that?”

I have to suppress a smile at the thought of Supatra allowing herself to be the center of any kind of public attention. “Dr. Supatra is a very private person,” I explain. “I think she would rather die than be involved in a media circus.”

By now the FBI is out of the cab, the door of which is still open, bending down to speak to me, her forehead a mass of wrinkles. “You mean you’re saying that stuff is real? Or might be?”

“Depends what you mean by real,” I say, and gently close the door.

Alone in the cab on the way back to Chanya, my mind insists on replaying the whole of those steamy, intense, impermissibly passionate moments with Damrong. I don’t think there was a day when we didn’t make love at least three times: Tell me your heart, Sonchai, tell me your pleasure. I want you to do things to me you’ve never done to any other woman. Sonchai, make me your slave, hurt me if you like, you can, you know.

It might look corny in black and white, but it’s heady stuff when it comes from a sorceress who has already bent your mind.

When I reach home, I see that Chanya has waited up for me. She is watching a soap on TV (magicians, ghosts, and skeletons add spice to a kitchen-sink drama) and welcomes me with a slow blink and the eternal greeting of country folk: “Did you eat yet?”

“I had a bite.”

The first thing I do after I kiss her is caress the Lump. It’s a sort of joke between us that the fetus is the reincarnation of my former partner and soul brother, Pichai. Except it’s not quite a joke. We have both been dreaming about him almost nightly, and Chanya has described him perfectly even though she never met him in the flesh. So I say, “How’s Pichai?”

“Alive and kicking.” She studies my face. “Well?”

“I showed Kimberley the video. She thinks she can check the perp’s eyes using isometric technology. It’s like fingerprints for the eyes. Every foreigner coming into Thailand has to have a digitalized mug shot these days, on the insistence of the U.S. They call it freedom and democracy. We should be able to catch him sooner or later.”

She puts a hand on my cheek, then checks my brow for fever. “I’ve never known you to be so affected by a case. Is it only because you were lovers?”

“What else?”

“What else? The ending, of course. What did Kimberley say about it?”

“She can’t quite handle it either. It made a strange atmosphere.”

“Even dead, that woman has the power to turn your world upside down.”

I take a couple of beats to absorb that penetrating observation. “Not only mine. The FBI isn’t exactly naive, but she’s in shock. It’s what it does to your faith in life. Makes it that much harder to get up in the morning. You don’t want to believe it, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence.”

By way of answer, she takes my hand and places it on the Lump.