by John Burdett
“Darling,” he manages, and bends forward from the hips to allow Lek to peck him on the cheek.
“You’re stoned,” Lek chides.
“I’m in the middle of a major work, love. I need the meditation aid.”
“This is my boss, Detective Jitpleecheep,” Lek says with a slight pout.
“Ever so pleased to meet you,” Pi-Oon says, and beckons us inside.
Now I’m thinking: Gauguin. Pi-Oon has used those same tropical purples, morbid mauves, and old golds to adorn the walls and roof of his wooden hut with images of katoey nightlife. A cabaret star with similar features to his is holding a microphone in the centerpiece of a triptych. I realize that every human depicted in his work is a transsexual. I’m most fascinated, though, by the frisson of his big boney tough-guy face, which seems to beg for love and tenderness. He gestures at the floor, which is unencumbered by furniture save for a few cushions. We all sit in semilotus with our backs against the wall. “We’ve come about the snuff movie,” Lek says, still irritated.
The words cause a dreadful pain to corrupt our host’s features. He places a palm against one cheek, his eyes great bulbs of horror. “Oh my Buddha, oh my, I never thought it was real, you know.” Looking at me: “It’s was only when Pi-Lek told me you were investigating that I thought, oh, oh, oh, Pi-Oon has got himself into hot water here. Pi-Oon, I said to myself, Pi-Oon honey, you’ve got the biggest mouth in Krung Thep. I wish I’d never got drunk and told everyone. I never drink, normally, so it went straight to my head, and I just spilled my guts.”
“Tell us what you saw,” I say.
“Well, at first it was just a big yawn, don’t you know, because the girl’s a real girl, and who wants to watch a tart do it nature’s way like a farm animal, you know, but my man’s bi, so I watched it with him to be polite, you know. And of course it made him horny as hell.” Glancing at Lek with a wink: “What a punishment he gave me afterward, you wouldn’t believe.” Turning back to me while Lek suppresses a smirk: “So it’s some silly whore doing a fairly elaborate boom-boom with a dishy stud in a black gimp mask, and at the end he snuffs her with a rope around her neck, but it never occurred to me that it was for real, you know, I thought it was virtual. Of course I did. I mean, why wouldn’t it be virtual in this day and age? Why go to the expense of snuffing the tart when you could fake it and use her again? Common sense says it’s virtual.”
“Who’s your man?” Lek demands, drawing a scowl from both Pi-Oon and me.
Pi-Oon casts me a helpless glance. “Isn’t our Pi-Lek direct? Doesn’t mince words, comes straight to the point.” Frowning: “You know I can’t tell you that. It’s against the rules.”
“You’ve told the whole of Krung Thep everything about him except for his name.” Turning to me, Lek says, “He’s very big in advertising, practically runs the industry here. He’s in his midforties and wears tons of gold. Keeps very fit, prefers katoeys to women but hates regular gays. Always uses a condom. Right?”
Pi-Oon seems genuinely put out. The palm presses the cheek again with the head on one side. “Oh my, did I really say all that?” Proudly: “It’s true he’s incredibly rich.” He giggles and makes Lek smile despite himself. “Very well endowed. On the first night I said, darling, there’s nothing for it, I’m going to have to charge you by the inch. Of course he loved that. Laugh? We have such a great time together, we’re even thinking about marriage, maybe in Canada where it’s legal. He’s a tiger in bed but gentle as a lamb the rest of the time. I’m sure he didn’t know it was a real snuff movie.”
“Course he did,” from Lek.
Stoned, Pi-Oon turns gray. “D’you think so? Oh my, I’m sure he didn’t have anything to do with it. Some rich buddy of his must have loaned it to him, someone straight, you know, because let’s face it, straight sex can be very very weird these days, what women will do with their bodies—well, I don’t need to tell you, you’re all cops.”
“Tell us his name, or we’ll whip you to within an inch of your life,” Lek says, looking firm.
“Promise?”
Now both katoeys have collapsed with laughter, and I’m scratching my jaw, feeling out of place. When Pi-Oon has recovered, he says, “Would you two honor my humble home by smoking some export-quality stuff with me? My man gave it to me, and you know what they say about money? It attracts the best.”
“I don’t smoke,” Lek says. “But he does.”
“Do you, darling?” Pi-Oon says, looking at me. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell the cops.” More giggles.
Naturally I refuse, but while Pi-Oon is getting his kit out from a box in the corner of the hut, Lek whispers to me that his friend is even more loose-tongued on grass than he is on alcohol. If someone doesn’t smoke with him, though, he’ll get self-conscious. I am also amazed to see Pi-Oon produce a homemade vaporizer, using a soldering iron stuck into the top of a large bell jar from which a long transparent tube emerges.
“I’m very health conscious,” Pi-Oon explains. “My father was a chain-smoker, and I had to watch him die, poor lamb. I said to myself, Pi-Oon, you’re never going to smoke anything in your life, ever again, but they say the vaporizer is totally safe. I got the instructions on how to make it from the Internet.”
He plugs the soldering iron into a socket, and within seconds a little wire basket of marijuana has started fuming inside the jar. Pi-Oon takes a couple of tokes, offers it to Lek, who refuses, and passes it to me. I have never used a vaporizer before and simply suck as if it were a joint, taking it all down as far as the esophagus and beyond. There is very little odor or taste, so I think it cannot be very strong and is maybe not exactly export quality as Pi-Oon insists, so I take a couple more tokes, which amazes Pi-Oon. “Wow! Well, you’re a real smoker, I can tell. Frankly, any one of those puffs would have been enough for me.” He takes a surprisingly modest toke himself, before passing it back. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated that the stuff doesn’t seem to have much effect, so I suck up a few more bottles of fumes, then sag against the wall. I know that I’ve misjudged the strength of the product when the guy in the mural starts to play the saxophone and I can hear one of the riffs from Blade Runner.
“Paul,” I hear myself saying in English, “I’m so impressed with your decision to reject the materialism of contemporary culture in favor of a more spiritual lifestyle.” Lek giggles while Gauguin seems to be giving me a perplexed look. “But tell me, how do you make them move?” It’s true, the saxophonist on the wall is swinging his instrument up and down while he belts out the meanest version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” I’ve ever heard. Now I realize it is the colors that are playing the tune, the complex structures of tropical russets, extravagant sunsets, overripe jackfruit, heavy brown men and women who seem to have only half emerged from the earth, the cries of the human spirit that has trapped itself in matter—all are transmuted into an intense, tangible aural landscape by the sax on the wall. Then Damrong appears. By an extraordinary shake of the kaleidoscope the whole wall swirls and twists until her form emerges. She is topless in a sarong of Tahitian design, and her brown skin fits the color range of the painting perfectly; but her slim body is lithe and Thai, and a superior energy gives her power over those around her. Her black hair is flying, and there is a mystic gleam in her eye. Hello, Sonchai. What are you doing here?
“I’ll call for a taxi,” Lek says, half amused, half ashamed.
8
Of course Lek and I know very well who Pi-Oon’s lover is. His mug adorns the pages of the HiSo zines in both Thai and English versions. Here he is with the usual suspects at some ballgown and black-tie function, having his pic taken with deep-cleavage wives of deep-pocket movers and shakers. Round-faced with porcelain skin, laden with filigreed gold on his neck, wrists, and—according to Lek—ankles, he has shrewdly cultivated the banking sector of the aristo circuit, which is said to be the real reason his advertising business thrives. His name is Khun Kosana, and he is known throughout Bangkok as a true na yai: big fa
ce. His bizarre affair with the poor, ugly, but wildly gifted Pi-Oon has been the talk of the gossip industry for over a year; it seems they get on famously and really are considering a marriage in Canada or Amsterdam, and to everyone’s amazment Khun Kosana, the na yai playboy par excellence, really does seem to adore his paramour, has paid for all the medical fees pertaining to his gender reassignment, and most incredible of all has so far been faithful to him.
I’m at my desk, thinking that things are falling into place rather well. All I have to do is find a subtle way to put the squeeze on Khun Kosana to find the origin of the Damrong snuff movie. I have no doubt one of the advertising mogul’s HiSo buddies earned himself some street cred by giving him a copy; no doubt it’s doing the rounds of the jet-set circuit, and so long as I play by the rules (never threaten law, only blackmail), I’ll be able to force one of them to reveal the true source. I’ll need to have Vikorn behind me in order not to get snuffed myself, of course, but that can be finessed by letting the Colonel do some milking of these expensive cash cows who run the country. All in all it was a good move to get stoned with Gauguin—I’m still thinking of him in that incarnation (which I rarely revisit, I mean the Tahiti lifetime a century ago; it was a mistake, the whole back-to-nature thing; I was a French doctor, which is how I got to know Gauguin, who, as we have seen, has not yet clawed his way out of the third-world trap he set himself over a hundred years ago—but never mind, it’s not part of the plot). Now my cell is playing Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You”: it’s Lek.
“They’re dead,” he says. “Both of them.”
“They tortured Pi-Oon in front of him, then shot them.”
Lek has called a couple of uniform cops to secure the hut while we’re waiting for the forensic team, but there isn’t going to be anything we don’t know already: Pi-Oon, his great prizefighter face still in a howl of agony, his artist’s hands twisted and torn, fingernails ripped out, a hole between his eyes and a bigger exit wound at the back of his skull, is propped against the lower part of his self-portrait in the middle of the triptych. Khun Kosana seems to have been executed standing up, because there is a vertical trail of blood on the painting, pointing down to where he is collapsed on the floor. He too bears the entry and exit wounds of a single professional shot.
“Nobody knows anything, of course?” I say to Lek.
“The shots were heard about three this morning. Yesterday evening about seven a tall, well-dressed farang paid a visit. He asked someone for directions, so it must have been his first time here. He spoke Thai with a thick English accent.” Lek is avoiding my eyes. When I try to bond with him, he says, “I’m going to the wat,” and leaves me in the hut to wait for the forensic team. When they arrive with their plastic gloves and video equipment, I go to find Lek at the wat at the entrance to the shantytown. He is sitting in semilotus facing a gold Buddha on a dais, straight-backed, his eyes closed. I light a bunch of incense to stick in the sand tray, sit with him for half an hour, then leave. In the street outside the wat I fish out my cell phone to call Vikorn. When I describe the scene of torture and murder, he grunts; when I tell him one of the victims is the famous playboy Khun Kosana, he says without missing a beat, “It didn’t happen.”
“But—”
“It didn’t happen.”
“What about his family and friends?”
“He was tragically hit by an untraceable truck.”
I take a deep breath. “Colonel, this is a murder. We’re cops.”
“This is Thailand, and I got a phone call five minutes ago.”
“Just a phone call is all it takes? The one who made the call—how much is he going to pay?”
“Mind your own business.”
“You have no sense of responsibility at all?”
“Cut it out, mooncalf. If you hadn’t investigated, nobody would have wasted them. If I’m taking money, it’s in return for covering for your fuck-ups. Maybe you’re the one who needs a course in responsible behavior. Who told you to get so intense about a little old snuff movie in the first place? Nobody cares about that whore except you.”
He is using Teflon Voice, preempting all argument. I’ll have to use Baker, I’m thinking as I close the phone. He’s the only lead left. But does he know anything?
9
Three hours later I take a cab to Soi 23, where Lek is waiting for me on the corner. On the grounds of Baker’s apartment building the guard tells us the American farang has received three visitors that afternoon, two of them young Thai men who were probably English students, and one a tall, well-dressed Englishman in his early forties. The Englishman stayed for only ten minutes and came away looking concerned.
This time when Baker opens the door to his flat, he is dressed in an open-neck shirt and long white pants. He is barefoot, however. We settle down in his plastic chairs, and I decide to resume where we left off.
“So your wife, Damrong, is deported, you do some jail time, and the next thing that happens is you arrive here in Thailand teaching English as a foreign language. Want to fill me in?”
He shakes his head and frowns. His posture is one of heroic struggle with demonic forces of pride, which he defeats with a theatrical groan. “I’m here because of her, of course.”
Stifling an embarrassing sob: “I’m that kind of guy—I’m turned on by life in the raw. I’m not really a jerk, I just live like one. When it comes down to the wire, there’s only one kind of woman who can deliver the total experience, and I’m ready to admit that to myself, ready to be humble. I came halfway around the world and stayed four years just for the crumbs she was willing to toss me from time to time, and I’m not even ashamed.”
Looking at me with a strange, twisted smile: “I envy heroin addicts. It must be so easy to kick that habit, in comparison to the habit of the most alive woman you’ve ever met.”
“Most alive,” Lek repeats, then clamps a hand over his mouth at a stern look from me. Baker’s eyes flick now from Lek to me and back again. I let silence tell the story. I’m thinking that if he already knows she’s dead, it will be hard to fake a reaction to the news. Lek and I are watching carefully, trying to sift maya from reality. With a slowness that may or may not be theatrical, he grabs the back of a chair and shifts it so that he’s looking out of his window while he leans on it.
Softly: “How did she die?”
“What kind of death did you have in mind for her, Mr. Baker?”
His head snaps around to glare at me. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I shrug. “You admitted to feelings of extreme bitterness, to being a kind of emotional slave. The condition of psychological slavery is invariably a precursor to homicidal thoughts. In your fantasies, from time to time, how did you kill her?” He stares, speechless. “I fear my interrogation technique is not quite up to Western standards, Mr. Baker. You must forgive me. You know how we Thai cops are, virtually no training in the finer points of forensic investigation, nothing but our crude third-world intuition to go by—and what little we’ve been able to glean of human nature in our folksy way. You did dream of killing her from time to time, didn’t you?”
I seem to have broken through to another, more interesting Baker when he says, “She was murdered? Yeah, okay. Guilty of homicidal thoughts against her, so long as you include half the johns in Bangkok in that category.”
Then all of a sudden another fragment takes over; there is nothing to forewarn us of the flash storm. “Dead? Goddamn it, you people just make me want to puke. You come here to tell a man his ex-wife is dead, and that’s it, you just say it like that, like a weather report, like it’s just a fact like any other.” He is wild-eyed and challenging me with outrage. Perhaps in a newcomer it would have been a convincing response, but this man has been here nearly five years. Finally he makes a show of controlling himself. “Are you going to tell me how she died?”
“First tell me how surprised you are,” I say. Just the quirky, dumb question you’d expect fro
m someone like me, right? Hard to answer though.
“How surprised? What kind of question is that?” He studies me for a moment. “Maybe I need a lawyer.”
I look around the room. “By all means. They’re expensive, though, and it can be quite difficult to find one who, let us say, has your interests at heart. You could spend a long time in jail waiting and then find you have to answer my questions anyway. Up to you.”
He thinks about this and says, “I am personally shocked that she is dead, but no one who knew her would be surprised that she met an early end.”
“Good,” I say, “now we’re getting somewhere. What sort of early death would you have envisioned for your ex-wife? Give us the whole story. Take your time.”
A pause, a groan, then what looks like an honest response: “Nothing you can’t guess. Really.”
I let a couple of beats pass while he wrestles with his heart. “When did you last see her?”
“A couple months ago.” He raises his eyes to look into mine. “Of course I’m not going to demand a lawyer. For what? You don’t have a system of justice—you have a system of extortion. This is a kleptocracy. Everyone who stays here long enough finds that out.” I raise my eyes in a question. “So it would give me some comfort if you would disregard some minor infractions, in the interests of bringing her killer to justice.” There is no self-consciousness now, no posturing; he’s looking for a deal.