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to help? I ask. Look for Don Buri, Pichai replies, then returns to the group.
    I wake up deeply puzzled, for buri is Thai for cigarette. Don, I think, is Spanish for mister. That’s Pichai at his most gnomic, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to rely on more conventional sources. Even so, the dream continues to replay in my head in the form of a question: Who in the world is Don Buri?

 
    4
    B y the time I finally get up, it’s early evening and I feel guilty for neglecting Lek.
    Lek is my new cadet, assigned to me by Vikorn himself. He’s been training with me for over a month, and I try to take the responsibility seriously. Nong, though, sees him more as a family slave and insists that I educate him in the finer points of domestic service. Trying to strike a balance here, but submitting to her bullying nonetheless (there are reasons why he needs to get along with her), I call him on his cell phone and tell him to pick me up at the club.
    Six thirty-five, and the city is still at a standstill from the rush hour. Lek and I sit in the back of the cab, the driver of which has tuned his radio permanently to FM97, or as we Bangkokians call it, Rod Tit FM (Traffic Jam FM). All over the city people imprisoned in vehicles without possibility of parole are using their cell phones to participate in Pisit’s call-in radio program. The theme this evening is the scandal of the three young cops who proved conclusively that three young women were engaged in prostitution by having sex with them for money. “With cops like these who needs criminals? Call me on soon nung nung soon soon nung nung soon soon. ” Now calls from the gridlock flood in, mostly in a mood of hilarity. Lek, though, eighteen years old and only three months out of the academy, wrinkles his nose.
    “Have you spoken to your mother yet?” He has managed to make his head lower than mine so that his delicate face is turned up to me like a flower, his hazel eyes oozing charm. In a feudal society everything is feudal, which is to say personal. I am not merely his supervisor, I’m his lord and master, and his fate rests in my hands. He needs me to love him.
    “Give me time,” I say. “With women the mood is everything. Especially with Nong.”
    “Are you going to speak to Colonel Vikorn?”
    “I don’t know. It’s a judgment call.” I have the cab stop at the junction of Soi 4 and Sukhumvit.
    The story of our errand goes like this. Once upon a time, not more than five or ten years ago, every side soi on Sukhumvit boasted at least one stall that sold fried grasshoppers, but with the relentless blanket bombing of our culture by yours, farang, we grew somewhat self-conscious about this quaint weakness of ours, with the result that—in Krung Thep, anyway—our insect cuisine was driven underground. At the same time, though, avant-garde farang cottoned on to this culinary exoticum with the enthusiasm of the pretentious, so that now the one place where you can buy fried grasshoppers is the farang -dominated Nana Plaza.
    We arrive at Nana just when the various hunting lodges, known as go-go bars, are shifting into top gear. “Handsome man, I want to go with yooo,” a girl in black tank top calls out to me over the palisade of one of the beer bars, but Lek’s star is far brighter than mine. Neither the girls nor the katoeys (transsexuals to you, farang ) can take their eyes off him as we push our way past mighty Caucasian bodies in sweaty T-shirts and walking shorts, half drunk more with the sexual opportunities than with the alcohol, although everyone is knocking back ice-cold beer from the bottle. This evening every TV monitor, and there must be about five hundred, is tuned to a tennis match between our very own Paradorn and someone nobody cares about in the French Open. There’s no commentary, however, because the ten thousand sound systems are all booming out the usual combination of Thai pop and Robbie Williams.
    Finally we reach the far end of the plaza,