Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  I wake in a state of total disorientation. Despite what I told the FBI, I myself do not normally fall asleep during massage. Why has Kimberley opened her curtain? Why is she kneeling next to me, stroking my cheek?

  “You started screaming, honey. You were scaring the staff.” Her face is the very picture of compassion when she says, “You’re a passionate man, Sonchai. Anyone can see a part of you kept on loving her, bad as she was.”

  After we have dressed and paid, standing together in the narrow soi at something of a loss, I finally have the courage to say, “Kimberley, I have a favor to ask. Can you guess?”

  “Sure. You need to watch the video again, and you need me to hold your hand.”

  I touch her shoulder. “Thanks, Kimberley.”

  24

  The video and Stanislaus Kowlovski’s performance in it weigh on my mind all the way home. Knowing I’m going to have to put myself through it all over again is a little like the second parachute jump. I’ve never done it, but I’ve heard people talk: the first jump is tolerable because you don’t know what to expect. On the second something deep in the mind rebels, a feeling like, Why am I driving myself through this terminal horror? After all, Vikorn wouldn’t bat an eye if I gave up investigating the Damrong video altogether. In fact, he would prefer it.

  I’m asking myself this question as I reach home, kiss Chanya, pat the Lump, and eat the food she puts before me with love and devotion in her eyes. She catches my gaze with hers for a moment, then swallows hard. I think, Oh Buddha, she has seen into my heart. Then a lover’s intuition kicks in, and I grab her and kiss her. The darling was feeling threatened because I had a massage with my farang friend. Chanya would never be challenged by a Thai girl, but she is overawed by Kimberley, whom she believes to represent the Western side of my mind: much as she loves me, Chanya can never forget I am a leuk kreung, a half-caste, and must surely have farang tendencies and farang preferences lurking somewhere.

  It is almost comic, how accurate the heart can be and at the same time how mistaken. Of course I spend most of my time thinking about another woman, but it isn’t the FBI. My vow—which I make with a mixture of tears and giggles, to the effect that I volunteer to be reborn a hungry ghost if I ever have so much as thought of sleeping with Kimberley—is so forceful, so convincing, that Chanya now is ashamed of herself and wants to compensate for doubting me. She promises to cook my favorite, pla neung menau, steamed fish in lemon sauce.

  We make love as best we can in her condition. She is anxious to please me, needing comfort and reassurance. She uses some of her old tricks from her days on the Game, which causes us to share a smile or two. I make her feel how much I love her, force that certainty upon her, and there is no hypocrisy here, only a haunting. Afterward, perhaps from subtle signals she has interpreted, whole packets of information transmitted by the subtlest alteration of pressure in the touch or intonation of voice, now processed properly through her encyclopedic experience of men, gives the right answer: “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  I grab her to hug her, but she turns away.

  “I have to see the video again, my love. It’s quite a chore for me. Kimberley is going to be with me.”

  “Why not me?”

  A long silence full of the anguish of separation: “Because of what you would see.”

  “You think I can’t handle a video like that?”

  “Of course you can. I can’t handle you watching me watch it.”

  Neither of us wants an argument, and Chanya has grown too used to serenity to squander it on something trivial like a snuff movie. I watch while the kind of divine sleepiness which is the privilege of the pure takes over.

  I take the opportunity to caress the Lump, full of wonder, fear, and anticipation. Vipassana meditation affects everyone in different ways. Although I was never any kind of master, I penetrated to that part of the psyche where memories of the womb lurk. These have returned to me since I’ve known that I will soon be a father. I can easily relive the fear of birth that afflicts us in that transient security: that first agonizing acid-breath of oxygen, air burning your skin like napalm, hanging upside down like a bat while someone in a white coat smacks your ass, then—and here’s the first taste of the police state—if you’ve seen enough already and decide to turn back because corporeal existence is not for you, it’s the oxygen mask: It ain’t optional, bud—you’re here to be processed. Who would fardels bear? Pichai seems still to be quite merry in his shrinking domain, though. According to the ultrasound, he is kicking and flapping his arms about and showing commendable faith in the future. In my less confident moments I fear a sports-obsessed brute. I reluctantly decide to pay a visit to Lek’s moordu, when I have the time.

  “Want a painkiller?” Kimberley asks the minute I’ve settled on the sofa in her suite at the Grand Britannia. “I don’t have any coke, but I guess you could get that if you wanted it. How about a single-malt Scotch? They have miniatures in the minibar.”

  She goes to the minibar and hands me a tiny bottle, keeping one for herself. We unscrew the tops and clink. “Good luck,” the FBI says. I take the video out of my jacket pocket and hand it to her.

  At first I think I’ve cracked my inner resistance, that I’ve got my objectivity back. I am able to watch the prolonged foreplay with a certain distance and professional eye. I have to admit, Damrong pulls out all the stops. With her, fellatio is developed into an art form, complete with elegance, romance, humor, drama, tension, and an attention to the visual side of the thrill which is nothing less than masterful; a sorceress at the top of her game. The masked man, too, is no amateur. He understands that he is the foil to this extraordinary performance and does not permit ego to intrude. Kowlovski is particularly courtly on his knees during the cunnilingus scene. Advanced camera techniques allow us to participate in the versatility of his tongue, the anguish of her pleasure. Kimberley pauses the disk for a moment, freezing Damrong with the tip of her tongue just touching her upper lip with her eyes half closed, to say in a philosophical tone, “I’ve been thinking about it, and the way I see her, she’s a kind of Madonna phenomenon. A basically plain face, nothing special at all, which somehow highlights the sexual charisma. A paradox, really. But you can see how it works.” The FBI presses the button that makes Damrong come to life again. “Look, she’s actually enjoying it. She’s not faking. She’s excited.”

  Which is very hard to take; her excitement, I mean. Accepting how real her enjoyment is ten minutes or so before she dies does something to my head. She isn’t even slightly frightened; she is in a state of ecstasy. I tell Kimberley to turn it off, but she refuses.

  “Tough love, kid,” she growls. “You’re going to suck it up this time.”

  “At least give me another shot.”

  She pauses the video to get four more miniature bottles from the minibar. With the action frozen, it is possible to take in a little of the scenery. Just as I recalled, a shelf with priceless objets d’art is visible: the jade reclining Buddha. Now that I know what I’m looking for, it is easy to identify the decor of Tanakan’s room at the Parthenon Club. We swallow the miniatures quickly, and she unleashes the rest of the flick.

  “Wait,” I say. She pauses again, using the remote, with a what-now look on her face.

  “I’m not going to be able to look at it again, after the ending, so let’s rerun the story so far. I need to know more about Kowlovski, but that damned mask is in the way.”

  “Watch his hands,” Kimberley says. “They’re all we have of the human in him.”

  We replay the foreplay in slo-mo. The FBI is right—the only clue to the psychology of the masked man lies in the way he uses his hands.

  “There,” Kimberley says. She freezes at a point where he is attending to Damrong’s left breast.

  I say, “What?”

  “The shaking. You can’t see it when I freeze. There.”

  It’s true—her female eye saw it probably from the start. I myself was too transfixed by Damron
g. “It doesn’t prove anything,” I say.

  “No, but it’s all we’ve got. Virginia sent me some porn stuff he did not long before. In the narrow confines of mainstream porn, he was something of a master.”

  “No shaking in the hands?”

  “No.”

  The FBI backs up a few frames and freezes again. Now we are looking at three fingers lightly supporting Damrong’s left breast, while bearing in mind that those fingers are actually shaking rather wildly. Indeed, we must bear in mind that the whole hand is shuddering from the wrist. I exchange a glance with Kimberley, and she presses play.

  Now that the FBI has shared her wisdom, it is not difficult to pick up on other clues. When their foreplay is almost over, he lays her on her back to begin the first of five intercourse intervals before the final countdown (on her back; doggy style; with her on top; plus a couple of rather complicated maneuvers that have him penetrating her from behind while she twists around for him to thrust his tongue down her throat).

  The FBI takes us through the first penetration scene again in slo-mo. Now that I’m focused, I see that the hands that dramatically part her unresisting thighs are hardly under his control at all. At one point Damrong herself reaches down to grasp a bunch of his fingers in a comforting way: one professional to another. She also whispers something in his ear.

  “STOP!” I yell. This time Kimberley obeys. She goes to the minibar and brings all the miniatures she can find, about ten in all, a mixture of brandy, whiskey, vodka, gin; necessity is the mother of anesthesia. I gulp two; my hands are the ones shaking in this scene. I have no choice but to let Kimberley see my pathetic, tearstained face.

  “Stay with it, trooper,” she says, which only makes things worse. She has to hold my head in her arms, as she would comfort a child.

  “She’s giving him moral support,” I say, hardly able to get the words out.

  Even the FBI is having trouble with self-control. “Say what you like about her, that is one amazing woman.”

  “It’s almost as if she loves him.”

  “Why not? He definitely loves her, though he might not know it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Why else would he be suffering like that?”

  “If he’s having so much trouble with his head, how can he still perform at all?”

  “Viagra is the lifeblood of the porn industry, Sonchai.”

  She presses play again. We are deep into intercourse territory now, with the camera somehow zooming in on private bits that, at this level of magnification, could be any part of the body at all; could even be the genitalia of some other anthropoid species; at one point the shading of flesh from deep crimson to light pink reminds me of carnivorous vegetation, say the pitcher plant.

  “Look!” He is taking her from behind again, but with such trembling in his knees that he is unable to maintain intimacy. Three times in this scene her small, elegant brown hand reaches down to reinsert his member.

  “Sonchai, for god’s sake!”

  “I bought her that ring,” I sob. I have just remembered. Our affair was so short, there was hardly any time for presents, and I recall how cheap I felt, buying her a silver ring from an antique stall at Wat Po for a few thousand baht, knowing she had slept with billionaires. It strikes me that it might not be a coincidence that this is the only jewelry she is wearing; that at this moment, exactly three minutes twenty-five seconds before her death according to the counter on the DVD player, she is perfectly aware that I would one day be watching this hand of hers, with my ring on it, giving comfort and aid to her executioner.

  When he finally takes her to a kind of trestle for her to lean on, so that no detail of the finale will be lost to the camera lens, and fumbles with the orange nylon rope so badly that he drops it and she has to pick it up for him, I grab the remote and switch it off.

  Kimberley looks at me with disappointed eyes. “Sonchai—”

  “I can’t.”

  “If you don’t, it’ll haunt you for life.”

  “I’m Thai. All Thais are haunted for life.”

  “Sonchai!”

  “Fuck your tough love, Kimberley. It’s destroying the world, haven’t you noticed?”

  Suddenly I’m outside her suite, slamming the door. It is a genuine tantrum, complete with amnesia: I have no idea how I got out into the corridor at this moment. I do know that I’m running, though. There is really only one thing to do at a time like this.

  I take a cab in the direction of the police station but have the driver stop at Phra Titanaka’s wat. Just outside the massive doors a string of stalls sell candles, lotus wreaths, and monk baskets. I am still shaking when I buy all the paraphernalia you need for a serious exorcism. The baskets these days are no longer wicker or bamboo but the same semi-transparent buckets of lurid hue you would use for washing the car, although these are all saffron-tinted. Inside, ready-packed by the stallholder, I find all a monk needs to survive a day or two in that spiritual desert called maya: a pack of instant coffee, biscuits, Lux brand soap, two cans of 7UP, a box of yaa dum aromatherapy sticks, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and incense. The whole idea of tambun is to store up treasure for chart na: give flowers, you’ll be beautiful; give money, you’ll be rich; give medicine, you’ll be healthy; give candles, you’ll be enlightened. It’s a long wait for the next life, though, when you’re only thirty-five.

  The magic is more powerful the more senior you go, so I seek out the abbot and offer him the goodie-crammed bucket, which he accepts with a nod. Now I’m in the temple kneeling before the great golden Buddha on the platform, holding my trembling hands in a high wai and begging for mercy. My mother, Nong, in extremis has been known to promise a thousand boiled eggs and a couple of roasted hogs’ heads, but I am of a different generation: I’ll be a better husband, a perfect father, a better cop, a wiser teacher to Lek, a more devout Buddhist—I’ll do anything, anything at all, just to get this THING off my back.

  You never know immediately if it’s going to work or not—it all depends on the unpredictable compassion of the Buddha—but for the moment I’m satisfied I’ve done what I can. I try to meditate for twenty minutes to give more power to my supplication; then, pretty much exhausted, I leave the temple. I’m on my way to the great gates, when a familiar figure catches my eye. Lek is sitting with Damrong’s brother, Phra Titanaka, on a seat under the banyan tree. Lek is careful to keep his head below that of the monk’s, while gazing at him with adoration. Phra Titanaka is speaking slowly, with a beautiful, compassionate smile on his face.

  Did you know, farang, that the ancients saw jealousy as a greenish horn-shaped intrusion of the astral body directly into the physical sheath? The cuckold’s horns were independently witnessed all over the world even before the age of sail: the Maya, the ancient Egyptians, and the Japanese all knew about them as well as the Elizabethans. I know because I checked the Net. Well, Arbeit macht frei, they say, so I stroll back to the office projecting nonchalance to see if I can push the case a little further along. However, I find conventional forensic analysis unhelpful: there is no evidence to link Smith the suave lawyer and Baker the less-than-suave pornographer either to the snuff movie or to Nok’s murder. Tanakan is only implicated to the extent that both atrocities took place in his very own perfumed garden—a circumstance he could argue away with a thousand-baht note. If, on the other hand, I unlock my bottom drawer and take out the old Burmese wooden phallus which I use only in extremis, like Green Lantern’s light—mostly because it’s embarrassingly large, with the glans painted a lurid crimson—and hang over it an amulet that Lek claims he got from a Khmer moordu of towering seniority—thus producing a kind of altar on my desk underneath the computer monitor—lean back on my chair, close my eyes, and let go of all extraneous thought, what do I find? Three blind mice propelled by tight little spirals of karma that go back many hundreds of years, and a black cat whose pleasure it is to toy with them.

  So much for clairvoyance; but the exercise does seem
to have provoked a more mundane line of inquiry. I check the data Immigration sent me this morning. It is a curious fact that Baker, Smith, and Tanakan all arrived back in Bangkok from their various destinations overseas on the same day, some twenty-four hours after the end of the period during which forensics says Damrong must have died. Coincidence, or the inevitable response of three blind mice who had no reason to be elsewhere once the cat was dead?

  2

  THE MASKED MAN

  25

  The FBI is staring at a tureen of fat snails cooked in their own juice with a brown sauce. We are eating at D’s, just off Silom, an open-air restaurant popular with those who work the Pat Pong bars.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. “Really. It’s quite a risk you’re taking.”

  “I want to. I got into Thai food in the States, right after I met you the first time.”

  I cannot comment because I never ate Thai food on my one trip to America. (To Florida; the john was a muscular seventy-something who meant well. I remember massive hands that were always fixing things, long hours while Mum and I stood around watching and applauding on cue at the Bathroom Leak Triumph, the Victory of the Fuse Box, the Battle of Flat Battery, et cetera. But he bored Nong so badly she had to invent a terminal illness for her mother so we could leave after a week. Back in Bangkok I had to deal with his pleading phone calls because Nong couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. I was twelve.) I’m not as worried about the snails as I am about the somtan salad, which also has caught Kimberley’s eye.