The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D’s, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.
“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “Really. It’s quite a risk you’re taking.”
“I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.”
I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the John was a muscular seventy-something who meant well. I remember massive hands that were always fixing things, long hours while Mum and I stood around watching and applauding on cue at the Bathroom Leak Triumph, the Victory of the Fuse Box, the Battle of Flat Battery, et cetera. But he bored Nong so badly she had to invent a terminal illness for her mother so we could leave after a week. Back in Bangkok I had to deal with his pleading phone calls because Nong couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. I was twelve.) I’m not as worried about the snails as I am about the somtan salad, which also has caught Kimberley’s eye.
“At least have some sticky rice with it. Roll it into a ball like this.”
She watches a little resentfully, having graduated in spice already. She copies me, however, dips her ball into the sauce, and munches merrily with no ill effects. “Delicious.” I see no advantage in pointing out there were no chili fragments at that end of the salad.
“We think he’s in Cambodia,” the FBI says. We are still doing Bright and Cheerful around each other, by the way, careful not to mention Lek.
“Who?”
“Kowlovski, the masked man. His isometric image was recorded entering Phnom Penh airport about a week ago. Meanwhile the LAPD has come up with a whole bunch of background data. It’s like looking at a fly caught in a web. That guy was in deep trouble.” She doesn’t really want to eat any of the snails but feels honor bound to give one a go. “How do you do this?”
“Suck.”
She does so, and after a moment of resistance the snail shoots out of its shell into her mouth. She starts to gag but masters herself manfully.
“Money?”
Covering her mouth and speaking through her fingers: “It all comes down to that. It’s the California Catch. To be marketable you got to be glamorous and to be glamorous you got to be hip, and to be hip you got to have dough, and to have dough you got to be marketable.”
“Cocaine?”
“Whatever’s in style. This guy is a cipher. He has the mind of a whore: Whatever you want me to do for money-just make sure I look sexy while I’m doing it. He owes dealers and loan sharks, he owes back payments on child support for an ex-wife and two kids in Kansas, and he owes lease payments on some SUV he never drives far because he can’t afford the gas. Threats pouring in. This is just stuff the guys on the ground over there picked up in one quick trawl through the porn industry. There are no secrets-it’s a very transparent business.”
“So why Cambodia? If he was paid as much as we think for the flick, he could have settled all his debts and resumed the lifestyle, gone back to the more humdrum kind of studding.”
A shrug from the FBI. “We don’t know. We only have one witness who saw him in the last couple weeks. It’s an old girlfriend who he keeps in touch with. She says she’s the only person in the world he’s ever had a relationship with that went below the skin. She thinks he’s a troubled soul, with everything repressed. That certainly fits the pattern for prostitutes, male and female.”
Kimberley rolls another ball of sticky rice and this time plunges it deep into the somtan salad, pressing it down to absorb more of the sauce, then takes a bite. I dare not get technical at this stage by explaining that the intense but transient suffering she is about to inflict upon herself has directly to do with the overstimulation of her second chakra, which of course is the prime mover in her passion for Lek.
“Did she say anything else?”
I have to wait for the answer because her mouth is on fire, she is hiccupping, a sweat has broken out on her forehead, and her face is heart-attack crimson. Cold water is the worst therapy, but she takes a gulp from the bottle in the ice bucket. Now she has to visit the bathroom. I munch on the somtan and pick off a couple of snails while I’m waiting for her to return. The chili in the somtan goes well with my cold Kloster beer. (The two streams come together in a riotous clash somewhere in the back of the throat, sending a delicious shock wave through the taste buds.) Now the FBI is marching back to the table, her face set.
“Yes. She said he came back from a trip somewhere overseas a couple weeks ago and was real quiet, then disappeared altogether. Usually he’s always ready with the latest friendly sound bite, normally a very personable guy in a Lycra kind of way. This time, though, he seemed depressed. She was surprised he had the depth to get depressed. I don’t think I need any more snails or somtan salad.”
“I think they’ll cook you a steak, if I ask them nicely.”
“I’m suddenly on a diet. How about I watch you eat, and I’ll munch on some nice bland sticky rice if I get hungry?”
“Okay. Did he seem to have money the last time she met him?”
“Yes, she said he made a point of paying off some back rent on his apartment in Inglewood, cleared the slate with a grocery store, and gave her a silk shirt and skirt. They asked her if it was Thai silk, and she said she didn’t know.”
Finally the braised duck has arrived in a pot. The FBI eyes it suspiciously, but when I assure her there are no spices in this dish, she takes a tentative bite, then digs in.
Her cell phone rings, except nothing rings anymore. The gadget explodes with an old Thai number she grew fond of when she was here a few years ago: “Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy.” She says, “Kimberley,” and listens. Then she says, “Shit,” and closes the phone.
“He committed suicide in Phnom Penh yesterday. Apparently he used an AK-47 and a piece of rope tied around the trigger, which is not easy to do, but I guess if you’re really determined to go that way…” She casts an eye over the remains of the meal, then looks at me. Hard to say what is causing my sudden loss of appetite: death; the manner thereof; the fact that the Masked Man will never be brought to justice; the memory of what he did to Damrong; the thought, only now surfacing in my mind, that I might have to make a visit to Phnom Penh. All of a sudden the energy has gone out of the day, and it’s not because Mercury is retrograde (though it is, and our prime minister is on record as observing what a corrosive effect it is having on political life; for me, Mercury can come or go, but Jupiter conjunct the Moon in Scorpio- now that’s a curl-up-in-bed-with-a-spliff day for yours truly).
This case has a trick of remaining perpetually out of reach, like a mirage. And no, I do not want to go to Cambodia; they hate us over there. Both sides have made so many land grabs over the centuries that no one really knows who started the feud, which shows no sign of diminishing no matter how many Thais cross the border to gamble. I guess they’ve never really forgiven us for defeating them at Angkor Wat that time: even in those days about seven hundred years ago, the Khmer were so reliant on magic they stopped bothering with combat training; the Thai invasion could be likened to a motorcycle gang smashing its way into an undefended sweet shop. We took everything they had: women, boys, girls, slaves, gold, their astrology and their temple designs, music, dance -it was an early example of identity theft. Not their cuisine, though, which was way behind ours and still is. If we’d known how long they were going to hold the grudge, we might have shown more mercy.
Suddenly the FBI and I don’t want our eyes to meet. Without the illusion of work, or at least a case to discuss, we are left to wonder what to do about each other. We sneak glances when we think the other is not looking, bestowing wonder and pity at each other’s karma. Finally Kimberley plays with a spare spoon on the table prior to getting something off her chest.
“Maybe it’s something about your country. I’m starting to feel like those middle-aged Western men you see walking up and down Sukhumvit with a girl on their arms half their age and looking like the cat that found the cream. I know I’m kidding myself.” Looking me in the eye at last: “I know that, or at least the left lobe does. But I can’t stop myself. Suddenly it’s spring again, the kind of spring I never had – there were always too many goals to aim for. When he’s around, I experience a deep sense of love, of affection, of compassion. What can I say? It’s what I was always supposed to experience as a human being, right? That’s what we’re here for, even though it’s totally impossible, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you didn’t go through this with Damrong.”
I inhale deeply. “Of course I did. When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it’s hard to go on pretending you’re dead. You know the promise of life is not entirely hollow. Ecstasy is not just the name of a drug-there is something behind stones of paradise.” I try to look at her with compassionate eyes. “If even a tiny part of you is still alive, you can’t refuse the challenge.”
She looks up with humble eyes. “So you forgive me?”
I slide my small hand over her big one. “Just be careful.”
“You think I’ll destroy him?”
“The other way around.”
She looks up into the trees that surround the open-air restaurant. “He hardly even notices me, right? He’s not aware of me at all in that way.”
“How do you think the girls feel, when they walk down Sukhumvit with those farang men who grin like Cheshire cats? Do they feel like they found the cream too or merely a dirty job that pays better than factory work?”
She nods. “But the surgery, Sonchai. That’s just plain wrong.”
I shrug. No point getting back into that. We let a good ten minutes pass, during which the restaurant has started to play some old rock music on the sound system. At other tables a young Thai couple are looking as if they intend to spend the afternoon in a hotel nearby; five male middle managers in their twenties are having a lunchtime boozeup on rice whiskey; some farang tourists are poring over a map; and cats roam under tables looking for scraps. The FBI says, “I’ll come with you. You need to go to Phnom Penh-a detective like you has to see for himself. I want to go too-I’m here for the case, after all. Anyway, I need a reality check. Maybe if I’m in a different country, I won’t think about him so much.”
The FBI leaves me at Sala Daeng Skytrain station to go pack. I call Lek and tell him to meet me early this evening at his favorite katoey bar, called Don Juan’s. I go back to the station to deal with a pile of paperwork, then go home to change and to tell Chanya I’m going to Cambodia for a day or so with the FBI. She toys with jealousy for a moment, but it’s not enough to distract her from the soap she’s watching. Her egg-shaped center of gravity provides an imperturbable complacency these days. “I’m also going to see Lek’s moordu,” I admit.
She looks at me for a moment to make sure I’m serious, then smiles. “About time. Tell me if he’s any good.”
“It’s a katoey,” I explain.
She makes big eyes. “Even better.” Katoeys are known to make excellent moordus.
There are plenty of different expressions to denote transsexuals: second women, third sex, the different ones. I like Angels in Disguise best. Don Juan’s is crammed with them. Smooth brown feminized flesh, padded bras and silicon-enhanced buttocks, plenty of jewelry-especially silver necklaces-shapely legs, lascivious laughter, cheap perfume, and sophisticated camp combine to lift desperate spirits for a night. You have to admire their guts. I hardly recognize Lek in his lipstick, rouge, and mascara; a tight T-shirt emphasizes his budding breasts. I think he is wearing jeans rather than a skirt for my sake. He squeezes between sisters to reach me, beaming. I don’t think he’s given the FBI a single thought since her last lovelorn call to him.
“This is my boss, my master,” he tells his friends with unrestrained pride. “We’re working on the most terrifying case you can imagine.” He clamps a hand over his mouth. “But I can’t tell you anything about it, it’s so secret.”
“Pi-Lek is such a tease!” a katoey in long imitation-pearl earrings exclaims. “It’s such a privilege to meet you. Pi-Lek has told us all about you-we know you’re the most compassionate cop in Bangkok, in the whole world probably. Pi-Lek says you’re already a private Buddha and stay on earth only to spread enlightenment. It’s such an honor.”
“He exaggerates,” I say. “I’m just a cop.” It’s hard not to be borne along by the avalanche of charm.
“Come,” Lek says, “let’s go find Pi-Da.” To his friends: “You can all run along now-my master hasn’t come to waste time with silly girls.” He waves a dismissive hand at them, provoking imitation tantrums and stamping of feet. He takes me by the hand to lead me through a crowd near the bar, then across to the other side of the room. His voice is considerably less camp when he says, “Pi-Da, this is my boss, Detective Jitpleecheep.”
Pi-Da clearly belongs to the other category of katoey. In his forties, with a big round face, a paunch, and heavy legs, he was never beautiful, but his womanly soul must have yearned for self-expression all his life. Lek has explained he is a performer in the “ugly drag” cabarets that feature in most katoey bars, when they send up their own camp culture. He is also a kind of wise aunt who eschews campspeak and all the usual trappings of his kind. His voice is high and naturally feminine, though. He is assessing me shrewdly even while we wai each other. Then he takes my hand to maneuver me to a table, where we sit down. I watch him clear his mind while he stares at me and I sense his penetration of my heart. He shudders, makes big eyes, stares at Lek for a moment, then back at me. Lek’s face collapses when he says, “I’m sorry, this is too big for me, I can’t go there. This haunting is too powerful.” He makes a gesture to push me away. Lek and I share a moment of confusion; then Lek says, “You have embarrassed me.”
There is hardly a greater cultural sin. Pi-Da’s face collapses under Lek’s relentless glare. When Lek turns away in disgust, Pi-Da says reproachfully, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“You’re supposed to be clairvoyant. You’re supposed to look fearlessly into the Other Side,” Lek says more in sorrow than in anger. The whole of the katoey’s resentment at not being taken seriously is suddenly at issue here: if Pi-Da can’t handle heavy-duty hauntings, what kind of moordu is’s/he anyway? Just another aging queen?
Pi-Da’s expression has changed. No longer the flabby aunt, he is now rather a man whose adulthood has been called into question. “We’ll have to go upstairs,” he says in a grim tone. Staring at me: “There will be no charge.”
“Upstairs” is a collection of rooms used for the storage of alcohol and boxes of snacks. Pi-Da clears a space, and the three of us sit on the floor. Pi-Da holds my hand again and closes his eyes. After about a minute he opens them again, but they seem to be unseeing. I watch with horror and fascination as he stands, places his hands on a wall, and bends forward with his backside sticking out. “Sonchai, why don’t you have me from behind like this? Whip me if you like.” It is Damrong’s voice to the last nuance. “You’re such a great lover, Detective, you remind me of a charging elephant.” A hysterical cackle.
Pi-Da shakes his head violently as if to break free. When he turns to us, his flesh is gray and he seems exhausted. “I can’t do more than that-her energy is too crude and too powerful. She’ll kill me if I let her take over. You have no idea what you’ve got involved with. This is Khmer sorcery, not a party game.” Without another word he leaves us to go back to the bar. Lek is staring at me with huge eyes.
“Yes,” I say, “it’s true. I had an affair with her.” I cannot face Lek any longer. I leave him to rush down the stairs two at a time into the anonymity of the busy Bangkok night.
There are lots of bankrupt states and plenty of kleptocracies; there are a few failed states; and there is Cambodia. After the Nixon holocaust: Pol Pot, generously supported by the CIA. Almost two million die in a civil war, except it’s not like other civil wars. Everyone here remembers the knock on the door in the middle of the night and relatives taken away in an oxcart, usually by a teen with a machine gun, never to be seen again except as corpses, often mutilated. Then there is Tuol Sleng, where the torturing took place, and the skull mountains in Choeung Ek. Among the Cambodians themselves, a universal numbness hides psychic scars that go to the marrow. Many appear to be sleepwalking, random thuggery is an everyday hazard, “girls, guns, gambling, and ganja” are the economy, corruption is the work ethic, child abuse a national sport. You can use the local currency if you’re feeling quaint, but everyone prefers American dollars. Naturally the capital, Phnom Penh, attracts NGOs like flies; pale pampered European faces look out from the tinted windows of four-by-fours. A lot of the city is crumbling. At the police station Kimberley flashes her credentials. Neither of us has any investigative rights here, but then nobody here obeys the rules. It’s not difficult to get them to cooperate for a hundred dollars.
The apartment where Stanislaus Kowlovski died is on a side street about two hundred yards from the Mekong. We duck out of a blinding sun, following a cop whose uniform may be the only legal thing he owns. A short, stooping brown guy with some fingers missing from both hands, he believes we’ll be excited by the blood and goo on the wall. He is. The stains are buried under a swarm of flies, though. He sniggers, “Big American, what a body, dead now. Crazy. What kind of pain could he possibly have, a white man? All over the country there are people who can hardly walk for the anguish they feel; others cannot walk because their legs were blown away by land mines. This guy had everything. With a body like that he could have had any woman he wanted, even farang women. Crazy.”
They showed us the gun at the police station, a Chinese-made Kalashnikov. You can buy them almost anywhere here: if they charge more than two hundred dollars, they’re ripping you off. When the cops took the gun, though, they left the cord he used to pull the trigger, via a pinion he had fixed in the stock, which he must have held between his feet. A bloody way to go -it took out the whole of his lower intestine and snapped his spine-but it did the trick. The FBI and I pay no attention to anything except the cord. You have to believe Kowlovski was making a statement here, perhaps a confession: it is bright orange, about a centimeter thick, just like the rope he used to kill Damrong.
“You okay?” the FBI says. Sure.
“What are you thinking?”
“Get him to show us the belongings.”
He takes his orders from her rather than me, obviously, and shows us out of the living room (linoleum, one dirty sofa, a TV) to the bedroom, where a suitcase is lying on the bed. Naturally anything valuable he might have owned will not be found. We rummage around a collection of clothes all designed to showcase his outstanding physique and way too big for any Cambodian cop, then find his money belt buried at the bottom. There’s no money in it, of course, but there are a few spent airline tickets and something else. The FBI looks at it quizzically and hands it to me. It is a varnished elephant-hair bracelet. I tell her about the one Tom Smith was wearing, last time I saw him, and that Baker also had one. “Smith said an eccentric monk gave it to him at a Sky-train station.”
Kimberley shakes her head and looks at me for guidance. “I thought your monk friend was in Bangkok?”
“Only an hour away. Monks are allowed to fly, just like us.”
“Don’t they take a vow of poverty? They’re not supposed to have cash?”
I nod and repeat, “Not supposed to have cash.” She jerks her chin at me, but I don’t want to say more. The implications are, after all, somewhat radical.
“Why Cambodia?” she asks.
“Yeah, why Cambodia?”
“You said he ordained here?”
I nod.
Kimberley shrugs and picks up a pair of shorts to shake them upside down. A second elephant-hair bracelet falls out. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“It’s like he’s making a point, this monk,” the FBI says.
“Right.”
“But who to, if not you?”
We get thorough in our search after that, but find nothing else of interest. At the morgue we’re able to identify Kowlovski from pix that Kimberley brought. The body collapsed in two when they picked it up, and the two pieces are laid in the drawer with a gap between them.
“In this country it’s a miracle they managed to get the head at the top and the feet at the bottom,” Kimberley growls.
The FBI needs a beer, and so do I. The best place I know is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which is right on the Mekong (old colonial building, fans and high ceilings, well renovated, brilliant snapshots of war on the walls). From the balcony I’m watching a boy wheel a crude barrow near the river, looking for tourists. The twisted human form strapped to the board, which is bolted to two bicycle wheels, must be a brother or other close relation, because the boy and the quadriplegic appear very close when they are not panhandling. He kisses the distorted human form with the extra-large head repeatedly, coddles him, and presents him to a middle-aged Western couple, perhaps Americans, dressed in smart casuals, as they stroll past. He and the cripple are very polite, to judge by the smiles and pleading eyes and tragic frown on the quadriplegic’s big twisted face, but the message is clear, calculated, and direct: How much is it worth to make this universal icon of guilt disappear? A few dollars, as far as I can see. After an embarrassed glance, the couple resume their walk by the Seine while the kid wheels his brother back toward the Mekong. What else could we have done? the couple seem to ask each other; decent people cannot stand very much reality.
“About this monk, Damrong’s brother,” Kimberley says, sipping her draught lager, leaving a white mustache around her mouth which she wipes with a sleeve.
As it happens, I’m not thinking about the monk-I’m thinking about Kimberley. I know she’s never been to Cambodia before, but I think something in her culture makes the detritus familiar; she’s more relaxed, more sure of herself, than in my more demanding country. She is also wearing military-style pants and a light khaki vest with a hundred pockets. “Anything could happen here,” she says with relish. “Are you sure he’s for real?”
“As sure as I can be. He’s definitely a mediator familiar with vipas-sana. There’s no other way to get that weird.” I tell her about Phra Titanaka’s personality changes.
“Bipolar,” she diagnoses. “A true psycho could never be that organized or that coherent. Maybe he forgets to take his lithium from time to time. You think he got to Kowlovski?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it? One elephant-hair bracelet might have been a coincidence, but two – ”
“Is downright provocative. Somehow he found out who the masked man was before we did? But I thought you said he never saw the video.”
“That’s what he said. Monks don’t lie.”
A snort from Kimberley before she quaffs more beer. She is shaking her head. “Wasn’t Pol Pot a Buddhist monk?”
“For a while. It didn’t seem to take with him.”
“A Khmer Buddhist monk?”
I shrug. “It’s obvious he didn’t do it-he’s not any kind of suspect.”
“But he seems to know more about it than we do. Sonchai, why are you protecting a religious nut you hardly even know? He got to Kowlovski. He distributed elephant-hair bracelets to all major suspects. Maybe he sold his sister? Maybe he’s behind the snuff movie?”
I flash Kimberley a look of incredulity. “You just don’t get it,” I say. It would be a rude response in Thai, but Kimberley’s mood is impregnably buoyant.
“Get what?”
“Gatdanyu.”
“Huh?”. I take a deep breath because I’ve been down this alley before; trying to explain gatdanyu to a farang is like trying to explain the DNA helix to a Sumatran headhunter-the reception is inevitably superficial.
As best I can, I describe the hidden structure of a society few foreigners would recognize as Thailand. When Buddhism first came to our shores, our ancestors accepted its message of generosity and compassion with enthusiasm. They also saw the need to adjust it to take account of a quirk in human nature which they had noticed during the ten thousand or so years they had passed without Buddhism. I guess the objection they had to the naivete of their new faith could be expressed in one word: payback. How do you make generosity worth anyone’s while? By making sure it pays is how. As a result, every Thai is the center of an endless web of moral credits and debits that will end only in death. Naturally every favor must be valued against an unwritten accounting system which uses the Big Favor of Birth as its starting point, a debt that takes priority over all others.
“Superficially, Thailand can seem like a male chauvinist culture; scratch the surface, and you’ll see we’re all controlled by Mother. I sure as hell am.”
“That’s really why you work in your mother’s brothel, against all your finer instincts?”
“Yes,” I confess, unable to look her in the eye.
“And when I see all you Thais running around as if everyone is a successful business center, what they’re actually doing is working out how to get a favor out of A to use to pay back a favor owed to B maybe from childhood, et cetera?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Wait a minute-what about the girls who work the bars? Are you telling me they’re paying back the debt to Mother by selling their bodies?”
“Yes. That is exactly what they’re doing.”
“And the mothers know?”
“There’s an omerta about it, but in reality everyone knows.”
Kimberley is looking at me over the rim of the pint glass of beer she just ordered. She shivers as she puts the glass down. “Wow.” She shakes her head. “They may not be cut out for the Game at all. It’s emotional blackmail pure and simple? They dump their chances for a successful marriage, childbirth, everything?”
“Now you’re going too far. What chances? We’re talking poor, Kimberley.”
“But how does this apply to the case? I thought Damrong and her brother hated their mother.”
“That’s the point. Gatdanyu is very practical. You owe the one who actually does the favor. In reality, the fact of birth aside, Damrong was her brother’s mother. She is the one who saved his life over and over and put him through school.”
“And she wasn’t a girl to stint when it came to reminding him of how much he owed her?”
“We don’t know, but that would be my guess.”
“Programmed him from early childhood?”
“Probably.”
“My god, that boy must have some problems.”
“So do we,” I say softly, and jerk my chin toward the Mekong. Tom Smith, also in smart casuals, is strolling along the river this morning. He suffers no culture shock when accosted by the kid and his quadriplegic brother, however. The smiles and pleading eyes freeze on their faces as he gives them the brush-off with a snarl. Since he is wearing short sleeves, it is easy to spot the burnished brown bracelet on his left wrist. I haven’t told the FBI about Smith’s client the Chinese Australian yet, so I tell her now.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Kimberley says when I’ve finished.
“Why?”
She shakes her head. “He’s a consigliere, Sonchai. That Chinese Australian, I know who he is. So do a lot of FBI agents with international experience. This is exactly the international dimension I’m over here to check out.” I wrinkle my brow. “We think he’s the front man for a syndicate of rich psychos. We call them ‘the invisible men.” They seem to be behind a lot of things: gladiatorial fights to the death in the Sonora desert, snuff movies filmed in Nicaragua with the victims picked off from helicopters just for the hell of it, sadomasochism for sale in Shanghai, boys from broken homes kidnapped in Glasgow and shipped off to the Middle East for the pleasure of oil sheikhs-the kind of stuff that never gets investigated because it happens offstage as far as America and the West are concerned and the people behind it are too rich and important to be captured.“
I’m not entirely surprised, but I don’t see why we need to panic and say so. “Even if Smith is here on the same business as us, it doesn’t mean he’s going to call up an assassination squad.”
The FBI shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m reading this place better than you. Don’t you get it? It is lawless. Lawless. Know what human beings do when there’s no law? They waste other human beings who are in the way, or look like they are going to be in the way, or have potential to be in the way. It’s called Cain’s First Law of Survival. Think about it: you are the consigliere to a powerful international syndicate whose public face happens to be mainstream pornography but whose premier product is for the delectation of psychotically morbid billionaires. Know what kind of power that gives you, to have the goods on a dozen or so of the richest perverts in the world? Imagine what’s at stake here. Smith’s people made that video of Damrong; now they’re very nervous because the costar did himself in less than a mile from here. About thirty minutes from now Tom Smith will bribe the same cops we bribed and go see the place where Kowlovski butchered himself. On the way the same cops we bribed will tell him about our visit. Tell him we checked out the crime scene. Tell him we are still here. Tell him we plan to be here until tomorrow. What does Smith do in a country where there are about two hundred thousand retired Khmer Rouge on the breadline? How long would it take to put a small squad together? Hell, he’ll probably use the cops as recruiting agents- they could call up a dozen contract killers in ten minutes. Maybe the cops are contract killers themselves, who like to do a little policing now and then. Don’t you see? He’s got to hit us here in Cambodia. It’s an opportunity a guy like him can’t afford to miss. Look what happened to Nok. Sonchai, let’s say I’ve been here in a previous life, I know where I am, okay?”
“It wasn’t here,” I say. “It was Danang in Vietnam. You were male then, of course. And black.” I smile sweetly while she looks at me in shock. “You’d better fly back to Bangkok. I need to check out Dam-rong’s home village, and it’s easier to do that by going overland and crossing the border at Surin province.”
We decide to stroll by the Mekong; everyone does. Blood-brown, myth-laden, I guess it means something different to all people. Even the FBI carries a piece of it inside her-deeds of derring-do by Navy SEALs thirty years ago, perhaps; it’s our Ganges and was created by a dragon, naturally. There is none of the traffic you see on the Chao Phraya, though; at Phnom Penh the Mekong is still a quiet, lazy liquefaction that merges into the red earth at sunset in a blaze like a fallen firework writhing in mud. It sustains a dozen dilatory fishing craft during the day; most of the canoes don’t have engines, and those that do are so small and quiet that, what with the motionless heat and the Pleistocene fishermen throwing skeins, you’d think that peace had prevailed here for a thousand years. That’s maya for you.
“I love him,” the FBI declares softly, looking away downstream, reserving the right to deny what she has just said, but high for a moment, having first dared herself to say it. “Sorry,” she adds, with a hand on my shoulder reasserting control. “I’ve never been sixteen before. It won’t last long.”
“You’ll be with him by tomorrow,” I say with a smile.
“Tonight,” she corrects, still looking away. “I just text’d him.” She allows her hand to drop so that it first brushes, then grasps mine. “You don’t know how clairvoyant you really are, Sonchai. I had the most vivid dream of my life last night. Vietnam. Danang. You’re right, I was black and about nineteen years old. The only thing I thought of as I lay dying was a girl in Saigon. All I cared about in the world was that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I died staring at a passport-size snapshot of her.”
“Lek?”
“To the last nuance, as you would say.” She looks me full in the face for a moment, then faces upstream, toward Laos. “You’re the one who is always explaining that we humans are simply the visible ends of karmic chains, intimately interwoven with others, that stretch back thousands, even millions, of years. You just didn’t want to apply that to an American in love, did you?”
Touche, and I would not mind leaving it at that. But Kimberley is farang, after all. “Sonchai, you don’t have to answer yes or no to this question. I’ll know by the way you look. Is this-this thing I’m feeling-is it really just the reflex of a sexually frustrated thirty-something? I mean, you don’t really think it’s all about dominance, money, power, and exoticism? You were just angry when you said all that? He’s more than ten years younger than me, I know, and very feminine…” She coughs. “Yeah, well, he’s totally irresistible. That beauty, that sensitivity-to an American cop like me, it’s a miracle he exists at all in this world. Two nights ago I watched him put his makeup on before he went to that bar of his. All my life I’ve been bored by women’s makeup rituals, but I could have watched him all night. What is happening to me?”
Five A.M.: the bus station at Surin is as big as an airport, with buses going everywhere but mostly to Bangkok. Even at this hour my nomadic people are on the move. We keep our restlessness hidden under serene exteriors, but check our life itineraries, and you’ll see we never stop moving from country to city and vice versa. Like temple dogs, we carry our fleas with us and never stop itching. I left the FBI at the airport at Phnom Penh; she was retrieving a picture of Lek that she had captured on her cell phone. He is beautiful, of course, but also very ethnic; he looked out of the FBI’s cell phone as if he were peering at her from another planet and knew it. She looked at him as if there were not a single thing about him she did not understand.
I’m lucky to get a seat at the back of the bus to Ubon Ratchathani. There’s that usual feeling of relief, of a journey finally started, when the driver climbs in and starts the engine. At the same time he plays a noisy video on the monitor, which is on a bracket above his head. Unfortunately it’s a sickly romance full of empty beaches, long sultry looks, and sustained close-ups of teary eyes; an ophthalmologist’s vision. I close my own eyes and drop off in seconds. I must be exhausted because I do not normally sleep on buses. The seat is quite uncomfortable, and I have to continually adjust by bracing my knees against the seat back in front of me; then when that position becomes intolerable, I twist around so my head is resting on the window; and so on. In the waking intervals I observe a hybrid landscape of failed development projects, sprawls of poor quality housing that looks unfinished even though it’s been there for decades, ragged streams, and sultry remains of jungle. The wasteland continues for a few miles, but by the time we reach Pak Cheung, there’s been a subtle change. Nature is not so cowed out here: the ramshackle settlements are like barricades against the dense creeping green of the hinterland.
After lunch I get into a conversation with the young woman next to me. We beat about the bush for a couple of minutes before we admit to each other we’re both in the flesh trade. She works in Nana Plaza and has been doing quite well these past few months. She’s going home for a few days to be with her five-year-old daughter by a Thai lover whom she hasn’t seen since she told him she was pregnant. She doesn’t say it, but I can see she is also looking forward to the respect her fellow villagers will show her for taking care of her parents and siblings; it will make a change from being just another whore on the Game in the big city. I ask her if she knows Black Hill Hamlet, where Damrong came from. She nods: Yes, she’s visited there a few times. Even for Isaan, it’s a very poor village. She saw children eating dirt there; they really are on the breadline in that area.
From Ubon Ratchathani I hire a four-wheel drive with driver to take me to the hamlet. Now I’m in true Isaan country. It’s starting to get dark, but there’s enough light to observe the mystically flat landscape that makes you feel like you’re at the lowest point on earth. Wild-looking day workers with T-shirts wrapped around their heads flash by in the back of pickup trucks. Regular tree lines form windbreaks for the smallholdings where women prepare food over charcoal fires; the mystic green of the paddy is immeasurably enhanced by the inexplicable presence of elephants. The pachyderms graze or stand impossibly motionless, relishing the emptiness. I’m reminded that Surin province is the elephant capital of Thailand. During the last weekend in November there is a festival, called the Elephant Roundup, in Surin town, and the roads are crowded with the beasts for weeks on end. In the country it is considered lucky, even vital, that children should run under the lumbering animals as they trundle past.
It’s dark by the time the four-wheel drive gets to the hamlet. I don’t bother to ask anyone about Damrong’s folks -I’m too tired. I find a woman who is prepared to let me sleep in her house for a modest fee of one hundred baht, including breakfast. Like every other house in these parts, it is on stilts. When I’ve climbed the wooden stairs, I see it consists of one huge room with a few futons on the floor and all the owner’s worldly possessions piled up in a corner. Being a widow and middle aged, there is no stigma in putting a man up for the night, nor any suggestion of impropriety. The house is in a compound surrounded by houses belonging to her relations. I don’t think she has ever experienced urban paranoia in her life. She shifts her futon to the other end of the room, though, and I fall asleep gratefully. In the morning she gives me rice gruel with a fried egg on top. Starting off gently, I ask her as obliquely as I can about Damrong and her family. I haven’t told her I’m a cop.
She has heard about Damrong’s death, of course-the whole hamlet has been talking about it for days. How did she hear about it? She shrugs: grapevine. I guide the conversation to Damrong’s home life. What kind of people?
Despite the labyrinthine forms of politeness and diplomacy with which country people broach delicate subjects, I’ve clearly hit upon some subtle level of the whole affair known only to the villagers. I see from her face that my hostess believes that magic, karma, or even divine vengeance were involved. When I open my wallet to offer to pay a little more for a cup of coffee if she can manage one, she understands immediately and, in a sudden change of mood, starts merrily and loquaciously to spill her guts.
Damrong’s family were hard people, my hostess explains. She uses a particular Isaan word which indicates a combination of fear, respect, and doubt: even in the country it is possible to take toughness too far. Damrong’s father died when she was in her midteens, but he was quite the country gangster in his day, who used sorcery to protect himself during his midnight raids on other villages. His tattoos kept him safe for years. In those not-so-distant times there were very few cops around, and those few were not exactly diligent. Damrong’s father killed five men during his life, mostly in brawls or simply because they got on his nerves-generally with the upward thrust of a knife under the ribs. The courting of Damrong’s mother consisted of abducting her and keeping her in his house for three days. Whether he raped her or not during that time is irrelevant; at the end of the three-day period, she was ruined as far as any other man was concerned, so she had to marry the country gangster. She didn’t much mind, so the story goes, for she had that extra tough-some would say criminal-streak herself, which is why the gangster chose her in the first place. Nobody liked doing business with them. A darkness hung over that family. Damrong’s violent death was seen hereabouts as simply one more chapter in a black family history.
My hostess pauses in her compulsive nattering and looks at me. “You know the tradition of making children run under elephants during the festival? Well, I happened to be there when her mother made Damrong do it. Personally I think it’s very cruel-some kids are so terrified they’re mentally scarred for life. Think of what it must mean to a six-year-old, seeing those enormous legs, those terrifying feet, and being told by your own mother you have to risk your life by running underneath them. Elephants are not gentle giants-they’re vicious and unpredictable.”
“How did Damrong take it?”
“That’s the thing, I never saw a child so terrified. But her mother beat her. I mean, she just kept on hitting her until she was more terrified of another smack than she was of the elephant. She ran under it, but I’ll never forget the hatred in her eyes-not of the elephant, of her mother. She didn’t run to her for comfort, she just stood there on the other side of the street totally traumatized. Such a pretty girl too. You could see what she was going to become even at that age. What choice did she have?”
We’re interrupted by a shout from below. One of the neighbors has heard that a stranger is staying here and wants to take a look at him. “We’re talking about Damrong!” my hostess yells down. “I’m coming up!” yells the other.
She is a very short country woman, perhaps no more than four feet nine-a diastrophic dwarf, the smartest kind of little person -in a worn sarong carrying a plastic bag containing a large spiky green durian that she no doubt hopes to sell somewhere today. To see her as poor, though, might be missing the point. I recognize her as belonging to a specific type which is fast disappearing. Even today, all over rural Thailand, especially here in Isaan, there are still people like her who live off the land in a literal way, people who are sufficiently familiar with the woods and jungles to survive there without much external support. Her face is deeply lined with a great forehead and young bright eyes under the sagging lids. This woman has never experienced depression in her life; she lives on some elemental level and shares her mind with spirits.
“The gentleman was asking about Damrong,” my hostess explains.
“Oh, of course,” says the dwarf, not at all surprised that someone should appear out of nowhere and demand to know all the gossip. “So sad.”
“I said she comes from a hard family.”
“Hard?” The dwarf also uses the Isaan word. “You’re not kidding.” Looking up at me and, I think, quickly identifying me as some kind of authority figure: “They say her brother, Gamon, is heartbroken.”
“Oh, yes,” says my hostess, distressed at having left out a dramatic detail. “They were so close. But of course, he is a monk, so he will know how to take it.”
“We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill himself,” says the dwarf in a contemplative kind of way, “monk or not. She was the only backbone he had.”
When we hear yet another voice downstairs, a curious neighbor wanting to see the mysterious visitor, I know it’s time to go. I dig out my police ID to flash it. No one is particularly surprised. The dwarf undertakes to lead me to Damrong’s mother’s house.
The house-actually a large shack-is the only one without a flower garden; garbage is heaped up in a corner in front. Unlike the other houses, the stilts supporting this one are entirely of timber, with no concrete support; they are rotting along with the stairs that lead up to the front door. I have to knock a few times. When she opens the door, I see one large, almost-empty space populated by plastic buckets to catch leaks from the roof. In a far corner a small black-and-white television flickers in front of a futon.
She’s drunk already and very thin in the way of terminal alcoholics: worn gray sarong wrapped around her skeletal form, black T-shirt. Whatever it is that happens to the legs of drunks has happened to hers: she walks stiffly with a jerk, as if there’s a broken nerve in the link between leg and brain. I’ve never seen a face so black with fear and loathing. No doubt she was hard as nails twenty years ago, but now the hardness has disintegrated, leaving only a rickety body and a damaged brain as processing unit; there’s been no higher consciousness here for decades. I know there’s no point questioning her, so I have to change my plan on the wing. I flash my ID. “Your son, Gamon, says hello.”
She glares at me, apparently not understanding the word “son.” I look for signs of him from the doorway and see, of all things, an old publicity photograph for a Harley-Davidson motorbike pinned to a wall. If I am not mistaken, it is a Fat Boy. A flicker of light passes through her eyes. She makes a shooing gesture with her hands. “Fucked off.”
“He joined the Sangha.”
She glowers. “Fucked off.”
“And your daughter, Damrong?” The name seems to have no meaning for her at all. Perhaps she would remember her daughter’s family nickname, but I don’t know what it is. From my pocket I fish out a still from the video: Damrong’s beautiful face about five minutes before she dies. It has a strange effect on the old woman, as if evoking not memories so much as a parallel world. She points at a flimsy structure in one corner of the space, which seems to form a separate room made of thin plywood, with a door that is locked by means of a cheap padlock. “Borisot,” she says: virgin.
I know the country tradition of building a special space for a daughter who has reached puberty and whose honor needs to be kept inviolable until a husband can be found. It is a custom which is emphasized in every second soap that appears on our TV screens. By a fantastic psychological maneuver Damrong’s mother must have decided one fine day to protect the virtue of her absent daughter, whom she forced into prostitution and from whom she has not heard for years. I have to give her two hundred baht before she will fish out the key to the padlock and open the door. Inside, the tiny room consists of two-by-four studs holding up plywood walls. There is nothing else at all except for two photographs, both of Damrong. One is about eight by twelve inches, old and yellow, pinned to the plywood: the kind of romantic pic only country photographers produce, with softened lines, starry eyes, and a stiff white dress with plenty of lace. Damrong could not have been more than thirteen years old when it was taken; she has been told to look skyward to a TV heaven of handsome husbands and air-conditioning. Despite the photographer’s efforts, her classic beauty shines through, and there is no denying the power of it. The other photograph is of a child running under a huge elephant. The old lady sees me stare at it and starts into an incomprehensible babble in her native Khmer. I think this hopelessness I feel, intensified by a factor of millions, must have been exactly what Damrong decided to combat one fine day when she was still very young.
“Just one thing, Mother,” I say, putting a finger to her lips. To my surprise, she stops ranting on the instant, like an obedient child. Gently I turn her around so she has her back to me and lift up the T-shirt. She yields as if she’s undergoing a medical examination. Sure enough, the tiger tattoo begins somewhere in the small of her back and leaps up so that its head is just peeping over her left shoulder. Interesting. The other tattoo is an elaborate horoscope. Both are very faded and wrinkled, I would guess she’s had them since her teens. I examine the horoscope for a while; it is written in ancient khom, of course. I don’t think there’s much more to be gained here, so I say goodbye and descend the stairs to the ground. Outside, looking up at the rickety hut with its rotting stumps and the black madness of the old lady who is at this moment slamming the door, I experience an overwhelming rage. What psychological mountains did Damrong have to climb just to function, just to get up in the morning-merely in order to believe in herself enough to work? What superhuman power enabled her to do it all with genius and panache? They knew nothing of all that, of course -Baker, Smith, and Tanakan-when they made use of her charms. I knew better but carefully concealed that knowledge from myself while I took my pleasure; just like them, mes semblables, mes freres.
The hamlet is a sprawling affair that takes up a surprising amount of land because each family owns a smallholding which separates it from the others. A few of the homesteads are quite affluent, even boasting carports with pickup trucks; most are at subsistence level. Everyone has heard that a stranger, a cop, has arrived, and ragged kids emerge blatantly to stare. Nobody wants to be seen talking to me in public, though. I decide to try my luck with the family who live next door to Damrong’s mother. A woman in a sarong is squatting under her long roof, using a pestle and mortar to make somtan salad. She has been watching me from the corner of her eye, and when I pause at her gate, she calls out, “Have you eaten yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Eat with us.”
There is a sliding iron gate, which I push open. At the same time three kids appear, the youngest about three years old. A bent old man, probably in his eighties, emerges from the house on wobbly legs, holding a bottle of moonshine. Behind him nagging abuse streams from an old lady. Now a young woman appears, walking very slowly. It is almost a perfect replica of Nok’s family. The first woman, who is in her fifties, has been watching my face as I gaze with a professional eye on the young woman.
“Medication,” she says.
“Yaa baa?”
“Her second husband was a dealer. The police shot and killed him, but not before he’d screwed up her head with his drugs. One half of her brain is mush. The mental hospital was going to keep her locked up for seven years if I didn’t guarantee her. I have to pay for the medication every month or she loses it completely.”
“Those are her kids?”
“All by different fathers. If it wasn’t for my first daughter, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“Your first daughter works in Krung Thep?”
She turns her eyes away. “Of course.” She begins serving the somtan and places a wicker basket of sticky rice between us.
I regret the insensitivity of my question and change the subject even as I stick my fingers into the rice and make a ball out of a handful. “I’ve been talking to your neighbor.”
“I know. You’re here because of Damrong.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Forever. We’re villagers-this is the only land we own.”
I decide to let her talk in her own time. She rolls her ball of rice around in the sauce of the salad, which is crimson with chili, and eats for a while, then says, “So, you’re a cop investigating poor Damrong’s death. That’s one family with very bad karma.” Shaking her head: “What other explanation could there be? We are poor too, we suffer just the same as them, but we don’t go bad. We’re good people, we go to the wat, we make merit, we keep a clean house, we never break the law.” A pause while she shakes her head. “What’s that mother going to be, chart na? She can’t even talk properly anymore. She’s going to hell. When she gets out, she’ll be lucky to be reborn a human. I’ve never seen anything that dark, that hopeless. What people do to their minds, hey?”
Suddenly the dwarf woman has appeared from nowhere. She is peering around the open gate, looking in. My hostess catches her eye. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No.” The dwarf joins us, lowering herself onto the rush mat we are eating off of and sitting upright with the straight back of a child.
“He’s asking about poor Damrong.”
“I know,” the dwarf says. She looks me full in the face, as if she has decided it’s time I knew the truth. “She was a very strong spirit with very bad karma,” she explains. “That’s why she incarnated into that family. She was very strong.”
“The mother’s spent a long time in jail,” I say.
“Yes.”
“There’s Khmer writing under the tiger on her back.”
“Yes.”
“And I think the horoscope is in the black tradition. Did she belong to some criminal cult?”
“Yes.” She nods without casting me a glance. Even in the midst of such a dark subject, her fifty-year-old child’s eyes are dancing over the house, the kids, the catastrophe of poverty, a smile always on her lips.
“Black sorcery?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It’s not good to think about what they did in that family. It will bring bad luck.”
“Did they use their own children?”
“Yes.”
“What about her brother?”
For the first time a moment of concern appears in her face, then is quickly erased. “She loved him. She’s the only reason he survived. A very weak spirit. Perhaps he cannot survive on his own without her.” Casting me a glance: “Do you know how her father died?”
“How her father died? Why don’t you tell me?”
“Very unlucky to talk about a violent death like that.” She lays a hand on my forearm. “I’m a non-Returner.”
It’s odd to hear a Buddhist technical expression used by someone who is obviously the product of some shamanistic cult, but when the Indians brought Buddhism to Thailand, much of it was absorbed into local animism. Nowadays it is quite common to hear people like the dwarf talk about “non-Returners.” Buddhist monks who believe they have achieved this level are careful not to commit a blunder that will land them in the flesh yet again. Even talking in an inappropriate way can ruin your disembodiment plans.
There are few proprieties to observe in the country. When I’ve finished eating, I get up to go, casting the dwarf one last glance. Without looking at me, she says, “They made the children watch, you know. Both of them, so they wouldn’t turn out like their father. The girl was just about old enough to take it-like I say, she was very strong. But the boy…”
“They watched their father die?”
She raises a finger to her lips. As I leave, the hostess calls to me in an urgent voice, as if there is something vital she forgot to tell me. “They’re Khmer, you know, not Thai people at all.”
At the main road I manage to wave down a pickup truck that will take me to the nearest bus station for a hundred baht. My driver is the best kind of country man: silent, devout, honest. In the delicious emptiness that surrounds him, my mind will not cease its endless narrative:
A Third-World Pilgrim’s Progress
1. Born into karma too daunting to contemplate, you decide to go to sleep for life.
2. Mother does not permit option I: you do run under the elephant, whether you like it or not.
3. Ruthlessness and rage at least produce reactions from society, unlike good behavior, which leads to slavery and starvation. Only sex and drugs pay a living wage. You have seen the light.
4. At the top of your game and winning, you regret aborting love. Too late, you have reached thirty and demons are massing on the horizon. Only death can save you now. One question remains: who will you take with you?
Welcome to the new millennium.
“Where is he, Lek?”
It pains me to use this tone, to reduce my protege to a sulky child, but I’m at the end of my rope. I’ve been back two days and seen no sign of Phra Titanaka.
“I don’t know,” Lek says camply, pouts, and looks at the floor. We are at the station in one of the small interrogation rooms, which hardly helps Lek’s mood.
“I’m sure you got close to him while I was away. I think you’re lying. I know he’s got you involved somehow. I saw you talking to him at the wat.”
He jumps up, his face exploding with hurt. “I’ve never lied to you in my life, I couldn’t lie to you -I have gatdanyu with you. You protect me every minute of the day. If you stamp all over my heart, I’ll kill myself.”
I pass a hand over my face. “I’m sorry, Lek. There’s no way I can pretend to you that I’m strong enough for this case. You’ll have to bear with me. I think you must have seen him while I was away. You were getting on so well.”
Now his mood has changed. He comes over to comfort me. Master, I’m so sorry for you. I would do anything to help.“
“When did you last see him?”
“He came to say goodbye when you were in Cambodia.”
“That’s all?”
“He asked me for your cell phone number. I gave it to him.”
I nod. Somehow it is inevitable that I must turn in the wind, awaiting a young monk’s pleasure. There’s karma here: I’m paying one hell of a price for those ten days of ecstatic misery I spent with Damrong.
Apart from the sudden spat with Lek, I’ve been listless all day. Just to get out of the station, I tell Lek I’m going for a massage, but I don’t really intend to have one. Outside, though, passing the Internet cafe- which has entirely lost its magic now that Damrong’s brother no longer uses it-I decide I may as well have the massage anyway. A wicked impulse of pure self-destruction suggests I should go to the third floor and have the works; that maybe two hours of luscious, aromatic, oily, slippery, seminal, orgasmic self-indulgence might be exactly what I need. I know it won’t help my self-esteem in the longer term, however, and I think of Chanya, even though I know she wouldn’t mind, would even encourage me if it would improve my mood. So I go for my usual two hours on the second floor.
All through the first hour my mind is hopping like a louse on a marble floor, and I hardly notice the massage. I calm down eventually, and I’m able to retrieve just an echo of the peace that once was mine by right. Then the cell phone rings. I left it in the pocket of my pants, which are hanging on a hook above the mattress. Even while the masseuse is pressing her knee into my lower spine, I grab my pants and feverishly fish out the phone.
“I need to talk,” Phra Titanaka says.
The cop in me recognizes a weakness finally, perhaps even an admission. “Talk.”
I beckon to the masseuse to go to something less strenuous- maybe tie my feet in a knot-while I’m talking. In reality it doesn’t matter what she does; my mind is focused on the monk’s slow, deliberate, cool tone.
“They sold her when she was fourteen,” the disembodied voice says into my ear. “It was a family decision. I wasn’t included in the discussion, but Damrong was. She agreed to work in a brothel in Malaysia as indentured labor on condition they look after me properly.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Your sorrow is a teaspoon of sugar in an ocean of bitterness.”
“I’m sorry for that too,” I say.
“It was one of those sixteen-hour-a-day jobs. She had to service twenty customers every twenty-four hours, minimum. The first night, though, they auctioned her virginity to the highest bidder. He was by no means gentle.”
“Oh, Buddha, I’m-”
“Cut it out, or you’ll miss the point. The contract was for twelve months. When she came home, she wasn’t the same at all. Not at all. But she checked on how well they had treated me. She asked me and everyone in the village, and she checked my body, my weight, everything. No one had ever seen her like that before. Totally efficient, totally cold.” A pause. “Of course, they hadn’t treated me very well at all. They’d spent her money on moonshine and yaa baa.” A long pause. “So she made them pay. Can you guess?”
No, I tell him, I cannot possibly guess how a helpless, impoverished, used and abused, uneducated fifteen-year-old girl could punish two hardened criminals.
“She snitched on our father to the cops. She arranged for him to be caught red-handed during one of his burglaries.” I know from his tone that he heard my intake of breath. “It worked better than she could have imagined. The cops were sick of him for his endless crimes. They killed him with the elephant game.” Another pause. “She was ecstatic. I remember the shine in her eyes. Next time she took on a contract of prostitution, in Singapore this time, my mother treated me very well for the whole six months. When she was sober.”
He has closed the phone.
When he next calls, the massage is over and I am in the process of paying the masseuse.
“I forgot to tell you, Detective. There was a written contract- Damrong insisted on it.”
I swallow. “I see.”
“Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell Vikorn.”
He has hung up. I’m thinking, Don’t tell Vikorn-betray my master? I am simultaneously thinking, Yes, screw Vikorn.
A written contract sounds unlikely, but if it exists, I’m prepared to bet Tom Smith drafted it. His masters surely would never have trusted any other lawyer. The possibility of getting hold of it seems remote. Was Damrong allowed to keep a copy? If so, where is it? Why didn’t she give it to her brother for safekeeping?
I’m at home watching Chanya cook when he calls again. I know that Chanya has grown concerned by my state of mind, that she is watching me as I fish the cell phone from my pants, which I already hung up on a hook on the bedroom door because I changed into lightweight shorts. It is almost as if I can experience her heart when my features alter at the sound of his voice: sorrow, fear, sympathy, a touch of anger because I seem to be slipping away from her.
“Can you talk?”
“Yes.”
“Talk about gatdanyu. What do you think of it?”
I scratch my ear. “It’s all we’ve got. There’s no other way to organize Thailand. It’s not perfect, people abuse it, especially mothers, but there’s no other way for us.”
“You’re half farang. You must look at it from a different point of view sometimes.”
“My blood is half farang, but I think like a Thai.”
“You’ve been abroad. You speak perfect English. You even speak French.”
“So?”
“I want to know.”
My tone expresses the beginnings of exasperation. “Know what?”
There’s a long silence. Perhaps he has never formulated this thought before. “What I’m doing.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I think you do. I want to know, from a farang point of view, am I going too far?”
“Too far?”
“The price she’s making me pay-is it too high?”
“What is the price? Did she give you instructions?”
A pause. “Perhaps.”
“And money. She gave you all the money she made out of the contract, didn’t she? How much? A lot, I think-she was very shrewd.
That’s what you don’t want to face, isn’t it? Two weeks ago you were a helpless monk; there was no point in dwelling on the horrors of your childhood; you were penniless; the most you could hope for in this life was to be left to pursue your meditation practice. You were already very advanced, almost an arhat. You were able to dissolve the past because the present offered no way of-“ I stop deliberately in midsentence. I want to know if he’s hooked or not. When he says, ”Go on,“ I’m sure that from now on he will not be able to stop speaking to me.
“Revenge,” I say.
Apparently this word has not yet crystallized on the surface of his mind, like a virus that does not reveal its true nature unless magnified and photographed.
“Revenge? Where would I start?”
“You would probably never start. You were never the one to start anything, were you? It was always her. She knew how to survive, you didn’t. You spent your life as a second-stringer. You still are a second-stringer. Sure, you wouldn’t know where to start when it came to revenge, but she would. Tell me what she is making you do.”
A pause. “No, I’m not going to tell you that. Anyway, I think you have already guessed.”
“She would never have left the strategy to you. I think that nothing has changed. In death as in life she is controlling you.”
“If you think like a Thai, you must know I owe her everything. If she had left instructions for me to hang myself with my robe, I would have followed those instructions to the letter.”
“How easy that would have been for you,” I say gently.
He takes a full minute to reply, then: “Yes. That’s true.”
“And how hard this is for you, whatever it is she is making you do.”
“I have to do it.”
“How? Will you hire foreign mercenaries? You can certainly afford them. But it would be difficult for them to understand. Even mercenaries have rules.” Listening to my own thoughts, I suddenly realize where the help will come from, when the moment arrives. “They’ll be Khmer, won’t they? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Retired KR foot soldiers have many advantages. One, they will do anything for money. Two, they obey orders instantly and to the letter. Three, they are plentiful and inexpensive. Four, they know all about elephants.
Five, they will be able to disappear into the jungle, or more likely Poipet, where geriatric generals in wheelchairs will protect them.“
He is full of surprises. “Poipet?” he says with an intake of breath. “You’ve been there?”
“Yes. Once.” Memory clip: a drab Cambodian town near the Thai border, roughly the same latitude as Angkor Wat. A terrible coarseness everywhere, even in the faces of children, most of whom were prostitutes. I really did see the famous retired KR generals in wheelchairs sucking on tubes attached to oxygen cylinders. “Have you been there yourself, Phra Titanaka?”
“I ordained there.”
He closes the phone, but the number he was using is recorded on my own. I think he will not answer, but I try anyway.
“Yes?”
“At least tell me about Kowlovski.”
“Who?”
“Her costar in the movie.”
“Ah, yes. The masked man.”
“You worked on him, didn’t you? I think you abused powers you had acquired in meditation. You didn’t raise a finger, but you killed him by making him kill himself, didn’t you? I think that would have been very easy for you. His tiny, shallow, ersatz heart was open to your gaze.”
A long pause, then: “I’ll send you the video.” He hangs up.
Chanya has pretended not to listen the conversation, or to see the intensity of my involvement with Phra Titanaka. She serves the pla neung menau in a tureen. The delicately textured fish is cooked perfectly, with not a touch of rawness or dryness, and the lemon sauce balances the natural taste of the fish to produce that wonderful tang on the palate. When we have finished, I pat the Lump, delighted to have the opportunity to play happy family. Our little rented house seems so small, though, and the walls so thin, our existence here so precarious. But it is not outside where the storm rages; it is in my head.
When we go to bed and make spoons, with Chanya curled up against my stomach, my mind flips back not to the case but to the womb. I reexperience that moment of total panic when we must break out at all costs; perhaps the most primeval of all human memories, and the one that always remains deep down inside us, like a door god at the gates of maya. Without that desperation born of claustrophobia, we would never leave that safest of safe havens; but the memory of those months of oceanic peace ensure we spend our lives trying to get back in. Damrong knew that about men.
I nod off for a couple of hours, then awaken with a single phrase on my mind: the elephant game. It resonates for anyone who has ever been involved in criminal law, but how can I be sure a simple Cambodian monk is reading from that hymnbook? Surreptitiously I slide out of bed, fish out my cell phone, and go into the yard.
“The elephant game,” I whisper when he picks up the phone. “Tell me about it.”
A sigh. “You don’t know? I thought all Thai cops knew about it. The cops built a ball out of thatched bamboo, just big enough for a small human being to be placed inside. My father was not tall, maybe five-four at most, and very slim in a vicious kind of way. There was a hatch with a lock on the outside. On the day we were taken to the police station, we stood against the wall of a compound at the back. Some grinning cops brought my father out into the yard and made him lie down while they tied him up hands and feet like a hog. Then they slid him through the hatch in the bamboo ball, locked the hatch, and pushed him around the compound for a while, just for some fun before the main event. Then they led a young elephant, maybe eight or nine years old, into the yard and they started to teach the elephant to kick the ball. That’s when my father started screaming. He was always so hard-boiled, I was sure he would keep his cool right to the end; after all, he’d wasted plenty of people himself. But he lost it after the elephant’s first kick. That made the animal curious. It sniffed around the ball with its trunk and discovered that every time it rolled the ball, the human thing inside would start screaming its head off. The cops thought it was hilarious. Pretty soon the elephant got addicted to football. It kicked to move my father a few feet along, then pushed with its trunk, then kicked. I guess this went on for maybe ten minutes until the ball stuck in a corner of the compound and the elephant lost patience. People don’t realize, elephants can have quick tempers. It whacked the ball with its trunk a few times, making a big dent in it; then it started trying to bring its foot down on it. The ball was too big for the elephant at first, but after it made a few more dents with its trunk, the ball collapsed to half its size, and the animal was able to stamp on bits of it. My father was screaming out of control by this time. Then he stopped screaming, but I could see he was still alive. I guess the animal had damaged some part of him that stopped him from screaming. He managed one last howl, though, when it stamped on his lower back. Next thing I knew, there was just a mess of spiky bamboo splinters all mixed up with my father’s remains.”
During the long pause I’m trying to think of what to say. It’s hard to say nothing, but he’s too smart, too mentally advanced, for any normal condolence. He saves me by speaking again: “There’s a picture.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of him being crushed by the elephant.”
“Who took it?”
“Who do you think? Actually, there are lots of pictures. She used up a whole roll of film. I’ll scan a few and send you a sequence.”
He sent me the pix by e-mail. I was expecting a few amateurish snaps in which an out-of-focus elephant steps on something indistinguishable. Not so. Whatever camera she used, it had an impressive zoom. Here’s Jumbo close up, sniffing around a gigantic bamboo latticework ball with a clearly discernible human form inside. Now she’s homed in on her dad, all trussed up. He was naked apart from a baggy pair of shorts; his elaborate esoteric tattoos are clearly visible. Now here’s a cruel sequence: the elephant with trunk upraised; elephant bringing trunk down on helpless human; close-up of helpless human’s big terrified eyes; split-second snap of furious elephant with trunk raised high in the air; trunk splintering the ball with bamboo shards flying; right foreleg lifted as high as it can manage; right foreleg squashing human.
I cross-examine myself thus: You of all people must have seen some clue, some pattern of behavior, that would have revealed her true nature. You, who have spent your whole life with women, who understand women better than you ever understood men, who have been known to cause hardened prostitutes to fall in love with you exactly because you’re the only man they ever meet who does understand them, you of all people: why couldn’t you read her?
Because I was in love is a pathetic reply, but it is probably no more than the truth. We didn’t talk much, few thoughts and feelings were shared, but she did not give the impression of a bored professional going through a pantomime of love. She was interested in me; with hindsight I guess the interest was that of a praying mantis for her doomed lover. She was interested in me as food; I invented a heart for her.
After sex, usually, when she had really made an effort to deliver the experience of a lifetime-not for my benefit, of course, but with exactly the same meticulous self-criticism a world-class ballerina might apply when dancing in front of a mirror-her long black hair would end up tangled and wild. She could get wild-eyed too with the frenzy of sex, and I have a snapshot of her in that state: black hair flying, madness in her eyes, naked, hunched like a witch over her breasts, her brown skin glistening with sweat, the room redolent with the stench of our lovemaking-even at such times to deny her power would have been as futile as denying our pagan origins. A hundred thousand years our ancestors spent carefully adding to the stock of irresistible allurements in the collective subconscious: her real art was to take men back to that forbidden jungle of lethal pleasure. Choosing the most vulnerable men was easy after a lifetime of practice.
Generally I was too intimidated, too concerned that my performance was not up to scratch-terrified, I guess, that she would come out with some cutting remark, some comparison with another lover that would destroy my face. She never did-she merely had to look as if she were about to.
This morning, in addition to the elephant pix, the monk sent the DVD of his conversation with the masked man.
The scene is Stanislaus Kowlovski’s apartment in Phnom Penh where he killed himself; I recognize the rip in the sofa. I think Phra Titanaka bought a DVD camera with his new wealth and learned to screw it to a tripod. It does not move throughout the interview, so that the monitor is full of our handsome buck, who is no longer so handsome after however many hours and days spent with a merciless interrogator of the soul. It is impossible to know if the camera is hidden or not. Perhaps the monk didn’t read the handbook too well, because the disk seems to begin in the middle of the interview. Phra Titanaka’s English is surprisingly grammatical, although his accent is thick Thai:
S.K.: I want to know how you found out about me, how you knew where to contact me in L.A. You still haven’t told me.
Monk: I have contacts on the other side.
S.K.: Oh, yeah, we’re not getting into that spiritual thing again are we?
Monk: Not necessarily.
S.K., shaking his head: This is weird, man, very very strange. First I thought you were putting the squeeze on me. That’s how you got me here. You know stuff about me, but I don’t know how much you know. Let’s say you convinced me it was in my best interests to get a plane to Phnom Penh. Then I thought you were going to kill me. Then I thought just for a moment you wanted to save my soul-you are wearing a monk’s robes after all.
Monk: Why would I want to kill you? You’ve been dead for a thousand years already.
S.K.: Shit, man, I don’t know if I can do that again today. Just tell me how much you want. I’ll borrow the dough.
Monk: Let’s say I’m a collector of stories of cause and effect. Let’s go back to that moment-that white-out we’re calling it, I believe-when you were, how old?
S.K., with a reluctant grunt: Thirteen. Yeah. I was pubescent all over. I finally knew what I was. A prick. A big, hard-
Monk: But why?
S.K.: I told you, sport was the only official way out, but I wasn’t any good at it. Gigolo was the only role left. It was the Columbine syndrome.
Monk: Deeper, Stan, please.
S.K.: Deeper? What can be deeper than that?
Monk: Was that the moment you decided there was no morality in the world?
S.K.: Yeah, that was it. I didn’t really give it a second thought I would have had to get into some born-again racket if I wanted to do moral. For what?
Monk: I think there was something else.
S.K.: What else?
Monk: I think there was a certain taste of nausea. Wasn’t there?
S.K.: Nausea? You mean like after sex with a bad performer?
Monk: More like a feeling of despair, but actually in the stomach.
S.K., surprised: Yeah, I remember that. How’d you know? Nauseous, yeah, that’s how I felt most of the time in a small town in Kansas. It disappeared the day I hit LA.
Monk: How was it, this nausea?
S.K.: Everybody knew about it. We called it small-town blues, but it was more than that.
Monk: Something missing inside?
S.K., nodding: Yeah. A vacuum on Main Street as far as the eye could see.
I realize I have underestimated the monk’s electronic prowess. He has edited the interview at least to the extent that it is in two parts. We jump now to the second part. Kowlovski is quite transformed, sweating, extremely nervous. A dozen twitches work his face. He gives the impression of a man in a state of chronic terror.
Monk: It’s okay, you’re still here, aren’t you?
S.K.: No. I’m not still here. I’m in a thousand pieces. You’ve fucked my head, man.
Monk: Did I? What did I fuck it with?
S.K.: My crime, fuck it, my crime. How in hell did you find out? How?
Monk: You really want to know?
S.K.: Yeah, I really want to know.
Monk: Are you sure you really want to know?
S.K.: Fuck you.
A long pause.
Monk: She was my sister. Before she died, she sent me an e-mail with the names and addresses of all the major players.
S.K., aghast but disbelieving: No!
Monk: Here, this is a snapshot of her in her prime, aged about twenty-four.
The monk hands over a passport-size photo. The masked man stares at it.
Monk: Of course, her neck is in a lot better condition than when you last saw it.
Screams come from Kowlovski. Then the picture dies.
Miraculously the camera switches on again. It is impossible to know how much time has passed, perhaps a minute, perhaps hours, but the sequence makes a kind of emotional sense. Kowlovski is slumped on that cheap sofa. He seems quite exhausted, but there is no peace in his baby-blue eyes. They dart from one place to another even while his body rests immobile.
“How often did you work with her?” the monk’s voice asks.
“That was the only time.”
“Is that the only snuff movie you ever made?”
“The only one. I don’t do that kind of stuff. I don’t even understand it. Someone was squeezing me.”
“Who?”
“You have the list, don’t you? She sent you a list of all the major players.”
“Names only. I’m a simple monk-how do I know what these names represent?”
“Well, that’s one question I can answer. Big, is what they represent. Power. Money. Not them, but what stands behind them. The invisible men.”
“Invisible men?”
“Sure. Why else would the world be so fucked up?”
“Ah! You only recently began to think like that, am I right?”
“You and her-you’re so alike, you could be the same person.”
“So you did talk to her before you strangled her?”
“Don’t keep saying that. If you’d seen the movie, you would know.”
“Know what?”
A pause while Kowlovski licks his dry lips. “She had to encourage me. I was permanently on the point of chickening out. We were supposed to film the thing in under two hours, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t control my bowels, and I had to take so much Viagra I couldn’t stop farting. I had this ridiculous erection I was too stressed to use. I kept bursting into tears, and I kind of collapsed, and they seemed to think about abandoning it all, but she insisted. It was incredible.”
“What was?”
“Her will. The Asian will, it’s truly amazing.”
“It’s not Asian. It’s third world. Two hundred years of misery and degradation can produce some strong spirits.”
“She was the strongest I ever met. She wasn’t human. Maybe you are, but she wasn’t.”
“I was human before you killed her.”
Screaming: “I didn’t kill her! She killed herself! Can’t you face that?”
A pause.
“So, you collapsed, the invisible men were thinking about cutting their losses and getting out, but she took you in hand. Tell me about that.”
“She told them we would start again same time next day. She didn’t ask, she just told them. The whole thing was falling apart, and she was the only one with a plan, so they said okay, talk to him. Take him home and sleep with him. Do what you have to do.”
A long pause.
Monk: ‘I see. You spent the night with her.“
It is a statement made in a compassionate voice. For a moment the monk seems to sympathize with Kowlovski, causing him to raise his eyes and steady them.
“Right. I spent the night with her.”
“She did something to you to strengthen your resolve. What did she do?”
“She explained the world to me, as she saw it. I never met a woman or man who could ever do that and reach me. Everything they ever told us, the Christian stuff, was just junk, you know, like everything else. What she said, I don’t know where she got it, but it wasn’t junk.” Looking frankly into the monk’s eyes. “If corresponded, you know?”
“Corresponded?”
“With everything that ever happened to me. The mother who wasn’t a mother, just some strange woman acting a part in a soap because she didn’t know what else to do with me. The father who wasn’t there even when he was. All the stuff people talk about. She said the invisible men control everything on the planet. The misery they make in the West is opposite and equal to what they do in the East: in the West the high standard of living but no heart at all; elsewhere you get the big heart steadily eaten away by the poverty. It was the most convincing theory of everything I ever heard.”
“And?”
“It’s a bust, according to her. A total bust. The biggest mistake of all is to value being alive.” Looking away at a wall and apparently quotes: “Once you stop wanting to live, you become free.” Looking back at the monk. “It was the best sex I ever had. The price she made me pay was to agree to kill her. I don’t have to tell you I was in love with her by morning.”
“But you went ahead with it?”
“I promised her, didn’t I? And after that night, even I could see there was no other way.”
“She gave you a little something to help?”
“Heroin. Never used it before. I thought it would neutralize the Viagra. It didn’t.”
There’s a pause for so long you wonder if the interview is over. Then Phra Titanaka says in a soft voice, as sly as a snake:
“You dream about her, don’t you?”
“Every night, man.”
“Except they are not dreams.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Even you know they’re not dreams. She’s glowing when she visits you, isn’t she?”
“How d’you know that?”
“And she fucks you. You wake up all wet.”
Screams.
The monitor turns blank. I stare at it for ten minutes before I can rouse myself to leave the darkened room and return to my desk.
I’ve not yet told you how the Damrong video ends, farang. Well, I never did bring myself to watch it again, and I don’t suppose I ever will. I don’t need to -it is etched into my memory for a thousand lifetimes:
He is having her from behind while she supports herself on a trestle, thrusting back eagerly with her loins. His timing apparently is equal to the challenge of simultaneous orgasms, and she really does seem to be enjoying it more than he is. In the terrible moment during which he unwinds the orange cord that is coiled around his left wrist, he loses it. The hand holding the rope shudders, and it is quite obvious that his nerve has failed. He does not so much drop it as allow it to fall in a gesture of defeat. She notices immediately and delicately disengages in order to pick it up. She turns to him and holds his masked mug with one firm little hand for a moment while she says a few words, then hands him back the cord. Still he hesitates, so she cleverly makes a feature out of his reluctance and elaborately, with the utmost narcissism, takes the cord from him. She finds the center and presses it against her Adam’s apple, at the same time throwing the two ends over her shoulders. Now watch while he so reluctantly pulls on the orange cord, highlighting every sculpted muscle in those massive forearms that gleam under the lights from Johnson’s baby oil. Her face fills the screen: the supreme bliss of the last climax morphs into the bloated paroxysm of death.
It is my misfortune that I can hear her shout of triumph long after her heart has stopped beating.