Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  As it happens, both women have arrived at our little house before me. This is the first time they’ve been alone together for any length of time, and I’m curious to see how they’ve been relating. So far each has been in awe of the other. Chanya can hardly believe that a woman can cope with the world in such a masculine way and achieve such authority and power; the FBI still gapes at the effortless elegance with which Chanya walks, talks, and smiles; she really cannot understand why my true love isn’t in Hollywood making billions. Nor is she sure her serenity is entirely terrestrial. Nothing bothers her, the FBI complained after the first couple of meetings. She has the sangfroid of a leopard. And then, of course, Chanya is heavily pregnant, which mystic state the FBI seems to find disturbing.

  Sangfroid translates literally as luak yen: same phrase, same concept. I thought about that. The two most important women in my life have luak yen to an unusual degree: my mother, Nong, and Chanya. The thought leads naturally to the Third Woman. Damrong possessed an effortless sangfroid: cruel, enticing, immense, a real leopard. But there was nothing petty about her. Both my mother and I expected her to act superior to the other girls when she first came to work for us, because she so obviously outclassed them; not so. She humbled herself, bought them presents on their birthdays, showed many kindnesses, gave free advice to those who wanted to ply their trade overseas, loved them. The general consensus was that she possessed jai dee, or good heart, in great measure. My stomach is fluttering because I don’t know how I’m going to react to scenes of her naked and performing for other men. “Hi,” I say, “I’m home.”

  At some level I was expecting them to be talking about me. It’s a little humbling to find them huddled together in the kitchen listening to the radio. The program is called Thinking in Modern Ways, and for Chanya listening to it has become a religious ritual. She is translating for the FBI: “You see, instead of just starting cooking and then looking for all the ingredients, you gather all the ingredients together first and put them in proper order on the bench. Now they’re talking about washing clothes. Instead of just putting all the clothes in a pile, you use three laundry baskets: one for whites, one for colors, one for delicates. See?”

  Chanya turns to Kimberley with a triumphant beam. The FBI has trouble hiding her confusion. She knows Chanya is no fool, so why is it necessary to have instructions on such primitive time-and-motion issues? “Great,” she says. “Efficiency makes life easier.” She’s relieved that I’ve appeared and looks at me expectantly. How to explain that a nation which has been surviving on intuition and custom for a thousand years doesn’t pick up Aristotelian logic just like that? The revelation that “A cannot be not-A” does not come naturally to undivided minds.

  It’s easier to change the subject. I go to a suitcase in the space under the stairs where I have locked Baker’s laptop. Both women stop to stare when I take it out. I bought a charger for it in Pantip Plaza so now I plug it into a socket in the living room. So they had been talking about me after all. The FBI has explained that the laptop will likely contain clips of Damrong performing with other men. The looks on their faces are a fine expression of puerile curiosity: How’s he going to take it? How much suffering are we going to see? We don’t have any chairs, so they huddle around me on the floor at the coffee table on which I have placed the computer. The FBI fishes a gadget out of her pocket that is about six inches long with a plug that fits into the USB port of the computer. The FBI switches on the gadget at the same time as pressing the boot button on the laptop. An LCD display on the gadget, which has space for about thirty digits, starts racing through numbers, letters, and punctuation marks at lightning speed. Eventually it stops at: {{jack***rongdam\29===forty. I never would have thought of that. Now the Windows icons come alive, and we are welcomed with the cheery music.

  In the MS Explorer screen I experiment with a few files before I realize that Baker uses the prefix X for his porn stuff. “Original,” the FBI says.

  A double-click, and there we are: a close-up of Damrong with an erect penis in her mouth. Probably Baker’s, for the clip, which lasts only forty seconds, seems experimental in nature. It is quite a jolt to be taken so rapidly into the unbearable frisson of a beautiful woman practicing an obscenity with such joie de vivre. She grins at the camera whenever she takes it out of her mouth. “I’m okay,” I tell the two women, who are even more interested in my reaction than in the porn.

  “She’s not even pretty,” Chanya says. This is not merely a reflex of jealousy; I think Chanya sees a very different image on the monitor: a common Cambodian face, browner than Chanya’s, with the somewhat pouting lips of the Khmer. To me Damrong’s is a gaunt, haughty beauty, whereas Chanya’s is full-bodied and jolly. But the FBI too is shaking her head. “Only men think that’s irresistible,” she grunts.

  We go through all of Baker’s X files, starting with the shortest. In about ten minutes we have covered Damrong’s full sexual repertoire, without observing any demonstration of passion on her part. The men’s faces rarely appear; when they do, it is by way of hairy pink foils to her performance. I have shrugged, inwardly, and bought myself a certain amount of cheap immunity thereby. I am even congratulating myself on my Buddhist self-control when I start into the first of the two longer clips.

  The atmosphere is quite different. One senses immediately that this recording has been made furtively, without the john’s knowledge. At first the couple move in and out of camera range, until Damrong has maneuvered her client to a specific position on the bed. Here she is giving oral pleasure with great enthusiasm; indeed, there is an intensity to her performance that hacks a hole in my guts. (Sexual jealousy started in the reptilian incarnations and is firmly embedded in the brain stem; its distorting effect on the personality has been studied for millennia.) “You okay, Sonchai?” the FBI says. Chanya stares at me in disgust: “He’s still in love with her, look at him.”

  “I’m okay,” I croak. “Really.”

  “So why have you turned green?” my pregnant partner wants to know.

  “I haven’t” is the best I can manage by way of reply. I’m struggling with an internal tornado during the first five minutes of the clip, though, and don’t start to come out of it until we begin to get flashes of the man’s face.

  “Look,” Kimberley says, “look how she’s moving under him to bring his face in range of the camera.”

  It is very subtly done, each pelvic shift on the bed made to look like a reaction to the exquisite torture of sexual frenzy. Now he is in full view. It does not help that he is a handsome farang with a strong jaw, auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a masterful manner. “You sucker,” I mutter, avoiding the women’s eyes. “That’s the way she worked,” I explain hoarsely. “She’s let him think he’s dominated her mind, that he’s so good and his cock’s so big she’s totally fallen for him, body and soul.”

  “That’s not a technique she invented, Sonchai,” the FBI advises. Chanya nods in agreement, still maintaining a sneer for my benefit. It’s the postcoital sequence that grabs all three pairs of eyeballs, though.

  “Amazing,” the FBI says.

  “Genius,” from Chanya, former bar queen.

  I’m rubbing my eyes. “Play it again,” Chanya instructs.

  “Real tears,” from the FBI.

  It’s true. Damrong has managed a delicate, reluctant trickle from both retinas, which she quickly, bravely wipes away. She pretends she cannot look him in the eye when she says, “Tom, you’re just amazing.” A slight wobble around the chin, then: “I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Tom says with a lump in his throat. “There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?” Now his eyes too are weepy. They blend the salt for a while, before starting again. This time she manages to get both his face and groin in camera range while she works on him.

  “Did she use that trick on you?” Chanya wants to know. So does the FBI, to judge by the way she�
��s looking at me.

  “No,” I say, not sure how I feel. “Not at all. I guess he has a lot more money than me.”

  “Hm,” the FBI says thoughtfully, “kind of over the top, somehow, unless she wanted more than just money.”

  “Like what? Not marriage, surely.”

  “No,” Kimberley agrees, “not that.”

  I take a deep breath. “Last one,” I say.

  It is the same room, but the atmosphere is quite different. The man is clearly Oriental, and that is all we know about him for the first seven minutes. Damrong has adapted perfectly to her ruthless Asian master, absorbing his remorseless thrusts with helpless cries and groans. When he becomes too aggressive, she bites him hard on one hand: a warning shot or an invitation to still more combative sex? Certainly, without antique fragments of the courtly love tradition to cloud his judgment, this client is not so easy to maneuver. When she finally has his mug in the camera lens, Chanya and I exchange a glance, and I freeze the frame. There he is, face turned beautifully in full frontal ecstasy while she works his member. The sexual angle is suddenly quite irrelevant, however.

  “What?” the FBI wants to know.

  “I’ll need a still of that,” I say.

  Kimberley shrugs, plays with the software for a moment, downloads the still, and folds her arms. “Will someone tell me what’s so different about this guy? I mean, I can see he’s Asian with a lot of Chinese blood. Quite a dish, actually.”

  “It’s Khun Tanakan,” Chanya whispers, careful, even in the midst of her contempt, to use the respectful Khun in accordance with feudal law.

  “Who?”

  “He’s big in banking,” I explain with a gulp. “About as big as they get. We’re talking HiSo all the way to the top of the pyramid. Him and his buddies control the economy. All big deals go through them.”

  Chanya and I switch to Thai for a telling moment:

  Chanya: What are you going to do? This could get you killed.

  Me: I know that.

  Chanya: You’ll have to tell Colonel Vikorn.

  Me, gloomily: How safe d’you think that will be? You know what he’ll want to do.

  Chanya: I’m pregnant, Sonchai. I don’t want to bring up our child all on my own.

  Me, passing a hand over my brow: I’ll have to think about it. I’ll do whatever’s safest.

  Chanya: Start by getting that laptop out of here. I’m scared, Sonchai, I really am.

  Me: Okay.

  Now I’m hurriedly unplugging the laptop and sliding it into its case under the gaze of the FBI.

  “Wow,” Kimberley says when I’m finished and about to leave the house, all in less than five minutes. “When you guys spook, you really spook. How about letting me in on some background?”

  “In the cab,” I say.

  Now Kimberley and I are standing in the street, hailing a passing taxi. Chanya has remained in the house. “I’ll let you off at the Grand Britannia,” I tell the FBI.

  “Where are you going with that thing?”

  “The police station,” I grunt.

  In the back of the cab I explain, “Damrong had that stuff shot for blackmail purposes. There can be no other explanation.”

  “I agree. So what?”

  “If she had started putting on the screws, Tanakan will have his people looking all over the city.”

  “But you’re a cop. Doesn’t that count for anything over here?”

  I smile ironically. “Sure.”

  “So?”

  “So, Chanya’s right. The smart thing has to be to tell Vikorn. At least I’ll have him on my side that way.”

  “Why is that a difficult decision to make?”

  I turn to her. “What d’you think he’ll want to do with the video?”

  I think the FBI has mastered this little cultural conundrum by the time I let her out at her hotel. She pauses while the door is open and pops her head inside for a moment. “Kind of strange, don’t you think?”

  “What is?”

  “That two or three easy steps is all it needed to get you this far. You did no more than the obvious, right?”

  “Looked up Damrong’s name on the database, which led to Baker.”

  “Which led to the most dangerous scoop of your career. Strange. I don’t know about Bangkok, but policing is rarely that simple stateside.”

  On the way to the station, with the laptop next to me on the seat, I’m thinking, Simple? I fish out my cell phone to call Vikorn on his. He’s cavorting at one of his clubs not far from the station. When I tell him in coded language what I have sitting next to me, he says he’ll get dressed and be with me in thirty minutes. At the station I’m so nervous about the laptop, I don’t release it from my grip. Once I read about a courier who brought two bottles of Mouton Rothschild ’45 from London to Hong Kong and for secuirty reasons had the briefcase containing them cuffed to his wrist. Well, this is the porn industry’s equivalent of Mouton Rothschild ’45. I have to wait about an hour before I get the call: he’s arrived.

  We’re sitting in his office now, having carefully reviewed Damrong’s performance with Khun Tanakan. It’s around midnight. When Vikorn turns to me, I cannot read the expression on his face. There is a frown of sorts, but it is complex and nuanced by what might be a smile flickering over his lips from time to time. I’ve known him so long, though, all I need do is check his eyes: bright and shiny. He speaks very softly, like a lover. There is gratitude and caress in his tone.

  “Sonchai, I might need a witness.”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone with the smarts to understand what’s going on, and at the same time the foresight to realize that any breach of confidence could be fatal.”

  “I’m not following, Colonel,” I say.

  “You know the way our country is, Sonchai, ti-soong, ti-tam.” The reference is to the Thai feudal system, called high-low or, if you prefer, top and bottom. “If I do this alone, he’ll find a way of pulling rank.”

  Light breaks in my frontal lobes. I feel a delicious frisson of fear and excitement. “You want me to be there when you put the squeeze on Khun Tanakan?”

  Vikorn raises a finger to his lips. “He won’t know you’re there.”

  “Why don’t you video it?”

  “Because he will insist on meeting in his office.”

  “So how can I be present?”

  “You’ll come as my assistant and bodyguard. He will not allow you into the room during negotiations, so I’ll be wired. You’ll have the recorder. You will also listen over a headset so you can claim to be a live witness if things go wrong. We’ll make it look like you’re listening to music—what are those stupid things called?”

  “iPods.”

  “Right. You’ll be one of those switched-on cops, like in the recruitment posters.”

  “This could put my life at risk, Colonel.”

  He raises his eyebrows, then looks away. “Ten percent for the relief of poverty.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Done.”

  I shrug. If it is the Buddha’s will that Khun Tanakan’s wealth be more equitably distributed, who am I to argue? Anyway, I wouldn’t want to miss Vikorn doing what he does best.

  “You better tell me about the case again,” Vikorn says. “It’s a murder investigation, isn’t it, or have I got that wrong?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Anyway, one thing is for sure. We can’t let this Baker character hang out unprotected. Have someone arrest him on pornography charges. I want him in the cells, where I can keep an eye on him.”

  “Okay,” I say, “okay.”

  As I’m preparing to go home, with most of the station in darkness, I realize I’ve not given much thought to Baker these last few hours. Hanging the laptop out of his window like that was humorously amateurish, the kind of dumb reaction of a born loser. But losers scare easily, and now I know what is on the hard disk. I call the guard at Baker’s apartment building.

  “He left with a rucksack more
than an hour ago, after that Englishman left.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You only bribed me for one call.” I groan, hang up, then dial the station operator to get me Immigration.

  “He can’t get far without his passport,” a cheery voice advises.

  “He’s running for his life. Maybe he has a forged passport. Maybe he bought a spare one in Kaosan Road.”

  “Okay, send me a good copy of his passport mug shot in the morning, and we’ll send it out in digital form to all major entry points.”

  I say something sarcastic that repeats the words all major and in the morning. Thais don’t react well to sarcasm, though, and he grunts noncommittally before closing the phone. I call Vikorn, who promises to kick ass; after all, he’s the one who wants Baker arrested.

  11

  I expected Vikorn to use his Bentley, which only goes to show how vulgar and unsophisticated I am. Of course, he is visiting the great Khun as Humble Cop, so we sit in the back of a particularly banged-up patrol car. Fortunately, the journey lasts only ten minutes, which is just about the upper limit of the Colonel’s tolerance as we bounce around on the torn-up backseat. He is in full police colonel uniform, though, and looks quite trim in the brown tunic with gold shoulder boards. Throughout the journey he has been making curious, delicate hand gestures, which are an expression of the infinite subtlety of his mind. I follow him into the vast lobby of the bank. He uses charm, not authority, on the receptionist, who makes a call. From the look on her face when she puts the phone down, the instruction must be to get the two cops out of the banking hall and into some private room, pronto. We are taken in a lift to an oak-and-green-leather conference room on a high floor, where we sit at the board table. Normally, one would expect a secretary to appear at this stage, but Tanakan didn’t get where he is today without knowing how to play every gambit of the game. The door opens, and there is the man himself. The Colonel and I both stand immediately, hands held together at our foreheads in a high wai. The Khun shows his humility by giving us a high wai back. This cookie is way too smart to try to defend the indefensible.