by John Burdett
“I love the girls—they’re terrific. They do more for me in an hour than anyone else ever did for me in thirty-nine years.”
“Well, that’s because you’re all man, dear,” Lek says.
“Am I? You’re looking pretty good from where I’m sitting right now.”
“You’re drunk, love.” He giggles. “Don’t do that—you can’t have me, darling. I’m a cop.”
“You’re rejecting me?”
“Me? I don’t reject people, darling. I’m at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom—getting rejected is my role. Don’t make me jealous, now.”
Having won on the horses today, Greg is feeling generous and doesn’t mind buying drinks for Henri, who is nursing his thousandth rejection by Marly. It doesn’t take long for them to rebond in the medium of alcohol (they had a fight last week that neither remembered the next day), and as they get drunker, their voices get louder. I’m pinned to my seat at the table with Marly and Nong, who try not to look at me while my guts are laid out for public consumption by the two drunks.
“D’you remember her?” Greg asks Henri. “She worked here a few years ago.”
Henri glances quickly over his shoulder, apparently believing we cannot hear him. “Of course, she wasn’t a common prostitute. She was a born courtesan, a creature of the Belle Epoque stranded in this age of functional barbarism. I felt a certain camaraderie, but she was so formidably elegant, I didn’t dare even speak to her. I was afraid of what her starting price might have been.”
“I did. I saved up. She was terrific between the sheets, but she had a way of screwing your head up. After the second time I was depressed for a week. She was way out of my class.”
“Shush. The boss’s son had her too.”
Greg is surprised. “Sonchai? He never goes with his girls.”
“He fell for her. It was the original coup de foudre, avec bells and whistles.”
Greg says conspiratorially, “The beat on the street is there’s a snuff movie. That’s how she croaked.”
“Mon Dieu, I didn’t know that.”
“Sonchai, why don’t you check upstairs to see if the cleaners did their job properly today?” Nong says, avoiding Marly’s eyes and casting a furious glance at the backs of Greg and Henri.
I go upstairs to lie down on one of the beds to let my mind wander. Musing: prostitutes were the world’s first capitalists. The ancients understood very well that men need sex more urgently than women. It was natural, therefore, that this imbalance should be redressed by means of cash, which hitherto nobody had had any use for. Later, of course, whores found other things to sell, and many were reincarnated as lawyers, doctors, dentists, merchant bankers, presidents, sweetshop owners, mayors, et cetera. Commerce was born, and war became just a tad less fashionable. Hey, if it wasn’t for prostitution, the human race would never have got beyond the siege of Troy. Many haven’t, of course.
I didn’t intend to do anything more tonight—I was in lazy-Thai mode—but Henri and Greg have stirred up a gut full of bile, and now I’m restless. When I check my watch, I see it’s only eight in the evening. There won’t be any airplanes flying to that part of the Cambodian border where they are holding Baker, but there will be plenty of buses. I don’t think I can quite stand a long, hot, uncomfortable bus ride tonight, though, so I make a call to Hualamphong railway station and manage to book a first-class overnight sleeper. It’s one of those third-world treats I like to accord myself from time to time, and I’m quite excited when the train starts and the uniformed orderly comes around with his crisp white sheets to make up my bunk. Suddenly I’m a boy again taking a first-class trip up north with Nong, who is flush with dough from our sojourn in Paris with the ancient Monsieur Truffaut. Clickety-click, clickety-click, I might not have the most respectable mum in the world, but I definitely have one of the smartest. Clickety-click, clickety-click, we have money in the bank and medicine for Granma’s eyes, and we’ve paid the rent—nothing to worry about for at least a month. Clickety-click. To know how to cheer oneself up is a first step to enlightenment. It’s fun to be disobeying Vikorn, who thinks I’m checking out Yammy at this very moment.
I wake up to a dawn in cleaner air. It’s a two-track, two-platform country station, but there are a few cabs waiting for passengers. I agree on a day price with a driver, and off we go for a picnic in the country.
13
Sleepy Elephant village is a large hamlet with no municipal buildings at all. You distinguish it from the countryside because there is a slight increase in the density of population. The police station where they are holding Baker is hardly more than a large shophouse with a five-cell jail attached and a half acre of land, where a silver buffalo is inexplicably tethered. The young cop behind the desk is feeding a pet monkey when I walk in. I flash my ID and tell him I’m investigating the murder of one Damrong Baker, which doesn’t ring a bell with him at all. I tell him the farang Baker, her ex-husband, is a key suspect in my investigation. He blinks at me: So what?
“Immigration,” I explain. “You are holding a farang who tried to cross the border illegally yesterday. They don’t have any holding cells—that’s why Baker is in one of yours.” His brow is like a piece of wood with fixed furrows. It occurs to me that stupidity can be exaggerated for strategic reasons.
The problem with rural policing is that there is no such thing as a rural policeman: the best you can hope for is boys and girls who can wear the uniform without getting themselves into too much trouble. Their loyalties are always local, however, and I’m from the despised big city. By all the rules I ought to bribe him, but I resent the idea. Anyway, he’s too young to help. I decide to concentrate on the monkey for a moment. It’s a baby and emotionally dependent on the young cop. It looks at me with big moist eyes, then scuttles away to cling to his neck, then climb up on his head, holding his hair in bunches in its tiny hands.
Now the cop with the monkey on his head is finally looking directly at me. He’s not at all sure I’m safe to talk to, and I’m not at all sure he can speak standard Thai; all I’ve got out of him so far is a few mumbles in the local Khmer dialect. I’ve got his attention, though. “Get the boss,” I say softly. He nods and picks up a telephone to say a few words.
Just as I thought, the boss was on the other side of a door, listening. Now he appears, doing up the buttons on his sergeant’s uniform, wiping his lips. He’s in his midforties and looking at me with drunken belligerence.
“Are you holding a farang in this station, a farang named Baker?”
He is at the point of shaking his head, so I intervene with a narrowing of the eyes and a concentration of the sixth chakra. When that doesn’t get his attention, I say, “Colonel Vikorn, Chief of District Eight, Bangkok, is going to be very angry with you if you took his money and then double-crossed him. Did you let Baker bribe you last night?”
The sergeant was not expecting to be put on the spot in this lifetime. His survival strategy in this body has been to take money and then kick the can a little farther down the road for someone else to pick up—or kick. His police station is ten miles from the smallest, most obscure, least used, and technologically most backward immigration post in all Thailand, so he’s had plenty of opportunity to develop this MO into an art form. Now he’s having trouble with the sudden delivery of the karmic bill about two hundred years before he expected it.
“You never heard of Colonel Vikorn before yesterday?” He shakes his head. “And you thought he was just some fancy-pants city slicker who would throw money at you, then let you resell Baker back to Baker, or Immigration, or whoever, and come up with some flimsy excuse like he broke out of his cell last night and managed somehow to cross the border, and isn’t it terrible how insecure these rickety little country holding cells can be. Right?”
The idiot blinks and nods: Isn’t that what everyone does? I also nod thoughtfully. There is really nothing for it but to call Vikorn and confess that I’m not masterminding his pornography venture right now but rather moonlight
ing on police business. The sergeant watches with slow, frightened eyes while I fish out my cell phone.
To Vikorn, I gloss over my dereliction of duty and come to the main point: the local cops are making a fool out of my Colonel. They’ve taken his money and then allowed Baker to bribe them to let him go, probably in cahoots with Immigration, whom Baker would also have had to bribe. I figure the pressure on the line has reached about a thousand pounds per square inch when I hand the phone over to the sergeant. I watch with interest while his face turns red, then white, then gray. He is blubbering Yes, yes, yes, and the hand holding the cell is shaking violently when he gives it back to me. Now he grabs the desk telephone and dials a number that seems to consist of three digits. He starts yammering down the line in Khmer and very quickly ratchets himself up to a full-throated scream. I have no Khmer at all, but I’m willing to bet Fort Knox against a jackfruit he’s saying, “Fucking get him fucking back or we’re all fucking finished.” Or words to that effect. Now he’s beckoning me to follow him with an impatient gesture, as if I’m the cause of delay. I follow him out the back of the police station to a carport, where a four-by-four is parked. It’s not a battered old police Toyota, though, such as we have to put up with in Krung Thep; no sir, this is a Range Rover Sport TDV6 4WD in metallic russet. Five minutes later I can see why he might need a real off-road four-by-four. The brand-new, metaled road leading to the border post is for wimps, obviously; this guy charges down a well-worn set of ruts that cut through dense jungle. In less than five minutes we have passed through a broken razor-wire fence and ignored a skull-and-crossbones warning about illegal border crossing, and we seem to be heading toward the border post on the Khmer side. Just as we draw up, an officer of the Thai Immigration service arrives in his Range Rover Sport (in metallic gray). He immediately identifies me as the source of his problem and scowls. On the other hand, he dashes into the Khmer border post. When the sergeant and I arrive inside the small building, we see the Immigration officer leaning over a desk and yelling in Khmer at one of the Cambodian officers. Once again I am reliant on intuition to interpret.
Thai Immigration official: Give him back immediately. We have a problem.
Cambodian Immigration official: Go fuck yourself. We’ve been paid, and we’ve stamped his passport.
Thai: It’s a false passport.
Cambodian: Well, I know that. Why else would he have bribed us?
Thai: Do you realize this could sink the whole scam?
Cambodian: Only for you, bud. Your successors aren’t going to be any more honest than you are.
Thai: Please.
The Cambodian looks out the window at the two Range Rovers.
Thai: Which one do you want?
Cambodian: Both of them.
Thai: How are we going to get back?
The Cambodian nods at two mopeds parked near the four-by-fours and smiles.
Thai: Can the farang walk?
Cambodian, mulling the question for a moment, then: We’ll give you a lift.
Outside the Cambodian Immigration post, I watch while the two rather worn mopeds are stashed in the back of one of the four-by-fours; then they bring Baker out from some dank place under the building. It takes two of them to hold Baker up, and even then his head lolls and rolls dangerously. There is a large angry bruise on the left side of his face, under the eye. “Fucking Cambodians,” the Thai Immigration officer says to me in standard Thai. But the Cambodian also speaks Thai. “They did this,” he says, pointing at the Thais.
“We didn’t do that,” the Thai says, pointing at the bruise. “We use telephone books—no signs of bruising. Only you barbarians do stuff like that.”
“So why couldn’t he walk last night when you brought him over? You knew who he was. The only point of beating him up was to get more money out of him.”
When they have laid Baker in the front seat of the four-by-four, I check his pulse, which seems surprisingly robust. Other vital signs show promise, and now I’m wondering if he, also, is not engaged in some kind of strategic pantomime. Maybe his health is not as bad as he is making out? “Just lie doggo until we’re out of here,” I tell him in a whisper.
We take the same route back through the jungle and arrive at the rear of the Thai police station in five minutes. I watch while they drag Baker out and prop him up against a wall while they unload the mopeds. The Thais are looking pretty sour when the Cambodians take their remaining four-by-four back over the border. Suddenly the sergeant has got his balls back. “Get him out of here,” he says. “You’ll have to pay for a taxi—we don’t have any transport.” He looks dolefully at the mopeds.
Now I’m looking at Baker and wondering if he’s up to a twelve-hour journey back to Krung Thep. “I need some painkiller,” I say. When the sergeant merely scowls, I threaten to call Vikorn again.
“What about opium? It’s all we’ve got out here.”
I shrug. The sergeant pops back into the station and returns a few minutes later with a long pipe with tiny brass bowl, a wedge of black opium between two transparent plastic squares, and a few pills. The pills are paracetamol, which he grinds up with the opium to make the drug less viscous; then he places a tiny drop on the side of the bowl, heats it with a butane lighter until it fizzes and bubbles, takes one toke himself, then hands the pipe to Baker, who sucks on it with unexpected enthusiasm. Baker keeps up the malingering for fifteen pipes until he can no longer disguise the feeling of supreme well-being that has overwhelmed him. “I guess he’s ready to travel,” I tell the cop, who helps me slide him into the back of the taxi.
Baker is deeply into his opium dream by the time we reach the country station, and I have to pay the driver to help me drag him to the train and dump him on a bench in the first-class compartment. It’s a relief when the train starts and I pull the blinds over the door. A few hours later Baker shows no sign of forsaking paradise for this sterile promontory, so I insert the name Damrong into his dream by whispering it slowly and clearly over and over again in his ear. Suddenly his eyes open full of that light which has not been much seen in farang since the sixties, and says:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.
“School play,” he adds with a smug smile. “I was Enobarbus.” And closes his eyes again.
It is not until we are on the outskirts of Krung Thep that the drug’s high tide begins to recede. He starts to rub the angry bruise under his eye and other parts of his body where they beat him. His mind seems to be working on a more powerful distraction than pain, though, when he begins to narrate his inner journey:
“Monochrome, shades of gray, white floor with gigantic tiles, maybe ten feet square, with black between them, like a giant chessboard. On each square a gray spiral staircase leading to a gray platform. She is color: gold and green mostly, dazzling, with dark purple, crimson, orange, a blaze of colored light in some kind of silk robe, stepping off the platform into the void. Go to the next tile. Again, spiral staircase, this time taller than the last; same thing, she is the only colored object, stepping off the platform into the void. And so on, for infinity, staircase after staircase, each one taller than the last, Damrong after Damrong—a different robe every time, do you see? Always about to step off into the void.” He grasps my forearm. “She comes to me every night, glowing gold-green. She controls my dick, my orgasm, everything. She can make it last for hours, literally all night, or make me come in five seconds flat. Every night, every night!” Digging his nails into my flesh: “I want to jump off into the void with her, but I just don’t have the guts.”
I have called ahead, so Vikorn has arranged for a police van to meet us at Hualamphong railway terminal.
14
We are tiny figurines hanging
from the charm bracelet of infinity. When these bodies wear out, we will migrate to others. What will I be next, tinker, tailor, tiger, fly? Demon, Buddha, mountain, louse—all things are equal in their essential emptiness. But will there be a planet worth living on in fifty years’ time? Chart na means “next life,” and if you’re Buddhist you worry about it. Not only yours, but the earth’s too, for it, also, is a living being with its own karma with which our own is inextricably entwined.
Well, it’s getting hotter year by year—that’s finally official. Even scientists employed by the United States government now agree: we will be the only species in cosmic history deliberately to fry itself to extinction. I happened to be watching the BBC on our cable link this morning and half expected the newscaster to adopt an urgent tone, but he used the same smooth voice as for births, deaths, and football results. It’s not his fault, of course; he knows better than most how retro normality can be, but what is the appropriate reaction when the mind relies on denial to balance itself? Carry on as normal, I guess: just keep burning carbon. Environmental fascism will come eventually. When the Himalayas are melting, leaders of English-speaking countries will threaten to nuke to a crisp those third-world nations still relying on fossil fuels. That’ll help global warming.
So now the FBI and I are in a cab on our way at last to a warehouse in Chinatown by the Chao Phraya River, which Vikorn has rented and is in process of buying for the purpose of developing the arts side of his empire. It was, clearly, a blunder on my part to mention to Kimberley this amendment to my job description, for I happen to loathe this new role of mine and need a couple of beers before I can steel myself to enter Yammy’s atelier.
I order a Kloster at a riverside café, and to my surprise Kimberley joins me. We both spare a moment to take in the river, which as usual is roaring with human life. In the midstream brightly painted tugs tow barges with big eyes on the bows, while longtails with gigantic former bus engines mounted on davits with outboard propeller shafts about fifteen feet long roar up and down, packed with tourists. The river is still the only jam-free thoroughfare for a lot of people commuting to work and back, so the long, thin passenger ferries are packed; they arrive and depart the floating docks amid a frenzy of hysterical whistles from the pilots at the stern, who like to give the impression of catastrophe narrowly averted.