Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  “How are you?” I ask with as much bonhomie as I can muster.

  Suspiciously: “Okay.”

  “I hear a new case came in early this morning.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “It’s my case. Colonel Vikorn called me at home at four o’clock this morning. You’re too busy to deal with it.”

  “I’m not trying to steal it from you. It might be connected to something I’m working on—maybe we should brainstorm together.”

  “Brain what? What are you talking about? It’s not connected to anything you’re working on.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Vikorn said so. He said if you called, I was to tell you it’s not connected.”

  “Did he tell you who did it?”

  “No.”

  “But he told you who didn’t do it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he tell you a certain senior banker named Tanakan had nothing to do with it?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  He hangs up. I call again. “At least let me have the address where the body was found.”

  “No. I’m not allowed to.”

  This time I hang up. I call Dr. Supatra instead to ask her for the address on the admission form that Kurakit must have completed. She’s too busy to deal with it right now but promises to fax the form to me, which includes Nok’s ID number and her original address in her home village. While I’m waiting for the fax, the FBI calls.

  “Sonchai, d’you know I think what you’re doing is evil? I’ve thought about it—there’s no other word. It’s so medieval, like castrating choirboys or something. He’s only doing it to sell his body, isn’t he?”

  “I told you why he’s doing it.”

  “I don’t buy it. It’s an Oriental cover-up. You people, I’m starting to get the picture here, you still play this game of making ugly things look pretty so you can sell them.”

  “Advertising is a Western invention. Ever watch a cigarette advertisement? They used to feature pure mountain streams, so they could sell poison that gave people lung cancer. I was bombarded with them throughout my youth. So were you, probably. You’ve just got a dose of culture shock, that’s all.”

  “It’s so grotesque. Cutting everything off like that, then giving him a phony vagina. Ugh!”

  “Do you feel the same way about breast implants? If you do, you could start a nice new pressure group in your own country, keep yourself occupied for decades.”

  She fumes over the telephone. “You think I’m just another lost farang woman looking for a soapbox to bitch on, don’t you?”

  “I think you’re in love with Lek,” I say.

  Two beats pass. Cautiously: “Is he gay?”

  “For Buddha’s sake, no. He’s never had sex in his life and likely never will. With his kind of katoey, the lust is all in the conversation. They can be quite prudish when it comes to the crunch. I told you, he’s a female spirit in a man’s body. All he wants to do is express his inner truth. Sorry if it’s difficult.” Exasperated, I hang up.

  She calls again in the time it takes to press an autodial button. “Did you say express his inner truth? Well, that’s what I want to do too. That’s why I’m here. You wanted to know, that’s why. I never thought of it like that till you used that phrase.”

  “If it involves seducing him, you’d better not use precision bombing—it tends to antagonize. Try a little sympathy. Try taking him seriously. He’s the one with the guts to have the surgery—give him a little credit.”

  A pause. “Has he really never had sex? How old is he?”

  “Twenty-two, and I’m busy.” I hang up, then turn off the phone and go to lunch.

  When I check with the telephone company, I am given the number of Nok’s family home. Now I hesitate. After all, she died because of me—how easy will it be to face her people? I decide to check the apartment first.

  The address is way out of town, quite near the new airport, which is not yet open. When I arrive in a cab, after more than an hour stuck in traffic on Sukhumvit 101, I realize that she lived in a standard one-room accommodation in a project intended as a dormitory for airport drudges. The apartment building is designed much like a prison, with ten-by-fourteen-foot cells giving onto an internal corridor. She lived on the fifth floor, which is the top, and there is no lift. The doors of the cells are secured by means of crude padlocks, but when I arrive at Nok’s, I see that her door is open. I knock anyway and enter. Five people are in the room, including a couple in their midfifties who must be her parents, a young man in his early twenties, a young woman who may be still in her teens, and a boy about seven years old. There is nothing else in the tiny room apart from a futon and some women’s clothes on hangers that are hooked over a length of molding. My eyes fixate on the boy for a moment; I hope he is not Nok’s son. In her conversations she never mentioned she had a child. “I am Detective Jitpleecheep,” I say.

  There is no hope at all in the five sets of eyes that stare at me. As a rule, cops don’t offer it. There is fear in the mother’s and daughter’s expressions, anger in that of the son. Neither the father nor the grandson seems to understand what is going on. I say, “May I ask why you’re here?”

  “Our cousin called us—he lives downstairs. He told us some men brought our daughter here on a stretcher last night, and he could see that she was dead. Then some other men came to take her away. We don’t know where she is.” It is the mother who spoke. Now the brother: “She was our only hope. She kept us alive. What will we do now?”

  Suddenly they all seem to be silently accusing me. I have to admit there is some justice in that. As a rule, fifty percent of problems suffered by the lower income levels are caused by cops.

  “She was a good girl,” her mother says. “She didn’t sell drugs, and she didn’t sell her body. She worked in a restaurant.” I look at the young boy without asking the obvious question. “Nok was married to his father, legally, but he found another wife and stopped sending child support.”

  “I see,” I say. Of course, there is no way Nok could have kept five or more human beings alive on wages from a restaurant job, but protocol requires these necessary illusions. Maybe only the mother is smart enough to realize what Nok really did for money. Certainly no one in the family would ever have discussed the matter out loud. Without breaking the omertà, though, it is difficult to discuss the case.

  “She sent home ten thousand baht a month,” her mother explains, “and I have to feed all of us plus my parents on that. We spend all our time growing rice to eat. We have no cash at all. My mother has diabetes. We get her drugs cheap on the government system, but she needs a special diet. My father has health problems too—something is wrong with his brain from farming in the heat all his life. My son here wanted to finish high school, but we didn’t have the money. My younger daughter here is a virgin, but she meets only local boys who have no money and usually drink whiskey and do drugs. Nok wanted to help her find a good husband, but she needs to finish high school as well or only LoSo men will look at her. Nok said she was pretty enough to find a farang husband in a year or so, when she might come here to Krung Thep. Nok said farang have so much money, one man would keep us all. Now what will we be, just beggars?”

  I see my own family here. Thank Buddha my mother had the smarts and the ruthlessness to get out for long enough to make a pile—and start a brothel of her own: nobody escapes the cycle of karma, not even a Buddha.

  Now the brother speaks. “Our cousin thinks it was cops who brought her and took her away again. We think maybe some rich man used her and killed her, then paid off the cops.” He stares at me accusingly.

  “I know that she was killed,” I say. “I don’t think she was sexually assaulted.”

  Now the father speaks. I recognize him as a type who might be termed the backbone of our country. He speaks slowly, carefully, and very politely, in a voice that has never told a lie. �
�We are a devout family. We give so much to the wat for tambun. Nok also made merit whenever she could, even here in Krung Thep. I have worked the fields all my life. When I was young, I ordained for a whole year. When I die, I will go to nirvana. I do not want to think about my daughter being killed by a bad man. It makes me feel crazy.” As he speaks, he holds his head between thick calloused hands and twists it one way then another. The gesture somehow completes my feeling of helplessness. I want to say that I will hunt down Nok’s killer and bring him to justice, like you hear in the movies, but I doubt even this unworldly family would believe that. Gentle they may be, but they have already absorbed and discarded Nok’s murder; what they want is some security for the future, some substitute for their only breadwinner. There is no tragedy that compares to an interminable tomorrow without rice. The mother seems to have followed my thoughts.

  “It cost us more than a thousand baht for all of us to come here today,” she says, fixing my gaze. I fish out my wallet, hand over two thousand, cast my eye around the room (not a sign of blood or struggle), nod, wai, and take my leave. Outside I trudge around for a while, feeling bad. The apartment building is only one of dozens that have sprung up on land speculation, and they are all the same: long five-story structures composed of identical cells. Blink once, and it could be a concentration camp. Blink twice, and it could be anywhere in the third world. Blink three times, and it might be all our futures in this age of functional barbarism. I have to get out of here.

  When I’m back at my desk, Vikorn calls. “Where have you been?”

  “I’m investigating a murder.”

  “Sonchai, I’m not asking this time, I’m ordering. Don’t go there. Let Kurakit deal with it. As it is, you’re lucky to be alive. I know you don’t give a shit about anything except your piety, but if you won’t keep your nose out of it for me, at least do it for Chanya and your unborn child. Tanakan will squash you like a bug and never give you a second thought. Do you want Kurakit investigating your murder? Where will that get you?”

  I think of Nok’s father and want to say, Nirvana. But I don’t have the innocence or the guts. Instead I grunt, “Okay.”

  In the circumstances, the company of a frustrated drug trafficker–cum—movie director feels like light entertainment. Yammy has just messaged me:

  I’m at the Kimsee, drinking. Come join me.

  The Kimsee is a Japanese restaurant on Sukhumvit, opposite the Emporium and under a Skytrain bridge. It looks as if it were carefully removed from somewhere quaint in Tokyo and reconstructed here in Bangkok under strict Japanese quality control. I’ve been there a couple of times, and apart from the Thai waitresses everything about the place strikes me as authentic Nippon, including the heavy-drinking salary-men who all have their own reserved bottles of best sake with their names printed on them, waiting on a high shelf.

  Yammy’s is not waiting, though. It started out as a liter but has lost half its contents. As I sit down at the dark-stained wooden table, which perfectly matches the dark-stained wooden decor, Yammy beckons to one of the waitresses, who comes to pour some of the sake into a stone jar for heating. A few minutes later it comes back warm, and she pours a couple of shots into the tiny mugs. Yammy is halfway through his bento box, gloomily picking at yellow tofu with his wooden chopsticks.

  “I don’t think I can go on any longer, Sonchai,” he says in that soft California accent. “This is it, I resign.”

  “Okay,” I say, taking a slug of the sake. “I’ll speak to the boss.”

  I cannot tell yet if this is the correct strategy. Maybe he’s too far down the line with his depression to be tricked out of it? He gives me a sly glance. “The third movie in the series is only one-half shot. You’ll have to find someone to take it over.”

  “Right.”

  Peering over his chopsticks: “You don’t care? The whole contract is at risk.”

  “I realize that, Yammy, but you’re an artist—you’re temperamental. If the working environment is not right for you, you cannot work. Vikorn will have to understand that.”

  “He won’t snuff me?”

  “He might. But we already know you have no fear of death. After all, you were on death row for a while, and we practically had to beg you to leave jail.”

  He manages a smirk and drops the pretense. “Look, I’ll finish this one and do the other ten, but after that—”

  “Yammy, forget it. If you want to be difficult, Vikorn will dump you anyway. Maybe he’ll kill you, or maybe he’ll send you back to jail. Maybe you really do have that kind of integrity, but so what? The movies are going to get made, Yammy, if not by you then by someone else. I’m only afraid Vikorn will want me to take over the production.”

  He hadn’t thought of that. He lays down his chopsticks to stare at me. “You? You don’t know scat about making a movie.”

  “I agree. Just think how awful they’ll be if I make them. How is an amateur like me going to get a penis to slide into a vagina? It must take decades of practice.”

  He maintains radio silence for about ten minutes—at least, that’s what it feels like. Finally, forcing me to stare back into those bottomless pits of morosity: “You have to babysit me, don’t you? That’s your job. So, we’re going to get drunk.” He tosses back some sake and nods at me to do the same. I’m still nursing guilt and mourning Nok and cannot think of a better thing to do. I’m not sure how many times we knock back the rice wine, but the sake bottle with Yammy’s name on it in elegant Japanese calligraphy is empty by the time we leave. Outside it is early evening. On the street, with the Skytrain rattling overhead and the static traffic chugging out airborne poison down below, the cooked-food stalls of the day, with their hundred varieties of sweet snacks, have been replaced by more serious stalls serving noodles and other dishes suitable for hungry commuters on their way home. Generally speaking, though, the landscape is more fluid than I remember. Yammy is in worse shape and can hardly stand. He claws at my left arm, which he is using to support himself. “You think it’s so easy to slide a penis into a vagina, when neither bit belongs to you? It’s not as easy as you think. You know who are the biggest prima donnas in the porn industry? The studs, my friend, the studs. One harsh word, and they droop.”

  “But you have Jock?”

  He grunts. “If not for him, I really would resign.”

  That night Chanya surprises me. We are in bed together with my hand on the Lump, and I have just finished telling her how Nok died. I was expecting another fear reaction, followed by a demand that I listen to Vikorn and forget Nok. Chanya, though, is quiet for a long time. Finally she says, “Do what you have to do, Sonchai.”

  “But what about you and the child?”

  “We’ll have to take our chances. Too many people in Thailand are in denial. Keeping quiet in the Thai way doesn’t work anymore. Maybe one day a rich man will decide to rape and kill me, then pay off the police. Change has to start somewhere.”

  “That’s not the way you talked last time Tanakan’s name came up.”

  “I know. Now another woman is dead. Perhaps our Buddhism has made ordinary Thais too humble.”

  “And the others too arrogant,” I mumble.

  21

  All serious crime starts with a plausible excuse: terrible childhood, fell down the stairs at a tender age, emerged from urban squalor, et cetera. The one I plan to commit needs nothing more than the murder of Nok, Pi-Oon, and Khun Kosana qua motivation; let’s not dwell on any residual outrage I may feel at the manner of Damrong’s demise. Nok, at least, did not conspire with her killer. I want Tanakan’s head, and to hell with Vikorn. I shall have to be a fox, though, if I am to survive. I have grudgingly to admit that it must have been precisely my connection with Vikorn that saved my life: if Tanakan bumped me off, the nature of his deal with the Colonel would alter in Vikorn’s favor; the Colonel would, of course, have shown no mercy.

  I don’t have much of a plan as yet, which puts me in one hell of a mood. All I can think of is to grab
the footman at the Parthenon on some pretext and do whatever is necessary to get him to talk, but if I do that, Tanakan will find out and snuff me. Anyway, that man does not fear death or jail; Tanakan holds his women, who are everything to him. He won’t talk unless he wants to. Sometimes I envy my Western counterparts the simplicity of their lives; presumably they have no care in the world beyond bringing perps to justice? A little schoolboyish, though, and lacking in moral challenge. I doubt you can burn much karma that way.

  Still furious, I decide to take a walk around the block. I’m in no mood for social niceties when the Internet monk manages to get in my way as I’m crossing the road. I glare and pass on.

  It is about eleven-thirty, the time when all good hawkers get cooking in readiness for the midday rush. They have set up their stalls opposite the police station especially for cops and staff, which earns them a special dispensation from arrest. You can tell what they are selling depending on the utensils: a simmering brass basin probably means a beef-based soup; a big enamel basin will have pigs’ legs simmering in it; a dark brown burnt-clay mortar with wooden pestle will produce wickedly hot somtan salad; a wok over charcoal means a fry-up, and so on.

  I’ve cooled down a bit by the time I’m returning to the station, and I’m wondering if this might be the time to bring the monk in for questioning when he reappears out of the Internet café just as I am passing and bumps into me all over again. I turn on him with a sarcastic comment on my lips but freeze because he is standing with his hands in the air, palms facing me. The expression on his face is quizzical, almost amused. Mad monks are as common in Buddhism as in other monastic traditions. I think he must be really crazy, though, when he maneuvers to stay in front of me until I can find a way around him. I’m still thinking about him when I reach my desk and Lek joins me.

  “D’you know what that Internet monk just did? He deliberately bumped into me and went like this.” I hold up both hands, palms toward Lek.