Bangkok Haunts

by John Burdett

“You’ve got to help me.”

  “You’ve got to talk.”

  It seems he can hardly master his mind long enough to put a decent confession together. I decide to help.

  “The problem, as always in any great criminal endeavor, was how to bind the loyalty of certain minor players who needed to be recruited for specialist services. The stud was easy enough—he owed money to loan sharks all over L.A., he didn’t have a future unless he could get hold of a big piece of money, and anyway he stars in the movie and is therefore incriminated. But what of the technical side? The flick is very well produced by someone who understands movie cameras. It seems as if one lens was fixed to the floor, to enable fuckshots in stand-up mode. There is quite a lot of sophisticated editing too: something well within the range of a gifted amateur, of course, but hardly the sort of expertise you can hire easily in Bangkok, not surreptitiously anyway. On the other hand, no smart operator connected to the proposed victim wants to be in the country at the time the movie is shot, and you after all were her ex-husband, with a criminal record and a known penchant for making skin flicks. What to do? Training, I think. They gave you a couple of ex-KR to train. The thing about them, they will obey all instructions to the letter. You didn’t need for them to be inspired—you merely needed them to produce the base product for you to edit, perhaps while you were in Angkor Wat. I think they sent you the rushes via e-mail. The Khmer had to be trained, though, and you wanted a cut. Was it a percentage or cash?”

  A long pause, during which I think he will not speak, then: “Both. It was her idea. She insisted on using me. She wasn’t going to trust anyone else. She’d worked with me before plenty of times. She knew I wasn’t about to screw up.” Looking at me: “And anyway, she was Thai.”

  “Superstition?”

  “You bet. We’d been mostly lucky in what we did together, Damrong and me. Even when we were busted, we managed to turn a profit.”

  “Could you identify the men you trained?”

  A shrug. “Maybe. They were homicidal puppets, like all the others. You don’t necessarily remember ciphers, even when you work with them for a week.”

  “There were rehearsals?”

  “With tailor’s dummies, until they got better. Then we used real live actors.”

  “In Cambodia?”

  “Sure.”

  “Were you aware of any of the other players, apart from your ex-wife?”

  “No. I was kept sealed off from everyone. I never met the stud, either. I just edited his performance.”

  “But what about Tom Smith, the lawyer? He started visiting your apartment after I came to see you.”

  “Up to then I thought he was just the john in that other clip with Damrong. I didn’t know he invested in the snuff movie. I wasn’t invited to meetings or anything. I was controlled by Damrong. Obviously, after they killed her, someone else had to deal with me. They were watching you. After you came to question me the first time, Smith needed to debrief me. He’s good. His questions were a lot harder to deal with than yours. I had to persuade him I didn’t sing, or he would have had me wasted.”

  “Excuse me,” I say, and fish out the cell, which is vibrating in my pocket.

  “Khmer in cars outside Smith’s law offices,” Lek reports. “I’m off to the bank.”

  I close the phone and try not to stare at Baker as if he were already dead. “But there must have been arrangements for you to receive your share of the royalties. There must have been some kind of enforcement clause. I can’t imagine Damrong or you going ahead without guarantees.”

  Baker stares at me. “But there wasn’t.”

  Now it is my turn to stare. “How can anyone believe that? This is a contract of death in which the deceased is supposed to get paid posthumously. No way that girl was going into that without security.”

  Baker shrugs. “They gave her more than a million U.S. dollars up front. She told me it would be used by someone for enforcement if necessary. She was very confident—she told me not to worry about the money. She said I could insist on some up-front dough if I wanted it, but there was really no need to worry. When Damrong said that about money, you had to believe she had the whole thing under control.”

  I nod. “A million dollars buys a lot of enforcement over here, that’s true. But the main players, the invisible men, were never based here.” I stop and rub my left temple. “But then she was Thai. She would think in personal terms. Symbolic terms too. Magical terms.” I look at Baker and try to imagine how she saw his role. The same image that haunts my nights springs into mind: wild-haired, bent over her breasts, madness in her eyes, a grin of total triumph on her face. In the distance a priestess from the forest period arranges a multiple sacrifice to the gods.

  It is as if Baker has read my mind. “Yeah,” he says. “With hindsight, you can see why she wasn’t so worried about enforcement.”

  There is a knock on the door. It is not particularly heavy; nor is it repeated. One boot busts the flimsy lock, and the guy I first saw in guard’s uniform enters with another behind him bearing a Chinese Kalashnikov. They gesture to Baker to come with them. Baker looks frantically at me.

  “I forbid you to abduct this man. I am an officer in the Royal Thai Police.” They don’t understand a word I say. When I fish out my police ID, they can’t read it. It doesn’t make any difference—Baker goes with them anyway. I go to the camera on the tripod and look through the viewer. A Toyota minivan has appeared, and they bundle Baker into it.

  About ten minutes later I’m still in Baker’s flat with no one to interrogate. Lek calls. “Nothing unusual about Tanakan’s bank,” Lek reports, “except that he’s not there. He’s at some meeting with other bankers, some kind of all-day thing. I asked about the guards at the bank. They’re very carefully vetted—no way anyone who didn’t speak Thai could join their ranks.”

  Another ten minutes, and I see it is Vikorn calling. “Someone’s abducted Tanakan,” he says in a hoarse voice. “It was carefully planned. Some heavies who looked and acted like Khmer blocked his car as he was leaving a meeting and grabbed him. If you know anything about this that you’re not telling me, you’re dead.”

  “Colonel—”

  “Do you realize how bad this is?”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Moron, of course it’s my fault. Don’t you understand? I was blackmailing him. That made him my responsibility. My honor died today.” He closes the phone.

  It is the next call, though, that surprises the most. “Sonchai,” Dr. Supatra says, “they’ve taken the body.” I’m too shocked to speak. “Some men came armed with combat rifles. They held us up for ten minutes while they went down to the morgue and grabbed the body. They didn’t take anything else, and they didn’t seem to be able to speak Thai. Someone said they were Khmer.”

  When I’ve assimilated that, I press buttons on the cell phone until I reach the message window and plug in Kimberley’s number:

  Can your nerds trace me from my cell phone signals?

  She messages back in less than five minutes:

  We can try. Why?

  I text back:

  Because I am about to go on a long journey.

  I sit on Baker’s bed for more than an hour before another Khmer guard appears with the standard-issue Kalashnikov. He points it at me in a desultory way and beckons for me to walk out in front of him. He prods me with the gun all the way down to the car park, where another Toyota four-by-four is waiting. I get in the back with half a dozen Khmer. We drive in an easterly direction for more than five hours before they decide to blindfold me. At the same time they take my cell phone away.

  4

  ENDGAME

  34

  Dearest Brother,

  By the time you read this I will have dumped this stupid body. Dear one, you are the only man I have ever loved. The only human being. I have taken care of you as our mother never could. Darling, I didn’t seduce you during those terrible nights when we were young. Your need
was the same as mine, we comforted each other as best we could. I sold my body for you. I gave you a life no other boy in the village ever had. You are educated, sophisticated, not a peasant anymore, a free man. Now I call in the debt: gatdanyu. All these pigs must die as part of my sacrifice. My spirit will be with you forever. If you do this thing, we will be lovers in eternity. If you do not, my curses will destroy you. But I know you will not betray me.

  Your loving sister, Damrong.

  Gamon, aka Phra Titanaka, finally showed me a printout of his sister’s last e-mail to him. Her orders are in the form of an attachment that is long and amazingly detailed, from instructions on the best way to intrigue and befriend me to the crude device of the elephant-hair bracelets. I was stunned to read her point-by-point guide to destroying the masked man, which included anticipation of his suicide and instructions to make a video of his interrogation by Gamon. It was her intention for him to pass it on to me, to bind me still further to him. The whole case seems to be the product of an evil genius such as I have never before encountered. But not everything is going according to plan. Baker is dead before his time.

  They blindfolded me when we reached Surin province, and I cannot guarantee that I am still in Thailand. Perhaps they used a jungle route to cross into Cambodia. The elephant farm is quite small but boasts the telltale ten-foot mounting platforms. Most of the buildings are crumbling. Perhaps it was a tourist venture that failed. My status here is unclear to me and to everyone else, perhaps including Gamon. I do not think the original plan calls for my presence at the denouement; some weakness in him, a fondness for me perhaps or a need for companionship, has nibbled at his resolve. The first I saw of him when they removed the blindfold was an elegant monk in saffron with a Kalashnikov slung over one shoulder. Bizarre though it sounds, I think my presence made him self-conscious, and now he has stopped wearing the gun.

  The Khmer guards watch me warily, but unlike Smith and Tanakan I am free to walk around. If I go too close to the jungle perimeter, though, they fire warning shots above my head. At night I am locked in a wooden hut from which I could easily escape, but escape to what? My chances are better here than in the jungle. In this heat it takes only a day of desperate wandering in the undergrowth for one to begin to die of thirst.

  I have no idea if Gamon bought the elephant farm or rented it; his conversation does not lend itself to such details. It is hot, hotter even than Bangkok, and there is no air-conditioning in any of the buildings. Electricity is intermittent, depending on whether the Khmer can be bothered to start the generator or not. Most of the time there’s nothing to do except watch the guards chew betel or shoot at trees. Or watch the elephants. There are three of them, young, irritable, and weighing about three tons each.

  Smith and Tanakan are imprisoned in concrete huts that seem to be new and purpose-built and face the compound, so they can see the animals trundling up and down on their giant carpet slippers. They can see the Khmer building the giant bamboo spheres too, out of a great pile of slats. The KR work slowly and often take time out to grunt at one another or shoot off rounds into the air. They are also given to inexplicable bursts of energy that they use not for work but to fire their Kalashnikovs into the jungle because they imagine they see something move. Only Gamon and I know that Baker’s death may have changed everything.

  He tried to escape, or perhaps he simply preferred to be shot. Somehow he managed to bust the locks on the steel door of his prison. There was a burst of machine-gun fire in the middle of the night, but this was not unusual. No shouts, no audible conversation. I imagine the guard simply shot on reflex, without giving the matter a second thought, then went back to sleep until morning. They called me at dawn because Gamon, who was meditating in his hut, had given orders not to be disturbed, and I followed them to the body lying on the perimeter of the compound. The spray had caught him in the head. He lay as he fell, twisted weirdly, because his brain died instantly and his body folded on itself. He was naked save for a dirty pair of green shorts with a camouflage motif. Already armies of insects were frenziedly feeding (reincarnations of souls that have been falling for a million years, they are drawn irresistibly by the odors of death—hard to believe they once enjoyed the privilege of human consciousness, which only goes to show where a string of poor choices can lead). Twin trails of red ants lead to and from the cornucopia of his mouth; larger monsters with proboscises, also imbued with a ferocious work ethic, lapped at cerebral matter dripping from the wound. Feeling grim, I walked over to Gamon’s hut and kicked the door. He was deep in meditation, so I kicked him too. Still, I had to almost drag him to Baker’s corpse. In the ten-minute interval a great swarm of flies had enveloped it. At first he seemed tempted to take it as another meditation exercise, another knot of karma to dissolve under the power of absolute truth. The law of cause and effect played on his mind, though, and I watched an unendurable anguish take over. He had turned the highest form of life on earth into a banquet for the lowest; turned Buddhism and evolution on its head. I think he suddenly saw the karmic price he would have to pay. Panic presented itself as an option. I grabbed his arm. “If you run away now, the Khmer will kill the rest of us.”

  He seemed to wake up from a dream. “Come on,” I said, and led him back to his hut. “Meditate now.” And I left him. I don’t know if he is alive or dead.

  Time slows in the jungle without TV. The Khmer are used to it—they can put their bodies in almost any position, then stare at nothing for hours on end. They are conditioned to obeying orders, though, and since Gamon is paying, he is the one they look to. But Gamon meditates sometimes for twelve hours at a stretch. I’m quite impressed. Before they shot Baker, I used to check on Gamon in his hut to see if he really was practicing vipassana. I think he was; his body has that combination of suppleness, emptiness, and immobility that is a good clue to what he is doing with his mind. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that this man uses meditation as another might use morphine. Something happened to him when he ordained; he realized there was a way out, that the mind was infinite in its possibilities, so why choose constant pain? It didn’t do much for his grasp of the here and now, though, a criticism that is often leveled against our form of Buddhism. It was never designed to build caring communities or create social welfare programs; it was brought to us in times quite as desperate as our own, when there seemed nothing left to our species but a downward spiral into barbarism. Plus ça change. I ought to visit Smith and Tanakan in their cells, of course, but so far I have not had the courage. Sometimes, despite myself, I spend hours staring at the elephants.

  Knowing the business plan gives a sinister aspect to these animals. One cannot help but be morbidly aware of them. In midadolescence they are already many feet taller than the tallest horse, and possess the independent minds of jungle lords. There seems to be only one mahout, a Khmer man in his sixties, dressed in filthy rags that in color and texture bear a resemblance to the pachyderms themselves. They are not tethered but wander around the compound at will. Yesterday one came up behind me, for they can be quite silent on those padded feet, and swung its trunk gently across the backs of my knees, bringing me to the ground. For a moment I thought I was done for, but the several tons of pure muscle were simply carrying out an experiment of some kind and trundled off with his conclusion, as if to share it with his three companions.

  I know that I have to go see Gamon in his hut again sooner or later, but I have no idea what to do or say. The whole of his sister’s careful planning seems to be unraveling. I decide to wait until tomorrow. Finally I summon the strength to see the prisoners. Despite the cultural divide, it is easier to approach Smith than Tanakan, who somehow still towers over me from his great height in the feudal hierarchy. I rouse myself and hitch up my sarong, a frayed, largely gray piece of cloth I found in the washhouse the day I arrived; my shirt and pants were sweaty and already beginning to stink; it was liberating to change into traditional dress.

  Smith is in a bad way. It is a shame t
o see that big, attractive farang body in a corner of its cell, curled up in a fetal position. His depression may be terminal, and I wonder if it would not be more humane for me to leave him alone. I press my head against the bars, watching. I see movement in his eyelids and the occasional twitch of a hand or leg. “Khun Smith,” I say, “it’s me, Detective Jitpleecheep.” He blinks and looks up at what must be a single intense shaft of light.

  My face disorients him still further. He cannot be sure it is really me, and if it is me, have I come to save or to gloat? We remain like that for perhaps ten minutes, neither of us sure of what kind of communication may be possible. Eventually he shifts his body, like an animal coming out of hibernation, and manages to stand. Like me, he is reduced to wearing an old sarong, which gives him the aspect of White Man Gone Native: an image from tales of the Raj. The bars impose a grid of vertical black shadows, like a giant bar code. “You,” he says, as if I am the source of his misfortune. He approaches the window with the curiosity of a man toward the devil that is tormenting him. “You.”

  “I didn’t do this,” I say. A jerk of his chin points out that I am free and he is not. “Damrong,” I explain. The name triggers a shudder. “It is hard for a farang to understand, perhaps impossible.” I scratch my head exactly because it has struck me just how difficult it must be for a Westerner to comprehend, even a man who has spent time in the East. “She left instructions.” He shakes his head. “She was not afraid of death, in a way had been looking forward to it all her life. Then came the money, you see, Smith, the money.”

  He glares in a vulnerable kind of way: defiance that expects defeat. What is it about Asians that makes us feel apologetic toward the West, as if we always knew in our heart of hearts the catastrophe toward which it was headed? Perhaps we should have done more to prevent it? I, at least, feel compelled to try to explain. “Death,” I say. “Tom, have you ever thought what it might mean? Never mind religion—I’m talking basic observation. Tom, what she knew is what nine-tenths of humanity also knows: Death trumps money. I’m not talking machines for killing people—that’s just Neolithic butchery. I’m talking about Death as an idea, Death as a weapon of the mind, Death as a reality only adults can confront. You were never going to win, Tom. You lost the war the moment you gave her that first lustful stare. While you were thinking about hiring her body, she had a much bigger plan, more holistic.” I pause, trying to find the words. I’m not sure if I really mean what I say next, but it seems inevitable that I say it: “Tom, are there any adults at all where you come from?”