Chapter 5

After we finished our room service breakfast, I gave Lek a handful of Baht to cover her cab fare home, and to show my appreciation. She had definitely followed the instructions from mama-san. All told, we fucked four times, including one in the shower, one in the large chair in the suite's parlor, and twice on the bed. I even had to call down and get additional towels delivered to the room. She even made a bit of a show putting her cell phone in her purse as we left Nana Plaza, and then made an even bigger show of taking it out of her purse the second she stepped out the door of my room the next morning as she headed to the elevators. She was talking to someone before she had taken four steps.

I called room service to come and pick up the remains of breakfast, and I checked out our gambling revenue and was delighted to see that it continued to grow. Right then and there I decided that at some point I was going to go to either Reno or Vegas and see how a "whale" gets treated.

I called the hotel car service and arranged to have a car and driver at my disposal for the day. A few minutes after 8 a.m., I headed out and had the driver take me to the condo. The driver gave me his cell phone number, told me he would find a place to park and would be no more than five minutes away. I told him that was perfect, and went to the elevators to go up to my condo. When I got there I realized I didn't have a key yet, but Rom and Anong were both there, walking through the rooms, chattering away in Thai at about 150 miles per hour.

We all sat in the kitchen and discussed possibilities and treatments. Rom had books of fabric and color swatches and a notebook full of ideas. I let her verbally walk me through the condo, discussing colors and treatments and furnishings, and I found that what she was proposing was very close to what I wanted. I found myself only making subtle changes to what she proposed. I was very impressed and told her so.

We discussed the budget for all of her ideas, and in the grand scheme of things, it was very, very reasonable, not that money mattered to me in the least.

"Anong, do we have enough funds left in the escrow account to cover all of this?"

"Yes," she replied. "More than enough."

"Well," I said, 'let's go to lunch and we can discuss what you guys can do independently and what you need my help with."

I pulled out my Blackberry, called my driver, and he was downstairs waiting for us when we emerged from the elevator. We found a nice place to dine and over lunch agreed that Anong and Rom would arrange for the painters, buy the furniture and furnishing, but I needed to pick out the Oriental rugs this afternoon, and if time allowed, all of the dishes and kitchen appliances. I would also, separately, buy the televisions and audio system.

We jumped back into the car and had the driver take us to the Chinatown area, where we could do some serious shopping. Parking was nonexistent, so we simply had the car drop us off and we told the driver we would call if we needed him.

Our first adventure was in an Oriental rug bazaar. We went into one of the smaller shops where Rom said she had made purchases before. She also let me know that this merchant could trade rugs with virtually any of the other merchants, so the size of the shop did not mean he had a small inventory. We started with the front hallway and described the runner we were looking for, and the main colors. The merchant and his assistant scurried off and began pulling rugs. Anong leaned over and whispered to me "just give them a cursory glance, make a horrid Farang face and reject all of them. He will be testing us."

Sure enough, the merchant and his assistant came out with half a dozen rugs for my selection. I looked at them, made a face, touched a couple of them, made some more faces, then turned to Rom in disgust and said, in perfect, University-level Thai (which she had never heard me speak), "Rom, why are you wasting my time with this junk that is not good enough to put on the floor of a Patpong bar. I thought you told me this merchant had quality merchandise."

The look on Rom's face was priceless. She was in utter shock as she assumed I only spoke pigeon Thai. Anong was equally shocked and her expression showed it. The merchant, seeing the look on Rom's face, assumed it was because of the quality of his merchandise, and began waving his arms in the air, yelling at his assistant in Thai to take out this junk and bring out the high quality rugs, like he had told him. This was theater at its finest, since the merchant himself probably picked out the rugs and the assistant only carried them.

The shop owner apologized profusely as he verbally threw his assistant under the bus, explaining that the assistant was new and obviously could not follow instructions. I nodded sagely and offered, again in Thai, "good help is so very, very hard to find." The merchant enthusiastically agreed.

The assistant came out from the back room with another half dozen rugs, which I looked at for a few minutes before summarily rejecting them and telling Rom and Anong, "we should think about leaving, the quality here is still well below my expectations." The merchant responded by having another hissy fit and roundly excoriating his assistant before ordering six more rugs be brought from the back room, this time specifying where they should be pulled from. This was almost as much fun as scoring fresh pussy. Well, not that much fun, but you get the idea.

I only had to wait a few minutes for round three, and it was worth the wait. These were clearly a higher quality rug, and I spent a lot of time looking at each rug, discussing it with Rom, before rejecting it. This time, as the assistant gathered up my rejects, the merchant himself went into the back room and came out with two absolutely gorgeous rugs. Rom and Anong beamed. I had both rugs put aside, looked the merchant in the eye, and quietly told him, "the fun and games are over, from this point forward, only rugs of this quality or higher, or we will walk out. This can be a very profitable afternoon, or one of great sorrow."