The Bangkok Asset: A novel by John Burdett Read Free Book Online Page A

daydreams I read and read—and did extra well at school and started to imagine that maybe Einstein had paid a visit to Soi Cowboy sometime in the seventies and had an adventure with a bar girl named Nong; until I realized how smart Mum was (Mama Nong learned to speak English faster than me and she didn’t even have an American dad); my smarts didn’t necessarily prove a thing about him. And so on. I drove myself crazy trying to find some trait of body or mind, anything that I could point to about myself and say,
That’s from him.
Did I become a detective in order one day to find him? I’m not sure. Certainly, I was tormented at an earlier age than most by the conviction that it was possible to discover who I was. Did such an absurd idea originate in your hemisphere, R?
    Sometimes my search hurt so much I’d confide in Mum.
Tell me,
I’d say,
tell me, just one thing that is definitely him not you?
She didn’t answer for years, until the girls in the bars started passing on stories about me. “That,” she said, pointing at my crotch. “All men have it, but not all have it that bad. That’s him all right.”
    “He was really as bad as me?” I asked, somewhat troubled by the thought.
    “Worse.”
    “And you put up with it?”
    “It was the seventies, there was a war on, I was a bar girl, there were thousands of us, you were grateful even for the chance to compete.”
    “But you loved him, you told me. I asked you a million times, and that’s the only question you’ve ever given a consistent answer to.”
    “I was a country girl. In the country you judge the male by its virility and the female by its fecundity. You could say he was a prizewinning buffalo, gold medal, any farmer’s pride and joy, deprive him of sex for a night and he’d tear the shed down. Sure I was proud of him. Proud as hell that he stayed with me, took me to America, once—that alone raised me to queen-of-the-village status. And he shared. He was generous. Almost as generous with his dough as with his sperm—and that’s saying a lot.”
    “You were in love with his dick, then?”
    “You want a whack?”
    She was tough. Looking back, it can make me laugh how she played the fragile Oriental lotus to soak the johns. Like all Thai women, she was master of the art of flattery. Not a customer she slept with whom she didn’t compliment on the size of his member, however diminutive:
Wow! Honey, I don’t think I’ve seen one that big before
—was she thinking of Dad as she flicked those flagging phalli back to life? There are questions even sons like me don’t ask, but the fact speaks for itself: she only let herself fall pregnant the once. Only one man she so honored. Why him?
    So, although I never got used to being without him, I did get used to always having a make-believe
him
to turn to as a role model. In fact I had a whole wardrobe of
him
s who I could wear depending on the need of the hour—e.g., strong, resolute, honest, the best kind of American—especially when I started as a cop. H/we grew partial to weed at an early age, though, and loved stealing cars (just a phase h/we went through, you understand). And when I doubted the historical accuracy of my invented progenitor, I had the brothels to turn to. There I always could find him, so to speak. I knew his excitement when a new, extra-delicious girl appeared on the revolving stages; I understood the profound respect he felt for the way she kept her dignity—and held out for the dough. I experienced that inexplicable compulsion to see just one more naked young woman on a bed waiting for me, like the drunk who needs just one more drink. That, basically, is all I have of Dad.
    —
    Now we’re stuck at the lights just before the Memorial Bridge, and a monk passes in front of us with an alms bowl and his
looksit
in white behind him carrying the morning’s haul of vegetarian food in a bundle of plastic bags tied up together. I almost became a monk; that could have been me there