If he was lucky, he’d be bringing home company.

Suko ran fingers the colour of sandalwood through haphazardly cut black hair, painted his eyes with stolen drugstore kohl, and grinned at himself in the cracked mirror over the sink. He fastened a string of thrift-shop Mardi Gras beads around his neck, studied the effect of the purple plastic against torn black cotton and smooth brown skin, then added a clay amulet of the Buddha and a tiny wooden penis, both strung on leather thongs.

These he had purchased among the dim stalls at Wat Rajanada, the amulet market near Klong Saensaep in Bangkok. The amulet was to protect him against accidents and malevolent ghosts. The penis was to increase his potency, to make sure whoever he met up with tonight would have a good time. It was supposed to be worn on a string around his waist, but the first few times he’d done that, his American lovers gave him strange looks.

The amulets were the last thing Suko bought with Thai money before boarding a California-bound jet and bidding farewell to his sodden homeland, most likely for ever. He’d had to travel a long way from Patpong Road to get them, but he didn’t know whether one could buy magical amulets in America. Apparently one could: attached to his Mardi Gras beads had once been a round medallion stamped with an exaggerated Negro face and the word zulu. He’d lost the medallion on a night of drunken revelry, which was as it should be. Mai pen rai. No problem.

Suko was nineteen. His full name was unpronounceable by American tongues, but he didn’t care. American tongues could do all sorts of other things for him. This he had learned at fourteen, after hitching a midnight ride out of his home village, a place so small and so poor that it appeared on no map foreign eyes would ever see.