Free The Deceivers by Harold Robbins Page A

until the snake was dead.
    It wasn’t a technique that a bartender blotched more than once.
    Spreading the creature out with its pale belly up, the bartender slit it along the belly with a knife and drained the blood into a container. He poured rice wine with a high alcohol content into the container, then added the snake’s heart and other innards. He shook the whole batch up and used a strainer as he poured the liquid into a glass.
    The bartender set the glass in front of Taksin and tossed the meaty innards from the strainer into a pan to be heated and served as a side dish to the blood cocktail.
    Nervous but laughing at the egging on he was getting from his bar mates, Taksin got up the courage and jerked down the drink. The snake cocktail burned like liquid fire going down his throat.
    Phitsanu followed suit and downed his cocktail.
    A bit tipsy, Taksin and Phitsanu left for their next stop: a house of prostitution. They had not bothered to get condoms. The cobra cocktails were reputed not only to drive up their sexual performance, but to prevent AIDS.
    That medical fact was verified by the bartender and confirmed by a man at the bar who said it saved him twice from the dreaded disease.
    The district Taksin chose for their next adventure was a section popular with farangs —foreigners, mostly Americans, British, Canadians, Aussies, New Zealanders, and Japanese. Because of the tourist prices, locals—except for the very rich—avoided the entertainment centers that attracted foreigners.
    Taksin knew the girls would rather fuck foreigners because the tips were bigger. But the girls, in general, were well mannered, genteel creatures no matter who hired them—they were just a little more receptive if they knew they were being paid well. Taksin was generous at these times, reasoning that the more money he flashed, the more a girl would make him feel as if he were a prince among men …
    The two friends went to Soi Cowboy, “Cowboy Lane,” a short street with several dozen clubs that mostly catered to foreigners. He’d heard it was named after an American ex-GI who wore a cowboy hat and ran a bar in the area during the Vietnam War era.
    The street was a circus—elephant rides, handlers selling elephant food to tourists, street girls, pickpockets, and kids of all sizes and shapes, some of them learning to be a pickpocket. A neon jungle, it was much smaller but even flashier than the pictures he’d seen of the Las Vegas Strip.
    They walked by a café with an outside patio that featured the traditional form of Thai fighting called Muay Thai in which eight human “weapons”—hands, elbows, knees, and feet—were used.
    Called the Science of Eight Limbs, there were eight different ways to strike as opposed to the Western tradition of using two fists in a boxing ring and the four points—two fists, two feet—in most martial arts.
    Taksin enjoyed watching the fights, but not tonight, and not at tourist prices.
    As they went by a nightclub that offered Ping-Pong shows—women shooting Ping-Pong balls from most orifices of their bodies, including the one between their legs—Phitsanu grabbed his arm.
    â€œI want to see them do it.”
    Taksin shook off the grip and kept going. “For tourists.”
    Men lured in by the macabre act often found their drink bill surprisingly more than they expected … and bouncers who were not friendly to those who objected too loudly.
    Taksin led his friend to a club where he’d paid for sex before. His passion was for a katoey , a male to female transgender that was commonly called a ladyboy. Ladyboys ranged from simply cross-dressers to those who were completely castrated and had reconstructive sex organ surgery and hormone treatments.
    The preference for men to be women was not considered an evil. Thais believed that being a ladyboy was the person’s karmic destiny and that they were helpless to alter