“A sleazebag,” Bright mutters, avoiding Hudson ’s glare.

I make a submissive face. “Shall I tell him you want to make a treaty?”

Bright is not at all sure if I’m being sarcastic or simply inept in my use of English. He oscillates between rage and contempt with a bias toward contempt. Hudson covers his reaction with a cough. “Yeah, tell him we want to talk. I’m sure we can work something out. It would help a lot if we were able to speak to the last person to see Mitch Turner alive. That would impress us considerably.”

They both finish their water in a few gulps, then stand up to leave. I follow them through the club to the front door, keeping my eyes on Bright. Yep, there it goes, that scan of the room he told himself he wasn’t going to make. Nat, of course, is nowhere to be seen.

As soon as they’re safely into a taxi, I call Vikorn. He’s silent for a full minute, then: “What’s your instinct?”

“We’re the Indians, they’re the cowboys, they want to make a treaty. They want Chanya at the meeting, Colonel.”

He coughs. “Tell them to come to the bar tomorrow night. We’ll close it for as long as the meeting takes.”

“Will Chanya be there?”

“I don’t know.”

In the dead of night my mobile rings. It is Lek at last. A desperate tone (he sounds as if he’s dying): “You have to help me.”

Lumpini Park (named for the Buddha’s birthplace) at night: love at its cheapest, but the incidence of HIV is said to be over sixty percent. In the darkness: furtive movements on benches and on the grass, muted moans and whispers, rustlings of large animals in heat, the intensity of the atomic fusion (highly addictive, they say) of sex and death. It is past midnight in this tropical garden. At the edge of the park, I have to call Lek on his mobile to find out his exact location. He is standing alone by the artificial lake, staring at a reflection of the moon in the water. When I touch him, his body seems half frozen.

“She told me to come here,” he whispers after a while. “She insisted that I see it at its worst.”

“She’s right. That’s exactly what a good Elder Sister is supposed to do.”

“I feel dreadful. She totally destroyed me.”

“She’s just testing you. Better you see the worst before you take the big step. You have to be sure you won’t end up here.”

“Half of the whores here are katoeys,” he blurts. “They’ve lost everything, even basic humanity. They’re just… just creatures. I’ve seen them hanging out on the benches, waiting for customers, just like starving demons. Some of them have lesions. They service taxi drivers.”

“What did Fatima say, exactly?”

“She said she would help me if I would drink the full cup of bitterness. She said the path of a katoey is sacred, only katoeys and Buddhas really see the world for what it is. She said I had to be strong as steel, soft as air.”

When I put my arm around him, he bursts into sobs. “I don’t think I have the strength. I only wanted to dance.”

“You think dancing is easy?”

Looking up at me with those big eyes of his: “Thanks for coming. I had a moment of weakness. I better stay here for a while. I need to see it all, don’t I?”

“Yes.” There’s really nothing more to say.

The Old Man’s Club would not, under normal circumstances, be anyone’s choice of venue for such grim negotiations, but it is the best we can do. The CIA, who are not officially here at all, do not possess an office, nobody wants to do it in a hotel room, and the District 8 police station is hardly appropriate. The only reason I am present is because Vikorn needs an interpreter whose discretion can be relied upon. The only reason Chanya is present is to take the opportunity to prove she didn’t do it. (She spent the whole of yesterday locked up with Vikorn in his office.) The only reason my mother is here is that it is her club and no way is she going to miss out.

Although both Hudson and Bright have read it many times before, they take a minute to study Chanya’s confession, the one that Vikorn dictated and I wrote, which they have in English translation as well as the original Thai. They both look up at the same time, and it is the young and ferociously eager Bright who speaks first. I am surprised he begins by addressing me not as the official interpreter but in my capacity as humble scribe.

“You were present when this statement was taken, Detective?”

“Yes.”

“You are the one who wrote it down?”

“Yes.”

“While Colonel Vikorn was present?”

“Yes.”

“And these are the true words of Ms. Chanya Phongchit as spoken at that time?”

“Certainly.”

“Did you think anything odd about her story?”

“No. You have to remember-”

A peremptory wave of the hand. “I know, I know, this is Bangkok, and these kinds of things happen all the time. Let me cut to the chase, Detective.” He leans forward, thighs pried open by the pressure of magnificent balls (obviously). “Detective, have you ever had sexual intercourse?”

A baffled pause. “It has been my good fortune from time to time.”

“And have you ever had the good fortune to do it from behind? Never mind what part of the lady’s anatomy is most interesting, let’s just concentrate on the position.”

Chanya inexplicably covering a grin, my mother frowning and staring at me, then from me to the Colonel. I think she has seen the drift quicker than anyone. The Colonel has not understood a word.

“Yes. It’s not my preferred-”

Another peremptory wave. “Spare us the comment, Detective. Let me ask you this. When you exploited your good fortune in this way, did you notice that the front of your thighs were really rather close to the backs of the lady’s? Putting it bluntly, Detective, unless you have a two-foot dick, your body would have been pressing against hers most of the time for the purpose of maintaining penetration?”

My heart sinks, and my mother looks away in disgust, I think, that the Colonel and I (her son of all people) should have committed such a gaffe. Only Chanya is unperturbed. On Vikorn’s order I translate the interrogation so far. To my astonishment, he also is unperturbed and responds with an avuncular smile. I should add that since the arrival of the CIA he has scrupulously and impeccably maintained the part of every farang’s idea of a crumpled, corrupt, incompetent, and less-than-intelligent third-world cop who only dimly grasps what is being said and who lost the plot some time ago. A slight shaking has been introduced in his left hand-a subtle addition, artistically done-and he has a half-empty bottle of Mekong whiskey on a table next to his chair. He has not shaved this morning; gray stubble catches the light nicely. A few deft touches, in other words, and the master has transformed himself-an astonishing achievement when you consider that in actual fact he is a decadent sleazebag third-world cop, but of an entirely different order. Any fool can play his opposite, but to play the character who is only a couple of shades away from the person you really are-now that shows real talent, in my humble opinion. Bright has been ignoring him with exaggerated contempt. This is exactly what he expected from us. Hudson so far is carefully noncommittal in his body language. Bright grinds relentlessly on, his voice rising through the full gamut of triumphalism to find its level in an excited squeak.

“Any woman who decided to castrate you from such a position, even if she had the muscles of an Olympic weight lifter, would have to cut off one of your thighs first, wouldn’t she?” Just in case he is not being explicit enough for my poor understanding, he stands up, folds Chanya’s statement I suppose as representing the knife, bends forward, and swings backward with his hand a couple of times. “It’s the one position where a man need fear no attack at all,” he adds with a triumphant smile, “not even if the lady had access to a samurai sword,” and sits down.