Lost in Pattaya (19 page)

I took the knife
from Kawai and cut the ropes binding Thuy Binh. Her freed arms fell to the
floor, offering no resistance to gravity. Ripping the shirt off my back, I bent
and covered her, the smell of urine and dog rose foul in my nostrils, but, I
did not cringe or turn my nostrils in disgust. Instead, the
Southern
Cross
appeared gliding in my thoughts, with me and Thuy Binh sailing alone and
forever away on the seas, following fair weather till she healed from the
nightmare of Kawai and his dogs. I didn’t want much more from life either, the
lapping of waves and that long final journey would leave us drifting forever on
the waters, at the mercy of the currents till we beached and decayed on an
abandoned island, churning into the oceans grains of sand. I stroked her
forehead, realising how precariously dehydrated she was; her tongue was a raspy
blob of sand, stuck hard and pasty in her open mouth.

“You have to leave
her, come on let us go,” Aziz got off the phone.

“No Aziz, they
never abandoned me and I can’t leave them like this,” gently stroking her face,
I replied, never once looking at Aziz. Her eyes came to life; for now that was
enough.

“Come on
,
I
can’t explain everything to you,” he said, grabbing a small pillow and handing
it to me, I placed it under her head and went to the room outside, cutting Miho
free too. She responded well, finding her feet, getting up from the chair,
realising her reversing fortunes for the first time.

“Miho, go away,
quick run away, turn back to Pattaya. You are needed there, go and take charge
of things. I will call you,” Aziz said. Miho moved towards the door, fear
crusting on her bloody face. Then, she turned and became of the night.

Aziz was barking
in Thai to Kawai’s dogs. I came to learn of the trap that he had laid out for
them much later. From the night beyond, faint circular screams of police’s
sirens reached us.

“Come on let us
go, I promise you, she will be safe. You have to trust me, come there is no
time. If they get here before we flee, they will kill us,” he grabbed my arm
and we too moved into the night.

They
were the force of police, closing in on
us, alerted by Aziz to the very spot where the lifeless body of Kawai lay
wasted in the heap of his own convoluted body-art. Aziz had left a large enough
force of dogs to defend the failed fortress of Kawai, but, he knew that without
leadership, courage would abandon the pack-dogs and they would submit in a mere
token resistance.

Aziz asked me to
walk besides him, asking me not to run, and in about seven minutes we heard the
sporadic firing of guns coming from behind us. I imagined the dogs trying in
vain, without any avenue of escape from the battle all soldiers dread, the ones
that they have to fight in.

At the forgotten-lodge,
we were welcomed without ceremony and shared a room that Aziz paid, for the
night.

After he had put
his phone to charge, he spoke softly into it, in Thai for about an hour, before
looking up at me. I was on the bed, still elated at the ejection of Li Ya from
this cess pit where I knew I now belonged. I did not have to say it; my gaze
was question enough for Aziz. “Is Thuy Binh well?”

“Yes she is safe,
she will be in prison, getting proper medical care. I promised you, we won’t go
after her,” he said.

Aziz began to play
soft, old Thai songs from his little phone speakers, and we stoned to genteel
lullabies.

That morning, the
papers were full of the night’s events, and Aziz was pleased with his work,
planned to the hilt with no trace of him or me in the news of death and demise
that Bangkok woke up to. The news for once was accurate, portraying the demise
of a vicious gang lord at the hands of the Thai police, and, the capture of
the
southern vamp, nabbed alive.

“What about Miho?”
I asked, as we sat by the street, having digested the news before munching a
breakfast of grill on sticks, straight off the coal, from the street vendor
besides us.

“She must be fine.
I am yet to call her, but if there was a reason for alarm, I would have known
by now,” he simply said, pointing to his phone.

“Now what?” I
asked.

“Get ready to take
over the streets of Bangkok, you are the perfect one to replace Kawai,” he
spoke unclear, still chewing at the meat off the bamboo skewers.

I almost choked on
the food, in my mouth.

But when I looked
around, I felt the streets of Bangkok coming to life all around us, with traffic
beginning to jostle about in preparation of the day’s struggle ahead. A
commuter train silently slid on the rails above and past us, as if saluting me
in a march past of weaponry fit for a commander.

“Why me?” I asked,
knowing he would comprehend my question, which was rooted in my lack of
experience at mafia lordship.

“Because you are a
good father and because you are a good man. We need good men in this business,
not animals like Kawai,” he got off the little sky-blue acrylic stool, dusted
the bottom of his pants, paid for what we had consumed, and only then moved
away from the eatery, to savour his morning’s cigarette, like a decent man,
putting some distance between our acrid smoky world and the uniformed kids who
had appeared next to us, giggling in blue thigh length skirts.

It was an amusing
notion, for me to run the prostitution mafia in Bangkok. In fact I was sure I
would not last beyond the fortnight it would take for Kawai’s dogs to hunt and
cut me down. What changed it all was my visit to prison, in about a week,
seeing Thuy Binh who had barely survived the vicious ravage that Kawai and his
troops had unleashed upon her.

Aziz advised me
against liaising with Thuy Binh in prison, but when I insisted, he mulled it,
before consenting to my demands.

The arrangements
that he made were far from the dry plastic visitor booths that the prison had.
I was sneaked in and allowed into her cell for hours at end, not only speaking
to her, but often we would dine together. She was herself again, and the
training of child prostitution helped tide each passing day, a day another
would find in-surmountable. The doctors had saved her but the attack had left
her damaged physically, and, she had been advised not to share her bed with a
man for at least a few more months. She remained in prison at her own will,
asking Aziz to ensure that the machinery of law remained protracted in a manner
that kept her in prison for a period of time. In her mind, this is where she
wanted to die, within walls that fold upon the shamed. The lure of the outside
was dead in her. In fact, it was plain to me; she was articulating no reasons
to go on with the life that medical advancements had breathed back into her.

“You must gain
strength and then return. Aziz will arrange your release, we will run the ring
from Bangkok,” I kept on with the same theme incessantly – her release and our
teaming to rise again, maybe even soar on the seas, gliding again on the
Cross
.

“Promise me, you
will raise her out from where she lies sunk, right there from where you swam
ashore,” she too kept up with her silly notion – resurrecting the Yacht that
she had been forced to sink off the Bangkok harbour, out of fear of being
spotted by the predator who eventually caught up with her in any case.

“Thuy Binh, you
have to let the past go, there is a future in a grander new Yacht ahead of us,”
I kept trying to rekindle that what keeps us all alive, hope for the future.

Sometimes I held
her, ensuring she fell asleep before I shut my eyes. I was not sure if she
found my visits comforting, for I knew I had lost her, to a point from which
she kept looking ahead, gazing into the abyss of her own demise.

After a few weeks
of seeing Thuy Binh, I outlined my moves to Aziz “I want to hunt out and kill
each and every man who tortured or ravaged her.”

At first Aziz was
not to be swayed “Don’t fall into the traps of revenge; it is a precursor to
wrong moves.”

“Think Aziz, if I
have to be accepted as the leader I have to instil a fear in the brothel owners
that is critical for me to run things. It is ideal to pick and wipe those who
tortured her, it will be a justifiable cleansing, and in another manner it will
be my christening for all others to witness and fear,” eventually, he saw the
logic and began to consent reluctantly to that first massacre I masterminded.

Where I had found
her shackled and ravaged, I built my temple, with no sanctum, enclosures or
deities, just a space for me to sit each day when I awoke, for a few minutes,
before I got stoned. My meditations were noticed by those that I allowed around
me, and when the hunt for her rapists began, they scattered like mice, putting
to rest my fears of a unified counter-attack. Eventually, within hours of the
first rapist’s deaths, Kawai’s dogs, the ones who had no part in the defilement
of my Goddess, they came and vomited the truth of my lover-mentor’s rape. From
those who confided in me, I began to choose and form my army. To decide upon rank,
we earmarked members with faces kind and a demeanour steady, preferably averse
to the partake of drugs and alcohol. In about a month I had formed a trusted
coterie of confidants around me, my soldiers conducting the business of
prostitution in my name.

I dug out all
detail from the point of Thuy Binh’s capture to my finding her tied up in
Kawai’s den. We built names and lists singling each and every of her
assailants.

The death list
eventually consisted of twenty one names, rank ordered by the number of times
each of them had ravaged the holy mother. With that weight of frequency, the
extent of torture got decided before death was meted on Thuy Binh’s hapless
assailants. Within the month, most of the remaining had fled to the provinces
where my troops found it easier to hunt them down. The last of the two were
traced fleeing in the distant highlands of rural
Prabang
, where the
Mekong refused to refuge them. The river is mine and she handed me the last of
the two rapists floating on her waters. My men cut them down, throwing their
bodies into the river like an offering enriching the plains in which the river
eventually drained. From each of the twenty-one victims, my men, at my behest,
peeled off and returned back to me the jewellery that adorned the dead dogs.

She remained
steady, storing meticulously in a jar the male adornments that I brought to
her. She recognised them all, jewellery that raped her.

On the first
occasion, when I handed her the recognisable adornments of her tormentors, she
smiled faint, not speaking, just a glimmer of her dead joy showing up, the one
that I was unable to fan into a fire. By the time I handed her the last of the
gold, her face had assumed a haloed glow, the imaginary one our mind associates
with objects of our veneration. With each passing day, she became my Buddha,
and I held her central to all my reflections of life, often turning to her for
decisions even after she left us. Her advice on running the ring in Bangkok was
always sound, and, with the added counsel of Aziz, peace returned to the
festival of sex that opened each day for the world to enjoy in Bangkok. Unlike
Kawai, a key part of our plan was to keep intact the mystery and intrigue
around my own persona. This meant remaining largely cut-off from people, making
it truly lonely at the top. The intrigue that we architected was critical in
ensuring that my actions remained un-predictable. It created a measured respect
for the incomprehensible, that all brothel owners submitted to.

The mystery of my
persona grew with the lessons in Thai language that I took up. When the need to
communicate arose, I spoke steady in Thai, using the element of surprise that
all of my inner circle came to respect. It was like an annexation, by a foreign
invader.

For the running of
a mafia, we implemented an Information System with dashboards that provided me
with all the alerts needed for running operations. It was created in the shadow
of the internet and Aziz remains sceptical, not wanting to leave trails for
another to find. With that implementation Aziz too started to distance himself,
having no need to meddle with what became a smooth running machine. I suspect,
with that implementation Aziz too came to fear me, me having expanded the
kingdom beyond his boundary of comprehension. Each Monday, I ranked the metrics
that revealed the state of each brothel’s business. Through the week we fixed
problems, mending deviants, till the trade of sex in Bangkok reaped the peak of
earnings from Friday through Sunday. The databases are all online and in the
new regime usernames and passwords became what gang tattoos were before I
etched my presence. Well after me and Aziz, when the database is discovered in
the bowels of the internet, it will pave the way for prostitution to be
legalised, existing like a shop in a mall with tax revenues that make matters
safe.

Strangely, in that
system I enforced social benefits that all my girls privileged from. Rate
cards, personal banking accounts with statements, access to contraceptives,
emergency medical funds, stamping out of un-agreed brutality; it helped me gain
respect within the first two years that I ran the ring in.

Each and every
member of my ring had a hierarchical status, with an ability to reach me,
through the structure that I created. And when the need to act presented
itself, I cared for each and every girl that made me the leader of the ring.
Short lived, since I too was physically wasting away.