"There's relative truth."

"Want to make it absolute?"

"We've been through that. We're culturally and spiritually incompatible."

"Meaning my abrasive American personality turns you right off, huh?"

"You are an excellent agent."

"How about if I were to soften up? I hear Johnson's baby oil can help in these kinds of situations." She turns away from my paranoid gaze with a smirk on her face. "It's the protocol," she says to the window, "information-sharing. Your Colonel is pretty selective, but then I guess so are we."

At the end of the waterfront strip we veer off to the left, then to the right. Halfway to Jomtien Beach, we take a left down a private road belonging to an upmarket block of condominiums. It's upmarket for Thailand, anyway. No one has bothered to repave the road since I was last here a few years ago, and we have to sit and wait in the car for the security to come and open the main gate.

I have timed the journey, taking the likely traffic problem into account, so that we arrive at about noon, when all good Russians are somewhere between sober and drunk. It is 12:12 p.m. when we reach the penthouse apartment on the thirty-seventh floor of the condo building and I press the buzzer. I agonized over whether to call ahead or not and finally decided not to. If Iamskoy is compromised with a half dozen Siberian women without visas, or who have overstayed their visas, or are obviously on the game, he might be that much more willing to talk. A lot will depend on how drunk he is, though. Too drunk and he will pa.s.s out, the way he did last time. Too sober and he'll be uptight, too far into himself with his Russian melancholy to communicate at all.

I think I might be in luck because a woman answers the door. She is about twenty-six, dyed blond hair, Caucasian, thick lips and a wolfish look which she clearly believes to be irresistible. She is wearing a black dress which comes an inch or two below her crotch and reveals a lot of cleavage. Her perfume is not up to my mother's standards, but then I don't think this woman has spent much time in Paris. She looks blank and about to close the door on us when I flash my ID.

"Andy," she calls without anxiety. Instead of Iamskoy another woman appears in shorts and T-shirt. Then another. A fourth is dressed in a long nightgown done up firmly at the neck. "Is this a bust?" the first woman asks, more with curiosity than concern.

"I don't know," I answer truthfully. "I want to speak to Andreev."

Eventually Iamskoy appears from among the small crowd of females. He is tall and gangly and has kept most of his hair, which makes him seem younger than the fifty and some years he has spent in this body. He does a double take, then grins broadly. I think he has absorbed just the right amount of alcohol when he says: "Sonchai! So long it's been! Come in, my good friend, come in."

I'm checking Jones' face as we enter, thinking she'll be surprised, because apart from the collection of women this is not like the home of a pimp at all. It is very untidy and a major contributor to the untidiness are the books. They are everywhere, on shelves on the walls, on the carpet, stacked up in corners, under the legs of collapsing armchairs.

Jones is fairly wide-eyed, but mainly because of the women, who seem to be unnerving her with their glares and snippets of harsh-sounding Russian. In my humble opinion Jones is a lot more attractive than any of them, which could explain the glares. I don't think she has seen the books at all, so I point them out. "Andreev is the most obsessive bookworm you'll ever meet. Look at them! French novels, Russian, American, Italian, but that's just light reading. Physics is his subject. He still keeps up with the latest developments, right, Andreev?"

This is not a diplomatic question on my part. His expression turns to bitterness for a moment, then he recovers and puts a forgiving arm around me.

"Thais are actually not sensitive at all, they just have this way of covering up through ritual politeness," he explains to Jones. "If you cut away the wai wais and the other formalities, you find a people who really don't give a d.a.m.n." His accent is thick, the grammar perfect.

"I think I'm finding that," Jones says. She's looking at the books now and, as I expected, warming to Iamskoy, whose eccentricities are so much more comprehensible than my own. She has read books about this stereotype, perhaps seen him in movies. Gently: "Are you really a retired physicist?"

"Unemployed. Sacked. Kicked out. Let's not mince words. The boot was looking for me even while Gorbachev was in power, that world-cla.s.s loser. It got me right up the a.s.s when the economy collapsed under the terminal drunk Yeltsin. We pick our leaders, we really pick them."

He leads us, still moaning about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, into the living room, where chaos has all but defeated order. The only unambiguous landmarks are three vodka bottles, partially consumed with the tops left off, on a large plain gla.s.s coffee table. From my last visit I remember the Russian tradition of opening more than one bottle. One bottle may be spiced, another flavored with apricot or apple; it is similar to the Thai habit of providing dipping sauces to flavor a meal. Of course, vodka is not food unless one is Russian.

Apart from the vodka, you have to spend a moment before you can visually disentangle one object from another. Books are not the only culprits. There are pieces of women's underwear, shoes, ashtrays, a vacuum cleaner with its tube snaked around the coffee table, crushed beer cans, some unopened bottles of wine, and on a side dresser such a heap of makeup products it's like a miniature rock pile. Nothing is horizontal or vertical, everything is resting crookedly on something else. And yet it is a huge apartment with five bedrooms, easily enough to accommodate twenty neat Thai girls who would surely keep the place spotless.

Two of the women have followed us into the room, the others are having an argument in the corridor. Muttering to himself in Russian, Iamskoy starts picking things up off one of the sofas and chucking them in a pile in a corner: a black bra, a volume of an encyclopedia, a bottle of shampoo, books which he examines curiously like long-lost friends before condemning them to the new pile. It takes a few minutes before we can sit down. He sits on the floor with his back resting on another sofa which has not been emptied of junk and says something to the woman in the short black dress, who finds some plastic mugs. She pours some vodka into the mugs and hands the mugs to us, without asking if we want any or not. She hands Iamskoy the bottle, then pours herself a drink from one of the other bottles. Meanwhile, the other woman leaves the room.

"Zoya has an appointment with an army general," he explains. "He's a first-time customer and she's slightly nervous. Only slightly, though. That's why she's only drinking slightly." We watch as Zoya pours more vodka into her cup and knocks it back. She says something in Russian to Iamskoy, who waves her out of the room. "Amazing, isn't it?" he asks Jones.

"What?"

"Did you see her figure under that dress? Power legs, fat a.s.s, short strong torso, round shoulders-a form evolved over many thousands of years to survive the steppe and work the land-but the General finds her exotic. With all these brown-skinned G.o.ddesses around, he actually pays more than ten times for Zoya."

The front door slams.

"Perhaps it's love," Jones says.

Startled for a moment, Iamskoy looks at her, then breaks into a broad grin. "That's good. That's very good. Excuse me." He puts the bottle to his lips to knock the vodka back. I watch his Adam's apple move twice in full-throated swallows. "I think I must seem even more of a wreck to an American than I do to myself, no?"

"I guess I don't know how much of a wreck you seem to yourself," Jones replies. I realize that Iamskoy and I are both watching to see if she will sip any of her vodka. I take a sip of mine by way of provocation and I'm pleased to find it is from the spiced bottle. She catches me looking at her and puts the mug on the arm of the sofa.

"To myself I look more than a wreck. I'm atomized. I was a nuclear physicist so I should know. n.o.body knew where my master the great Sakharov was leading us when he took his stand. He was like Christ pitting himself against the Roman Empire. How many put their money on Christ at the time? He must have drawn the longest odds in the ancient world. But then they weren't Russians. Russians love a bad bet."

"You worked with Sakharov?"

"Let's not exaggerate. I was an a.s.sistant to his a.s.sistant. More properly, an a.s.sistant to the a.s.sistant of his a.s.sistant. Communism was strangely hierarchical toward the end, a point which has been made many times." Another swig. "It's really ironic, isn't it, that the transformation in Russian society largely provoked by Sakharov the nuclear physicist has led to our atomization? It's like reality imitating a bad pun. Of course, n.o.body told us that's where it was all leading. We knew that capitalism makes wh.o.r.es of everyone, but not atomized wh.o.r.es. That was something we could not conceive in our theoretically logical universe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union I have become the proud owner of at least twenty different personalities. This is necessary in the global economy. I'm a burned-out physicist, an intellectual sn.o.b, a drunk, a failed poet, a renegade husband, absent father, a master of unfinished novels, an incompetent businessman, a fan of Russian ballet, a bankrupt and a pimp. It is impossible to be all these things at the same time, so I must decide, moment to moment, which of these many Iamskoys I should wear. In America you must be adept at such rapid costume changes, you've had more practice. For a Russian, it's still hard."

"You must enjoy the challenge." To my surprise, Jones picks her mug up and takes a deep swallow, not a polite sip at all. She glares at me. "Which of your many parts do you find the most difficult?"

"Pimp," he replies promptly. "It's even more complex than trying to write a novel and requires much finer judgment than playing with neutrons. You would think it would be easy, just a question of supply and demand with the added advantage that the products transport themselves of their own accord, no need for freight and delivery systems. Not with Russians. You think I run these women or they run me? They are independents. Two of them have degrees, one of them is a Ph.D., the other two are merely very well educated. They could get work in Russia if they really wanted to, but . . ." He shrugs.

"Not well paid, huh?"

"It's not money exactly. Not in the American sense."

"What is money in the Russian sense?"

"Gambling chips. They go home as poor as when they arrived, but while they're here they get to gamble for relatively big stakes in those police-protected casinos which don't officially exist. Paying their fares home after they've blown their profits is part of a Russian pimp's overhead." A glance at me. "That and paying off the Thai police of course." To Jones. "Every Thai cop apart from Sonchai is a world-cla.s.s businessman. You simply can't beat them. If I'm not careful they hire the girls, then fine me the price of the girl-for trafficking in women-less ten percent for my expenses. Not Sonchai. He's an even worse businessman than me. That must be why I like him, he doesn't make me feel inferior."

"I wondered," I say, sipping more vodka.

"That and the fact that he's even more of a head case than me. You should have heard our last conversation. It was like Hindu science fiction. I guess he didn't enjoy it as much as I did, though, because he stayed away three years."

"You pa.s.sed out after insulting the Buddha."

"I did? Why didn't you shoot me?"

"I didn't think you were alive."

"Anyway, what did I say?"

"You said that Gautama Buddha was the greatest salesman in history."

To Jones: "I was right. He was selling nothing. That's what 'nirvana' means: nothing. As a cure for the great cosmic disaster most of us call life, he prescribed a rigorous course of meditation and perfect living over any number of lifetimes, with nothing as its final reward. D'you think anyone on Madison Avenue could sell that? But the whole of the Indian subcontinent bought it at the time. Today there are more than three hundred million Buddhists in the world and growing."

"You also said he was right. I can't remember the argument."

"Correct. Black holes in s.p.a.ce, which can fairly be described as pockets of nonexistence since no light or time survives there, have been seen to emit subatomic particles and reabsorb them. Life comes from nothing and returns there after all. Smoke and mirrors, just like the man said two thousand five hundred years ago. Magic. Which may yet make logic the biggest superst.i.tion since the virgin birth."

"Well, there you are," Jones says. "It only goes to show. But there's a play on words here, isn't there? He was only selling nothing if you understand nothing in a certain sense. Nothing to a Buddhist is also everything, since only nothing has any reality." A little self-consciously, she takes another glug of vodka. Iamskoy and I are both grinning at her. Iamskoy suddenly claps a few times and I feel obliged to join him. Jones blushes but I've never seen her so happy.

"You've been schooling her?" Iamskoy asks me.

"Not at all. I didn't think she was interested in Buddhism."

"Are you?" Iamskoy asks.

"I'm interested in this jerk." She points at me and takes another deep swallow of vodka. "And Buddhism is the only sure way to turn him on. At least with Buddhism you can get some conversation out of him."

"I found that too," Iamskoy says. "He has this Thai way of falling asleep at the drop of a hat, but mention rebirth or nirvana or relative truth, and he perks up. That's what I love about this country. Everyone has a spiritual dimension, even cops. Even crooks. Some of the biggest gangsters make merit by giving huge sums to the monasteries and donating to the poor. Makes you wonder."

"About what?"

"About what the past five hundred years of Western civilization have been about. If we'd remained medieval we might have been smiling as much as the Thais."

"Gimme some more vodka, will you?" Jones says to me. "I've been waiting for a conversation like this, seems like forever. It's better than school."

There are footsteps in the hall and the woman in the nightgown appears. After Iamskoy's comment I check her figure, as far as I can. She is slim and pale with hair which is almost black and very large green eyes. I could find her exotic. Jones gives her a big warm smile, woman to woman, and she smiles back.

"This is Valerya," Iamskoy says. "She's the Ph.D. You see, she heard the conversation and was irresistibly drawn to join us. That is one of our million faults, Russians are perpetual undergraduates. We still talk about life in a way the West grew out of fifty years ago."

"It's better than sucking c.o.c.ks," Valerya says, walking to the coffee table and taking one of the bottles and swigging it. "But I'm not yet a Ph.D. I'm funding my thesis." Her English is less accented than Iamskoy's, with a British tone. Now that she has spoken I can see her hardness, though, the hardness of a beautiful woman who doesn't need to care. I no longer find her exotic.

"Were you funding your thesis at the casino last night?"

A shrug followed by a second swig. "You're right about Russians. We love to blow everything on a bad bet. I can't believe it. All that s.e.x, for nothing. If I could delete the gambling I could delete the selling of my body, they cancel each other out, but I'd still need to fund my Ph.D."

"What is your subject?" Jones wants to know.

"Child psychology."

Iamskoy and I both see the look of horror cross Jones' face, but Valerya doesn't seem to as she engages Jones' eyes and speaks earnestly about how a Russian degree isn't worth a dime even in Russia, but with a Ph.D. she could probably get a teaching job in one of the American universities, using her research project into criminalized street kids, of which there is an abundance in Vladivostok, just like in New York or Los Angeles. She really wants to get to the States.

As Iamskoy predicted, the babble of semi-intelligent conversation is too tempting for the three other women, who now appear one by one, with two vodka bottles cloudy with condensation. More plastic cups appear and all of a sudden we have a party. Despite her pa.s.sing disgust that a hardened prost.i.tute should also be a child psychologist, Jones is taken with Valerya, who seems to offer intelligent female companionship, maybe something to develop while she's here, maybe she'll help Valerya get to the States and they'll be bosom buddies. They yammer away twenty to the dozen about a dazzling array of subjects while Iamskoy develops his theory about materialism being the superst.i.tion of the twentieth century, a dark age which will be replaced by an enlightenment of magic. He believes I will be seduced by this, which only goes to show he doesn't understand Buddhism, which despises magic, but I don't want to annoy him quite yet. The three other women are babbling in Russian interspersed with English and seem to be talking about a winning strategy at blackjack. The vodka swills and the noise level rises and I fall into silence. This is a Caucasian party. What I see is the great juggernaut of Western culture with its insane need to fill s.p.a.ce, all of it, until there is no s.p.a.ce or silence left. After a while I say: "Andreev, did any of your workers ever get flayed alive?"

A thundering silence. Jones is deeply embarra.s.sed and red in the face. Valerya has stopped in mid-sentence and is boring into me with those green eyes which don't seem so beautiful anymore. Iamskoy has snapped his head away toward a wall and the three others who I didn't think spoke much English are looking down at the carpet. When Iamskoy brings his head round again to face me his mouth is crooked. "Is that what you came to ask me?"

"Yes."

"Get out!"

"Andy!" Valerya says.

"Get the f.u.c.k out of my flat!"

"Andy, you can't talk like that to a Thai cop. You're a Russian pimp in a foreign land. Stop it."

For a moment I think he is going to stand up to hit me, and he does begin to rise, but he is too drunk to make it all the way up from the floor and falls back in despair with his head resting on the seat of the sofa as if he has lost the use of his limbs. "Why?" His eyes plead with me. "Why bring that up? Didn't your people do enough? Haven't I spent enough of my life in that purgatory? Was it my fault?"

I turn to Valerya, whose cynicism might be exactly what I need, in the face of all this indecipherable Russian emotion. "You know what I'm talking about?"

"You're talking about Sonya Lyudin."

"Shut up," Iamskoy tells her.

"Don't be ridiculous, Andreev, the whole of Vladivostok still talks about it. Why shouldn't we tell him?"

"He knows already. He's just being a sly Thai."

"I don't," I say. "I don't know already. Already what?"

"If you don't know already, what are you up to? This is very hush-hush over here, you know. Very hush-hush. Oh yes." Upset, Iamskoy has lost his urbanity and control over his tongue. "You're not shupposed to talk about it, even if it's shtill the big story in Vladivostok. At leasht in the grimy circles in which I am now forced to mix." Picking up the vodka bottle and looking at it. "Grimy circles. I who once shat at the feet of the great Sakharov." He bursts into cackles. "That's good. Shat at the feet . . ."

"The story of Sonya Lyudin is tragic," Valerya explains, "but not typical. If it was typical none of us would be here. We're not orphans or street wh.o.r.es. We're smart women here to make a fast buck in a hard world. There's no way we would risk our bodies like that. Sonya Lyudin was different."

"How different?"

"She was a street wh.o.r.e. No education, born into an urka family. Hard as nails, a real Siberian. She'd do anything. She had no fear. She thought all men were dumb animals to be led by the nose. I'm not a great fan of men myself, but I think that's a dangerous att.i.tude for a woman to take. Especially in this job." One of the women on the floor says something in Russian. "Natasha says I'm being a sn.o.b, that Sonya Lyudin was not so stupid as that. Just unlucky."

"She was supposed to have protection," Natasha explains in English. "She wasn't an independent. She was brought here by a gang of urkas. They were supposed to protect her. Andreev was just used for the introductions."

"That's true," Valerya concedes. "They took a contract out on the American's head. They'll get him sooner or later."

"They won't," Natasha says. "The American paid them off."

"No he didn't," Iamskoy says. "He tried to, but they refused. They couldn't let it go, it was a matter of credibility. Of face, as they say out here. So the American had to get protection of his own. The best protection, so I hear."

"What American?" Jones is alert now, leaning forward.

"Someone called Warren. A jeweler. A big shot in this country."

"This is known? You're telling me in Vladivostok the name of Warren is openly a.s.sociated with this?"

"Oh yes. He's a kind of bogeyman amongst women like us. You know, the worst nightmare: Be careful you don't get a Warren tonight Be careful you don't get a Warren tonight."

"There's a video," Valerya says. "I've spoken to women who have seen it. A white American and an enormous black man."

"Andreev," I say, "I have to know. Do the Thai police have a copy of this video?"

He seems to have reached the pa.s.sing-out stage. I think he is nodding but I can't be sure as his head falls forward, then throws itself wildly back, then falls forward again. I look at Valerya and Natasha, who avoid my eyes. Iamskoy slides inexorably into the horizontal with legs together and arms by his side. All of a sudden he's the tidiest thing in the room.

Laid out on the floor, Iamskoy opens one eye. "The Thai police bought the video from the urkas, paid a fortune for it. Of course the money came from Warren and of course the urkas promised it's the only copy. They don't care about the video, they want Warren."

"Valerya, how tall was Sonya Lyudin?" Jones is locking eyes with the child psychologist, who turns to Natasha, who turns to the woman next to her. Now everyone is looking at Iamskoy. "About six feet," he says with his eyes closed. "Slim. Very good body."

"How much time did she spend with Warren before she died? Were there a number of a.s.signations?"

"There were two. The first was quite short and according to her nothing happened except that she stripped for him and he fondled her. He gave her a short gold stick and told her if she wore it in her navel he would set a jade stone in it. Of course, she was only too delighted to go to the nearest body piercer and wear the gold stick. She never came back from the second a.s.signation."

"Did she mention a black American?"

"No. Only people who saw the video talk about a black man. I never saw the video."

"Often the killer in this kind of case will need a trigger," Jones explains to Valerya. "Sometimes it's racial, sometimes social, sometimes physical-only tall or small victims for example-sometimes it's social background. Usually it's something that somehow gives the killer a proprietorial feeling, some claim on the body of the victim. It looks like Warren was very particular."