The Thais had a saying about people who spent a lot of time thinking about such matters: rok kriad. In the land of sanook—the land of fun-making and play—one stayed on the same page and seriousness was often viewed as a kind of disease. Rok kriad translated as “the disease of seriousness.” The cure? In Thailand the prescription was simple: Stop think- ing and have fun.
THIRTEEN
“I TRUST THAT you had a good night’s sleep,” said Valentine as he eased into his chair at the dining table. Breakfast of cereal, banana, honey, milk, juice and coffee was laid out on a bamboo mat.
“Creature number two crept in last night for an unscheduled visitation. Do you know what sexually arouses her?”
Calvino shook his head. He had no idea. He wondered why Valentine had a deep-seated need to share intimate information about his staff.
“Rubbing her cheek against my sweaty old baseball cap. It’s a known condition. The literature calls such an arousal complex mysophilia. They are aroused by various smells of unclean underwear, hats, or socks. After she left, I dreamt I was in England. I was standing on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall and the audience waited for me to play. Only there was one slight problem. There was no piano. What do you make of that? An audience in anticipation, and my instrument had vanished into thin air.”
“I dreamt of a cobra. Not unlike the one in the jar on the shelf,” said Calvino. He nodded in the direction of the collection of jars with the preserved remains of snakes at the far end of the table.
“You are a New York City boy,” said Valentine. As if that fact had particularly serious consequences in dreamland.
“The country often gives people nightmares of the jungle variety. Our ancestors, after all, lived in the bush. They were eaten by large beasts and sometimes killed by snakes. That primitive fear is in our bones.”
As Calvino had said to Ratana the evening before, Valentine was not so much a romantic as a hardcore fantasist. One had to be medicated to have more illusions than Valentine about the nature and purpose of relationships. His sexual partners were off the frame. Nok krob. The whole setup was of another world.
“I have a few questions.”
“I should hope so. That is the reason you have been invited, sir. To ask questions and to seek truthful answers.”
Calvino opened a small notebook and uncapped his pen. “When did Prasit die?”
“That’s easy. The end of August.”
Calvino looked up. “Do you remember the day?”
“It was the 27th. A Wednesday.”
“Where were you on that day?”
“I was at my piano. Music will always remain my true passion.” Valentine laughed and spooned in another mouthful of bananas and cereal.
“Did Prasit ever use drugs?”
“Antibiotics on the goats.”
“Did Prasit take drugs?”
“Good God, no—I would have fired him on the spot.”
“You said Prasit gave the goats antibiotics. Not Fon. She is a trained vet.”
“She worked in a bloody pet shop shampooing poodles. Prasit knew more about goats than she would ever hope to know. And why are you asking if he took drugs?”
“People who use drugs sometimes deal drugs.” He didn’t wish to break Maew’s confidence that yaa bah pills had been sprinkled over her husband’s body.
There was an admission of agreement in the expression on Valentine’s face. “As I said, Prasit didn’t even drink. Can you imagine a gardener who doesn’t live for Singha beer or Mekhong whisky?”
“I drink Mekhong and Coke,” said Calvino.
“If you are after the gardener’s job, I might overlook your peasant drinking choices but I am afraid I couldn’t quite set you loose amongst my creatures.”
“You don’t like competition,” said Calvino.
“Don’t like it? I loathe competition. That’s why rich people use their money to buy monopoly power. They don’t wish to compete.”
“It’s in our DNA,” said Calvino.
“Well said. We all carry the gene for monopoly. In most people it is mercifully recessive. So they don’t suffer in their powerlessness.”
Calvino looked down at his notebook. “Did you see anyone coming into the compound that day?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. It was just another day.”
“One of your employees might have mentioned something.”
“The creatures were questioned by the police. I questioned each of them. But by all means feel free to question them yourself. They saw nothing. They saw no one. I am paying for this investigation in order to satisfy the creatures. Fon put Maew up to nonsense.”
“What kind of nonsense?”
“She had Maew organize a strike. Despite her ill intentions, my desire is to be fair to the woman. But the harsh reality is, at the end of the day, she must go. I need a new gardener, and the new gardener and his wife need a place to live. I have two very important, unfulfilled needs. Meanwhile, Fon is stalling. She loves it here. And why wouldn’t she? My lovely gardens are returning to their feral natural state. Her point is that I will lose interest in her husband’s death if she leaves.”
“She has a point,” said Calvino.
“Of course she has a point. I tried to pay her off. I offered her quite a large sum of money to leave. But she’s very stubborn and refused. I guess there is no harm in having someone investigate. That is why I chose you. To come and ask and prepare a report saying poor Prasit for reasons only known to himself and God decided to hang himself. If you ask me, it was his wife that drove him around the bend. The last month or so, she was always on about something or other. The woman’s relentless. I don’t think Prasit ever had a moment’s peace.”
“That was about the time Prasit’s brother was killed.”
“The brother was on a motorcycle. He was shot. This happens all the time. You drive in Bangkok. Try driving upcountry. How many times have you wanted to shoot one of these motorcyclists? You see one about to slam into you. Blindside you before you can react. If you had a gun, then you might use it. Upcountry it is five, ten times a day. Recklessness doesn’t quite describe this behavior. Inebriation along with the mistaken view that they will be born to a better life makes it seem like they expect someone to shoot them.”
“The police found yaa bah on the brother’s body. And bullet holes in his body.”
“The police are always finding yaa bah and bullet holes in dead bodies. If he was shot, then it was road rage or he was robbed. Or killed by rival drug dealers. There’s a crackdown. Don’t you read the newspapers? If you get knocked down outside my gate, they might find pills on you. And bullet holes. So be careful.” Valentine broke in a wide grin. He had finished his breakfast and signaled the maid to clear the table.
“How many ways are there in and out of the compound?” Calvino asked.
“Now that is your first good question. You are using your brain. And to answer that question, I will take you on the grand tour of the grounds. You can inspect the boundary of my property. Then you tell me how many entrances I have.”
“You don’t need an entrance to get access to this place. Someone can easily climb over a wall near the goat pens. Am I right, Valentine?”
“Ah, now you have pleased me. You have used the right name. And yes, you are right, this isn’t a high-security prison. If someone wants to get in, they surely can find a way.”
“Let’s have a look around the grounds,” said Calvino.
Calvino finished his coffee and closed his notebook. As he rose from his chair, Valentine leaned across the table. “My maid tells me you made a visitation to the widow’s house last night.”
He had his spy network, noted Calvino. He may have had an intelligence network—and likely did—to report what was really going on inside the compound, and inside the heads of people living in the compound. Or the source of the information might have had a more simple explanation. Maew could have had her own reason to snitch on Fon. How Valentine h
ad obtained the information was, for the moment, less relevant than finding the true motive of the person providing it.
“I asked your staff a few questions, if that’s what you mean. That’s what I am here to do. Are we working off the same page?”
“Of course we are. Did Fon reveal anything of interest?”
He had gone straight to the point. Valentine remained fixed on Fon as a window to understanding her attitude, intentions and plans.
“She has an abiding desire to prove her husband was murdered.”
“Murdered? Ridiculous woman.”
Valentine was visibly annoyed. He stared at his sandals, stroked his ponytail several times, pondering his Burmese ngats in the alcove outside the main entrance. When he looked up, he had regained his composure. This ability must have come from long years of learning how to quickly recover and mask that one has hit the wrong key in a complicated piece of music.
“Before taking the tour, let me show you my studio,” said Valentine.
“I’ve made some changes since you were last here.” A tour of the grounds was exactly what Calvino had in mind. The diversion to the studio, however, seemed like an indulgence, a great waste of time. Valentine had already shot ahead, talking about why he had walked away from such a career. Valentine explained that on his last night at the Royal Albert Hall, he had felt something touch his soul: He would never—could never—play that well again. It was like being twenty-three years old swimmer and winning the gold medal for the 100 meters. It happens once. After that you swim but you don’t swim for gold. No matter what reserves might be called up from his depth of talent, inspiration and intuition, at the very best, his performance might come close to that moment. It would never exceed that moment. He had, in his modest estimation, hit the artistic equivalent of the speed of light and the realization had terrified him. He clung to that one gold medal; it had been enough.
They reached the outside door to the studio. There was a series of doors. The outside door opened first. They entered a chamber that could have been a drug contamination airlock between a hot-zone lab and the world of health and innocence. The dead space created a barrier between the searing tropical heat on the outside and a Steinway grand piano on the inside. Valentine explained, “Without temperature and humidity control, the love of my life would soon bleed into a tuneless hag. Therefore, we must maintain strict temperature control. I open this door. We enter. The first door is secured.
That means closed, shut tight. Then we open the next door and enter. It is slightly tricky as there is no light in the passage.” Valentine let out an awful laugh as he opened the outer door.
As the outside door closed and the darkness enveloped them, he continued to talk about music and the life of a concert pianist.
“What was the point of continuing? I would have practised for twelve hours a day. I would have made myself drunk on music. You can have no other life. Visitations from creatures were a rare luxury. I figured out that evening the meaning of life. I didn’t want to make that large a commitment to my art. I wanted other things.”
Valentine opened the inner door and walked ahead into his studio, a vast, open space with Persian carpets over polished hardwood floors. “Of course, you might say, I could still have made a living as a concert pianist. That is true. But knowing what I had achieved and knowing what it took to maintain that peak level made me utterly miserable.”
He sat down at the Steinway and played Mozart, his fingers rolling down the keyboard, his eyes half-closed in a state of total feeling for the music. Suddenly, he stopped and looked up at Calvino.
“Have you ever faced personal disappointment? Of course you have. Men like us know the meaning of disappointment. It doesn’t help when fools sing our praises because we know that fools can’t help us. Their foolishness makes us more desolate and alone. I knew in my heart of hearts that my performance was falling lower, failing, and that I had nothing left but vanity to grab onto. After a certain age you no longer can compete at the same level.”
His fingers frantically raced down the keyboard with self-assurance.
“I faced the horror of a free fall into mediocrity.” Valentine’s hands danced down the keys.
He spoke as he played, “Who in their right mind wishes to experience such vulnerability, such a constant fear of personal disappointment? Not I, sir. So I retired and disappeared to Thailand. I built this compound with my own hands. Every flower, bush, and tree I chose the way a conductor chooses his orchestra. And it has become this grand daily performance—walking the land, smelling the flowers, seeing what I have planted in the earth bear flower and fruit.”
Valentine stopped, rose from the bench, walked across the room and poured himself a glass of ice water. He stood looking across the room at the concert grand.
“Each afternoon, in the hottest part of the day, I retire to my studio and play for myself and sometimes for the amusement of my employees, who were raised to think of music as banging drums. I can’t tell most people this story. They can’t believe a musician of my stature would have turned his back and walked away from fame and a brilliant career. I knew the truth. I was playing for a dying audience. Taste, vision, and a brilliant ear for a perfect tone were traits being bred out of our species. Weaned on a diet of MTV, pop radio and movie soundtracks, my audience was on the way out. I was unwilling to sacrifice my life practising and playing for a diminishing audience. Because I am selfish, the world is without Searles
Valentine, his concert recitals of Mozart, Liszt and Brahms. But Searles Valentine has his interests, hobbies, and diversions. He has a wonderful life. But, and this is where you come in, there is a problem. A man killed himself and my creatures are in revolt. Now we can go on the grand tour.”
Valentine talked about himself a great deal. Another symp- tom of someone who had fallen off the world.
Calvino’s Law: People who talked about themselves in the third person had the personality equivalent of a detached retina; they could no longer see themselves except as a blurry vision projected by others. If Valentine had been a New Yorker, the remedy would have been a couple of decades on a therapist’s couch. As Valentine lived in Chon Buri, his therapy was working with his goats, secretary, vet, gardener, and his specialized staff of sanom with tailored sexual fetishes. He didn’t seem to be getting better. But he did seem, except for the strike and dead gardener problem, a happy man.
FOURTEEN
AROUND EIGHT IN the morning they left the main house. A windless, hot, dry morning sun hovered above the horizon. The air clear and pure, Valentine inhaled, eyes half-lidded, and slowly exhaled.
“That air is a tonic. A drug. An addiction.”
“Was Prasit ever involved with drugs?”
“I thought I answered that question earlier. I told you that as far as I knew, Prasit never touched alcohol. Drugs? Did Prasit take drugs? Highly unlikely.” He shook his head violently.
“I didn’t say take. I said involved.”
“You are a born lawyer. And that’s why you are here. But to answer your question for yet another time, Prasit was involved with the gardens and the goats. Believe me, this is a full-time job. Other involvements would have been impossible.”
Valentine had cranked himself up into the gentleman farmer, tour guide mode, cocking a battered straw hat over one eye, and wearing an expensive pair of sunglasses as he charged over the drawbridge, kneeling down on the other side where three dogs waited, tails wagging, yapping, fawning, the Great Dane sniffing and pawing. Below in the moat, the lotus blooms had opened and the brackish water was dotted with dozens of white lotus blooms. The dogs followed as they walked ahead passing the guesthouse and kitchen. Bees appeared along the verge, diving and darting among the flowers as they walked. The stillness of the air made the bees’ presence all the more noticeable. Valentine hurriedly moved down a narrow stone path through a grove of towering coconut trees. He would suddenly stop as if he had heard a voice or had a thought, cocking his head to the side
.
“Prasit loved this garden.” Valentine shaded his eyes with his hand and stared up at the green coconuts hanging in clusters under the long green leaves. “Ton ma-phraow that is “coconut tree” in Thai. We were going to buy a monkey and train it to fetch the coconuts. We had many more. But I had Prasit cut them down. Danger of coconuts landing on one’s head is not some remote possibility. Finding monkeys for the trees that remained was another disappointment, I am afraid. But these coconut trees are the percussion section of my naturally grown orchestra. They are tall, strong with the potential to create the canon fire of the 1812 War. Aren’t they magnificent? I read somewhere that thirty people are killed every year from a coconut falling onto their head. Death is such a terribly random visitor and with such a sense of humor. Killed by a coconut. Not the kind of thing you want on your death certificate. Hanging by your belt is bad enough.”
“Have you ever been married?” Calvino asked.
Valentine laughed. “Good, God, no. I suffer from gamophobia.”
“Which is?”
“You, my dear fellow, didn’t study Greek or Latin. It means fear of marriage.”
After walking another thirty meters, the pathway cut between rows of mango and lychee trees. All evenly spaced and, from the soil around the base, recently watered. The long stems on the mango trees were thick with green fruit the size of bloated green kidneys.
“My French horns,” said Valentine, pointing at the mango trees. “And my flutes.”
His hand gestured towards the lychee trees. Behind the mango trees were two rows of jackfruit trees. “Drums and snares,” he said nodding at the jackfruit trees. Coming out of the orchard and into a field was a tall evergreen with star clusters of green oblong leaves. “Do you know the name of this tree?”
Calvino had already told him he didn’t know the name of any trees.
“It’s the devil tree,” said Valentine. “It is the conductor of the orchestra. And on the other side of the devil tree are horsetail trees. Look at the fine green leaves. Each leaf is like a slender spike on the body of an exotic sea animal. The Thai name is much nicer. Son pradiphat. ‘Horsetail’ is too common for such a splendid creature.”
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