My desk phone rings. It is Vikorn’s secretary, Manny, summoning me to his office, pronto. In a whisper she lets me know that something has gone wrong with the Tanakan case. He does not speak when I enter, merely hands me a sheet of paper, which is a printout of a photograph that has been sent by e-mail. In the picture an elephant is about to bring its trunk down on a bamboo ball in which a trussed-up, tattooed man has been imprisoned.
“Where did you get it?” Guess.
“Tanakan? Someone sent it to him?”
Turning away from the window. “This is serious stuff, Sonchai. I was working him to the limit of his tolerances. As it was, Tanakan was only a couple centimeters from having me assassinated -I had to calculate the figure pretty precisely.”
“Five dragons?”
My Colonel nods gravely. “I was keeping within my rights, but only just. Another million, and he would have felt entitled to take the risk of a hit team.” He points at the photocopy I’m holding. “Now this.”
“He thinks it comes from you?”
“Of course he does. He thinks I’m inventing a third party to protect him from so I can keep squeezing. He thinks he’s going to have to fork out a few million every year. He thinks I’m a low-rent crook who’ll just keep sucking his blood forever.” I refrain from comment. “That’s what happens when the lines start to get blurred. Honor and respect are the first casualties.”
“What d’you want to do?”
“It’s what I have to do. We’re going to see him now. We’re going down on our knees. We’re acknowledging that the situation has swung in his favor. We are even reducing our fee.” Pointing at the photograph: “We have to convince him this isn’t us.”
In back of the battered old patrol car I watch Vikorn move the assemblage point of his mind to a position of total humility. The receptionist at the bank was charmed enough on our first visit; now she’s overwhelmed at the Buddhist quality of this senior cop: so self-effacing yet at the same time firmly professional. We are whisked up to Tanakan’s suite at lightning speed by a couple of heavily built guards. As before, we wait in a conference room. This time it is the perfect secretary, not the man himself, who arrives to call us into his office. There is no offer of tea, coffee, or soft drinks, and she doesn’t look at me. Tanakan does not bother to stand up when we enter, and the secretary closes the door behind us without a word. Vikorn sinks to his knees on the carpet, at the same time showing a high wai, and I have to do the same. This does have the effect of warming the atmosphere, from maybe minus five to zero.
“Khun Tanakan,” Vikorn says, “I am aware of what Khun Tanakan must be thinking, but it is not so.” Vikorn is careful to keep his hands together at his forehead. “Your humble servant is an honest trader.”
Tanakan glowers, somewhat theatrically in my view. “I wish I could believe the Colonel. What began as an honest negotiation between men of honor seems to have – ”
“Not at my instigation, Khun Tanakan. Would Khun Tanakan take it as evidence of my sincerity that I am prepared to lower the value of the vase?”
Tanakan stands up and emerges from behind his desk.
“From now on the vase has no value, Vikorn. From now on if I hear anything in relation to the vase, I will press a certain autodial number on my cell phone. A cell phone belonging to the owner of a motorcycle and his armed assistant will ring somewhere in the city. I am sure the Colonel understands. Certainly one always prefers to play the game and avoid loss of life. When someone starts to break the rules, however, one must take one’s chances. After all, I have a position to defend, and I thought it was implicit in our discussions that you were my principal defender. You have failed, Colonel. You’re not doing your job, man.”
Vikorn has turned gray. However, he masters himself, bows his head, stands, and all of a sudden we are on our feet at the door. Tanakan calls us back for a moment, however. He reaches into his drawer to take something out and chuck it across his desk at Vikorn. It is an elephant-hair bracelet. “It came with that abominable picture,” he snaps, then turns his back to look out of the window.
In back of the car on the way to the station, Vikorn delivers one of his homilies:
“You see what happens when the work of professionals is screwed up by amateurs? Tanakan knew he’d been caught with his knickers around his ankles and was ready to cough up like a pro so long as the negotiations were courteous, discreet, and professional and the price was reasonable. Now some barbaric clown has poisoned the well. I want you to find him and give me the address. You don’t have to be there when the men make the visit, understand?”
He raises haggard eyes. I gulp and nod.
Back at my desk, the cell phone rings.
“You watched the video?”
“Yes.”
“So now you know what to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can adjust the technique according to the personality of the subject. Kowlovski was very stupid. I think your subjects will be more fun.”
I’m not sure I’m really understanding. If I am, I don’t want to. “What subjects?”
“The ones I have identified with the bracelets.”
My jaw drops. “How can I interrogate them? One is a senior banker, one is an eminent lawyer, the other is a bum, and all of them have perfect alibis.”
“No, they don’t.”
“But they weren’t even in the country. They weren’t even in the same country as one another. One was in the U.S., one was in Angkor Wat, and the other was in Malaysia.”
“Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“Well, it may look suspect, but it does prove that none of them were directly involved in the” -I grope for the right word -“killing.”
“My sister said there were meetings. You know, as in major shareholders.”
“How did she know?”
“She was one of them.”
The revelation causes quite a jolt. “She attended business meetings at which her body and her death were the proposed profit center? I’m going to need evidence.”
“Confessions are always the best evidence. Is that not so?”
“You can’t get confessions like that out of free men.”
“Free men? I’m working on it.” He closes the phone.
With cynical intent to deceive I call Vikorn directly on his cell phone. “I’ve been looking into it. I’m going to raid Baker and Smith. I think one of them must be behind this elephant crap.”
“Why bother with a raid? I’ll send a motorbike.”
“No, Colonel, I’m not sure it’s one of them. I’m just sure I can find out something from them.”
“Have it your way. But I want the one who sent that photograph strung up by the balls and presented to Tanakan in a nice neat velvet package.”
“I know.”
“I think our banker might prefer a living body he can have some fun with.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
I balance my chair on its back legs, put my feet on my desk, and make a cathedral of my hands. It never works, but it does make me feel like Philip Marlowe. I am frowning. The same three suspects: Dan Baker, Tom Smith, Khun Tanakan. But suspected of what, exactly? I am not even sure if Damrong’s contract was illegal in Thailand. I am not even sure there was a contract. Perhaps no crime was committed at all, beyond manslaughter by Kowlovski? It was a crime against the heart, though-a crime against humanity, you might say-which led to others: Nok, whose butchered innocence rests heavy on my heart; the otherworldly Pi-Oon and his flamboyant lover. This surely is the monk’s message. I agree, but who to scare first, Baker or Smith? Tanakan will have to be left alone for the time being since he’s under Vikorn’s protection; I’m not at all sure how to finesse that. I guess even Marlowe didn’t get himself into these kinds of jams.
On the face of it, Baker would be the obvious first choice. A weak character, accustomed to doing deals with cops, probably incapable of loyalty. I have more or less decided on him, then change my mind. The trouble with Baker is that he doesn’t fit and has started to puzzle me. Instead of Chinese boxes, in this case we have Chinese pyramids, all fitting one inside the other. Tanakan and Tom Smith are part of an elite Great Pyramid of international players. Smith is near the bottom and Tanakan is near the top, but it’s the same exclusive global pyramid. Dan Baker, the small-time hustler, belongs to a quite different low-rent pyramid, where he subsists somewhere near the bottom.
Puzzling it through: something about Smith the lawyer attracts me-that modern British hysteria just below the surface, despite his brilliant mind and worldly wisdom. The man who lost his head more than once in a jealous frenzy may lose it again and again. I think about busting him, then decide to go to his office on a fishing expedition instead. Then I suffer from what one of my uncles calls “a touch of the seconds.”
The problem is not normally featured in police thrillers, but it goes like this: How exactly does a low-ranking, humble, third-world cop go about browbeating a smarter, more powerful, better-educated, and, most daunting of all, better-connected, senior, respected lawyer? Yes, it’s called a sense of inferiority, but just because you feel like a victim doesn’t mean you’re not about to become one. I would like some concrete facts to confront him with, but when I think about his various cameo appearances, none of them adds up to much more than a mirage. Perhaps his fondness for brothels and prostitutes would count against him in a more hypocritical society, but, thanks to our natural openness, no one would doubt he was in the same boat as most other men who live here. I need something more, something that will at least give me more confidence, even if it isn’t a killer point. I sit immobilized by an apparently insurmountable reluctance and only slowly formulate a plan. It’s about six in the evening when I finally decide to call Lek over to my desk.
“Lek, do you keep a skirt in the office?”
Covering a smirk: “Of course not. Don’t you think I have enough to put up with?”
“So go home and change into your Saturday-night best. Tight T-shirt or sweater to flash the estrogen, very short skirt, rouge, mascara, earrings-the whole works. Be as provocative as you like, but not too vulgar. The Parthenon is up-market, after all.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go there asking for work again. This time look serious, and make sure they believe you. When you leave the premises, you will pass the doorman. Give him a scrap of paper with my name and cell phone number. Whisper, Anywhere, anytime, any price.”
I put my feet up on my desk again and wait.
“Chatuchak market, tomorrow, eleven-twenty, stall 398 in the northwest corner.” The caller, a young woman, hangs up immediately. I am thinking, Smart, very smart. Chatuchak, that vast, unfathomable labyrinth of covered market stalls, amounts to a city of open-air merchandisers, selling anything and everything from tropical fish, brightly colored birds, and exotic orchids-which rarely survive the journey home-to plastic pails, to offers of irresistible real estate opportunities on islands with dubious land titles-just about everything. You can even get your Toyota serviced while you’re browsing. Today is Friday, so it will be jam-packed. Hard to say, these days, who are in the majority, vacationing farang, trendy urbanites, middle-income Thais looking for genuine bargains, or the browse-only bunch who simply love markets. Anyway, I’m reduced to a shuffle-and-twist technique to get me through the narrow body-packed alleys that lead, finally, to stall 398 of section 57 in the northwest corner.
I don’t know why I’m intrigued that the produce on sale consists of orchids and tropical birds; something in the back of my mind links these two, but I cannot remember the scam just at the moment. Two young women, pretty in their aprons with large money-pockets, are calling out to passersby, with particular interest in well-to-do farang families with that wide-open look which comes with one’s first arrival in the exotic East. Now I remember the scam and smile. When the young women take no notice of me, I go to a cathedral-shaped cage which is the prison of a particularly vivid crimson and yellow parrot, lick an index finger, and start to stroke the crimson crown on its head. That gets their attention real quick. “I am Sonchai,” I say, before they have a chance to scold. At the same time I hold up my index finger, the end of which is now slightly crimson. The older of the two whisks me through to the back of the stall, which is shut off from the front by a tarpaulin curtain. The doorman, wearing spectacles, sits at a table in navy surplus shorts and flip-flops, no shirt. The brown bird he is holding firmly in his left hand looks somewhat like a macaw but owns streaming central tail feathers that make it ideal for this kind of exercise. I don’t know its name in English, but it’s very common, particularly in Isaan, where it is considered a pest. Actually the feathers are delicate shades consisting mostly of dark chocolate on cafe au lait; their somewhat monochrome beauty has no appeal to the vulgar, though, and like the Acropolis in its day, it needs plenty of help from paint to appeal to popular taste.
The doorman is clearly an expert. He uses a tiny artist’s brush and works from some authoritative tome with full-color plates. “It’s going to be a red-tailed tropic bird,” he says, looking down and reading. “ ‘Phaethon rubricauda.” “ He casts me a glance before continuing with the pink, orange, and black markings he is laying across the eyes and wings. Little by little he adds value with the concentration of a Picasso. ”This is what I used to do before I went to work for him.“ He gives me a quick, shattered look. ”Before I lost my innocence, you might say. I do it for free now, just to keep my hand in. This stall belongs to my sister. Those girls out front are her daughters.“ He manages an ironic smile. ”You could call it a family business handed down from one generation to the next. Frankly, it has always been the boys who make the best painters, with a couple of exceptions. My father was brilliant-he could turn a blackbird into a flamingo if he wanted to. I don’t even come close.“ Neither I nor the bird is convinced by his modesty. His masterful makeover has improved the creature’s self-esteem immeasurably. When he places it back in its cage, it prances and preens and cannot wait to impress the opposite sex with its irresistible new wardrobe. I say, ”What about the orchids?“
“Oh, that’s women’s business. Boys never have the patience. They’re amazing.” I check out the dozens of varieties of exotic flowers, heavy-headed and liable to break their stems if not cunningly supported by concealed wiring. “Actually, there’s no real deception involved.”
“Only the implication that they’re going to survive the next few days.”
He smiles thinly. “They are the products of intense cultivation-a lot of work. They’re grown from hybrids, and it’s true, only an expert can produce those kinds of blooms, and then usually only once in the plant’s life.” He points at a collection of books on a shelf. “The girls have to study the names in English-we get a lot of amateur orchid growers coming to ask complicated questions. It’s a headache because their English isn’t so good, and there aren’t any Thai translations.” He takes another brown bird out of a cage, fondles and strokes it, examines it as a portrait painter might examine a subject, and says, “Excuse me. It’s so much easier for me to talk to you while I’m concentrating on this. Painting takes me into a better world. What exactly do you want to know?”
“Everything you can tell me.”
“About the death of your girlfriend Nok? Not much. I didn’t do it. I was put in charge of the clean-up. He uses professionals for his wet work. I’m just a doorman.”
“But she got the key from you. You snitched on her.”
It is not guilt so much as a profound sadness that turns his flesh gray. “What could I do? I told her to be discreet. I warned her that if she were spotted anywhere near his room, I would have no choice but to tell the boss. And what do you two do? You walk past those girls in the swimming pool like you were returning to a hotel room. I had no choice.”
“That’s all you have to say? A young woman is snuffed out because of you, and you just shrug?”
He pauses, stares at me, and puts the brush down. He will not release me from his stare.
I say, “Okay, I’m sorry.”
“Because of me she died? Or because of your obsession with that witch Damrong? Know what the boss told me? He said no cop in the whole of Krung Thep has any interest in that snuff movie except you. You could stop the investigation tomorrow, and Vikorn would breathe a sigh of relief. So tell me, did she die because of me or you?”
I cough, look at the floor, turn my gaze to the birds and the orchids, try to lose myself in the voluptuousness of color, only to find a monochrome dust has settled on my mind. As a kind of old-fashioned courtesy, he has continued with his painting, as if he has not noticed my distress. I take time out to stand up and examine some of the orchids. “But I think you know a lot about the organization,” I mumble.
He shakes his head. “You just can’t stop, can you?”
“I think you take the girls to their assignations with the X members.”
He concentrates on the tail, somehow producing a convincing crimson tone without compromising the fluffiness of the feathers. “You know that much? Nok told you?” Casting me a glance: “That’s why she had to die.”
“The video, the Damrong video. It was filmed in Tanakan’s suite at the Parthenon Club.”
“Was it? D’you think he tells me more than I need to know? I wasn’t involved.”
“But you know how the deal came about?”
“What deal?”
“It was a contract, probably voluntary. She offered to die that way in return for a lot of money.”
He pauses in his painting and looks into some middle distance. “Really? How much? You don’t know? A lot, probably, as you say. Personally, I would jump at the chance. If I could get my family out of his clutches forever, I would die a thousand deaths. You don’t know what it’s like when your blood is mortgaged for life.”
I’m still feeling wrong-footed, still mumbling in a pathetic, pleading tone. “The thing is, deals like that don’t just happen. Delicate approaches have to be made. It takes exactly the right suggestion at exactly the right time. I don’t know where the original plan came from, her or them. I do know the Englishman Tom Smith was involved.” He grunts. “You can at least tell me about him.”
He considers this for a moment. “Just another deluded prick. In a society like ours, it’s best to be either a prince or a peasant. Anything in between is too stressful.” He pauses to give me a shrewd glance. “You know, I have no idea what you boys ever saw in Damrong. To me she was a perfectly ordinary-looking Khmer girl, nothing special. You can hire ten for a thousand baht in Phnom Penh. She didn’t give me a hard-on at all. Heartless whores are ten-a-penny anywhere in the world.”
What can I say? I swallow. “The Englishman-he was a middleman?”
“Just another lawyer who didn’t know his place. Can you believe he still persisted even after I warned him?”
“Warned him what?”
“That the boss wanted his girl. I thought I was being helpful, trying to save a life. He didn’t see it that way.”
“He knew Tanakan was after Damrong?”
“He had this farang notion about equality, honor, democracy, the righteousness of love, all that nonsense. Damrong told Tanakan about him. I had to do some squeezing.”
“You mean Damrong was trying to get Smith killed by telling Tanakan he was a rival? Why?”
“I don’t think she wanted him killed. From what you’ve just told me, I think she had her own agenda. I played the good consigliere. First a polite hint. Second a polite warning. Third time you show them the torture instruments. It was strange. It was as if she were deliberately making both men hate her. She taunted Tanakan with Smith and Smith with Tanakan. Even a novice working girl knows better than that.” He looks at me and shrugs.
“By the time you’d finished with him, Smith had seen the light? He had to do something to get back into Tanakan’s good books? Tanakan would have finished him professionally, even if he let him stay alive?”
“Like I say, it was part of her agenda to make them both love her and hate her. I thought she was just another whore with her head in a mess. Now I wonder. Maybe she knew what she was doing.” He puts the newly painted bird back in its cage. “That’s all I can tell you. I’ve risked my life by talking to you because I want at least some tiny part of my soul to survive this incarnation, or I’ll be reborn as an insect. I don’t want money, but don’t contact me again.”
At Smith’s law offices I do not receive quite the same level of attention from our tall handsome lawyer as on my first visit. I have come not as a player in an international porn deal, after all, but as a humble detective and am therefore undeserving of respect. Somebody must have snitched: Vikorn? In this symphony of treachery a mere double-cross would have the simplicity of “Jingle Bells.” I’m not sure even Vikorn knows what side he is on.
As soon as Smith has me in his office, he slouches on his executive chair (black leather and chrome, it seems able to swivel and roll at its master’s will; Smith has no idea how closely it resembles the one he used in Chicago in the abundant days of Prohibition in a previous life) and stares at me. He doesn’t actually say Well in a derisive voice; he doesn’t need to.
“I’m a little puzzled by your attitude, Mr. Smith.”
“Yeah? What attitude?” A little of his Cockney origins emerging here.
“A woman dies, murdered. A woman you were pathologically fond of, shall we say. A woman whose very flesh – ”
“Cut out the third-world melodrama, Detective. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking murder, Mr. Smith.”
“Oh, that. Who’s dead?”
“Damrong Tarasorn Baker, among others.” He gives no sign of recognition. “Your lover. Your whore. Your plaything. Your tormentor.”
I guess it just doesn’t work; once a farang, especially a lawyer, gets into “A cannot be not-A,” all connection with the heart is lost. It is as if a tap has been turned off at the throat chakra, leaving only a talking head. “A woman you were literally crazy about has been slaughtered like a lamb,” I suggest in a tentative voice. No reply, but at least I’ve made him feel just a tad awkward. “A woman whose ex-husband you have taken to visiting lately.” He’s good-he can do Stone Face and keep it up under pressure; if I’m not mistaken, though, there was just a flick of his left pinkie, followed by a stroking of his nose with his right index. An experienced hunter can read this kind of spoor.
I pace up and down his office, a technique analogous to the mammalian practice of claiming territory by pissing on it. It does seem to irritate him; mildly though. I take a breath. “A woman dies, as I was saying, killed by a fellow human, a woman whose flesh had proven capable of driving you crazy. As it happens, her demise is caught on film.” I cut myself short so that I have quality time to focus on the twitches that have appeared around his mouth. “Yes, on film, Mr. Smith. To be more precise, on a DVD disk. So, what sort of words shall we use to set the international community aflame with indignation? Copyright infringement, perhaps? Yes, let’s say I’m investigating a particularly egregious form of copyright infringement. No point dwelling on the collateral damage, which you’ve kept to three so far: one Nok, a worker at the Parthenon; one Pi-Oon, a harmless transsexual who knew too much; and one Khun Kosana, a buddy-slave of your master Khun Tanakan who had the misfortune to get hold of the DVD and share it with his lover. Your trail is quite bloody, Khun Smith.”
He leers. “Copyright infringement? That used to be my specialty. What kind of intellectual property are we talking about?”
I cough. “Ah, you are an expert. How easily you have called my bluff. Of course, foolish of me-how could it be a copyright issue when no one would dream of registering this work? Yes, you are right, I shall have to find some other concept. How about conspiracy to produce pornographic material, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy-”
“I think I can shorten this,” Smith says, softly now but still with the leer corrupting his handsome mug. “If you’re talking about a video product of extremely poor taste that may or may not have been made for an elite international market, which may or may not for all I know feature a common prostitute with whom I admit I once had a liaison – if that’s what you’re talking about, then I have to tell you, Detective, I have never seen the product in question.”
I halt, because he has quite floored me with his openness. Sure, he knows all about it, and he doesn’t care if I know he knows. This man has protection from someone big. Curious. I find I have to jump to point two before I intended.
“You’ve never seen it? But you have heard of it?”
“I told you, I’m networked here and I speak the language. A lot of people have heard of that video. Lots and lots, Detective, thanks to the infantile fuss you’ve been making about it. Everyone knows you fell for her like a ton of bricks. Same as me. Does the word hypocrisy mean anything to you?” He pauses and stares at me with maximum insolence. “She had a snapshot of your dick on her cell phone. Yours and dozens like it. Hard to recognize a dick in isolation, even your own, so she gave them names. Yours was ‘Detective.” Funny how the racial extraction comes out in the area of the genitals. Your face is white, but your dick is more tan than pink.“
I don’t want him to see me swallow hard, but he does. I try to turn a shudder into a shrug. “I’m afraid I have not expressed myself with sufficient clarity for a legally trained mind such as yours,” I mumble, struggling. “What I’m talking about is shareholder satisfaction.” I pause and put a finger to my temple. “Yes, I can easily imagine that you might not have seen the product. I can easily believe that. Intuitively, I guess your story might go like this. Let me see, how might one start? Perhaps with that wonderful Australian expression keeps his brains in his dick?” Smith’s eyes have narrowed. “A vulgar phrase disguising a male phenomenon much researched but little understood. How will it be explained in the future when we are all androgenous again, this strange tendency of certain kinds of men, professional men in particular-one is almost inclined to say especially lawyers, doctors, accountants, and dentists, a disease of the overwrought professional class, plus politicians and senior bankers, of course-a tendency, shall we say, to divide themselves in half. How could it be otherwise, when you have great urban testosteronic warriors like yourself pretending to be interested in serving others when what they’re really after is rape and pillage? Yes, one can understand why the extracurricular activities of such men might be a little, shall we say, contradictory.” I look at him. “I can believe you never saw the video, Mr. Smith. You are not a voyeur.”
I let a couple of beats pass. He is way too suave to break the silence. I continue: “You may even possess the kind of finesse that would prevent you from watching such a product. Perhaps, like me, you would find it almost unbearable to look at. Yes, I’m ready to credit you with that.”
He jerks his head: So?
“So if I were to construct a theory of your involvement in this – let’s call it a copyright issue, shall we? You know how we Thais love euphemism-this copyright matter, then, the theory would go something like this. A man, a lawyer, very well connected to the Thai-and indeed an international -financial elite, is, forgive me, exactly one of those alpha male types whose massive sexual appetite is sublimated into socially useful activities only during working hours. I’ll call my example Smith, if you don’t mind. Smith, then, as we have seen, is quite hopelessly in love with a young woman who appears, by all accounts, to possess the charms of a Circe, a sorceress. Smith, for all his martial and commercial prowess, finds himself in a difficult psychological trap. This girl has studied other alpha male specimens whom she probably finds indistinguishable from him. She knows what animal lurks behind the business suit and also how to manipulate it. Smith, at first, is simply amused; he has been down this road before. But the girl is far more adept than he realized. She isn’t acting out some chapter from Thai Whores’ Guide to Farang. Oh no, this girl really does understand. Best of all, she can convince him that she’s very much that way herself: fast-lane passionate, let’s call it. A World Class Triple-A Fucker in other words, someone who really does know how to prolong the ecstasy. She also looks like every farang’s idea of the perfect Oriental lover. Her skin is as soft as chamois, her face is demonically beautiful, her body is simply perfect, her voice is soft, yielding, with an exotic accent in English which she speaks with surprising sophistication. After each assignation you tell yourself you must stop seeing her or she will ruin you, but you are haunted by the quality of her flesh, her merciless sangfroid – ” I stop, pause at his desk, lean on it to go eyeball to eyeball, and do my best female impersonation: “Tom, you’re just amazing. I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.”
I think the words are more of a hard-to-identify echo than a sentence written in his heart. I stand back. “Did you know her husband – sorry, ex-husband-was standing in the closet making a film star out of you? Of course not. I think you did not make his acquaintance until much later. Not until all administrative chores had fallen to you to deal with, as consigliere to the jao paw, or should I say legal adviser to the board?”
He parts his lips but says nothing. Now I’m doing my best to reproduce his complex accent with its Cockney and transatlantic references, complete with lump in the throat, in an octave lower than that in which I am accustomed to express myself: “Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?”
He has leaned back a little in his executive chair, contemplatively, and managed to close his mouth. I’m at the end of my rope and quite incapable of Buddhist patience. With astonishing irrelevance I pick up a cube of sugar that lies in the saucer of a coffee cup on his desk. “You do not take sugar? Too fattening, I suppose.” I crumple the sugar in my hand, then toss it over him. “Heroin,” I say in a loud voice. “I have caught you red-handed.” He does not react, confirming my earlier surmise that he is enjoying protection now. He brushes off the sugar with a go-fuck-yourself leer. I walk around his desk to stand above him.
Scratching my head: “So I ask myself, how could Smith be connected to a video he has never seen that records an assassination he could not possibly have participated in because he was in another country at the time? And yet everything in my third-world-cop instinct tells me that this Smith knows something about the case, is involved in some way.” I turn my head to one side and smile. “Of course, it took me a while to work it out. After all, corporate law is not exactly my field. Oh yes, for a very long time I wondered how you fit in, Mr. Smith. Until I remembered that your training is indeed in corporate law. How many corporations are you on the board of? In how many land transactions throughout the length and breadth of the country are you a shadow shareholder? How often have you enabled farang to get around our protectionist land laws in order to profit by redevelopment? And I saw it, the perfect revenge for a lawyer driven quite insane by his lover-shareholder in the enterprise. That’s what I think you are. She had wounded you more than any woman you ever met. Others merely scratch-she stole bone marrow. You were incomplete until the day she died. How smart you must have thought yourself, reaping perhaps a tenfold, even hundredfold profit from the planned, digitally recorded execution of the demon who laughed as she chewed your guts. What an elegant ending.”
I am making a question mark with my eyebrows, which he seems to find slightly comic. It is a good moment to kick his chair, which I do with maximum force. He virtually flies across the floor until he reaches the wall. It looks for a moment as if he will be able to keep his balance and his dignity, but the wheels on the thing are so efficient, they fail to provide stability, and he ends up on the floor with his head rammed uncomfortably against the wall. I walk over to stand on his left arm. He is in pain, but not enough. “I have protection,” he mutters. “You’re such a pure little fuck-up, I had to go higher.”
“Who to? Vikorn?”
A leer. “Higher. You don’t know who I’m connected to.”
I smile. It may not sound like it, but this surely is a confession of guilt of a sort.
He tries to pull his arm free from my foot but is unable to. I add to his difficulties with my other foot, then squat beside him, placing all my weight on his arm. “If that is your answer, Mr. Smith, then I’m afraid you are out of luck. I’m not working for the Royal Thai Police today. I’m moonlighting for the Buddha.” He blinks. “You’re looking a little yellow around the gills these days, Tom. I hope you haven’t been sleeping with ghosts?”
He grunts in astonishment, and the mask falls. It occurs to me that he could easily overpower me; it is the promise of narrative, the carrot of closure that keeps him prone. “Let me tell you how she comes to you – every night, if I’m not wrong. You experience her first as a kind of erotic stirring, but since you are asleep, the stirring is more an overwhelming feeling of lascivious anticipation, a certainty that the final, ultimate coupling is about to free you from the misery of eternal isolation. Then she appears, glowing, wearing whatever garment you find most erotic -in my case it’s a low-cut black ballgown with nothing underneath, but then I’m corny like that. What’s amazing is her control over your body. She is capable of working your dick by remote, just by the power of transferred thought. You are her slave-she doesn’t stop working you until you’ve climaxed at least twice. Not the normal, restricted, rationed kind of functional orgasm that goes with the mediocrity of civilized life. No, Tom, you climax as a satyr might, or a tiger, say: total, wild, ruthless, unrepentant. And you wake up in a pool of spent seed, defeated, wanting nothing except to go through it all again. Am I right?” He says nothing, and yet I fancy I have finally softened him.
After a pause I say, “How much was she paid, exactly? About a million U.S.?”
He licks his lips and mutters, “About that.”
“That’s a lot. In a poor country like Thailand, a million crosses a line, from mere wealth to genuine power. It’s always dangerous to give power to ignorant, resentful third-world peasants, don’t you think?” He stares. “With no culture of positive thinking, you see, and no faith in human nature-frankly, who has, after age twelve in the lower income brackets?-there is little to prevent-how should one put it?-a negative response? Certainly, a woman from another background, say Essex, would have invested in a balanced portfolio of stocks and shares to provide income and growth for her dependents-although a woman who thought like that would have been unlikely to choose such an early exit. To be sure, Damrong had traveled enough and spent enough time with rich men to know how the other half-more accurately, the privileged five percent-live and think. Hard to imagine why any modern young woman would choose death when she could afford a Mercedes, but we are all products of programming, and hers worked in a different way. Culture.”
I see that I have at least begun to interest him in the chain of cause and effect responsible for his predicament. “Let me put it in my simple Buddhist way, Smith, and please forgive the naivete, but the problem was: no one to love. Not really. In the end even her brother seemed on the point of betraying her for the Buddha. Love frustrated is bad enough, but how about love inverted? Turned on its head by a perverse economic system and a brutal childhood? In such circumstances an apocalyptic mentality is almost inevitable. Nothing like death to bust the illusion of inequality. And she had the money to stage a spectacular finale, of which you are a part.” I think he half understands. “Smart as you are, she fooled you. What did you think, exactly, when you took a position -is that the phrase? -in the movie she wanted to make?”
He clears his throat, which seems very clogged. “She acted of her own free will. It was her idea. She approached me, and I approached certain business interests who were clients of mine. She designed the whole thing. It was a product of her own mind. Not everybody loves life, and she was approaching thirty. Things happen to whores at that age.”
“Exactly my point, Khun Smith, exactly my point. Had your own culture not caused you to discount the possibility that she might have been, in her strange third-world way, as smart as you-smarter-you might have thought to yourself there was more to her project than met the eye.” He frowns. “I mean, you might have perceived that what she had in mind was not self-annihilation at all, not in her terms, but rather a statement, a final testament to the world, an act of revenge part symbolic, part literal. You could almost say she was exercising a form of self-respect, after all.”
He shrugs. “So what?”
“Ah! You ask that? So what? So everything.” An irritated frown. “Didn’t you notice it before? Was it not exactly her self-respect that drove you crazy? That way she had of delivering the sexual thrills of a lifetime, as if your lust had achieved that very level of ecstasy a man like you always wants from a woman? Then when you had paid her, you simply ceased to exist for her until next time. Nothing unusual about that, except for the extreme of the polarity in her case. That was her genius. That was her self-respect. Her capacity to wipe you from her heart at will, like a dirty little mess on the floor.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the reason you must die, Khun Smith.” A perplexed look. “Don’t you see? If you had understood her, you would have understood how dangerous it was to accept such a command performance whenever you engaged her services. Even for her, I imagine, it was an affair of unusual intensity-she even seemed to fall in love with you. In her case that was a sign of homicidal intent. Even you must have noticed how close she came to getting you snuffed by Khun Tanakan? You told yourself that she left you no choice, but perhaps you did not realize that she intended for you to get into a losing battle with your rival, intended for you to see your survival as dependent upon her demise.” His frown has deepened. “She planned it from the start.” Now his eyes have opened wide. “It wasn’t an idea that came to her toward the end of your affair-it was the reason she chose you in the first place. She read you. She knew you were the one to provoke and tease and torture. She put you in an impossible position of adversary to one of the most powerful men in Thailand-and you fell for it. Within a month she had put your life, your identity, and your career in peril. She knew you would agree to her idea in the end, as an elegant way of getting rid of her.” He is staring wildly. “How old are you? Let me tell you. You are forty-six years old. Exactly the same age as her father when she had him killed.”
I stand up with a little hop. “It doesn’t much matter whether I take you in or not. I guess you would prefer not. That’s okay.” I take a piece of paper out of my back pocket, unfold it, hold it above him, and let it gently fall onto his head. It is a printout of an e-mail showing an enraged elephant with sociopathic tendencies. “That’s how she had her dad bumped off, Mr. Smith. She took the photos herself.” I reach down to touch the lacquered elephant-hair bracelet on his left wrist and wink.
At the door I cannot resist turning back for a moment. He is prone, still, and apparently quite bewildered. “Sweet dreams,” I say as I leave, gratified by his gasp.
I have no idea how or why Baker might have been involved. The only reason I think he must be directly implicated is because the monk has fingered him with an elephant-hair bracelet and because Smith the consigliere has visited him at least twice. Mentally we’re back to Star Wars, with me flying blind on instructions from some disembodied intelligence. I have not heard from Damrong’s brother for three days. I’m trying to brainstorm with Lek in the back of the cab as to how and why a small-time player like Baker might have wound up as a shareholder in a world-class snuff movie, and I don’t notice the new boys on the block until we’re out of the cab at Baker’s apartment.
One locks eyes with me for a moment; I experience the kind of devastating insight into the void that makes you wish people with those kinds of problems would wear sunglasses. None of his features move, and he doesn’t bother to shift his gaze. He is in a guard’s uniform, with nightstick and cuffs hanging from his belt. I say something quickly in Thai, to establish that he does not understand. Lek is from Surin province and speaks a dialect of Khmer. I tell him to ask the new guard where the old guards went. The psychopath replies with surprising eagerness, apparently pleased to be speaking his native tongue.
“He says a new security company has been appointed.”
“How many of them are there?”
“About ten.”
As he speaks, I see some of the others. Not all are in uniform, but I’m prepared to bet they all speak Khmer.
“Tell him I’ve come to see Khun Baker, the English teacher.”
I watch carefully but see no reaction to the name. He knows which is Baker’s floor, though, and nods us into the lift, where I have to revise my approach to Baker. By the time we’re out of the lift, another thought occurs to me, accompanied by a sharp intake of breath. I tell Lek to go to Smith’s law offices and check on the guards there. He is to call me back on my cell phone. Lek takes the lift back down to the ground floor while I knock on Baker’s door.
The trouble with inspirational detection: it can make you appear scatty. As Baker opens the door, I forget all about my planned assault on his psyche because a truly extraordinary possibility has occurred to me. I fish out my cell to call Lek again. “When you’ve checked up on Smith’s security guards, go to Tanakan’s bank. See if there’s anything unusual in the security there today.” I have spoken in rapid Thai, so I do not know if Baker has understood or not.
Oddly enough, the moment of random-access intuition has freed up my brain, and now I think I know exactly why Baker was involved in the flick. I’m not angry with him, though-on the contrary, I believe the whole of my approach is tinged with pity.
“Khun Baker,” I say as I step into his apartment, “so sorry to bother you again.” I stop short. What with nattering to Lek and all, I’ve not yet focused on his face. Now I see he is crumbling with terror. I stare at him and fish out a copy of the same photograph I gave to Smith. “I guess you’ve seen this already?” He looks at it, gulps, and stares at me.
“Well,” I say, “if you talk, I’ll see what I can do.”
Instead of replying, he directs my attention to the camera he has mounted on a tripod by the window. It is generously endowed with a huge zoom lens, which I suppose is the point. I go to it to look through the viewer. It is directed at the gate to his compound, where two of the new guards are sitting playing checkers with bottle tops. Even at leisure the impression is of bored souls waiting for a little slaughter to cheer them up.
“They’re ex-KR,” he says hoarsely. “They don’t speak a word of Thai. Is this anything to do with you?”
“No, but I can understand your fear.”
“You’ve got to help me.”
“You’ve got to talk.”
It seems he can hardly master his mind long enough to put a decent confession together. I decide to help.
“The problem, as always in any great criminal endeavor, was how to bind the loyalty of certain minor players who needed to be recruited for specialist services. The stud was easy enough-he owed money to loan sharks all over L.A., he didn’t have a future unless he could get hold of a big piece of money, and anyway he stars in the movie and is therefore incriminated. But what of the technical side? The flick is very well produced by someone who understands movie cameras. It seems as if one lens was fixed to the floor, to enable fuckshots in stand-up mode. There is quite a lot of sophisticated editing too: something well within the range of a gifted amateur, of course, but hardly the sort of expertise you can hire easily in Bangkok, not surreptitiously anyway. On the other hand, no smart operator connected to the proposed victim wants to be in the country at the time the movie is shot, and you after all were her ex-husband, with a criminal record and a known penchant for making skin flicks. What to do? Training, I think. They gave you a couple of ex-KR to train. The thing about them, they will obey all instructions to the letter. You didn’t need for them to be inspired-you merely needed them to produce the base product for you to edit, perhaps while you were in Angkor Wat. I think they sent you the rushes via e-mail. The Khmer had to be trained, though, and you wanted a cut. Was it a percentage or cash?”
A long pause, during which I think he will not speak, then: “Both. It was her idea. She insisted on using me. She wasn’t going to trust anyone else. She’d worked with me before plenty of times. She knew I wasn’t about to screw up.” Looking at me: “And anyway, she was Thai.”
“Superstition?”
“You bet. We’d been mostly lucky in what we did together, Dam-rong and me. Even when we were busted, we managed to turn a profit.”
“Could you identify the men you trained?”
A shrug. “Maybe. They were homicidal puppets, like all the others. You don’t necessarily remember ciphers, even when you work with them for a week.”
“There were rehearsals?”
“With tailor’s dummies, until they got better. Then we used real live actors.”
“In Cambodia?”
“Sure.”
“Were you aware of any of the other players, apart from your ex-wife?”
“No. I was kept sealed off from everyone. I never met the stud, either. I just edited his performance.”
“But what about Tom Smith, the lawyer? He started visiting your apartment after I came to see you.”
“Up to then I thought he was just the John in that other clip with Damrong. I didn’t know he invested in the snuff movie. I wasn’t invited to meetings or anything. I was controlled by Damrong. Obviously, after they killed her, someone else had to deal with me. They were watching you. After you came to question me the first time, Smith needed to debrief me. He’s good. His questions were a lot harder to deal with than yours. I had to persuade him I didn’t sing, or he would have had me wasted.”
“Excuse me,” I say, and fish out the cell, which is vibrating in my pocket.
“Khmer in cars outside Smith’s law offices,” Lek reports. “I’m off to the bank.”
I close the phone and try not to stare at Baker as if he were already dead. “But there must have been arrangements for you to receive your share of the royalties. There must have been some kind of enforcement clause. I can’t imagine Damrong or you going ahead without guarantees.”
Baker stares at me. “But there wasn’t.”
Now it is my turn to stare. “How can anyone believe that? This is a contract of death in which the deceased is supposed to get paid posthumously. No way that girl was going into that without security.”
Baker shrugs. “They gave her more than a million U.S. dollars up front. She told me it would be used by someone for enforcement if necessary. She was very confident-she told me not to worry about the money. She said I could insist on some up-front dough if I wanted it, but there was really no need to worry. When Damrong said that about money, you had to believe she had the whole thing under control.”
I nod. “A million dollars buys a lot of enforcement over here, that’s true. But the main players, the invisible men, were never based here.” I stop and rub my left temple. “But then she was Thai. She would think in personal terms. Symbolic terms too. Magical terms.” I look at Baker and try to imagine how she saw his role. The same image that haunts my nights springs into mind: wild-haired, bent over her breasts, madness in her eyes, a grin of total triumph on her face. In the distance a priestess from the forest period arranges a multiple sacrifice to the gods.
It is as if Baker has read my mind. “Yeah,” he says. “With hindsight, you can see why she wasn’t so worried about enforcement.”
There is a knock on the door. It is not particularly heavy; nor is it repeated. One boot busts the flimsy lock, and the guy I first saw in guard’s uniform enters with another behind him bearing a Chinese Kalashnikov. They gesture to Baker to come with them. Baker looks frantically at me.
“I forbid you to abduct this man. I am an officer in the Royal Thai Police.” They don’t understand a word I say. When I fish out my police ID, they can’t read it. It doesn’t make any difference -Baker goes with them anyway. I go to the camera on the tripod and look through the viewer. A Toyota minivan has appeared, and they bundle Baker into it.
About ten minutes later I’m still in Baker’s flat with no one to interrogate. Lek calls. “Nothing unusual about Tanakan’s bank,” Lek reports, “except that he’s not there. He’s at some meeting with other bankers, some kind of all-day thing. I asked about the guards at the bank. They’re very carefully vetted -no way anyone who didn’t speak Thai could join their ranks.”
Another ten minutes, and I see it is Vikorn calling. “Someone’s abducted Tanakan,” he says in a hoarse voice. “It was carefully planned. Some heavies who looked and acted like Khmer blocked his car as he was leaving a meeting and grabbed him. If you know anything about this that you’re not telling me, you’re dead.”
“Colonel – ”
“Do you realize how bad this is?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Moron, of course it’s my fault. Don’t you understand? I was black-mailing him. That made him my responsibility. My honor died today.” He closes the phone.
It is the next call, though, that surprises the most. “Sonchai,” Dr. Supatra says, “they’ve taken the body.” I’m too shocked to speak. “Some men came armed with combat rifles. They held us up for ten minutes while they went down to the morgue and grabbed the body. They didn’t take anything else, and they didn’t seem to be able to speak Thai. Someone said they were Khmer.”
When I’ve assimilated that, I press buttons on the cell phone until I reach the message window and plug in Kimberley’s number:
Can your nerds trace me from my cell phone signals?
She messages back in less than five minutes:
We can try. Why?
I text back:
Because I am about to go on a long journey.
I sit on Baker’s bed for more than an hour before another Khmer guard appears with the standard-issue Kalashnikov. He points it at me in a desultory way and beckons for me to walk out in front of him. He prods me with the gun all the way down to the car park, where another Toyota four-by-four is waiting. I get in the back with half a dozen Khmer. We drive in an easterly direction for more than five hours before they decide to blindfold me. At the same time they take my cell phone away.