“Of course. I’ll probably cut it all off-I’ve always wanted to meditate in a nunnery. Maybe I’ll do a meditation course upcountry somewhere.”

“That’ll be fine,” I say, although the thought of her losing all her hair almost moves me to tears. A slightly awkward silence. “Chanya, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if there’s anything you did in the States when you were over there that you think we should know about…”

She searches my eyes. In hers I see only innocence. “I worked of course. The money was fantastic, especially in Las Vegas. It’s a wonderful country, but a bit bland. I got bored after a while. I was planning to come home as soon as I had enough dough to build my own house in Surin, and enough to retire on, but 9/11 ruined my plans. I came home sooner than I intended and for family reasons I needed more money. I stayed here because you’re a good papasan, and your mother’s been a good boss. It’s fun. I like your club.”

The temptation to ask her exactly what happened last night is very strong, but my professional discipline, learned at the feet of my master Vikorn, enables me to resist. That was one hell of a disemboweling, though. Even for a Thai, her coolness is a little unusual, not to say downright scary. I fear my smile was just a tad alienated when I left her alone with her statement and the packet of crickets. I didn’t even ask about the opium since that did not officially exist. I noticed she’d got rid of the pipe.

Downstairs my mother has Lek cleaning glasses. I check the time, then switch to the radio on the sound system to listen to Rod Tit FM. Every cop in District 8 will be listening at this moment, for Pisit has told us he has a scoop on the eternal and notorious battle between our beloved Colonel Vikorn and that blackguard General Zinna, who has just emerged unscathed from a court-martial in which he had to explain his apparent involvement in large-scale trafficking of heroin and morphine. His claim that he was framed by the police, in particular Vikorn, was tacitly accepted by the court.

Pisit begins by reminding us that this drug rivalry between the army and the police is not new. Every Thai has heard about, and some still remember, the great standoff up in Chiang Mai in the fifties when civil war seemed about to break out over a dispute between the two services as to who exactly owned a massive shipment of opium that the Kuomintang (with the connivance of the CIA) had sent into Thailand by train. The standoff lasted three days before a compromise was reached: the entire shipment would be dumped into the sea. According to legend, the dumping of the several tons of opium was organized by the Director of Police, who arranged for a ship to be in the way. Now the perennial battle seems to have fallen onto the shoulders of Vikorn and Zinna. What Pisit didn’t tell us in advance is that his source today is none other than Zinna himself.

Pisit: General Zinna, it is a great honor to have you on this show. You must be relieved and exhausted after your ordeal.

Zinna: What ordeal?

Pisit: General, I was referring to the court-martial that cleared your name.

Zinna: Oh, that. I was framed by a certain police colonel, everyone knows that.

Pisit: But General, if this is true, it is dynamite. Any particular reason why this police colonel, whom we shall not name, or indeed any policeman, would desire your downfall?

Zinna: Simple-they’re scared of exposure. Right now the police run Thailand. Look at the news every day, what do we find? We find naked, unadorned reports of police corruption throughout the country at every level of the police force, but not a damned thing is being done about it. Why? Because the government itself is scared of the police. The police have become the only cohesive power in our country. And they call this democracy. That particular police colonel we have already mentioned is always going on about democracy. It’s all just a power play, of course. This is the problem with the West, it is childishly superficial. Create a system that resembles theirs, no matter how defective and corrupt, and they praise you. Create a different system, and they try to undermine you. So what the cops have so cleverly produced is a police state that looks like a democracy. No wonder farang love us. It’s their system exactly.

Pisit: And the police are scared of the army because it is the only viable alternative to them?

Zinna: Certainly. And the only unit powerful enough to expose them and survive.

Pisit: Nothing to do with rivalry over income sources?

Zinna: What are you getting at?

Pisit: General, you just referred to reports of police corruption. I would guess at least fifty percent of those complaints are drug related.

Zinna: Of course. There has to be motivation for cops to run the country. Under the guise of democracy, of course.

Pisit: And if the army ran the country again?

Zinna: That is a very provocative hypothetical.

Pisit: What would you like to do to that certain police colonel who framed you?

Zinna: That is a private matter between him and me.

Lek, of the abbreviated attention span, has tried to follow but lacks the background that makes the interview comprehensible. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

My mother and I exchange a glance. “The Colonel’s never been the same since his son Ravi died,” Nong says.

No wiser, Lek turns his wide eyes onto me. “The army shot Ravi during the troubles in May ’92,” I explain.

The landline rings. It’s the forensic team in quite a tizzy. They want me over there at the hotel where Mitch Turner died right away. I think about taking Lek, but he’s doing his professional duty as he sees it by ingratiating himself with my mother (they’re discussing the finer points of mascara application), so I go on my own.

When I arrive, I see what they mean. In their zeal they turned the corpse over and left it that way. Now they are all staring at me staring at it. I’m not sure whether to vomit or simply scratch my head. I am too stunned to do either. My mind flashes back to Chanya and the way she was this morning: cool and bright, cheerful as a lark. Shaking my head, I lift the receiver on the hotel phone and tell the operator to get me Vikorn at the police station. For once he is actually in his office.

“The forensic boys turned him over.”

“So?”

“He’s been flayed. From shoulders to the top of his backside. The whole of the surface skin is gone. It’s just a bloody mess.”

A long pause, during which I think even Vikorn is stumped. Then: “Tell them to turn him back the way they found him. Have they taken photographs of his back?”

“I think so.”

“Tell them to destroy those.” A click as he hangs up.

While staring at the victim as they turn him over again, I am thinking farang, I’m thinking France, Germany, England, Japan, the United States, G8, I’m thinking decadence. In a single stroke the case has been taken out of Thai psychology, and I’m reduced to whatever cultural insights I acquired overseas. The poor, you see, murder honestly for passion, land, money, or superstition, so this brutal disemboweling/castration appeared at first glance as a common enough expression of rage, fear, or greed well within the grassroots tradition of every third-world country. (The severed penis, frankly, appeared to me as Thai as tom yam soup.) The flaying, though, that gratuitous extra, can only come from a society with a large, wealthy, and bored middle class. (It has ennui written all over it.) So what the hell did happen to Chanya in America?