He wasted no time cutting around a thick curtain of bamboo; the large yellow stocks streaked with green veins were old growth supporting the weight of a thick umbrella of green shooting skyward until the weight bowed the bamboo carrying the green leaves, like weeping willows, back to earth.
“With Prasit’s help, all that you see we planted on this land. Before it was barren and without order and structure. We brought design and meaning and music to the landscape. To live well in the world, you must know the names of things. Without knowing the names you can’t truly see or appreciate them.”
In Valentine’s mind, he had created a private world-class orchestra. He was the conductor and Prasit had played first violin and of course any conductor knows that losing your first violin is a huge loss. And a powder room also constructed from flowers, shrubs, vines and trees. Prasit had played a key part in this comic conspiracy between desire, nature and music. Following his boss’s instructions to plant a string section, and brass, and oboes, horns and chimes. The flowers and trees and shrubs weaved a harmony from color, order and beauty. The notes were perfect. It was Wagner and Beethoven in flowers and leaves and bark. What those great composers had done with music, Valentine had done with plants. Calvino looked around at the garden in full bloom as Valentine inside his head waved his arms like a conductor, playing a most beautiful melody that only he could hear. What was left for Calvino standing on the path as Valentine conducted? He stopped, looked around, smelled the flowers, and listened. What he heard was near total silence.
Beyond the gardens was a large open pasture with goats. He watched as the young women he had seen from the night before were inside the enclosure housing the goats.
“You see my creatures are working.”
As Valentine unlatched the gate to the fenced area where the goats were kept, Calvino answered his cellphone. Colonel Pratt’s voice was distinct and clear.
“I heard you took a new case in Pattaya,” said Colonel Pratt.
“I am at my client’s goat farm.”
Colonel Pratt hadn’t expected this answer.
“Khun Ratana didn’t mention anything about goats.” Colonel Pratt was smiling to himself, Calvino thought.
He thinks I’ve hit a new low. A farang private investigator reduced to slumming in a goat pen.
“The client’s gardener died. The police say suicide. The widow says murder.”
“Any evidence of murder?”
“I am investigating the possibilities,” said Calvino. “Let’s talk about it later.” The call ended.
Pocketing the cellphone, Calvino walked through another gate. Valentine had already stepped inside one of the holding pens and ruffled the ears of a goat. He talked to the goat in baby talk. The goat’s ear shivered, its tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth.
“You, my lovely, are an adorable creature. Soft and beautiful. Your eyes are like jewels. Her name is Bach. Don’t look surprised.”
“A goat named Bach?”
“Why not?”
Calvino shrugged.
“A friend once named a fighting cock after me.” That had been Edward McPhail and (except for the first fight) the cock had gone on to never win another fight. Calvino decided to keep that bit of information to himself.
Walking down the rows, Valentine bent down and looked inside, “Elgar has a runny nose.” He moved over to the next pen, “Sibelius is suffering from an iron deficiency. That’s why she’s looking not at her best.” He turned to Calvino.
“To have all the world’s greatest composers healthy and giving you milk from which you can make cheese and yogurt is one of the great mysteries of life.”
Valentine with Bach beside walked between the rows of wooden pens. Valentine walked with one hand looped around Bach’s neck. On the side of the gate of each pen, a plastic sleeve had been attached and inside was a printed card with the name of the goat—Handel, Schubert, Delius, Elgar, Strauss, and Debussy.
“Smell this goat. Bach never smelled so clean, pure.”
“Like the perfume tree or was it a shrub. Or maybe a case of mysophilia?”
“Very good, Vincent. Someone sexually aroused by a goat. That as it happens isn’t one of my fetishes. What I am trying to show you is a perfectly ordinary day in my life. You do want to know something of Prasit’s duties?”
Somewhere between the boundary of duties and household rituals, the mystery of Prasit’s death would be unraveled, thought Calvino. The world was divided between those who had a huge desire to know and those who wished to avoid knowing. Facts, reality, evidence and clues belonged to the first kind of person. Illusion and fantasy belonged to the second. Calvino had made it a point to take assignments from clients who genuinely wanted to know the truth, and had developed the habit of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. On the other hand, Calvino didn’t have a lot of clients.
Watching Valentine with the goats after a tour of a garden planted like an orchestra with a powder room attached, the feeling was becoming clear which world Valentine occupied. The more he saw of Valentine’s constructed world, the more he thought that suicide was the more likely possibility. Sucked into a world of evergreen instruments, creatures with names and numbers, and natural powder rooms, it wouldn’t take much to push someone a little too far until one day he snapped, slipped a belt around his neck and leaned forward in a chair.
In the far corner of the goat pen, Fon looked up as she raised a bucket of feed and poured it into a trough for several of the goats. She quickly looked away before he could establish eye contact, turning her back as if neither her boss nor he were in the goat pen. Another woman helped with the morning chores. From the evening before at the dining table, Calvino recognized her as Kem—sanom number two, her eyes watery and red, sniffling, as she squatted before a spigot waiting to fill a bucket with water. This was the sanom who became, according to Valentine, sexually aroused by the smell of sweat on his baseball cap. Her lower jaw quivered, the shudder of someone who had been sobbing. Valentine took no notice of either woman. Why was the young girl crying? Had she had a fight with Fon? Where were the other girls? He scanned the goat pens looking for the others. They must have stayed in their rooms.
“Prasit was a gardener. But he also helped with looking after the goats?”
“Of course Prasit helped with the goats. He was an exceptional worker. He was up and running around doing chores hours before I arrived. Watering the flowers and shrubs. Pruning. Planting. Sweeping up leaves. Then he would wait for me here inside the goat pens. He loved these creatures almost as much as I do. In the morning, we inspected the goat herd. We have twenty-five goats. And one of them is always either coming down with or recovering from a health problem. I would make suggestions about treatment. I’d check the feed, the water, the condition of the animals.”
Each of the pens was built on a concrete platform and separated by a wire fence. The breed of goats was called Nubian and they had long floppy beautiful ears and markings, along with the nobility and stature of a fallen celestial being making do with their lot, giving their milk, waiting for a new life they once knew far beyond the horizon of this planet. As Valentine stopped talking, Kem had taken the water into one of the pens. She sat down on a stool and milked one of the goats.
“Why is she crying?” Calvino asked.
Valentine looked up from Mozart, continuing to stroke its head.
“Because she’s a silly creature. Kem refuses to accept the first principle of the goat business. A goat can produce five liters of milk a day. And from that we make cheese and yogurt. It is a cottage industry but it teaches the employees the value of industry and independence. All of the profits go to those who work. Everyone has their task: building fences, enclosures, cleaning up, feeding, getting the product made and marketing. Maew delivers the produce. She doesn’t really like goats. But she can market, so she receives a share. Gop, my Number Three, has no feeling for the goats or the business at all. She neither feeds nor grooms the goats. When
she sees the others making profits, she will come around. Money is such an effective spokesman for labor.”
“I asked why Kem was crying.”
“Quite right, and I gave a lecture on goat economics. Kem is crying because she is sad. And why is she sad? Yesterday I told her to separate the newly born kid from its mother. This had to be done before the mother could lick the membrane from Mahler’s eyes and mouth. Mahler’s a splendid name for this kid. But I digress. The newly born kid must be separated the moment it leaves the womb to be nursed by a human. Elgar, Bach, Wagner—they’ve all gone through this procedure. There can be no bond; no visitation between mother and offspring. You may think that is cruel. Kem obviously feels it is heartless, and one must admire her delicate disposition. But one of the first things about raising goats is that the kid must be separated from the mother at birth or the kid drinks the mother’s milk and without the milk to make into cheese and yogurt there is no business and without business there is no profit. And without profit there is nothing to show for one’s labor.”
Valentine had an answer for everything. Sometimes a man with too many answers has no interest in questions, especially ones asked by others investigating a death. Calvino figured him as an eccentric, industrious, slightly mad, gamophobic—to use Valentine’s own diagnosis—middle-aged farang who had slipped off the edge of the known map of life, opted out of reality and settled into an enclosed way of life invented by himself. Valentine knew what he wanted and he wanted precisely what he had. The only fly floating on the cream was the strike to withhold sexual services (which worked imperfectly as Kem has taken a bribe the previous night to slip into Valentine’s room). Organized by Maew who fronted (for reasons of her own) for the gardener’s widow, the strike was inconvenient and had created a black market for sexual favors for those who otherwise had been paid to deliver them. Except for this blip of organized resistance on Valentine’s radar screen, the cottage industry and the rest of the household appeared to function normally—if such a word could be wedged into a description of Valentine’s life.
“She will get over it. She’s young and silly the way young people are. She transferred her maternal instinct to that of a goat. The goat feels no great sense of loss. It has no more emotion for its kid than it does for the feed I hand it.” He looked out over the pasture and sighed.
“You are doing this business for the women?” asked Calvino. While Valentine had many talents and impressive qualities, altruism didn’t seem to be on either his short or long list.
“Absolutely. The sanom need a sense of purpose and discipline. They can’t be expected to properly look after me if they can’t look after this small herd of goats. Without close supervision, at the moment, I am afraid it would all come to grief.”
He scooped up a handful of feed and fed it to Mozart. The feed was gone in an instant. “The expansion of the herd is linked to the expansion of the women tending the goats. Two goats can sustain one woman. And a household of self-sustaining women is a good thing. When the times come for them to leave, they will have accumulated a substantial sum.”
Valentine’s fingers played the top of the fence like the keyboard of the piano as if he were hearing music, and as the chords became louder and louder his fingers rose to find the right keys to match the sound in his head. The goat enterprise was a separate universe of milk and cheese and yogurt, of labor, of grooming, feeding, and cleaning. Fon, the ex-vet, took a syringe from a plastic box, inserted it in a small vial, and then Calvino watched as she injected one of the goats. The women worked a couple of feet apart but with very little conversation. It wasn’t clear whether this was caused by the presence of Valentine or for some other reason.
“When do you decide to dissolve the ménage à trois and add a new member?” asked Calvino.
Valentine sighed. “It’s not a ménage à trois. It’s troilism.”
“Trolls?” asked Calvino.
Valentine threw back his head and laughed. “Not mystical creatures. Troilism is three people having sex. You don’t necessary sleep with them at the same time. A ménage à trois is where say Maew and I are a couple and we seduce another woman to sleep with us. While each of my sanom has a different rank, each is a separate lover.”
Calvino frowned.
“You have three sexual partners. Plus you that makes four people. How’s that troilism?”
“At least you’re not mathematically challenged. Or perhaps you were trying to trap me.” Valentine narrowed his eyes, trying to read from Calvino’s expression where he was going with this line of questioning.
“It’s not a trap. Two, three, or four. The number doesn’t matter,” said Calvino.
“How long will one of your lovers last in this arrangement?” In the back of his mind, Calvino thought if one of the sanom was under threat, she might have turned to the gardener for moral support. Love triangles were a leading cause of death.
Valentine shrugged. “There’s no set time. Perhaps after two or three years. Who knows? George Orwell said, ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.’ The same applies to all creatures. One might last much, much longer. It all depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Performance.”
“You mean fetishes.”
“A man should be greater than the sum of his fetishes. Performance is the measure of all human activity and endeavor. Whether you are sitting at a grand piano at the Royal Albert Hall or working in a harem, a bank, a factory, or an office. One must be up to the task or one is let go.”
“Or weaned away like the newborn kid,” said Calvino. “Young girls are filled with false emotions. With a kid, the mother’s milk is for sale. It isn’t for the offspring. The same system applies for my creatures. After I decide one should leave, in theory she must go immediately. That is the optimal system. With Fon the theory has broken down. I could just kick her out. That wouldn’t be rational. And at the core of my being, I am a rationalist.”
“Other than Kem, were any of the sanom unhappy? Or possibly think they might be cut from the team?”
“Team? I like that,” said Valentine. “And I am the coach.”
Valentine knelt down in the corner of the pen and let out a long sigh. He called out, “Kem, stop that blubbering and come here immediately.” He tugged on the end of his ponytail. His face looked bloodless and older as the sunlight slanted across his jaw. She pretended not to hear him.
He called to her again, “Come here quickly. I know you heard me.”
The conductor had issued a direct order to a member of his private orchestra. Calvino leaned over the pen and looked down at the concrete floor. Valentine knelt beside a small pile of tiny wet pellets. Goat shit. To his right was a bucket of the goat feed that Calvino had hauled in from the shophouse near the main highway.
The feed the goats ate looked no different from the turds, except the feed was dry. In the passage from the lips to the anus, the feed had been wetted before being expelled. Valentine explained that it was Kem’s job to clean out the pens. Everything was to be swept up and put it in plastic bags that were hauled away. As Kem slowly walked over to the pens, Valentine continued. “The most important thing to remember with goats is hygiene. If there is filth or dirty conditions, everything is ruined. This is why there is bird flu. The chickens are raised in filth. A virus thrives in squalor. We must purify to save ourselves from disease. I teach this to the yings.” The yings washed their hands before touching the animals or the feed. They were required to sweep the pens and clean the stalls. Their obligation as an employee, an oath given to Valentine, was to maintain cleanliness. In the enclosures and in the bedrooms, they understood the importance of a sterile hand as it came into contact with another life form.
Kem sulked; her chin lowered, dried tears on her cheeks, as she walked inside the pen.
“Do you see this? It is obviously not clean.”
Valentine pointed down at the small pile of turds in the corner.
She shrugged, turned away, and reached for a broom. “This will cost you fifty baht,” said Valentine.
Kem frowned, sweeping the shit into the bag. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s a question of following the rules, Kem. And if I inspect the pens and find that you haven’t cleaned them properly, you are fined fifty baht. Does this look clean to you? No, it’s not clean.”
Fon wandered over and waited until Valentine had finished. She pulled notes from her pocket and peeled off a fifty baht note and gave it to Kem. “It’s my fault; I asked Kem to feed the kid before she cleaned the pens.”
“Right,” said Valentine with barely concealed anger. “So you decided to change the system. I will let Sandra know that she should deduct that sum from your monthly share.”
Sandra was on the list Calvino had made of the people working on the estate. This had been the first time Valentine had mentioned her. “I’d like to talk to her at some stage.”
Valentine smiled. “By all means. She’s a wealth of information.”
“What are Sandra’s duties?”
“Nothing sexual if that’s what you are implying.”
“I wasn’t implying anything. You seem defensive.”
“No. Not at all.”
Valentine explained that all of the cash earned from the milk, cheese, and yogurt passed through Sandra’s hands. His constant fear was of being cheated, the victim of fraud and double-dealing. His secretary, an Indian from New Delhi, had been with him since his London concert days. If the cottage industry of goat products was going to succeed, Valentine convinced himself that all rules of work, hygiene and money had to be faithfully obeyed.
“The incentive to increase one’s wealth is basic to the human condition,” said Valentine as they left the goat pens.
“And the gardener’s widow, as you saw for yourself, is undercutting my authority at every step. Changing the rules. Turning my creatures against me. Please, Vincent, settle this matter of Prasit’s death quickly so that I can be satisfied that this woman’s husband killed himself and I can at last see her off the premises with a clear conscience.”
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