Bangkok Tattoo sj-2

by John Burdett

  Phonetically it goes like this: "Krung Thep mahanakhon bowon rattanakosin mahintara ayuthaya mahadilok popnopparat ratcha-thani burirom-udomratchaniwet mahasathan-amonpiman-avatansathri-

  sakkathatityavisnukamprasit."

  There's no Bangkok in it.

  TWO

  The South

  13

  O n the flight to the deep South I sit next to two young sex tourists who are chuckling over a familiar chestnut:

  "So I paid her bar fine and took her back to my room for an all-night, and when I went to use the bathroom in the morning, canyabelieveit, she's actually been squatting on the seat-there are foot marks all over it."

  This particular story always annoys me. I think it does illustrate the cultural gap though, not because the girls are used to squatting, but because Westerners find it so important and shocking. I guess the toilet is right at the center of the farang mind, just as Buddha is with us, no? I'm afraid I could not resist an intervention.

  "Recent research shows that people who squat rarely if ever suffer from cancer of the colon," I tell the young fellow next to me (headscarf, nose stud, three-quarter walking shorts, and T-shirt).

  A quizzical look. "That right?"

  "Yes, soon you'll all be squatting over there too. It'll take a while to catch on, there'll be squat-ins, everyone will have to go to classes, there'll be how-to best-sellers with illustrations, talk-show hosts will demonstrate how it's done, missionaries will be dispatched to other countries."

  "Huh?"

  Isn't universal education a wonderful thing? I turn away to stare out the window at weightless white puffs, still irritated, until I remember the venerable Monsieur Truffaut, who hired my mother for a few months in Paris when I was young. There was a squatters' toilet even in his cinquieme arrondissement apartment. My mother always respected him-and the French-for that. Actually, my mother and I both prefer to squat. Neither of us has ever suffered any kind of bowel disorder in our lives, by the way, farang.

  In Hat Yai I catch a cab to the railway station.

  Train: I think we must have bought our rolling stock from the British in the heyday of empire; I imagine an Edwardian in worsted wool somewhere in the English Midlands calculating that if he left out the upholstery, he could fit in one more native per seat. After half an hour the slats have imprinted themselves on my bum, which I am sure must resemble a wicket.

  Scenery: Small black violin-shaped birds sing in unison on telephone wires, a silver-gray buffalo with long horns blunders across a field, naked kids play in a stream, the grass is the same green as a card table, in flooded fields the first frail shoots of this year's second rice harvest; everything distorts with heat. You could say the landscape changes dramatically from Hat Yai on south, though not for any reason of geography. All of a sudden the women working the fields are wearing Islamic headscarves and long skirts. Many are in black from head to foot. It is not in the nature of our women to cover their faces or affect prudishness, but the statement is unambiguous: this is another country. The men, too, wear Islamic headgear, either the skullcaps that so resemble those of their Hebrew brothers, or flowerpot-shaped things that cling to the sides of their heads. It is early evening, just before sunset, and the cries of invisible muezzins calling the faithful to invisible country mosques haunt the gathering dusk. Fear settles on my shoulder for a long haul. Anything can happen down here.

  It's dark by the time the train reaches Songai Kolok, and my instinct is to check the town out first, before contacting Mustafa.

  It looks as if every second building on the main street is a form of rentable accommodation. I toy with the idea of using one of the seedier ones for old times' sake (I could produce an encyclopedia of the dives Mum and I stayed in overseas, when she was commuting between johns) but decide against. I will have a Muslim guide to massage, after all, so I choose what looks like the biggest and best. It's called Gracious Palace in Thai, Malaysian, and English and manages to be big, expensive, dingy, overlit, and sleazy all at once. At reception they issue me with towels, soap, and three condoms. Well, you can't say they're not taking HIV seriously.

  Half an hour later I have showered and changed my clothes (generic black shoes, black pants, white shirt as usual); I am strolling through the town and beginning to get the picture. What I like best is the police station. It's a big, even majestic building encircled by a perimeter wall, on the outside of which there are maybe three hundred little bamboo huts leaning against it and a girl or two in each hut. The huts are not brothels, of course-they're too small for that. They pretend to sell food and drink, and some of them even have small fridges with beer, but there's no mistaking the point of the exercise.

  The girls are not usually local Muslims; they tend to be Buddhists from all over Thailand, especially the poor North, who have decided to specialize in this niche market. It doesn't pay nearly as well as the farang market in Bangkok, but it's a lot more reliable. Every weekend and most weekdays great hordes of pious young Muslim men from Malaysia cross the border here and leave their piety on the other side. They come in expensive four-by-fours, on cheap Honda motorbikes, in buses or minibuses. Some even come by bicycle. Some come on foot. Right now, for example, the town is flooded with them. The girls have all learned Malay, and the ringgit is an accepted currency. Young men are standing or sitting in every one of the huts, purring while the girls charm them. In a way they can be more civilized than farang. They don't come just to get laid-they want the full debauch, including alcohol and a huge cavernous disco with karaoke. The sex comes at the end of the evening, so long as they're still sober enough.

  With my professional eye I spy one beauty who owns an elegance you do not generally see outside of Krung Thep. She surveys me with a blink almost imperceptible to a nonprofessional, sees my Thai style of dressing, and discards me as a possibility. It says a lot that a woman like that is working here. It doesn't say nearly as much as the police station, though. No one familiar with Asia can doubt that the cops charge the girls rent for the use of the perimeter wall against which to lean their huts.

  As I walk, my orientation acquires ever greater accuracy. The flesh trade is everywhere, it is the economy of this town, there is really nothing else. I think of Mustafa: what an affront it must be to him; what torture to his pure soul to walk through this town day after day. In every hotel lobby, every cafe, restaurant, and street corner, there's a huddle of women somewhere between twenty and thirty years of age. Usually they look past me, for they have trained themselves to specialize in Malays, but most seem amenable to persuasion, should I weaken. Not exactly a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism: I think any Al Qaeda evangelist would be laughed out of town. Muhammad himself couldn't incite these local guys to a jihad: they're in Islamic heaven already.

  I try to think of the farang Mitch Turner hanging out here month after month. Well, it seems he bolted for Soi Cowboy at least once. I can see why. Prostitution aside, this is a small, claustrophobic town.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a young Muslim man pull out a cell phone and speak into it. Did I imagine that involuntary jerk of the chin in my direction? While he is talking, I pull out my own cell phone and call Mustafa: engaged. That would prove nothing to a properly trained cop, but to a third-worldy working on intuition, it's pretty conclusive.

  As soon as the young man closes his phone, I call Mustafa again: it rings.

  "Sonchai, where are you?"

  "You know where I am."

  A pause. "I'll come now."

  He arrives on foot within ten minutes. I'm seeing him in context now, his context, this serious young man of Islam. I want to observe his reaction to the prostitutes who are responsible for the town's economy: his town, his economy. But he seems hardly to notice them. A mission of some kind has usurped his imagination. He looks grimly ahead, walking tall, straight-spined like his father. There is no denying the beauty of his surrender to Allah-no serious meditator could fail to approve-but the Buddha gave us the middle path; I see no gol
den mean in Mustafa's. Without his father's restraining hand, he could clear the town with a bomb and hardly notice. We do not wai each other; without the old man our recognition is neutral, like enemies who find a common purpose for a moment, before resuming an ancient feud.

  "I have the key," he says, not looking at me and fishing in his pockets.

  "Not on the street, Mustafa," I say. I guide him into a cafe, where I order a 7-Up and he drinks water. He is uncomfortable here, even though the cafe does not serve alcohol. I think he would be uncomfortable in any surrounding designed to induce congeniality. I see it in tantalizingly vague and elusive mental images from many centuries ago: even then he was impaled by that same single-mindedness that is a form of tunnel vision. Buddhism was too subtle for him then, as it is today. To the evolved mind of the Gautama Buddha, any desire was an obscene distortion, even the desire for God. Mustafa is one of those passionate souls who were made for Islam, the warrior religion.

  "Relax," I tell him. "Open your mind. I need information."

  "What information?" He is startled and defensive. For him, our meeting here was circumscribed with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He has no idea how Western this quaint shrinking of reality is.

  "Well, how about the address?"

  A blink: "I was going to show you, but you insisted on coming in here."

  "Good. In a minute you will show me where Mr. Mitch Turner lived. That is the future, Mustafa. Let's stay in the present. Don't you like it here?"

  He looks around and shrugs. "It's just a cafe."

  I cannot penetrate this iron skull. But I was his teacher once, and he loved me with the very same fierceness, the same passion, the same blindness. "Mustafa, let me tell you something: you are brilliant at what you do. It's really not that easy, even in a small town like this, to have someone followed, to know where they are minute to minute. But your network has been on my tail since I arrived. I didn't notice myself until I saw one of your people with his cell phone, and even then it was just a hunch on my part."

  "So? My father has to know what is going on at all times. I told you that in Krung Thep. It is his network, not mine. He says-" He breaks off, scared of saying too much.

  "What? What does your father say?"

  "He says there is nothing more threatening to the modern world than a moderate Muslim. The fanatics hate us because they think we are heretics and cowards, and the West hates us because we have a morality it lost a long time ago-many farang are converting to us, especially in America. I have to protect my father."

  "So you run the network that he put in place?"

  "Yes."

  "So you probably know more about Mitch Turner than anyone on earth. At least, the Mitch Turner who lived here in Songai Kolok for however many months."

  "More than eight months." He catches my eye and allows the faintest trace of a smirk. "Eight months and two weeks."

  "Your people followed him wherever he went, didn't they?"

  "My father told you, we were trying to keep him alive. The only way to do that was to keep an eye on him."

  "Did he know?"

  A shake of the head. "He was very stupid." He looks me in the eye. "No, that is not the word, but he was a typical farang, lost, confused, pulled in a thousand directions like a man consumed by demons. He lived in his head and saw very little of the outside world. I could have had ten men following him in a line, and he wouldn't have noticed. Of course, being farang he thought he was the only one doing the spying. He deteriorated after the first month. A whore came to see him from Bangkok from time to time. He used drugs. He went through a bad patch, he thought he was undergoing a religious conversion. That's when he went to see my father. But it was just his Western psychosis. Why do farang think that God loves crazies? Allah loves men of steel."

  "A whore? D'you know who?"

  "No. She never stayed long enough for us to find out."

  "You didn't get a picture?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "We didn't need to. He kept a picture of her in his apartment. If you had not insisted on coming into this cafe, you could have been looking at it right now."

  Oh Mustafa, I want to say, you haven't changed at all.

  "You searched his apartment regularly?"

  "Not regularly." The question has thrown him a little.

  "Mustafa," I say. He looks me in the eye. "If you want me to conduct a full investigation and produce a convincing report, you will have to tell me everything."

  Reluctantly: "One of our electronics experts from over the border gave us a device, some gadget that recorded the keystrokes of his computer. Naturally, we had to get into the apartment to fix it in place, then again to take it away."

  I can hardly control a smile and find some solace in the grin that is building on Mustafa's face. He controls himself immediately, however.

  I maintain an admiring smile while I speak: "The device recorded the first keystrokes he used whenever he went online, didn't it? His access code, in other words. That's why you only needed the device to be in place for a short time. You got into the CIA database?"

  "Not at every level. After access, there are many different checks. We never got beyond the gossip." To my raised eyebrows: "That's what we called it, because that's what it basically was. Just a lot of junk, the kind of crap they love to talk about."

  I had decided to wait until morning before trying Turner's apartment, but absent getting laid, there is really nothing to do in this town, and anyway the setup has begun to intrigue me. I think of my spacious but seedy hotel room and decide to stick with Mustafa.

  Mitch Turner's local address turned out to be just around the corner from where we were sitting. It is a five-story apartment building, very close to the police station. When we enter, the concierge, who lives and works in a small room with a single bed, a television, and a view of the entrance, turns away from Mustafa with a stony look.

  "A Buddhist. One of yours," Mustafa explains.

  "You intimidated him to get the key?"

  "I didn't do a thing." A pause. "Didn't need to."

  I'm breathless by the time we reach the top floor and sweating in the night heat. Mustafa seems unaffected by the climb. When we enter the apartment, what hits me immediately is the view over the police station, the perimeter of which is dense with young men and women and cacophonous with a thousand cheap stereo systems all blasting out a mixture of Thai and Malaysian pop.

  I share a glance with Mustafa, who nods toward the master bedroom. I first see a small stack of books, then: there it is, in a place of honor next to the single bed: a silver-framed picture of Chanya.

  She has to be in the States because she's wearing a padded parka coat and looks just about as cold as a Thai can get in those northern climes. She looks happy enough, however, and that amazing smile of hers shines through. Even though you can see nothing of her figure under that parka, you just know that that is an exceptionally attractive woman staring into the camera lens. Come to think of it, there is something special about that picture. I think it was taken by a man in love.

  What a terrific exercise in perception I'm experiencing, like something out of a Buddhist manual. I replay that moment in the bar when Chanya seduced a sullen, dumb, weightlifting, whoremongering moron and substitute a highly intelligent, educated, sensitive man who already knew her and obviously adored her. I'm so damn lonely, he told her. You look beautiful tonight. So why did she kill him? Why did she mutilate him? Why did she skin him? I check Mustafa's eyes, but they have glazed over. No curiosity here about the farang's love life. I wonder what Mustafa does with his mind in those moist moments that even fanatics experience. Do they all simply postpone, pending paradise?

  "You know who she is?" I ask him.

  He shrugs. What does it matter? She was just a whore from out of town, of no more consequence to him than a ball of fluff. She was not part of any war that interested him. I allow myself the luxury of dwelling on her face (that smile) for a few mo
ments: no way Mustafa is going to read my heart, which I have to admit has sunk just a tad. I pull open the picture frame and take out the picture of Chanya, which I pocket.

  Unable to follow up on the mystery of the picture, I examine that small stack of books on the bedside table. Huckleberry Finn, a black Bible, the biography of the FBI spy Robert Hanssen by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller, a translation into English of Dante's Inferno, a copy of the Koran in English, The Encyclopedia of Arachnids, Advanced Spider Keeping, and Problems in Identification and Classification of Asian Arachnids. I flick through the vivid color plates: scorpions luminescent under ultraviolet light. I raise my eyes to Mustafa.

  "He collected them, I forgot to tell you. At first we thought he was genuinely insane. We used to watch him crouching in dark alleys with some kind of little net and a bottle."

  The rest of the books are in Japanese script, indecipherable to both of us. One includes pictures, though, lithographic prints of samurai dueling with their famous curved swords. As I flick through the book, I see it is some kind of manual. There are photographs of samurai swords and diagrams that seem to show how one is made.

  "He was fluent in Japanese," Mustafa explains. "We think that was his main qualification, what got him into the CIA. He had Japanese friends."

  Finally, Mustafa gives way to the disgust that has been building since we entered the flat. "How can children like this hope to lead the world? Look at the books, at his life. This was a thirty-year-old teenager, a consumer kid taking culture off a supermarket shelf: samurai stuff from Japan, a whore from Bangkok, a little Christianity here, a little Islam there, when he wasn't hunting for spiders or smoking opium." He looks about to spit.