by John Burdett
Kimberley shakes her head and looks at me for guidance. “I thought your monk friend was in Bangkok?”
“Only an hour away. Monks are allowed to fly, just like us.”
“Don’t they take a vow of poverty? They’re not supposed to have cash?”
I nod and repeat, “Not supposed to have cash.” She jerks her chin at me, but I don’t want to say more. The implications are, after all, somewhat radical.
“Why Cambodia?” she asks.
“Yeah, why Cambodia?”
“You said he ordained here?”
I nod.
Kimberley shrugs and picks up a pair of shorts to shake them upside down. A second elephant-hair bracelet falls out. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“It’s like he’s making a point, this monk,” the FBI says.
“Right.”
“But who to, if not you?”
We get thorough in our search after that, but find nothing else of interest. At the morgue we’re able to identify Kowlovski from pix that Kimberley brought. The body collapsed in two when they picked it up, and the two pieces are laid in the drawer with a gap between them.
“In this country it’s a miracle they managed to get the head at the top and the feet at the bottom,” Kimberley growls.
The FBI needs a beer, and so do I. The best place I know is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which is right on the Mekong (old colonial building, fans and high ceilings, well renovated, brilliant snapshots of war on the walls). From the balcony I’m watching a boy wheel a crude barrow near the river, looking for tourists. The twisted human form strapped to the board, which is bolted to two bicycle wheels, must be a brother or other close relation, because the boy and the quadriplegic appear very close when they are not panhandling. He kisses the distorted human form with the extra-large head repeatedly, coddles him, and presents him to a middle-aged Western couple, perhaps Americans, dressed in smart casuals, as they stroll past. He and the cripple are very polite, to judge by the smiles and pleading eyes and tragic frown on the quadriplegic’s big twisted face, but the message is clear, calculated, and direct: How much is it worth to make this universal icon of guilt disappear? A few dollars, as far as I can see. After an embarrassed glance, the couple resume their walk by the Seine while the kid wheels his brother back toward the Mekong. What else could we have done? the couple seem to ask each other; decent people cannot stand very much reality.
“About this monk, Damrong’s brother,” Kimberley says, sipping her draught lager, leaving a white mustache around her mouth which she wipes with a sleeve.
As it happens, I’m not thinking about the monk—I’m thinking about Kimberley. I know she’s never been to Cambodia before, but I think something in her culture makes the detritus familiar; she’s more relaxed, more sure of herself, than in my more demanding country. She is also wearing military-style pants and a light khaki vest with a hundred pockets. “Anything could happen here,” she says with relish. “Are you sure he’s for real?”
“As sure as I can be. He’s definitely a meditator familiar with vipassana. There’s no other way to get that weird.” I tell her about Phra Titanaka’s personality changes.
“Bipolar,” she diagnoses. “A true psycho could never be that organized or that coherent. Maybe he forgets to take his lithium from time to time. You think he got to Kowlovski?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it? One elephant-hair bracelet might have been a coincidence, but two—”
“Is downright provocative. Somehow he found out who the masked man was before we did? But I thought you said he never saw the video.”
“That’s what he said. Monks don’t lie.”
A snort from Kimberley before she quaffs more beer. She is shaking her head. “Wasn’t Pol Pot a Buddhist monk?”
“For a while. It didn’t seem to take with him.”
“A Khmer Buddhist monk?”
I shrug. “It’s obvious he didn’t do it—he’s not any kind of suspect.”
“But he seems to know more about it than we do. Sonchai, why are you protecting a religious nut you hardly even know? He got to Kowlovski. He distributed elephant-hair bracelets to all major suspects. Maybe he sold his sister? Maybe he’s behind the snuff movie?”
I flash Kimberley a look of incredulity. “You just don’t get it,” I say. It would be a rude response in Thai, but Kimberley’s mood is impregnably buoyant.
“Get what?”
“Gatdanyu.”
“Huh?”
I take a deep breath because I’ve been down this alley before; trying to explain gatdanyu to a farang is like trying to explain the DNA helix to a Sumatran headhunter—the reception is inevitably superficial.
As best I can, I describe the hidden structure of a society few foreigners would recognize as Thailand. When Buddhism first came to our shores, our ancestors accepted its message of generosity and compassion with enthusiasm. They also saw the need to adjust it to take account of a quirk in human nature which they had noticed during the ten thousand or so years they had passed without Buddhism. I guess the objection they had to the naïveté of their new faith could be expressed in one word: payback. How do you make generosity worth anyone’s while? By making sure it pays is how. As a result, every Thai is the center of an endless web of moral credits and debits that will end only in death. Naturally every favor must be valued against an unwritten accounting system which uses the Big Favor of Birth as its starting point, a debt that takes priority over all others.
“Superficially, Thailand can seem like a male chauvinist culture; scratch the surface, and you’ll see we’re all controlled by Mother. I sure as hell am.”
“That’s really why you work in your mother’s brothel, against all your finer instincts?”
“Yes,” I confess, unable to look her in the eye.
“And when I see all you Thais running around as if everyone is a successful business center, what they’re actually doing is working out how to get a favor out of A to use to pay back a favor owed to B maybe from childhood, et cetera?”
“You’ve got it.”
“Wait a minute—what about the girls who work the bars? Are you telling me they’re paying back the debt to Mother by selling their bodies?”
“Yes. That is exactly what they’re doing.”
“And the mothers know?”
“There’s an omertà about it, but in reality everyone knows.”
Kimberley is looking at me over the rim of the pint glass of beer she just ordered. She shivers as she puts the glass down. “Wow.” She shakes her head. “They may not be cut out for the Game at all. It’s emotional blackmail pure and simple? They dump their chances for a successful marriage, childbirth, everything?”
“Now you’re going too far. What chances? We’re talking poor, Kimberley.”
“But how does this apply to the case? I thought Damrong and her brother hated their mother.”
“That’s the point. Gatdanyu is very practical. You owe the one who actually does the favor. In reality, the fact of birth aside, Damrong was her brother’s mother. She is the one who saved his life over and over and put him through school.”
“And she wasn’t a girl to stint when it came to reminding him of how much he owed her?”
“We don’t know, but that would be my guess.”
“Programmed him from early childhood?”
“Probably.”
“My god, that boy must have some problems.”
“So do we,” I say softly, and jerk my chin toward the Mekong. Tom Smith, also in smart casuals, is strolling along the river this morning. He suffers no culture shock when accosted by the kid and his quadriplegic brother, however. The smiles and pleading eyes freeze on their faces as he gives them the brush-off with a snarl. Since he is wearing short sleeves, it is easy to spot the burnished brown bracelet on his left wrist. I haven’t told the FBI about Smith’s client the Chinese Australian yet, so I tell her now.
“We’ve got to get ou
t of here,” Kimberley says when I’ve finished.
“Why?”
She shakes her head. “He’s a consigliere, Sonchai. That Chinese Australian, I know who he is. So do a lot of FBI agents with international experience. This is exactly the international dimension I’m over here to check out.” I wrinkle my brow. “We think he’s the front man for a syndicate of rich psychos. We call them ‘the invisible men.’ They seem to be behind a lot of things: gladiatorial fights to the death in the Sonora desert, snuff movies filmed in Nicaragua with the victims picked off from helicopters just for the hell of it, sadomasochism for sale in Shanghai, boys from broken homes kidnapped in Glasgow and shipped off to the Middle East for the pleasure of oil sheikhs—the kind of stuff that never gets investigated because it happens offstage as far as America and the West are concerned and the people behind it are too rich and important to be captured.”
I’m not entirely surprised, but I don’t see why we need to panic and say so. “Even if Smith is here on the same business as us, it doesn’t mean he’s going to call up an assassination squad.”
The FBI shakes her head. “I can’t believe I’m reading this place better than you. Don’t you get it? It is lawless. Lawless. Know what human beings do when there’s no law? They waste other human beings who are in the way, or look like they are going to be in the way, or have potential to be in the way. It’s called Cain’s First Law of Survival. Think about it: you are the consigliere to a powerful international syndicate whose public face happens to be mainstream pornography but whose premier product is for the delectation of psychotically morbid billionaires. Know what kind of power that gives you, to have the goods on a dozen or so of the richest perverts in the world? Imagine what’s at stake here. Smith’s people made that video of Damrong; now they’re very nervous because the costar did himself in less than a mile from here. About thirty minutes from now Tom Smith will bribe the same cops we bribed and go see the place where Kowlovski butchered himself. On the way the same cops we bribed will tell him about our visit. Tell him we checked out the crime scene. Tell him we are still here. Tell him we plan to be here until tomorrow. What does Smith do in a country where there are about two hundred thousand retired Khmer Rouge on the breadline? How long would it take to put a small squad together? Hell, he’ll probably use the cops as recruiting agents—they could call up a dozen contract killers in ten minutes. Maybe the cops are contract killers themselves, who like to do a little policing now and then. Don’t you see? He’s got to hit us here in Cambodia. It’s an opportunity a guy like him can’t afford to miss. Look what happened to Nok. Sonchai, let’s say I’ve been here in a previous life, I know where I am, okay?”
“It wasn’t here,” I say. “It was Danang in Vietnam. You were male then, of course. And black.” I smile sweetly while she looks at me in shock. “You’d better fly back to Bangkok. I need to check out Damrong’s home village, and it’s easier to do that by going overland and crossing the border at Surin province.”
We decide to stroll by the Mekong; everyone does. Blood-brown, myth-laden, I guess it means something different to all people. Even the FBI carries a piece of it inside her—deeds of derring-do by Navy SEALs thirty years ago, perhaps; it’s our Ganges and was created by a dragon, naturally. There is none of the traffic you see on the Chao Phraya, though; at Phnom Penh the Mekong is still a quiet, lazy liquefaction that merges into the red earth at sunset in a blaze like a fallen firework writhing in mud. It sustains a dozen dilatory fishing craft during the day; most of the canoes don’t have engines, and those that do are so small and quiet that, what with the motionless heat and the Pleistocene fishermen throwing skeins, you’d think that peace had prevailed here for a thousand years. That’s maya for you.
“I love him,” the FBI declares softly, looking away downstream, reserving the right to deny what she has just said, but high for a moment, having first dared herself to say it. “Sorry,” she adds, with a hand on my shoulder reasserting control. “I’ve never been sixteen before. It won’t last long.”
“You’ll be with him by tomorrow,” I say with a smile.
“Tonight,” she corrects, still looking away. “I just text’d him.” She allows her hand to drop so that it first brushes, then grasps mine. “You don’t know how clairvoyant you really are, Sonchai. I had the most vivid dream of my life last night. Vietnam. Danang. You’re right, I was black and about nineteen years old. The only thing I thought of as I lay dying was a girl in Saigon. All I cared about in the world was that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I died staring at a passport-size snapshot of her.”
“Lek?”
“To the last nuance, as you would say.” She looks me full in the face for a moment, then faces upstream, toward Laos. “You’re the one who is always explaining that we humans are simply the visible ends of karmic chains, intimately interwoven with others, that stretch back thousands, even millions, of years. You just didn’t want to apply that to an American in love, did you?”
Touché, and I would not mind leaving it at that. But Kimberley is farang, after all. “Sonchai, you don’t have to answer yes or no to this question. I’ll know by the way you look. Is this—this thing I’m feeling—is it really just the reflex of a sexually frustrated thirty-something? I mean, you don’t really think it’s all about dominance, money, power, and exoticism? You were just angry when you said all that? He’s more than ten years younger than me, I know, and very feminine…” She coughs. “Yeah, well, he’s totally irresistible. That beauty, that sensitivity—to an American cop like me, it’s a miracle he exists at all in this world. Two nights ago I watched him put his makeup on before he went to that bar of his. All my life I’ve been bored by women’s makeup rituals, but I could have watched him all night. What is happening to me?”
27
Five A.M.: the bus station at Surin is as big as an airport, with buses going everywhere but mostly to Bangkok. Even at this hour my nomadic people are on the move. We keep our restlessness hidden under serene exteriors, but check our life itineraries, and you’ll see we never stop moving from country to city and vice versa. Like temple dogs, we carry our fleas with us and never stop itching. I left the FBI at the airport at Phnom Penh; she was retrieving a picture of Lek that she had captured on her cell phone. He is beautiful, of course, but also very ethnic; he looked out of the FBI’s cell phone as if he were peering at her from another planet and knew it. She looked at him as if there were not a single thing about him she did not understand.
I’m lucky to get a seat at the back of the bus to Ubon Ratchathani. There’s that usual feeling of relief, of a journey finally started, when the driver climbs in and starts the engine. At the same time he plays a noisy video on the monitor, which is on a bracket above his head. Unfortunately it’s a sickly romance full of empty beaches, long sultry looks, and sustained close-ups of teary eyes; an ophthalmologist’s vision. I close my own eyes and drop off in seconds. I must be exhausted because I do not normally sleep on buses. The seat is quite uncomfortable, and I have to continually adjust by bracing my knees against the seat back in front of me; then when that position becomes intolerable, I twist around so my head is resting on the window; and so on. In the waking intervals I observe a hybrid landscape of failed development projects, sprawls of poor quality housing that looks unfinished even though it’s been there for decades, ragged streams, and sultry remains of jungle. The wasteland continues for a few miles, but by the time we reach Pak Cheung, there’s been a subtle change. Nature is not so cowed out here: the ramshackle settlements are like barricades against the dense creeping green of the hinterland.
After lunch I get into a conversation with the young woman next to me. We beat about the bush for a couple of minutes before we admit to each other we’re both in the flesh trade. She works in Nana Plaza and has been doing quite well these past few months. She’s going home for a few days to be with her five-year-old daughter by a Thai lover whom she hasn’t seen since she told him she was pregnant. She doesn’
t say it, but I can see she is also looking forward to the respect her fellow villagers will show her for taking care of her parents and siblings; it will make a change from being just another whore on the Game in the big city. I ask her if she knows Black Hill Hamlet, where Damrong came from. She nods: Yes, she’s visited there a few times. Even for Isaan, it’s a very poor village. She saw children eating dirt there; they really are on the breadline in that area.
From Ubon Ratchathani I hire a four-wheel drive with driver to take me to the hamlet. Now I’m in true Isaan country. It’s starting to get dark, but there’s enough light to observe the mystically flat landscape that makes you feel like you’re at the lowest point on earth. Wild-looking day workers with T-shirts wrapped around their heads flash by in the back of pickup trucks. Regular tree lines form windbreaks for the smallholdings where women prepare food over charcoal fires; the mystic green of the paddy is immeasurably enhanced by the inexplicable presence of elephants. The pachyderms graze or stand impossibly motionless, relishing the emptiness. I’m reminded that Surin province is the elephant capital of Thailand. During the last weekend in November there is a festival, called the Elephant Roundup, in Surin town, and the roads are crowded with the beasts for weeks on end. In the country it is considered lucky, even vital, that children should run under the lumbering animals as they trundle past.
It’s dark by the time the four-wheel drive gets to the hamlet. I don’t bother to ask anyone about Damrong’s folks—I’m too tired. I find a woman who is prepared to let me sleep in her house for a modest fee of one hundred baht, including breakfast. Like every other house in these parts, it is on stilts. When I’ve climbed the wooden stairs, I see it consists of one huge room with a few futons on the floor and all the owner’s worldly possessions piled up in a corner. Being a widow and middle aged, there is no stigma in putting a man up for the night, nor any suggestion of impropriety. The house is in a compound surrounded by houses belonging to her relations. I don’t think she has ever experienced urban paranoia in her life. She shifts her futon to the other end of the room, though, and I fall asleep gratefully. In the morning she gives me rice gruel with a fried egg on top. Starting off gently, I ask her as obliquely as I can about Damrong and her family. I haven’t told her I’m a cop.