These newspapers were Prasit’s prayer room legacy. The carefully preserved papers were the pages of his photo album of fears.
The chanting stopped. Fon leaned over the table and switched off the tape recorder. Maew sat back, relaxed, and managed a smile as she waited for Fon to switch on the ceiling light. The small room was hot and humid. Sweat ran down Calvino’s neck.
“A week before my husband died, a snake was found over there,” said Fon. She pointed to a row of milk cartons behind the bodyguard doll. “If it had bitten him, he would have died.”
From the jars of snakes, it seemed that being bitten by one was an occupational hazard for any gardener. Valentine had said a falling coconut was, in percentage terms, a greater danger. But coconuts don’t fall inside a prayer room. She waited for some reaction from Calvino. “Snakes in a house are common.”
“You don’t understand. This wasn’t an ordinary snake. It was a Siamese cobra. These cobras don’t live in the province of Chon Buri. They live in the south.”
The Siamese cobra had had some assistance in its migration from the south. The connection with “south” inspired a sense of fear and suspicion. Her tone was the same as his secretary’s on the phone.
“She speak English very good,” said Maew with obvious admiration. She had already forgotten her cover story that her presence was needed to translate for Fon.
“Because I am a gardener’s wife doesn’t make me stupid,” said Fon.
Fon was not the average gardener’s wife. She was articulate, educated, and intelligent. It didn’t take much of a leap to conclude that the objects in the room, the recording, and the strange beliefs in invisible bodyguards had originated out of Prasit’s personal fight with demons.
“Whose voice is on the tape?” asked Calvino. “Ajarn Sawai.”
A monk was offered referred to as “ajarn.”
“Who is Ajarn Sawai?”
“He gave my husband strength,” she said.
“They were friends? Or he was his guru? How did it work? Did he pay Ajarn Sawai to make the tape?”
She shook her head.
“No, Ajarn Sawai never accepted money.”
If mysticism was a source of strength, it hadn’t been enough for Prasit, thought Calvino. The room had voodoo sensibilities. The practitioner hadn’t done it for money. Fon spoke of him with reverence. Had she been wooed by the art and music and chanting?
“Were you in this room when your husband saw the snake?”
“No. I was in the goat pen. And when I returned, my hus- band had already killed the snake. He told me not to worry. And I said, ‘Someone put that snake in our house.’”
“Did he say who that someone was?”
She blinked and looked down at the floor.
“Did you ask him?” “He had no idea.”
“Do you know if Sawai is from the south?”
Her eyes grew wide. She looked offended. “He’s from Chon Buri province.”
“It’s my job to ask questions, Fon. I need to know what happened and who the people are who are involved. That means personal friends, business associates, strangers—anyone who had access to this room.”
“I understand,” she said.
“What did your husband tell you?”
She explained how he had believed the snake wasn’t in the room by accident. A deadly cobra had been let loose in the prayer room, slithering over the sacred images on the table, a couple of feet above the floor lined with newspaper photographs of horror and death. Prasit told his wife that he had been praying but at the last moment he opened his eyes. The bodyguard of the monk had spoken to him, warned him of danger and saved his life. In the middle of his prayer, Prasit looked up and saw the snake, its hood open and ready to strike. The presence of some force—from the revered statue of the monk—came through and gave him courage. He stared at the snake a few inches away, hissing, raised up between the flowers. Slowly he reached under the table, his hand grasped a knife, and without blinking, his hand came up, cutting the snake in half. He brushed the dead snake to the floor. He went out into his shed and found a jar, washed it out, and deposited the two pieces inside. He slipped into the dining area that evening and left it on the shelf with Valentine’s collection of jars. The Siamese cobra had been the last snake killed by the gardener.
Fon said that she hadn’t told anyone, including Valentine, about what had happened that night. From the grim expression on Maew’s face, Calvino felt this was the first time that she had heard the story. This gave Fon’s story credibility. To test that credibility, Calvino had some questions. Why hadn’t she told Valentine that Prasit had killed the snake inside his room and carefully placed it in a jar that same night?
“He said he found it near the moat,” said Fon. “He lied to his boss?”
“My husband didn’t know how to tell him what had happened. It might have caused a problem.” If she had told the maid or one of the other women, by the next morning all of the women in the compound would have known. Everyone would have been afraid of finding a deadly snake in their room.
That was plausible, thought Calvino. And there were other reasons. Thai workers rarely passed bad information to their boss. To say that a snake had been in the house might have alarmed Valentine, making him believe that his gardener had attracted bad luck or bad karma. Who would admit such a thing except to their wife? It was the kind of leap of assumption that Prasit could have easily made. It fit a personality profile. Servants don’t bring bad news to their boss. They do everything to reinforce the order and stability of their boss’s universe.
“Let’s say someone put the snake here. They had to know how to get into this compound when you were away, and they had to have some skill in handling such a deadly snake,” said Calvino.
“What if I told you that the police say Sombat, my husband’s younger brother, was shot because he had a conflict with a drug dealer? But it wasn’t true. He never took drugs. He never sold drugs.”
“You think the police killed your brother-in-law?”
She slowly exhaled, as if her patience was being tried. Recklessness on the road killed tens of thousands.
“When my brother-in-law’s body was found, a Siamese cobra was coiled near his body.”
“The same species? Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“How did you find out about the snake?”
“My husband talked to the man who found his body. He saw the snake. My husband knew snakes and from the description, he knew it had been a Siamese cobra.”
“The police didn’t put it into their report.” He hadn’t seen the report; he was guessing. If it had been in the report, Valentine certainly would have said something about such an odd occurrence.
“It had disappeared into the fields by the time the police came.”
“Were there any bite wounds on Sombat’s body?”
“I asked my husband but he wouldn’t say.”
“Would he have told you had he known?”
“He told me what he thought kept me safe. He was a very good man. Good men don’t hang themselves.”
She had his attention.
“Not usually,” said Calvino. “And have you ever seen a cobra inside a coffin?”
Now she had gained his full attention. Calvino had lived in Thailand long enough to know that most people feared an attack by a king cobra. The Thais called them ngu jong-ang. The police were often called to residences in the Sukhumvit area to kill a cobra—ngu hao—a different species of cobra—that had crawled into a house. In the rainy season, when it flooded, the snakes hid under the surface of the water. Only the brave ventured through knee-deep water after a storm. There were several other types of cobras and other types of venomous snakes. Added to the list of snakes that could kill in minutes were sea snakes, banded kraits, Russell’s viper, Malayan pit viper, green pit viper. The most dangerous and aggressive was the Siamese cobra. Despite what Valentine thought about coconut deaths, a fair number of people died
from snakebites in Southeast Asia each year. It was a slow, painful, terrible way to die. Snakes had their territory.
There were two brothers from the north; each had left home to find work in Chon Buri province, where jobs were easy to find as the eastern seaboard expanded. Each brother had, or at least from what appeared on the surface, experienced a nasty confrontation with a Siamese cobra that was native to the south of Thailand. Both men had died. But neither brother had died of a snake bite. The gardener died by hanging himself on the prayer room door underneath a dead dragonfly. In one way the death was bizarre, but in another way it was an ordinary, common death that happened frequently and was hardly newsworthy. If either Prasit or his brother had been killed by a cobra—that would have been news. There would have been graphic photographs splashed in the local newspapers.
A connection might have been drawn between the troubles in the south and the species of snake, leading to a conclusion of terrorism and violence. But it hadn’t happened to the two men or anyone else. If it had, Calvino was convinced that the newspapers carrying the photos of the victims would have been preserved for floor coverings in prayer rooms.
The widow seemed to read Calvino’s mind.
“My husband and his younger brother were killed.”
“But not by snakes.”
“By someone who knows snakes very well.”
“Tell me about the snake in the coffin.”
“It happened at my brother-in-law’s funeral.”
TEN
THE CREMATORIUM WAS on a knoll surrounded by a heavily wooded area. A few miles from the wat, the mourners had a short journey through the town before arriving at the crematorium on the other side. A small sala with the coffin inside had been lifted and placed on a flatbed and hitched to a pickup. The truck led a procession through the village. A monk sat in the front of the pickup. Nine monks waited inside a large open-air sala. Rows of folding chairs had been placed in the sala waiting for the funeral party to arrive. On the opposite side of the road from the sala was a crematorium with its sliding metal gate closed. The moment Fon saw that the gate was closed she knew the family, friends and neighbors were in for something unpleasant. Prasit standing next to his wife said that she wasn’t allowed to walk down the hill. She was to stay at the sala. He had wanted to spare his wife what he sensed would be a gruesome ordeal. Friends of his brother, men from the village, worked stacking wood and tires into a platform. Sweat rolled off their arms and necks as they worked.
Fon had to stay behind with her mother-in-law, uncles, cousins, and friends who had the good sense to not get too close. Prasit had rarely ordered his wife to do anything against her wishes. She didn’t question him when he ordered her to stay away from the cremation site. As Prasit walked down the hill he looked back and saw her with her back turned, and saw her turn, and look towards the pyre. It was the last family affair they had attended together. For a moment their eyes met over the distance. She felt that he was very far away and she resisted the urged to break into a run and go to him. Instead she did what he had asked. She stayed back and waited.
One hundred meters down a narrow dirt road, which led from the open-air sala, the platform had been piled in layers—planks of wood and underneath the wood, old threadbare car tires were wedged between the planks. The pyre was finished by the time Prasit reached the bottom. A signal was made and a half dozen of the neighbors pulled the trailer with a blue-roofed sala to the edge of the makeshift platform. Prasit, an uncle, and his brother’s friends lifted the coffin and nestled it on the wood and tires. The men gathered around the coffin as the lid was removed. Prasit swung the axe to cut a coconut and poured the coconut milk onto the head of his dead brother. Prasit handed the axe to one of Sombat’s friends. The other friends and Prasit stepped back from the platform. They watched as a friend handed the axe to one of the attendants who had earlier walked down the hill from a shed opposite the closed permanent crematorium. The attendant, a bald, middle-aged man, held the same axe that Prasit had used to split open the coconut and, hovering over the open coffin, swung the blade into the body lying in the coffin. The attendant leaned over the corpse and hacked open the stomach, the sound of ripping of flesh carrying up the hill. With the stomach split open, the axe moved down the body, chopping long, deep gashes into the flesh of the upper thighs. He sunk the axe into Sombat’s flesh with no more expression than a butcher. Prasit watched a couple of feet away, his face pale, wiping the beaded sweat away from his brow. The attendant who had done his job with great efficiency, suddenly looked up, a half-scream in the back of his throat as he stumbled back from the coffin. He dropped the axe and ran. One of Sombat’s friends caught up with him and led him back to the coffin. He swore that he had seen a cobra inside the coffin. He howled with fear as the friends dragged him to the coffin. Each cautiously approached the pyre and looked inside the coffin. The attendant gave them no time as he turned, lit a match and threw it into the wood, igniting a raging fire. Prasit ran forward but it was too late to look inside. The flames had engulfed the coffin.
Had there been a snake coiled inside? The attendant swore on his amulets he had seen one. Sombat’s friends hadn’t seen one. The flames were a solid sheet and whatever was inside the coffin had been consumed. The axe had done its job as the flames burned the body without any explosions erupting from inside it. The last thing family and relatives needed to hear was a loud bang as the stomach filled with gas exploded into a ball of flames, leaping skyward to burn the leaves off the nearby trees.
Prasit told his wife that his brother had looked peaceful. He had been killed outright. He hadn’t suffered. Later that day, when they returned for the ashes, Prasit found the inciner- ated cobra. It had been coiled at the bottom of the coffin.
ELEVEN
FON LEFT THE prayer room, returning after a moment carrying a chair. She stopped at the entrance. In one hand she had a man’s leather belt wrapped around her fingers. Maew’s smile evaporated. Ever since the discussion of snakes, she had sat upright, raising her legs up to touch her chin, her eyes scanning the room. Vigilant, watchful, and uncertain what lurked in the shadows.
“Go to your room and sleep,” Fon said to her in Thai.
Maew was grateful for the suggestion. It meant that her obligation to Fon had been satisfied and she could go. She scrambled to her feet and walked out of the prayer room. A moment later, Calvino heard the entrance door close. He was alone with the widow.
Fon wasted no time positioning the chair against the door and looping the leather belt around the doorknob. Calvino watched her re-create the death scene. It was common practice to reenact a crime. In the case of a death that could be murder or suicide, reenactments were also staged; those who favored suicide produced a reenactment to support their theory as those who claimed murder adjusted the scene for their purposes. She sat on the chair and described how the police and doctor believed that Prasit had put a chair next to the door of the prayer room, looped the belt around his neck and leaned forward, not so much hanging himself as stran- gling himself. The metal buckle had tightened hard against the right carotid artery, cutting off the oxygen. Strangulation hadn’t taken long. His neck hadn’t been broken. There were no signs of bruises or violence. It had been Prasit and the dragonfly hanging on the door. His brain no longer had the supply of oxygen to function, closing down each and every system of the body.
“I had gone into Pattaya. Nai wanted to buy syringes to inject the goats with some medicine. He asked my husband to go. But after Sombat was killed, my husband never left the compound. He always sent me or someone else. I used our motorcycle. I am a careful driver. I couldn’t have been away from the house for more than two hours. When I came home, I found him in his chair.”
What she described wasn’t anything a wife should ever have to witness. Prasit’s tongue lolled from the side of his mouth. His face had gone puffy and purple and bloated. His eyes were bloodshot and yellow and wide open, as large as saucers. His favorite amulet hung on a
gold chain from his neck. This was another small detail in Fon’s mind that convinced her that her husband hadn’t killed himself. He would never have hanged himself wearing an amulet around his neck, or do such an act of self-destruction on the entry door to the room he held sacred.
She pointed out the contrary argument by the police. The main one was that there had been no sign of a struggle. It was difficult to believe that a man would voluntarily allow someone to hang him with his own belt without putting up resistance. Besides, no one inside the compound had seen anyone come or go from the house. Behind the house was the edge of a forest. In theory someone could have slipped over the fence with the forest as cover. But none of the neighbors had noticed any stranger or any unusual movements around the compound. Someone would have seen something, the police had said. The widow’s opinion had been less persuasive than she had hoped for. Valentine felt the police had exam- ined the evidence and reached a logical, sound conclusion. The widow, in Valentine’s view (one shared by the police), was simply being a hysterical woman—emotional, unstable, illogical—falling apart as a result of grief suffered from losing her husband. An understandable (and regrettable) premise made of sorrow, but life had factors other than sorrow to consider and Valentine insisted that what Fon believed was fundamentally unsound in its premises. Another Thai woman might have given in. But not Fon. She had allies in the compound. Maew, Valentine’s number one “creature,” occupied the official position as the senior employee in charge of feeding the goats. Her unofficial position was number one in ranking of those invited, from time to time, to occupy the bed of the goat owner. Maew had agreed with the widow, and applied the kind of pressure that only someone with number one ranking who sometimes shared a bed with the boss can apply. She organized a strike that had forced Valentine to bring Calvino to Pattaya.
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