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they need it so they don’t have to worry about losing a few tens of millions on a risky venture. D’you know who fits into that category?”
    “Yes,” Yammy replied.
    “Dealers,” the director said while closing one nostril with a forefinger and bending over the table. “And d’you know who runs the dealers?”
    “Yes,” said Yammy.
    “And d’you know who runs the mob in L.A.?”
    “The Bureau,” said Yammy.
    When they returned to California, the director decided to give the talented young Japanese his big break. The party was at an obscure and secret mansion located in the desert and well known to everyone who was anyone in the film industry. Yammy remembers women and men with eyes the size of flying saucers staring at a white mountain, in the middle of a banquet table, that even Yammy knew was not a wedding cake. Near-naked women, boys, and dozens of spare bedrooms were available for anyone to use, but most could not take their eyes off the white mountain. Within five minutes everyone except Yammy was enjoying impregnable self-confidence while bumping into furniture and talking nonsense.
    “You don’t have to worry about the chief of the L.A. Bureau,” the director explained, coming up behind Yammy and missing his step. “See, they have to get their information about who to murder in Colombia and Bolivia from somewhere, and who are they going to get it from if not the mob in L.A. who buy the stuff wholesale? Bust them, and their intelligence sources dry up. That’s why the chief is here tonight.” Maybe the director thought he was nodding discreetly as he shook his head like a neighing horse at the short, broad guy on the other side of the table who had just grabbed a handful of the mountain. “This is freedom.”
    Next day, depressed, for he had made no use at all of the golden opportunity to further his career by socializing with the mob at the coke orgy, Yammy decided he just didn’t have what it took to make it in L.A. and packed his bags. Back in Sendai with Mama, he called up his one pal in the film industry in Tokyo, who had managed to make a feature film about a psychotic body piercer who murders everything that moves except his pet hamster, which he ends up dying for. The film had flopped, but so what? At least he’d made one feature film in his otherwise meaningless life. Yammy paid him a visit in the Shinbashi area of Tokyo.
    “Listen,” his pal said after five bottles of sake, “there’s only one way to make a film these days, and that is to find the kind of investors…”
    Yammy finished the sentence for him.
     
    Well,
farang,
I know you’ve guessed the rest, although it happened in Jap Time, which is to say that dear Yammy slumped into alcoholic depression for nearly a decade before he succumbed to the inevitable. To be fair to Yammy, he came very close to running a successful business operation, but like a lot of beginners in my country, he made the fatal error of choosing to buy from the army instead of the police. Worse, he bought his modest ten kilos of smack from Vikorn’s arch-enemy General Zinna, which, to cut a long story short, is why Vikorn had him banged up and had the boys produce a watertight case that will inevitably get Yammy the double injection. (We changed from the bullet last year in recognition of current fashions in the global execution industry; Buddha knows why, nobody ever felt the slug enter the back of the skull. It wasn’t a question of humanity, simply new-wave squeamishness. Personally I would much prefer hot lead in the cerebellum to a slow suck into the big sleep by chemical means. What d’you think,
farang
?)
    So, things were not looking so good for Yammy until five minutes ago. Here’s my heroic visit to him in his cell in Lard Yao (our biggest, holds nine thousand prisoners, built by the Japs as a concentration camp in World War II):
    Imagine a long hot ride to a tropical middle-of-nowhere. Suddenly a not-displeasing display of lush vegetation