by John Burdett
I don’t want him to see me swallow hard, but he does. I try to turn a shudder into a shrug. “I’m afraid I have not expressed myself with sufficient clarity for a legally trained mind such as yours,” I mumble, struggling. “What I’m talking about is shareholder satisfaction.” I pause and put a finger to my temple. “Yes, I can easily imagine that you might not have seen the product. I can easily believe that. Intuitively, I guess your story might go like this. Let me see, how might one start? Perhaps with that wonderful Australian expression keeps his brains in his dick?” Smith’s eyes have narrowed. “A vulgar phrase disguising a male phenomenon much researched but little understood. How will it be explained in the future when we are all androgenous again, this strange tendency of certain kinds of men, professional men in particular—one is almost inclined to say especially lawyers, doctors, accountants, and dentists, a disease of the overwrought professional class, plus politicians and senior bankers, of course—a tendency, shall we say, to divide themselves in half. How could it be otherwise, when you have great urban testosteronic warriors like yourself pretending to be interested in serving others when what they’re really after is rape and pillage? Yes, one can understand why the extracurricular activities of such men might be a little, shall we say, contradictory.” I look at him. “I can believe you never saw the video, Mr. Smith. You are not a voyeur.”
I let a couple of beats pass. He is way too suave to break the silence. I continue: “You may even possess the kind of finesse that would prevent you from watching such a product. Perhaps, like me, you would find it almost unbearable to look at. Yes, I’m ready to credit you with that.”
He jerks his head: So?
“So if I were to construct a theory of your involvement in this—let’s call it a copyright issue, shall we? You know how we Thais love euphemism—this copyright matter, then, the theory would go something like this. A man, a lawyer, very well connected to the Thai—and indeed an international—financial elite, is, forgive me, exactly one of those alpha male types whose massive sexual appetite is sublimated into socially useful activities only during working hours. I’ll call my example Smith, if you don’t mind. Smith, then, as we have seen, is quite hopelessly in love with a young woman who appears, by all accounts, to possess the charms of a Circe, a sorceress. Smith, for all his martial and commercial prowess, finds himself in a difficult psychological trap. This girl has studied other alpha male specimens whom she probably finds indistinguishable from him. She knows what animal lurks behind the business suit and also how to manipulate it. Smith, at first, is simply amused; he has been down this road before. But the girl is far more adept than he realized. She isn’t acting out some chapter from Thai Whores’ Guide to Farang. Oh no, this girl really does understand. Best of all, she can convince him that she’s very much that way herself: fast-lane passionate, let’s call it. A World Class Triple-A Fucker in other words, someone who really does know how to prolong the ecstasy. She also looks like every farang’s idea of the perfect Oriental lover. Her skin is as soft as chamois, her face is demonically beautiful, her body is simply perfect, her voice is soft, yielding, with an exotic accent in English which she speaks with surprising sophistication. After each assignation you tell yourself you must stop seeing her or she will ruin you, but you are haunted by the quality of her flesh, her merciless sangfroid—” I stop, pause at his desk, lean on it to go eyeball to eyeball, and do my best female impersonation: “Tom, you’re just amazing. I don’t think I can stand the thought of you with another woman. I just can’t.”
I think the words are more of a hard-to-identify echo than a sentence written in his heart. I stand back. “Did you know her husband—sorry, ex-husband—was standing in the closet making a film star out of you? Of course not. I think you did not make his acquaintance until much later. Not until all administrative chores had fallen to you to deal with, as consigliere to the jao paw, or should I say legal adviser to the board?”
He parts his lips but says nothing. Now I’m doing my best to reproduce his complex accent with its Cockney and transatlantic references, complete with lump in the throat, in an octave lower than that in which I am accustomed to express myself: “Don’t worry about that. There wouldn’t be any fucking point, would there?”
He has leaned back a little in his executive chair, contemplatively, and managed to close his mouth. I’m at the end of my rope and quite incapable of Buddhist patience. With astonishing irrelevance I pick up a cube of sugar that lies in the saucer of a coffee cup on his desk. “You do not take sugar? Too fattening, I suppose.” I crumple the sugar in my hand, then toss it over him. “Heroin,” I say in a loud voice. “I have caught you red-handed.” He does not react, confirming my earlier surmise that he is enjoying protection now. He brushes off the sugar with a go-fuck-yourself leer. I walk around his desk to stand above him.
Scratching my head: “So I ask myself, how could Smith be connected to a video he has never seen that records an assassination he could not possibly have participated in because he was in another country at the time? And yet everything in my third-world-cop instinct tells me that this Smith knows something about the case, is involved in some way.” I turn my head to one side and smile. “Of course, it took me a while to work it out. After all, corporate law is not exactly my field. Oh yes, for a very long time I wondered how you fit in, Mr. Smith. Until I remembered that your training is indeed in corporate law. How many corporations are you on the board of? In how many land transactions throughout the length and breadth of the country are you a shadow shareholder? How often have you enabled farang to get around our protectionist land laws in order to profit by redevelopment? And I saw it, the perfect revenge for a lawyer driven quite insane by his lover: shareholder in the enterprise. That’s what I think you are. She had wounded you more than any woman you ever met. Others merely scratch—she stole bone marrow. You were incomplete until the day she died. How smart you must have thought yourself, reaping perhaps a tenfold, even hundredfold profit from the planned, digitally recorded execution of the demon who laughed as she chewed your guts. What an elegant ending.”
I am making a question mark with my eyebrows, which he seems to find slightly comic. It is a good moment to kick his chair, which I do with maximum force. He virtually flies across the floor until he reaches the wall. It looks for a moment as if he will be able to keep his balance and his dignity, but the wheels on the thing are so efficient, they fail to provide stability, and he ends up on the floor with his head rammed uncomfortably against the wall. I walk over to stand on his left arm. He is in pain, but not enough. “I have protection,” he mutters. “You’re such a pure little fuck-up, I had to go higher.”
“Who to? Vikorn?”
A leer. “Higher. You don’t know who I’m connected to.”
I smile. It may not sound like it, but this surely is a confession of guilt of a sort.
He tries to pull his arm free from my foot but is unable to. I add to his difficulties with my other foot, then squat beside him, placing all my weight on his arm. “If that is your answer, Mr. Smith, then I’m afraid you are out of luck. I’m not working for the Royal Thai Police today. I’m moonlighting for the Buddha.” He blinks. “You’re looking a little yellow around the gills these days, Tom. I hope you haven’t been sleeping with ghosts?”
He grunts in astonishment, and the mask falls. It occurs to me that he could easily overpower me; it is the promise of narrative, the carrot of closure that keeps him prone. “Let me tell you how she comes to you—every night, if I’m not wrong. You experience her first as a kind of erotic stirring, but since you are asleep, the stirring is more an overwhelming feeling of lascivious anticipation, a certainty that the final, ultimate coupling is about to free you from the misery of eternal isolation. Then she appears, glowing, wearing whatever garment you find most erotic—in my case it’s a low-cut black ballgown with nothing underneath, but then I’m corny like that. What’s amazing is her control over your body. She is capable of working yo
ur dick by remote, just by the power of transferred thought. You are her slave—she doesn’t stop working you until you’ve climaxed at least twice. Not the normal, restricted, rationed kind of functional orgasm that goes with the mediocrity of civilzed life. No, Tom, you climax as a satyr might, or a tiger, say: total, wild, ruthless, unrepentant. And you wake up in a pool of spent seed, defeated, wanting nothing except to go through it all again. Am I right?” He says nothing, and yet I fancy I have finally softened him.
Afer a pause I say, “How much was she paid, exactly? About a million U.S.?”
He licks his lips and mutters, “About that.”
“That’s a lot. In a poor country like Thailand, a million crosses a line, from mere wealth to genuine power. It’s always dangerous to give power to ignorant, resentful third-world peasants, don’t you think?” He stares. “With no culture of positive thinking, you see, and no faith in human nature—frankly, who has, after age twelve in the lower income brackets?—there is little to prevent—how should one put it?—a negative response? Certainly, a woman from another background, say Essex, would have invested in a balanced portfolio of stocks and shares to provide income and growth for her dependents—although a woman who thought like that would have been unlikely to choose such an early exit. To be sure, Damrong had traveled enough and spent enough time with rich men to know how the other half—more accurately, the privileged five percent—live and think. Hard to imagine why any modern young woman would choose death when she could afford a Mercedes, but we are all products of programming, and hers worked in a different way. Culture.”
I see that I have at least begun to interest him in the chain of cause and effect responsible for his predicament. “Let me put it in my simple Buddhist way, Smith, and please forgive the naïveté, but the problem was: no one to love. Not really. In the end even her brother seemed on the point of betraying her for the Buddha. Love frustrated is bad enough, but how about love inverted? Turned on its head by a perverse economic system and a brutal childhood? In such circumstances an apocalyptic mentality is almost inevitable. Nothing like death to bust the illusion of inequality. And she had the money to stage a spectacular finale, of which you are a part.” I think he half understands. “Smart as you are, she fooled you. What did you think, exactly, when you took a position—is that the phrase?—in the movie she wanted to make?”
He clears his throat, which seems very clogged. “She acted of her own free will. It was her idea. She approached me, and I approached certain business interests who were clients of mine. She designed the whole thing. It was a product of her own mind. Not everybody loves life, and she was approaching thirty. Things happen to whores at that age.”
“Exactly my point, Khun Smith, exactly my point. Had your own culture not caused you to discount the possibility that she might have been, in her strange third-world way, as smart as you—smarter—you might have thought to yourself there was more to her project than met the eye.” He frowns. “I mean, you might have perceived that what she had in mind was not self-annihilation at all, not in her terms, but rather a statement, a final testament to the world, an act of revenge part symbolic, part literal. You could almost say she was exercising a form of self-respect, after all.”
He shrugs. “So what?”
“Ah! You ask that? So what? So everything.” An irritated frown. “Didn’t you notice it before? Was it not exactly her self-respect that drove you crazy? That way she had of delivering the sexual thrills of a lifetime, as if your lust had achieved that very level of ecstasy a man like you always wants from a woman? Then when you had paid her, you simply ceased to exist for her until next time. Nothing unusual about that, except for the extreme of the polarity in her case. That was her genius. That was her self-respect. Her capacity to wipe you from her heart at will, like a dirty little mess on the floor.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the reason you must die, Khun Smith.” A perplexed look. “Don’t you see? If you had understood her, you would have understood how dangerous it was to accept such a command performance whenever you engaged her services. Even for her, I imagine, it was an affair of unusual intensity—she even seemed to fall in love with you. In her case that was a sign of homicidal intent. Even you must have noticed how close she came to getting you snuffed by Khun Tanakan? You told yourself that she left you no choice, but perhaps you did not realize that she intended for you to get into a losing battle with your rival, intended for you to see your survival as dependent upon her demise.” His frown has deepened. “She planned it from the start.” Now his eyes have opened wide. “It wasn’t an idea that came to her toward the end of your affair—it was the reason she chose you in the first place. She read you. She knew you were the one to provoke and tease and torture. She put you in an impossible position of adversary to one of the most powerful men in Thailand—and you fell for it. Within a month she had put your life, your identity, and your career in peril. She knew you would agree to her idea in the end, as an elegant way of getting rid of her.” He is staring wildly. “How old are you? Let me tell you. You are forty-six years old. Exactly the same age as her father when she had him killed.”
I stand up with a little hop. “It doesn’t much matter whether I take you in or not. I guess you would prefer not. That’s okay.” I take a piece of paper out of my back pocket, unfold it, hold it above him, and let it gently fall onto his head. It is a printout of an e-mail showing an enraged elephant with sociopathic tendencies. “That’s how she had her dad bumped off, Mr. Smith. She took the photos herself.” I reach down to touch the lacquered elephant-hair bracelet on his left wrist and wink.
At the door I cannot resist turning back for a moment. He is prone, still, and apparently quite bewildered. “Sweet dreams,” I say as I leave, gratified by his gasp.
33
I have no idea how or why Baker might have been involved. The only reason I think he must be directly implicated is because the monk has fingered him with an elephant-hair bracelet and because Smith the consigliere has visited him at least twice. Mentally we’re back to Star Wars, with me flying blind on instructions from some disembodied intelligence. I have not heard from Damrong’s brother for three days. I’m trying to brainstorm with Lek in the back of the cab as to how and why a small-time player like Baker might have wound up as a shareholder in a world-class snuff movie, and I don’t notice the new boys on the block until we’re out of the cab at Baker’s apartment.
One locks eyes with me for a moment; I experience the kind of devastating insight into the void that makes you wish people with those kinds of problems would wear sunglasses. None of his features move, and he doesn’t bother to shift his gaze. He is in a guard’s uniform, with nightstick and cuffs hanging from his belt. I say something quickly in Thai, to establish that he does not understand. Lek is from Surin province and speaks a dialect of Khmer. I tell him to ask the new guard where the old guards went. The psychopath replies with surprising eagerness, apparently pleased to be speaking his native tongue.
“He says a new security company has been appointed.”
“How many of them are there?”
“About ten.”
As he speaks, I see some of the others. Not all are in uniform, but I’m prepared to bet they all speak Khmer.
“Tell him I’ve come to see Khun Baker, the English teacher.”
I watch carefully but see no reaction to the name. He knows which is Baker’s floor, though, and nods us into the lift, where I have to revise my approach to Baker. By the time we’re out of the lift, another thought occurs to me, accompanied by a sharp intake of breath. I tell Lek to go to Smith’s law offices and check on the guards there. He is to call me back on my cell phone. Lek takes the lift back down to the ground floor while I knock on Baker’s door.
The trouble with inspirational detection: it can make you appear scatty. As Baker opens the door, I forget all about my planned assault on his psyche because a truly extraordinary possibili
ty has occurred to me. I fish out my cell to call Lek again. “When you’ve checked up on Smith’s security guards, go to Tanakan’s bank. See if there’s anything unusual in the security there today.” I have spoken in rapid Thai, so I do not know if Baker has understood or not.
Oddly enough, the moment of random-access intuition has freed up my brain, and now I think I know exactly why Baker was involved in the flick. I’m not angry with him, though—on the contrary, I believe the whole of my approach is tinged with pity.
“Khun Baker,” I say as I step into his apartment, “so sorry to bother you again.” I stop short. What with nattering to Lek and all, I’ve not yet focused on his face. Now I see he is crumbling with terror. I stare at him and fish out a copy of the same photograph I gave to Smith. “I guess you’ve seen this already?” He looks at it, gulps, and stares at me.
“Well,” I say, “if you talk, I’ll see what I can do.”
Instead of replying, he directs my attention to the camera he has mounted on a tripod by the window. It is generously endowed with a huge zoom lens, which I suppose is the point. I go to it to look through the viewer. It is directed at the gate to his compound, where two of the new guards are sitting playing checkers with bottle tops. Even at leisure the impression is of bored souls waiting for a little slaughter to cheer them up.
“They’re ex-KR,” he says hoarsely. “They don’t speak a word of Thai. Is this anything to do with you?”
“No, but I can understand your fear.”