Mosquito
“Nice workmanship,” he said, screwing a monocle into his eye, and awarding me a detailed examination. “Unreal.”
“Unreal as a doll. Unreal as love…”
“And cool. I’m impressed.”
“Tracer. Stung me in Gung-Ho. I know you come. I not stupid.”
“I don’t believe you are, dear boy, or you would never have allowed me to find you.”
“Curiosity, Mr James.”
“Desperation, I’d guess. Oh, I know all about you Mosquito…” He turned his back to me, stepping over Zipper and walking to the window, to stare down at the night-transfigured city thirty floors below. “Aren’t you tired of working for that American pimp? Is he the one who tells you to speak and act like some second-rate Suzie Wong?”
I let fall a tear, not altogether crocodile, but prompted more by the exigencies of coquetry than by genuine sorrow or regret. It was wasted. He did not deign to look me in the face.
“Harry likes me to talk that way,” I said, throwing off my Third World guise. “Says it reassures the clients. What exactly do you know about me, James?”
“Everything, little Mosquito…” A blue-grey nimbus of spent nicotine was forming above his head, like the signature of a prosecuting angel. “How would you describe your childhood?”
“Idyllic.” He laughed.
“Spoilt little rich boy. Your father a big name in sericulture. And your youth?”
“Gilded.”
“But oh so soon tarnished! You studied at Cambridge, yes?”
“I was happy there…”
“I’m an Oxford man myself. Anyway, you took a postgrad in Comparative Literature. Your thesis: ‘The Second Decadence: Literature of the 1990’s.’ Then you got into that scrape with Lord Dagenham’s son. And he only fourteen. How wicked. Your father ordered you back to Thailand. Cut you off without a satang. Poor Mosquito, it’s been downhill ever since…”
“How do you know all this? And why tell me?”
“Because I’m feeling philanthropic, dear boy. How much money do you get from the American?”
“Not enough to leave him. This apartment’s his. He keeps nearly all the money from our jobs. Even Zipper’s on loan. My father’s made it impossible for me to get a decent job…”
“I wouldn’t have you wasted on decency, Mosquito. The next job’ll be just you and me. And this time you’ll take enough of the percentage to enable you to shake Harry off for good.”
“So much?”
“I need my doll, Mosquito. My Cartier doll. And I need her tonight. Passport, visa—I have my own contacts for that. But I must have my doll before morning.”
“Do you need your doll so bad, James?”
“Name your price.” He about-faced; I held his reptilian stare. There had been other Englishmen. Some, quite pretty. None had offered me escape. But I had known that one would come who would be special, who I would recognize by his incomparable beauty, who would, at last, carry me off to his castle in the sky. My prince.
“I don’t want money, James,” I said tremulously, “I want to go back to the land of ice and snow. Take me with you, James. Take me to England.” In petulance, he swung open the plate-glass doors and stepped onto the veranda. The tropical night crashed into the room. I followed him outside.
“Dear boy, what sort of foolishness is this?”
“The first time I saw you…” I began, but he cut me short.
“Please—let’s not make this complicated. Mosquito, you don’t want to go to Europe.” He waved his hand over the roofs of Bangkok. “Look out there. You think Europe can compete with this? The Old World is dead, Mosquito. Names: that’s all she has. The names of her jewellers and goldsmiths, her clockmakers and couturiers. And now even they are being taken from her. Forget Europe, Mosquito. She has been plundered and raped. Nobody speaks of her any more…”
Below us the city glistened like a well-oiled body, rippling under the stars. It offered forbidden technologies, flaunted stolen ideas. It mocked the impotent West. Europe had sickened, its economy in misrule. An empire of style, it had surrendered manufacturing to the Pacific Rim and the Americas, investing instead in the refinement of those luxury goods coveted by the Information Revolution’s arrivistes: jewels and perfumes, elegancies of cloth and design, and, most perverse of fabulations, the automata. But with the passing of the aube du millénaire, Europe’s fashion masters were confronted by a world increasingly fickle, increasingly philistine. Japanese disinvestment prompted recession, and from the Atlantic to the Urals, the continent was eclipsed by foreign vulgarizations of its genius.
