Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett

Author:John Burdett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary, Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9781400044900
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2005-05-10T10:00:00+00:00

Chanya thinks she will puzzle for the rest of her life about why exactly Thanee introduced her to the farang. For quite a while she will think of the tall, muscular, and rather unattractive man as just that: the farang, probably because since she took on Thanee, she has hardly met any white men at all. Why did Thanee invite her to lunch with the farang at 7 Duck on Massachusetts Avenue (wicker and pillows everywhere, the penne pasta with seafood would have been a lot better with more chiles), on exactly the day that he broke it to her that he had been posted to Beijing and would be leaving in two months? Sometimes she thinks it might have been a kind of malice, not toward her but toward the farang. Perhaps the subtle revenge of an Asian diplomat who has not failed to notice how even his smoothness, charm, intelligence, and perfect English still do not qualify him as an equal of the Americans who believe they run the world? If that is the case, then it is a stroke of malicious genius on Thanee’s part; anyone could have foreseen how hard the farang was likely to fall.

Mitch Turner cannot keep his eyes off her all through the lunch, to the extent that it becomes embarrassing and Thanee makes signs of irritation too subtle for Turner to notice. Chanya has to keep dropping her eyes so as not to lock with the farang’s. Sometimes she slips rather rudely into Thai, in the hope the American will be offended, but he seems not to notice. Those blue eyes simply burn into her skin. He cannot stop staring at her.

This is not entirely surprising. She has been in Washington for five months now and for most of that time she has been kept by Thanee, who is not a man to begrudge a woman when it comes to clothes and cosmetics. She is wearing a fawn Chanel business suit, and her creamy brown skin has benefited from endless visits to upmarket beauticians who also know how to emphasize the mystery in those Oriental eyes, but best of all, her natural poise convinces everyone that she is a young diplomat herself, the product of the best education money can buy. Surely no peasant girl who began her working life by minding water buffalo barefoot in the paddy could possibly know to sit like that? And to be so relaxed it is almost intimidating? That is the word Mitch Turner will use later, when they know each other better. That whole lunch he feels intimidated by her!

On this day at least she is saved by neo-Puritanism. Normally Turner permits himself only half an hour for lunch, and this one has gone on for seventy minutes. When he can take his eyes off her, he gets into a cryptic conversation with Thanee that she cannot follow. Now Turner must get back to the office.

Thanee and Chanya exchange signs of relief undetectable to non-Thais,

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