Dearest Brother,
By the time you read this I will have dumped this stupid body. Dear one, you are the only man I have ever loved. The only human being. I have taken care of you as our mother never could. Darling, I didn’t seduce you during those terrible nights when we were young. Your need was the same as mine, we comforted each other as best we could. I sold my body for you. I gave you a life no other boy in the village ever had. You are educated, sophisticated, not a peasant anymore, a free man. Now I call in the debt: gatdanyu. All these pigs must die as part of my sacrifice. My spirit will be with you forever. If you do this thing, we will be lovers in eternity. If you do not, my curses will destroy you. But I know you will not betray me.
Your loving sister, Damrong.
Gamon, aka Phra Titanaka, finally showed me a printout of his sister’s last e-mail to him. Her orders are in the form of an attachment that is long and amazingly detailed, from instructions on the best way to intrigue and befriend me to the crude device of the elephant-hair bracelets. I was stunned to read her point-by-point guide to destroying the masked man, which included anticipation of his suicide and instructions to make a video of his interrogation by Gamon. It was her intention for him to pass it on to me, to bind me still further to him. The whole case seems to be the product of an evil genius such as I have never before encountered. But not everything is going according to plan. Baker is dead before his time.
They blindfolded me when we reached Surin province, and I cannot guarantee that I am still in Thailand. Perhaps they used a jungle route to cross into Cambodia. The elephant farm is quite small but boasts the telltale ten-foot mounting platforms. Most of the buildings are crumbling. Perhaps it was a tourist venture that failed. My status here is unclear to me and to everyone else, perhaps including Gamon. I do not think the original plan calls for my presence at the denouement; some weakness in him, a fondness for me perhaps or a need for companionship, has nibbled at his resolve. The first I saw of him when they removed the blindfold was an elegant monk in saffron with a Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder. Bizarre though it sounds, I think my presence made him self-conscious, and now he has stopped wearing the gun.
The Khmer guards watch me warily, but unlike Smith and Tanakan I am free to walk around. If I go too close to the jungle perimeter, though, they fire warning shots above my head. At night I am locked in a wooden hut from which I could easily escape, but escape to what? My chances are better here than in the jungle. In this heat it takes only a day of desperate wandering in the undergrowth for one to begin to die of thirst.
I have no idea if Gamon bought the elephant farm or rented it; his conversation does not lend itself to such details. It is hot, hotter even than Bangkok, and there is no air-conditioning in any of the buildings. Electricity is intermittent, depending on whether the Khmer can be bothered to start the generator or not. Most of the time there’s nothing to do except watch the guards chew betel or shoot at trees. Or watch the elephants. There are three of them, young, irritable, and weighing about three tons each.
Smith and Tanakan are imprisoned in concrete huts that seem to be new and purpose-built and face the compound, so they can see the animals trundling up and down on their giant carpet slippers. They can see the Khmer building the giant bamboo spheres too, out of a great pile of slats. The KR work slowly and often take time out to grunt at one another or shoot off rounds into the air. They are also given to inexplicable bursts of energy that they use not for work but to fire their Kalashnikovs into the jungle because they imagine they see something move. Only Gamon and I know that Baker’s death may have changed everything.
He tried to escape, or perhaps he simply preferred to be shot. Somehow he managed to bust the locks on the steel door of his prison. There was a burst of machine-gun fire in the middle of the night, but this was not unusual. No shouts, no audible conversation. I imagine the guard simply shot on reflex, without giving the matter a second thought, then went back to sleep until morning. They called me at dawn because Gamon, who was meditating in his hut, had given orders not to be disturbed, and I followed them to the body lying on the perimeter of the compound. The spray had caught him in the head. He lay as he fell, twisted weirdly, because his brain died instantly and his body folded on itself. He was naked save for a dirty pair of green shorts with a camouflage motif. Already armies of insects were frenziedly feeding (reincarnations of souls that have been falling for a million years, they are drawn irresistibly by the odors of death-hard to believe they once enjoyed the privilege of human consciousness, which only goes to show where a string of poor choices can lead). Twin trails of red ants lead to and from the cornucopia of his mouth; larger monsters with proboscises, also imbued with a ferocious work ethic, lapped at cerebral matter dripping from the wound. Feeling grim, I walked over to Gamon’s hut and kicked the door. He was deep in meditation, so I kicked him too. Still, I had to almost drag him to Baker’s corpse. In the ten-minute interval a great swarm of flies had enveloped it. At first he seemed tempted to take it as another meditation exercise, another knot of karma to dissolve under the power of absolute truth. The law of cause and effect played on his mind, though, and I watched an unendurable anguish take over. He had turned the highest form of life on earth into a banquet for the lowest; turned Buddhism and evolution on its head. I think he suddenly saw the karmic price he would have to pay. Panic presented itself as an option. I grabbed his arm. If you run away now, the Khmer will kill the rest of us.“
He seemed to wake up from a dream. “Come on,” I said, and led him back to his hut. “Meditate now.” And I left him. I don’t know if he is alive or dead.
Time slows in the jungle without TV. The Khmer are used to it-they can put their bodies in almost any position, then stare at nothing for hours on end. They are conditioned to obeying orders, though, and since Gamon is paying, he is the one they look to. But Gamon meditates sometimes for twelve hours at a stretch. I’m quite impressed. Before they shot Baker, I used to check on Gamon in his hut to see if he really was practicing vipassana. I think he was; his body has that combination of suppleness, emptiness, and immobility that is a good clue to what he is doing with his mind. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that this man uses meditation as another might use morphine. Something happened to him when he ordained; he realized there was a way out, that the mind was infinite in its possibilities, so why choose constant pain? It didn’t do much for his grasp of the here and now, though, a criticism that is often leveled against our form of Buddhism. It was never designed to build caring communities or create social welfare programs; it was brought to us in times quite as desperate as our own, when there seemed nothing left to our species but a downward spiral into barbarism. Plus ca change. I ought to visit Smith and Tanakan in their cells, of course, but so far I have not had the courage. Sometimes, despite myself, I spend hours staring at the elephants.
Knowing the business plan gives a sinister aspect to these animals. One cannot help but be morbidly aware of them. In midadolescence they are already many feet taller than the tallest horse, and possess the independent minds of jungle lords. There seems to be only one mahout, a Khmer man in his sixties, dressed in filthy rags that in color and texture bear a resemblance to the pachyderms themselves. They are not tethered but wander around the compound at will. Yesterday one came up behind me, for they can be quite silent on those padded feet, and swung its trunk gently across the backs of my knees, bringing me to the ground. For a moment I thought I was done for, but the several tons of pure muscle were simply carrying out an experiment of some kind and trundled off with his conclusion, as if to share it with his three companions.
I know that I have to go see Gamon in his hut again sooner or later but I have no idea what to do or say. The whole of his sister’s careful planning seems to be unraveling. I decide to wait until tomorrow. Finally I summon the strength to see the prisoners. Despite the cultural divide, it is easier to approach Smith than Tanakan, who somehow still towers over me from his great height in the feudal hierarchy. I rouse myself and hitch up my sarong, a frayed, largely gray piece of cloth I found in the washhouse the day I arrived; my shirt and pants were sweaty and already beginning to stink; it was liberating to change into traditional dress.
Smith is in a bad way. It is a shame to see that big, attractive farang body in a corner of its cell, curled up in a fetal position. His depression may be terminal, and I wonder if it would not be more humane for me to leave him alone. I press my head against the bars, watching. I see movement in his eyelids and the occasional twitch of a hand or leg. “Khun Smith,” I say, “it’s me, Detective Jitpleecheep.” He blinks and looks up at what must be a single intense shaft of light.
My face disorients him still further. He cannot be sure it is really me, and if it is me, have I come to save or to gloat? We remain like that for perhaps ten minutes, neither of us sure of what kind of communication may be possible. Eventually he shifts his body, like an animal coming out of hibernation, and manages to stand. Like me, he is reduced to wearing an old sarong, which gives him the aspect of White Man Gone Native: an image from tales of the Raj. The bars impose a grid of vertical black shadows, like a giant bar code. “You,” he says, as if I am the source of his misfortune. He approaches the window with the curiosity of a man toward the devil that is tormenting him. “You.”
“I didn’t do this,” I say. A jerk of his chin points out that I am free and he is not. “Damrong,” I explain. The name triggers a shudder. “It is hard for a farang to understand, perhaps impossible.” I scratch my head exactly because it has struck me just how difficult it must be for a Westerner to comprehend, even a man who has spent time in the East. “She left instructions.” He shakes his head. “She was not afraid of death, in a way had been looking forward to it all her life. Then came the money, you see, Smith, the money.”
He glares in a vulnerable kind of way: defiance that expects defeat. What is it about Asians that makes us feel apologetic toward the West, as if we always knew in our heart of hearts the catastrophe toward which it was headed? Perhaps we should have done more to prevent it? I, at least, feel compelled to try to explain. “Death,” I say. “Tom, have you ever thought what it might mean? Never mind religion -I’m talking basic observation. Tom, what she knew is what nine-tenths of humanity also knows: Death trumps money. I’m not talking machines for killing people-that’s just Neolithic butchery. I’m talking about Death as an idea, Death as a weapon of the mind, Death as a reality only adults can confront. You were never going to win, Tom. You lost the war the moment you gave her that first lustful stare. While you were thinking about hiring her body, she had a much bigger plan, more holistic.” I pause, trying to find the words. I’m not sure if I really mean what I say next, but it seems inevitable that I say it: “Tom, are there any adults at all where you come from?”
I have failed to get through to him, of course. Now he’s certain I’m just an unhinged half-caste, a kind of Oriental gargoyle sent by some barbaric power to torment him. I give up, feeling bad.
Khun Tanakan has heard our conversation and come to his window in the cell next door.
“How much?” he hisses. “Just tell me how much you want.” Even in such a short sentence, his exalted level in our culture, his familiarity with the highest echelons, his sophistication, and his innate toughness are implied in every syllable. His Thai is so much more elegant than mine I am almost tempted to speak English.
“It is not up to me,” I say.
“Vikorn? Is Vikorn behind this?”
“No,” I say. “It’s the girl herself.”
“What are you talking about? The girl’s dead.”
“Only in a manner of speaking. You might say her will is very much alive.” He glares. “It was mostly your money, wasn’t it, that financed the project? You handed over the million-plus for her services, less whatever minor investment Smith made. Of course, you knew you needed an aide-de-camp, a fall guy, a consigliere, for you could not afford to get too close to the scam itself. And of course, there was always going to be a need for enforcement: Khun Kosana, your fatally indiscreet slave-buddy, with his lover Pi-Oon. If not for that, I think you would have had Smith killed just because she used him to make you jealous. He is after all taller, younger, stronger, and Caucasian. Yes, certainly, you would have killed him as a casual reflex of power, so to speak: Nok. How Damrong must have insulted you, how she must have poisoned your days and nights for months on end for you to even think of doing anything so reckless as to invest in that snuff movie. Can you admit that you loved her?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yes, with you I can use that word. Strange, isn’t it? You are so much harder, so much tougher than your accomplice Smith, and yet with you that word comes to mind. She was, after all, your total and complete opposite-dare I suggest your other half? You in the penthouse, she in the gutter. She twisted a knife in your heart by telling you all about Smith, the handsome, phallic farang whose cock was so much bigger than yours. She was an expert at injecting acid into your veins just when you thought you were winning. Am I right?”
“Go on.”
“Lust is blind to class. What drove you out of your mind was her total and intimate understanding of that reptilian side of you. She knew where your ambition came from. It came from a kind of hatred of life-exactly the same impulse that drove her. You got rich out of revenge on life. So did she, in the end. And then there was always your mother. At the end of the day, only a whore could really turn you on.”
His eyes pierce like needles. “Bring on the elephant. Get it over with.”
He retreats to a corner of his cell where light does not reach.
“Ah, no one doubts that you are harder than steel, Khun Tanakan. All who know you would agree. But think about this. If she is able to reach you at will, night after night, and rape you dry even while you are in the body, what chance will you have on the other side?” Chinese are even more ferociously superstitious than we are. I observe a twitch in his right hand, then a shudder as he turns to the wall.
Over in a corner of the compound the Khmer have gone back to work on the first of the bamboo spheres. It’s taking shape but is still very wobbly. After an hour or so they give up. Too hot. There is no hurry. The show won’t begin today, or even tomorrow.
The first you see of dawn is blood in the eastern treetops and a universal glowering heralding another unbearable day. Twenty minutes later the sky starts to blind while it boils, and you do everything in your power to get out of the way. The sun itself is usually invisible behind a pulsating screen of humidity, so that the whole sky seems to radiate an unhealthy intensity of light and heat. I awaken early, before first light, wash myself down at a stone trough outside my hut, and wrap my sarong around me.
My body still wet, my sarong soaked, I make up my mind to climb the stairs to Gamon’s hut. I decide not to knock but press the door. It opens, and I step over the threshold. I guess he could not be dead and still be in a semilotus position, but the vital signs are few. I step over to him where he meditates with his back against a wall under a window. I think I am about to shake him, but the Buddha directs differently. I caress his beautiful face and kiss him gently on the forehead. “Phra Titanaka, my brother,” I whisper.
He opens his eyes in another universe. He smiles with the generosity of one who has dumped ego and accepts eagerly the love in my eyes; then he remembers, and the anguish takes over.
“Gamon,” I say, “we’re going to have to let them go. Baker is dead because of us, but it was not really our fault. We don’t have a lot of bad karma arising from his death. But if we go through with Damrong’s plan, what will become of us? We’ll be locked in granite for a million years.”
Horror in his eyes: “And if I don’t obey her? Have you any idea the power she has? She visits me every night. I still have sex with her.”
“Because you let her. You’re a Buddhist monk-how can you allow yourself to be enslaved?”
My words startle him. He blinks at me then stares at his robes. “Of course, I’m so used to these, I’ve forgotten I no longer have the right to them.”
In his disoriented state his childlike response is to stand and disrobe in front of me. This is not the effect I expected, and I want to tell him to put them on again, but as he stands in a pair of boxer shorts with the heap of saffron cloth at his feet, I watch a fascinating transformation. The monklike comportment quite melts away in less than a minute, together with the personality that went with it. That other side of him emerges: harder, more primitive, more built for survival, more criminal. I see clearly now the young man who once smoked and traded yaa baa. His voice is stronger, hoarser. He goes to the single window of his hut to look down on the compound where his elephant assassins graze.
I say, “Gamon.”
He sighs. “There is more.”
“Tell me. It might save someone’s life.”
Controlling his tone: “Her last e-mail didn’t tell the whole story. It didn’t tell the story at all.”
I think he wants to turn his face to me but cannot. I have him in profile while light starts to bleach the compound. “Things she didn’t want to remember or think about simply ceased to exist in her mind.”
He summons the courage to face me. “You saw the reference to incest, but you didn’t pick up on the significance.”
“Tell me, my friend, while there is still time.”
A groan comes from the heart. “It started just like she said, two frightened kids in a wet and stinking two-room hut, Mum and Dad drinking, smoking yaa baa, and screwing in the next room -partying, you understand -no food for a day or two because they were too far gone. Then when Mum was unconscious and Dad was out of his head, he would call for her. He liked to mix sex with his voodoo. She would go to him, then come back looking like death. Looking like a seventy-year-old fourteen-year-old. But she stopped him from using me. Even then she was using her body to protect me.” A long sigh. “But she had her needs too.”
After a pause, he starts again in a stronger voice. “Sure, that’s how it started. She showed me what she wanted and how she wanted it done. When I was a little older, she showed me what I wanted and did it for me. That was after her first tour. My first experience of sex was world-class, you might say.”
He coughs. “Nothing wrong with that, apart from some primitive taboo designed to keep the tribal genome healthy, which hardly applies in an age of contraception. People who worry about such things should worry more about how Damrong and I would have turned out without incest.”
A long pause. “But when she came back from her first tour in Singapore, she had changed. She was only eighteen, but she was a woman.” Licking his lips: “And a whore. Whores suffer from terminal love starvation-you know that. They screw and they screw and they screw, and not a drop of love comes out of it no matter what they try. A kind of madness takes over them. They must have a real lover, even if he’s some ugly, broken-down, old white man – ”
“Or a close family relation.”
He nods. “After every tour she came home panting for me. Usually she would get to Surin and call for me. I would go see her in a hotel. If she’d done well that month, she would rent a five-star suite. She liked showing me the power of her money. She was so hungry for me, it was almost like being raped. But of course, I wanted love too.” A couple of beats pass. “She would always spoil me afterward, buy me motorbikes, whatever I wanted. One time she’d made so much, she bought me a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy-we had to sell it a few months later when times got tough. She would say over and over again that our love was the only way, that she couldn’t keep on the Game and support me if she didn’t have me to come back to.” Looking at me curiously: “How did your mother handle it? Did she keep asking you if you really loved her?”
“We went through that stage.” Paris, old Truffaut snoring in his gigantic Belle Epoque bedroom under the silk bedspread, None embarrassed in front of me for going with such an old man: You do love me, Sonchai, don’t you? You forgive your mum, darling, don’t you?
“But she never seduced you?”
“Nong? No. Impossible even to imagine.”
“From the age of fifteen I heard the same words over and over: If you ever leave me, I’ll kill myself.”
Light dawns in my skull just as the heat starts to bite, and sweat magically appears all over his brown body. I think: Of course, foolish of me, she would have needed a real lover just to carry on. But he would have had to be a cripple, hobbled. Memory flash: once walking with her on Sukhumvit, hand in hand, insanely happy, I tripped on a manhole cover-a stupidity you commit only when you’re in love. I had to limp for a couple of days. I expected Damrong to despise me, but her reaction was opposite to that. She took care of me, urged me to lean on her shoulder, massaged my ankle in the middle of the busy street, showed love while I was helpless, used kindness from her palette of seduction. “I see.”
“Perhaps you don’t. She did a tour in Switzerland that lasted eighteen months. She was making so much money, she didn’t want to lose her clientele until she felt she’d cleaned up.”
Two beats pass while he brings his heart under control, then: “I was the one who couldn’t stand it. I simply couldn’t. Without her I was less than half alive. I smoked too much yaa baa, started selling it, got caught. She had to rush home to bribe the cops to get me out of jail.”
A terrible choking takes hold of him. He coughs hoarsely and shakes his head. He points to that short, thin white scar on his left wrist, which precisely replicates the one on his sister’s arm. “Childish, third-world melodramatic -but the blood was real. We vowed our lives away to each other. She said she’d never leave me for so long again, I promised to reform, go to some fancy school in Bangkok that she wanted to send me to, learn to speak English -I would be the saved one. When she was totally burned out by her late twenties, I would be able to look after her. Repay the debt: gatdanyu. That’s what this case has always been about, Detective. You could call it a Case of Third-World Debt.”
“But you ordained,” I say.
He rubs his eyes. “She did try to make more regular visits, but then the chance came to work in America, and she was greedy. She used some Mafia connections to get a visa. She was away two years that time. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I was in my early twenties. I’d graduated from university with a degree in sociology, of all things. I don’t think she realized how useless that was going to be.” He looks frankly into my eyes. “I knew I could never work-too fucked up. But I didn’t want to betray her by going back to drugs. I did what any young Thai or Khmer man might do. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But the Thai Sangha wouldn’t have me because of my criminal record, so I crossed the border to Poipet, the Cambodian gangster town where our parents came from. No worries about criminal convictions there. When I e-mailed my decision to her, she didn’t mind at all. She thought I would stay in the robes for a month or so before boredom forced me out. So did I.”
I am staring at him, lost in horror, wonder, and admiration. I say, “Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“You found you were a natural.”
“Everyone said so, from the abbot to my meditation master. A reincarnate for sure, they said. This kid has been around for millennia, flirting with Buddhism, never quite taking the final step. I found vipassana so easy, I was able to meditate for a full two hours after only the first week. After a year I could manage a full day and night. I was experiencing freedom and happiness for the first time in my twenty-four years on earth.”
“While she was in the States.”
“Yes.”
“It was easy to believe that the Buddha had intervened and relieved you of all karma, even gatdanyu.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“But when she came back?”
He turns again to the window. “She’d been busted for prostitution and running a bawdy house in Fort Lauderdale with her American husband. She didn’t give a damn about that, but she was in a rage against American men. According to her, they were either pubescent boys in men’s bodies, or total animals. She despised her husband. Two years with not a single emotional event in the life of a young woman, even a woman like her, was hard to take. She’d spent the last twelve months craving me.”
“She wrote to you?”
“E-mail. In Cambodia the rules are very relaxed. Monks surf the Net all the time -it’s not even frowned on.”
My sharp intake of breath sounds like a hiss in that hot little hut. “You were living two lives.”
He nods. “I couldn’t tell her by e-mail that I was the real thing, a genuine monk. I didn’t have the strength.”
“Then she returned from the U.S.”
“Then she returned,” he agrees, with a grunt not totally devoid of humor. “She was boiling with rage that I did not make myself available.” He coughs. “You know how Cambodia is. She bribed some monks to look the other way, shaved her hair, dressed in white like a looksit, and sneaked into the monastery.” He challenges me with a sudden ironic smile. “Can you imagine? I hadn’t had sex for two years. How erotic, her naked body with her head shaved. Silent and furtive in candlelight. Insane.” A pause. “Of course, after that night she had won no matter what I did. I tried counting how many precepts I had broken: sex, harboring a woman under the same roof, deception of the abbot, habitual reoffending. She came to see me every night for two weeks, until her next tour.”
“A pattern was established?”
“Certainly.”
“You could not adapt-that would have been impossible. You had no choice but to divide yourself in half.”
“Whenever she went back to prostitution, I would meditate for twenty-four hours every third day, until my mind had relinquished her. Vipassana works whatever you use it for.” He flashes me a dark look. “But for a weak monk, even his successes come to haunt him. In the midst of serenity, demons.”
I stand up to go to the little window and look over his shoulder. The three elephants are grouped together, sniffing the ground where Baker’s blood was spilled. When you have been around these animals for a while, you start to notice clues as to their extraordinary intelligence. I have no doubt that some kind of communication is taking place, as if they too are discussing the case. I’ve come to feel awe at those gigantic, know-all craniums, those probing trunks. They seem to comprehend everything. I guess the jungle is getting to me.
“But the biggest scar, surely, was the elephant game itself, when the cops killed your father.”
He shrugs. “Not a scar, exactly. An initiation. I was in my early teens. Until then adults, my sister, had belonged to the realm of the gods. When they first rolled the bamboo ball out, I thought it was a game. I grew up in the fifteen minutes that followed. The real revelation was her joy, her incredible enthusiasm with the camera-she’d bought an expensive Minolta with a big black zoom lens. When I started meditating, that was the first, persistent image I had to deal with: not him dying but her with the camera, filming his death. Her glee, her insane cries of triumph. She was all I had, and she’d taken me into her world, which I assumed to be reality-what else?”
A cough. “It changed her, though.” He challenges me to ask. I nod: Go on. “It was a major success, her first. She started to realize how powerful she could be. After all, in one stroke she’d destroyed the monster that tormented our nights. She wasn’t a victim anymore.” He is shaking now, all pretense of control abandoned: “She was the one who insisted on watching. When she knew what the cops planned, she persuaded them to let us watch. They didn’t really want us there.” I gasp. Nothing to say. It is as if an age passes.
When I turn to him, I see that he too is fixated on the elephants. “Sorcery uses the power of ritual, which is no more or less than the power to refocus the mind on forbidden knowledge, black powers buried deep in every culture until someone like her digs them up. She was not prepared to be a victim ever again, not even of death. She had to turn her death into another victory, an even bigger one, with even more blood to power it. She knew she would lose me sooner or later to the Buddha. She wanted to bow out at the height of her game and control me from the other side, where she would be infinitely more powerful.”
He looks down at the saffron pile, then at me. “I’m a second child, Detective. I follow leads. What should I do?”
“Put your robes back on, Phra Titanaka. It’s against the rules to disrobe yourself. Only the Sangha can do that.”
I leave him, descend the crude wooden stairs, cross the compound to my own hut, and try to prepare my mind for another unbearable day in the oven. From the shade of my hut I gaze on Gamon’s closed door, wondering what kind of monster is rebirthing there, its hour come round at last.
Yesterday another event occurred to disrupt the terminal boredom. Some of the Khmer decided to liven things up by killing one of the elephants, which, after the death of Baker, was superfluous. It was possible to understand much of what they intended by watching their body language and the smirks on their faces. They spoke to the mahout, who remonstrated with them. He seemed to be telling them they were crazy, that this was a very bad thing to do, that no good could come of it. They laughed at him and took out their machine guns. They fired from the safety of a hut, straight across the compound, ripping through the elephant’s skull, chopping off its trunk. Its great strength kept it alive for more than an hour after they stopped shooting. They were fascinated by the anguished groans of the other two animals, the way they came to sniff at their dying brother and comfort him with their trunks, all the time making heart-wrenching noises of dumb distress. The KR thought it hilarious.
In late afternoon they were asleep on the balcony of the hut when the animals attacked. One of the Khmer managed to escape. Smith, Tanakan, and I watched while the animals destroyed the hut as well as the remaining human in a fantastic orgy of primal rage, snorting and honking furiously, masters again at last. Within minutes there was no more than splinters, bones, and blood and a pile of firewood where the hut had been. The two giants tossed wooden beams around with their trunks and stabbed at the dead Khmer with their tusks in wild downward thrusts-a quite superfluous expression of vengeance considering they had already stamped on his chest. The remaining Khmer thought this hilarious also. Tanakan and Smith turned gray; I expect I did too.
It’s shocking how quickly we all got used to the new reality: a hut in splinters, an elephant carcass in the middle of the compound, human remains among the firewood already starting to stink. Survival on earth is our true god, or we would have migrated to less challenging planets millennia ago. We are all savages now, Smith, Tanakan, and me, by virtue of our acceptance of the barbarism. I’m not so sure about Gamon, who did not emerge from his hut all day today, not even in the midst of the shooting, screaming, yelling, and laughing. We have made even the animals hate us.
When I finally took a look at the hut the elephants had destroyed, I saw a couple of sacks oiyaa baa in powder form. I had seen the Khmer licking their fingers from time to time but had not paid it any mind. Typical of them, they did not measure the amount of the drug they were using but simply wet their fingers and stuck them into a sack of the stuff whenever they felt their high beginning to wane.
The elephant rebellion did have the effect, however, of concentrating the minds of the remaining Khmer. All of a sudden they went to work manfully on the bamboo balls, and by the end of the day they were ready. I watched, as no doubt Smith and Tanakan watched, while they rolled them out into the open area between the huts, tested them for durability, and checked the hinged hatches they had installed. Two of them went to the window of Smith’s hut to check his size against the ball they had built for him, which is quite a bit bigger than Tanakan’s. That exercise complete, they returned to their own huts and watched. Little by little, I suppose, the gaze of everyone came to rest on Gamon’s closed door.
Hours have passed. I have come to recognize every subtlety of heat. The fierce sudden heat of the morning is quite different in texture from the relentless heat of midday, which is different again from the sullen molten copper of late afternoon. It is, I guess, about four p.m. when I notice a shuddering in the structure of Gamon’s flimsy hut, signifying that he is moving around. Finally the door opens slowly, and it remains so for a full five minutes before the human form emerges.
I know I inhale sharply, and I bet everyone else does too, when the figure in a black ballgown and a wig of long black Asian hair begins to walk sedately down the stairs. You would need to be in the grip of some Western superstition to suppose that this new creature is simply a gifted transvestite. I don’t think any of us believe that, except maybe the English lawyer Smith. It is Damrong in every movement, every gesture, down to the last nuance. Goose bumps have erupted on both my forearms and the back of my neck is rigid; in the unendurable heat I am frozen to the spot. Appalled and fascinated, I wait for the first words to emerge from those lips that she has enriched with purple lipstick.
She crosses the compound elegantly with a beautifully straight back, not a trace of exaggeration in the seductive swing of her buttocks. “It’s time,” she calls out in that soft, compelling voice. Astonished and profoundly impressed, the Khmer stand and roll out the giant bamboo balls. “Bring the prisoners,” Damrong commands; it is her voice. She has spoken in Khmer, but there is no doubt about her meaning.
“No!” I yell in an involuntary outburst, and stand up.
She turns toward me curiously, daring me to meet her gaze. This I am unable to do. No matter how hard I try, I cannot bring myself to look into those eyes. “Hello, Sonchai,” she says in a mock-seductive tone. “Have you eaten yet?” Struck dumb, I shake my head. “Look at me, lover. Look into my eyes.” Again I shake my head like a village idiot. “Aren’t you pleased to see me, darling?”
“Wha, wha, wha,” I start to jabber. “What have you done to Gamon?”
She smiles. “Just like you to ask the most difficult question. Do you love him more than you love me? I think you do. Why Sonchai, he’s in the hut meditating. Why don’t you go and say hello?”
If I was scared before, I’m suffering a paralyzing extreme of terror now. At this moment I think that nothing in the world would induce me to walk over to Gamon’s hut-except for one thing. “Go to the hut, Sonchai,” she commands, “or look into my eyes.” She takes a step toward me, leaning her head to one side, as if to force me to meet her gaze. I turn away and find myself making toward the hut.
I climb the rickety stairs slowly, with more than an inkling of what I might expect. Sure enough, when I enter, he is all dressed up in his robes, sitting in a semilotus position. It is Damrong’s corpse, of course, beginning to rot and filling the hut with the stench of formaldehyde, the eyes glazed and wide open. In a strange way, everything suddenly fits. Somehow the logic of sorcery would have required her cadaver; but has she really imprisoned her brother’s spirit in that corpse? Outrageous, even for her. But at least the cadaver is immobile. I take the opportunity to rummage around until I find my cell phone, which the Khmer confiscated. I press an autodial number, and Kimberley answers, “Where are you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Drama?”
“Plenty.”
“Leave this line open as long as you can. I’ll see if I can patch you over to Virginia.”
I lay the cell phone on the floor with the line to Kimberley still open, hoping the battery holds out.
Now I hear sounds of steel doors opening down in the compound. When I step out onto the balcony, I see the Khmer have tied the hands of Smith and Tanakan behind their backs and are bringing them out. Smith, with his farang addiction to logic, is able to maintain his mental balance, terrified though he is. Tanakan, on the other hand, is trembling like a child and appears to have peed into his sarong.
“Hello, lovers,” Damrong says. “Are you surprised to see me?” She walks elegantly up to them and caresses Smith’s face with one hand.
“Fucking pervert,” Smith says.
Damrong responds with that cynical-joyful laugh of hers that I remember so well. “Tom, Tom, you always did miss the point. That’s why you’re in this mess. If only you’d been born Asian, you would have understood so much better.” He turns his head away from her and spits. I have to admire the way he has found his courage again. But he won’t have it for long, I fear. “If you’re so sure I’m just a screwed-up pervert in drag, why don’t you look into my eyes, Tom? Please, do that little thing for me.”
I see that he too cannot bear to meet her gaze. The idea is profoundly counterintuitive, like an animal’s fear of fire. She reaches out to hold his jaw. “Call me a ‘fucking pervert’ again, Tom, please.”
Something has happened to his identity. He would like to show true British spirit at a time like this, but he cannot. She is destroying his center, that complex, contradictory, illusory, but vitally necessary idea of self, without which we are no more than helpless infants. She nods to the Khmer, who have melted into her slaves. One of them holds Smith’s head, while another tries to keep his lids from closing. I cannot help my fascination as she takes one step closer to him and stares directly into his retinas. I am thinking, No, no, you cannot do that. You cannot bring a virgin soul into contact with the other side without preparation. You will destroy more than his body.
The effect is electric, as if he has been whipped. Suddenly he is a limp rag, a shadow, all autonomy lost. I turn away as he bursts into tears. He is blubbering something that sounds a little like “Mother,” but it is hard to be sure. She has raped him.
She turns away from him in contempt and steps toward Tanakan, who starts to speak rapidly in Thai. I strain to catch his words, which are incomprehensible until I realize he is listing his assets, all of them -mansions, palaces, islands, gold, stocks, shares -offering them to her, begging her to accept them, at the same time painfully aware that he doesn’t have anything the dead might need. He is using terms of address normally reserved for royalty and Buddhas. No Caucasian resistance here, he has accepted the new reality without reservation. “I will build a temple to you,” he is saying. “Your name and image will be worshiped. I am a billionaire -for me such things are easy to accomplish.”
She laughs gaily and says something in Khmer. It is not difficult to understand, because the guards start to take Smith and Tanakan toward the bamboo balls.
I try to think of the most far-fetched, illogical solution, the one thing Aristotle would never have considered in a million years. Revolted though I am, I know I have to go back inside the hut.
It takes only a minute to undress the cadaver. I change quickly into the saffron robes; then, trying not to gag or to fixate on the hideous Y-shaped gash in her torso, I pick her up (she is much lighter without her internal organs) and make for the door, grabbing Gamon’s Kalashnikov and at the same time picking up the butane lighter that he used to light his candles.
Unaccustomed to the robes, or to carrying a corpse for that matter I stumble on the stairs, but no one pays any attention. A primal orgy of sadism is in progress, and everyone is enthralled to watch the Khmer bind Smith’s and Tanakan’s feet, then force the two men into fetal position and bind them further like hogs. Tanakan is smaller and therefore easier to force through the hatch into one of the balls. His face is closed tightly like a fist when I reach the compound. Still nobody notices me as I set down the cadaver, take out the lighter, and apply the flame to the cadaver’s left pinkie.
Damrong now lets out a diabolical oath and turns around, at the same time shaking her left hand exactly as if she has accidentally burned it. She is incredulous to see me, the holy fool, in Phra Titanaka’s robes. But I am pointing the gun at the head of the corpse.
Any vestigial notion that there might be a rational explanation, or that “A cannot be not-A,” is quite erased by the way she flies through the air toward me (she adopts the diagonal like a banking helicopter, about ten feet from the ground, black hair flying wild, no broomstick), her face distorted with rage. In the circumstances I feel I have no choice but to pull the trigger on the cadaver. In the far distance I believe I can detect the sound of rotor blades.
It is not the approaching helicopter (somehow I knew the FBI would find a black one) that freaks the Khmer, though -it’s the sorcery. Even as the chopper circles above the compound, the thugs are fleeing into the jungle, taking the mahout and the elephants with them. Somewhat disheveled, I fear, and not managing the robes very well at all, I walk toward the figure in the black ballgown lying facedown a few yards from me. The wig has fallen off. When I turn him over, he is still breathing, but there is a terrible head wound in the region of his left temple, where I shot the cadaver. He opens his eyes, though, and seems to recognize me. I cradle his shaved head in my hands.
“She’s gone, I can feel it, she’s gone for good,” he says with a smile. Then: “Whatever you do, don’t save my life.”
“Of course not,” I reply. “Of course not, Phra Titanaka.”
“I was a real monk, Sonchai. If I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have felt so much pain, would I?”
“You were born a monk, my friend.”
He smiles at that. “I scaled the heights, Detective, I really did. People don’t realize how available nirvana is. I experienced total love, the cosmic power of compassion, Buddha mind, but I could never sustain it. Too many previous wasted lifetimes, all of them spent with her. She was too strong for me. I wanted so much to save her. I thought if I became a monk, a serious one, and transformed myself, then she would have to follow. But she had other ideas. She always did things her way.”
I think he wants to say more, but he fades away at that moment.
I drag myself over to the bamboo balls. Tanakan is snugly inside his, but the terrified Khmer dropped Smith outside the other one. From within his lattice womb Tanakan has recovered his nerve and starts to demand that I get him out. I stare at him for a moment, frown, then go over to Smith. “I need a cell phone,” I tell him, but he is not responsive. I have to climb back up to Gamon’s hut to retrieve my own, but the battery has run down. Never mind, Kimberley has jumped out of her chopper and is running toward me, combat style, dressed in black coveralls, carrying a sexy-looking two-tone carbine (cafe au lait on dark chocolate). “What happened?” she says, coming to an abrupt halt, not sure where to point the gun.
“Damrong’s ghost trapped her brother in her own cadaver so she could use his body while supervising the ritual slaying of those two,” I explain, pointing at Smith and Tanakan. “But I shot the cadaver in the head, which put an end to her scheme. I believe the technical expression is sympathetic magic. It’s not due to become available to humanity at large again for another thousand years. Can I borrow your cell phone?”
She hands it to me, and I plug in a familiar number. “Yamahatosan,” I say, “I have a job for you.”