The Queen of Patpong

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Old cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, sweat. The proven architecture of soft pink light on soft brown skin. Bad rock and roll, some mercifully forgotten tight-pants, stadium-rock anthem from the 1980s, still being played in Bangkok, the town where bad songs last forever. Shredded speakers, probably blown for fifteen years. The bass notes like tearing paper.

The girls on the stage.

And there she is: Number 27.

The tall man sees her the moment he reaches the top of the stairway, the symbolic barrier that prevents Bangkok's finest from enforcing Thailand's strict anti-nudity law, news of which has clearly not reached this room. Thanks to an elaborate, almost courtly, system of graft, the cops pause downstairs long enough to let the doorman slip them a couple thousand baht as he pushes a buzzer, and then they shuffle slowly upward while the girls onstage wrap themselves in the cheap taffeta slips that are normally knotted around their upper arms to display the merchandise.

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