Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

  On the face of it, Baker would be the obvious first choice. A weak character, accustomed to doing deals with cops, probably incapable of loyalty. I have more or less decided on him, then change my mind. The trouble with Baker is that he doesn’t fit and has started to puzzle me. Instead of Chinese boxes, in this case we have Chinese pyramids, all fitting one inside the other. Tanakan and Tom Smith are part of an elite Great Pyramid of international players. Smith is near the bottom and Tanakan is near the top, but it’s the same exclusive global pyramid. Dan Baker, the small-time hustler, belongs to a quite different low-rent pyramid, where he subsists somewhere near the bottom.

  Puzzling it through: something about Smith the lawyer attracts me—that modern British hysteria just below the surface, despite his brilliant mind and worldly wisdom. The man who lost his head more than once in a jealous frenzy may lose it again and again. I think about busting him, then decide to go to his office on a fishing expedition instead. Then I suffer from what one of my uncles calls “a touch of the seconds.”

  The problem is not normally featured in police thrillers, but it goes like this: How exactly does a low-ranking, humble, third-world cop go about browbeating a smarter, more powerful, better-educated, and, most daunting of all, better-connected, senior, respected lawyer? Yes, it’s called a sense of inferiority, but just because you feel like a victim doesn’t mean you’re not about to become one. I would like some concrete facts to confront him with, but when I think about his various cameo appearances, none of them adds up to much more than a mirage. Perhaps his fondness for brothels and prostitutes would count against him in a more hypocritical society, but, thanks to our natural openness, no one would doubt he was in the same boat as most other men who live here. I need something more, something that will at least give me more confdence, even if it isn’t a killer point. I sit immobilized by an apparently insurmountable reluctance and only slowly formulate a plan. It’s about six in the evening when I finally decide to call Lek over to my desk.

  “Lek, do you keep a skirt in the office?”

  Covering a smirk: “Of course not. Don’t you think I have enough to put up with?”

  “So go home and change into your Saturday-night best. Tight T-shirt or sweater to flash the estrogen, very short skirt, rouge, mascara, earrings—the whole works. Be as provocative as you like, but not too vulgar. The Parthenon is up-market, after all.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to go there asking for work again. This time look serious, and make sure they believe you. When you leave the premises, you will pass the doorman. Give him a scrap of paper with my name and cell phone number. Whisper, Anywhere, anytime, any price.”

  I put my feet up on my desk again and wait.

  31

  “Chatuchak market, tomorrow, eleven-twenty, stall 398 in the northwest corner.” The caller, a young woman, hangs up immediately. I am thinking, Smart, very smart. Chatuchak, that vast, unfathomable labyrinth of covered market stalls, amounts to a city of open-air merchandisers, selling anything and everything from tropical fish, brightly colored birds, and exotic orchids—which rarely survive the journey home—to plastic pails, to offers of irresistible real estate opportunities on islands with dubious land titles—just about everything. You can even get your Toyota serviced while you’re browsing. Today is Friday, so it will be jam-packed. Hard to say, these days, who are in the majority, vacationing farang, trendy urbanites, middle-income Thais looking for genuine bargains, or the browse-only bunch who simply love markets. Anyway, I’m reduced to a shuffle-and-twist technique to get me through the narrow body-packed alleys that lead, finally, to stall 398 of section 57 in the northwest corner.

  I don’t know why I’m intrigued that the produce on sale consists of orchids and tropical birds; something in the back of my mind links these two, but I cannot remember the scam just at the moment. Two young women, pretty in their aprons with large money-pockets, are calling out to passersby, with particular interest in well-to-do farang families with that wide-open look which comes with one’s first arrival in the exotic East. Now I remember the scam and smile. When the young women take no notice of me, I go to a cathedral-shaped cage which is the prison of a particularly vivid crimson and yellow parrot, lick an index finger, and start to stroke the crimson crown on its head. That gets their attention real quick. “I am Sonchai,” I say, before they have a chance to scold. At the same time I hold up my index finger, the end of which is now slightly crimson. The older of the two whisks me through to the back of the stall, which is shut off from the front by a tarpaulin curtain. The doorman, wearing spectacles, sits at a table in navy surplus shorts and flip-flops, no shirt. The brown bird he is holding firmly in his left hand looks somewhat like a macaw but owns streaming central tail feathers that make it ideal for this kind of exercise. I don’t know its name in English, but it’s very common, particularly in Isaan, where it is considered a pest. Actually the feathers are delicate shades consisting mostly of dark chocolate on café au lait; their somewhat monochrome beauty has no appeal to the vulgar, though, and like the Acropolis in its day, it needs plenty of help from paint to appeal to popular taste.

  The doorman is clearly an expert. He uses a tiny artist’s brush and works from some authoritative tome with full-color plates. “It’s going to be a red-tailed tropic bird,” he says, looking down and reading. “‘Phaethon rubricauda.’” He casts me a glance before continuing with the pink, orange, and black markings he is laying across the eyes and wings. Little by little he adds value with the concentration of a Picasso. “This is what I used to do before I went to work for him.” He gives me a quick, shattered look. “Before I lost my innocence, you might say. I do it for free now, just to keep my hand in. This stall belongs to my sister. Those girls out front are her daughters.” He manages an ironic smile. “You could call it a family business handed down from one generation to the next. Frankly, it has always been the boys who make the best painters, with a couple of exceptions. My father was brilliant—he could turn a blackbird into a flamingo if he wanted to. I don’t even come close.” Neither I nor the bird is convinced by his modesty. His masterful makeover has improved the creature’s self-esteem immeasurably. When he places it back in its cage, it prances and preens and cannot wait to impress the opposite sex with its irresistible new wardrobe. I say, “What about the orchids?”

  “Oh, that’s women’s business. Boys never have the patience. They’re amazing.” I check out the dozens of varieties of exotic flowers, heavy-headed and liable to break their stems if not cunningly supported by concealed wiring. “Actually, there’s no real deception involved.”

  “Only the implication that they’re going to survive the next few days.”

  He smiles thinly. “They are the products of intense cultivation—a lot of work. They’re grown from hybrids, and it’s true, only an expert can produce those kinds of blooms, and then usually only once in the plant’s life.” He points at a collection of books on a shelf. “The girls have to study the names in English—we get a lot of amateur orchid growers coming to ask complicated questions. It’s a headache because their English isn’t so good, and there aren’t any Thai translations.” He takes another brown bird out of a cage, fondles and strokes it, examines it as a portrait painter might examine a subject, and says, “Excuse me. It’s so much easier for me to talk to you while I’m concentrating on this. Painting takes me into a better world. What exactly do you want to know?”

  “Everything you can tell me.”

  “About the death of your girlfriend Nok? Not much. I didn’t do it. I was put in charge of the clean-up. He uses professionals for his wet work. I’m just a doorman.”

  “But she got the key from you. You snitched on her.”

  It is not guilt so much as a profound sadness that turns his flesh gray. “What could I do? I told her to be discreet. I warned her that if she were spotted anywhere near his room, I would have no choice but to tell the boss. And what do you two do? Yo
u walk past those girls in the swimming pool like you were returning to a hotel room. I had no choice.”

  “That’s all you have to say? A young woman is snuffed out because of you, and you just shrug?”

  He pauses, stares at me, and puts the brush down. He will not release me from his stare.

  I say, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “Because of me she died? Or because of your obsession with that witch Damrong? Know what the boss told me? He said no cop in the whole of Krung Thep has any interest in that snuff movie except you. You could stop the investigation tomorrow, and Vikorn would breathe a sigh of relief. So tell me, did she die because of me or you?”

  I cough, look at the floor, turn my gaze to the birds and the orchids, try to lose myself in the voluptuousness of color, only to find a monochrome dust has settled on my mind. As a kind of old-fashioned courtesy, he has continued with his painting, as if he has not noticed my distress. I take time out to stand up and examine some of the orchids. “But I think you know a lot about the organization,” I mumble.

  He shakes his head. “You just can’t stop, can you?”

  “I think you take the girls to their assignations with the X members.”

  He concentrates on the tail, somehow producing a convincing crimson tone without compromising the fluffiness of the feathers. “You know that much? Nok told you?” Casting me a glance: “That’s why she had to die.”

  “The video, the Damrong video. It was filmed in Tanakan’s suite at the Parthenon Club.”

  “Was it? D’you think he tells me more than I need to know? I wasn’t involved.”

  “But you know how the deal came about?”

  “What deal?”

  “It was a contract, probably voluntary. She offered to die that way in return for a lot of money.”

  He pauses in his painting and looks into some middle distance. “Really? How much? You don’t know? A lot, probably, as you say. Personally, I would jump at the chance. If I could get my family out of his clutches forever, I would die a thousand deaths. You don’t know what it’s like when your blood is mortgaged for life.”

  I’m still feeling wrong-footed, still mumbling in a pathetic, pleading tone. “The thing is, deals like that don’t just happen. Delicate approaches have to be made. It takes exactly the right suggestion at exactly the right time. I don’t know where the original plan came from, her or them. I do know the Englishman Tom Smith was involved.” He grunts. “You can at least tell me about him.”

  He considers this for a moment. “Just another deluded prick. In a society like ours, it’s best to be either a prince or a peasant. Anything in between is too stressful.” He pauses to give me a shrewd glance. “You know, I have no idea what you boys ever saw in Damrong. To me she was a perfectly ordinary-looking Khmer girl, nothing special. You can hire ten for a thousand baht in Phnom Penh. She didn’t give me a hard-on at all. Heartless whores are ten-a-penny anywhere in the world.”

  What can I say? I swallow. “The Englishman—he was a middleman?”

  “Just another lawyer who didn’t know his place. Can you believe he still persisted even after I warned him?”

  “Warned him what?”

  “That the boss wanted his girl. I thought I was being helpful, trying to save a life. He didn’t see it that way.”

  “He knew Tanakan was after Damrong?”

  “He had this farang notion about equality, honor, democracy, the righteousness of love, all that nonsense. Damrong told Tanakan about him. I had to do some squeezing.”

  “You mean Damrong was trying to get Smith killed by telling Tanakan he was a rival? Why?”

  “I don’t think she wanted him killed. From what you’ve just told me, I think she had her own agenda. I played the good consigliere. First a polite hint. Second a polite warning. Third time you show them the torture instruments. It was strange. It was as if she were deliberately making both men hate her. She taunted Tanakan with Smith and Smith with Tanakan. Even a novice working girl knows better than that.” He looks at me and shrugs.

  “By the time you’d finished with him, Smith had seen the light? He had to do something to get back into Tanakan’s good books? Tanakan would have finished him professionally, even if he let him stay alive?”

  “Like I say, it was part of her agenda to make them both love her and hate her. I thought she was just another whore with her head in a mess. Now I wonder. Maybe she knew what she was doing.” He puts the newly painted bird back in its cage. “That’s all I can tell you. I’ve risked my life by talking to you because I want at least some tiny part of my soul to survive this incarnation, or I’ll be reborn as an insect. I don’t want money, but don’t contact me again.”

  32

  At Smith’s law offices I do not receive quite the same level of attention from our tall handsome lawyer as on my first visit. I have come not as a player in an international porn deal, after all, but as a humble detective and am therefore undeserving of respect. Somebody must have snitched: Vikorn? In this symphony of treachery a mere double-cross would have the simplicity of “Jingle Bells.” I’m not sure even Vikorn knows what side he is on.

  As soon as Smith has me in his office, he slouches on his executive chair (black leather and chrome, it seems able to swivel and roll at its master’s will; Smith has no idea how closely it resembles the one he used in Chicago in the abundant days of Prohibition in a previous life) and stares at me. He doesn’t actually say Well in a derisive voice; he doesn’t need to.

  “I’m a little puzzled by your attitude, Mr. Smith.”

  “Yeah? What attitude?” A little of his Cockney origins emerging here.

  “A woman dies, murdered. A woman you were pathologically fond of, shall we say. A woman whose very flesh—”

  “Cut out the third-world melodrama, Detective. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking murder, Mr. Smith.”

  “Oh, that. Who’s dead?”

  “Damrong Tarasorn Baker, among others.” He gives no sign of recognition. “Your lover. Your whore. Your plaything. Your tormentor.”

  I guess it just doesn’t work; once a farang, especially a lawyer, gets into “A cannot be not-A,” all connection with the heart is lost. It is as if a tap has been turned off at the throat chakra, leaving only a talking head. “A woman you were literally crazy about has been slaughtered like a lamb,” I suggest in a tentative voice. No reply, but at least I’ve made him feel just a tad awkward. “A woman whose ex-husband you have taken to visiting lately.” He’s good—he can do Stone Face and keep it up under pressure; if I’m not mistaken, though, there was just a flick of his left pinkie, followed by a stroking of his nose with his right index. An experienced hunter can read this kind of spoor.

  I pace up and down his office, a technique analogous to the mammalian practice of claiming territory by pissing on it. It does seem to irritate him; mildly though. I take a breath. “A woman dies, as I was saying, killed by a fellow human, a woman whose flesh had proven capable of driving you crazy. As it happens, her demise is caught on film.” I cut myself short so that I have quality time to focus on the twitches that have appeared around his mouth. “Yes, on film, Mr. Smith. To be more precise, on a DVD disk. So, what sort of words shall we use to set the international community aflame with indignation? Copyright infringement, perhaps? Yes, let’s say I’m investigating a particularly egregious form of copyright infringement. No point dwelling on the collateral damage, which you’ve kept to three so far: one Nok, a worker at the Parthenon; one Pi-Oon, a harmless transsexual who knew too much; and one Khun Kosana, a buddy-slave of your master Khun Tanakan who had the misfortune to get hold of the DVD and share it with his lover. Your trail is quite bloody, Khun Smith.”

  He leers. “Copyright infringement? That used to be my specialty. What kind of intellectual property are we talking about?”

  I cough. “Ah, you are an expert. How easily you have called my bluff. Of course, foolish of me—how could it be a cop
yright issue when no one would dream of registering this work? Yes, you are right, I shall have to find some other concept. How about conspiracy to produce pornographic material, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy—”

  “I think I can shorten this,” Smith says, softly now but still with the leer corrupting his handsome mug. “If you’re talking about a video product of extremely poor taste that may or may not have been made for an elite international market, which may or may not for all I know feature a common prostitute with whom I admit I once had a liaison—if that’s what you’re talking about, then I have to tell you, Detective, I have never seen the product in question.”

  I halt, because he has quite floored me with his openness. Sure, he knows all about it, and he doesn’t care if I know he knows. This man has protection from someone big. Curious. I find I have to jump to point two before I intended.

  “You’ve never seen it? But you have heard of it?”

  “I told you, I’m networked here and I speak the language. A lot of people have heard of that video. Lots and lots, Detective, thanks to the infantile fuss you’ve been making about it. Everyone knows you fell for her like a ton of bricks. Same as me. Does the word hypocrisy mean anything to you?” He pauses and stares at me with maximum insolence. “She had a snapshot of your dick on her cell phone. Yours and dozens like it. Hard to recognize a dick in isolation, even your own, so she gave them names. Yours was ‘Detective.’ Funny how the racial extraction comes out in the area of the genitals. Your face is white, but your dick is more tan than pink.”